Shanghainese on screen and in song: films, TV and music

The commonest complaint from anyone learning Shanghainese is that there is nothing to listen to. There is less than for Cantonese and more than people think — as long as you know which Shanghai films are actually in Mandarin.

Updated 19 September 2026 · 4 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Shanghainese examples play the recordings from Verbavia’s course, made with a Shanghainese voice; Mandarin examples play a Mandarin voice.

Films with real Shanghainese in them

Wikipedia keeps a category of Shanghainese-language films, sixteen titles, and it is a good place to start and a bad place to stop: several of the films in it are multilingual and use Shanghainese for a scene or a character. These are the ones where the language carries the film.

The other names in Wikipedia’s category — In the Mood for Love, Center Stage, A Brighter Summer Day, Saving Face, Hidden Blade among them — use Shanghainese for particular characters, often Shanghai emigrés in Hong Kong or Taipei. Worth knowing when you hear it; not a way to learn.

The ones that are not Shanghainese

Three films set in Shanghai are regularly recommended to learners and are in Mandarin: Suzhou River (2000), Shanghai Triad (1995) and Everlasting Regret (2005). Shanghai Triad’s Chinese title, 摇啊摇，摇到外婆桥, is a genuine Shanghai-area nursery rhyme, which is presumably how the confusion started; the dialogue is Mandarin. And The House of 72 Tenants (1963), adapted from a wartime Shanghai stage farce, is a Hong Kong film in Cantonese. Its source play is the Shanghainese thing; the film is not.

Television

• Blossoms Shanghai 繁花 (2023–24) — Wong Kar-wai’s thirty-episode series, shot in Shanghainese and released in a Shanghainese and a Mandarin version. Thirty hours of natural, subtitled speech from three generations of actors; it has its own page, with where to stream it.
• Sinful Debt 孽债 (1995) — Shanghai Television’s twenty-episode drama, directed by Huang Shuqin, about children from Yunnan arriving in Shanghai to find the parents who left them behind. Wikipedia: it “primarily features Shanghainese dialogue” and took a record 42.62 percent audience share in the city.
• 老娘舅 (1995–2007) — the Shanghainese sitcom, five seasons on Shanghai Oriental TV, about a shikumen household. Episodes circulate on Chinese video sites; the counts of seasons and episodes come from Baidu and I could not confirm them elsewhere.

Music

First, two songs that are not in the language, because they are the ones people reach for. 上海滩, The Bund, the 1980 TVB theme sung by Frances Yip, is Cantonese. 夜上海, Night in Shanghai, Zhou Xuan’s 1946 recording, is Mandarin. Both are Shanghai; neither is Shanghainese.

What is:

• Top Floor Circus 顶楼的马戏团 — a Shanghai rock band formed in 2001, fronted by Lu Chen, whose songs are mostly written in Shanghainese. 呒没劲 and 谈钞票伤感情 are on YouTube; the titles alone — 呒没 m meh ‘there isn’t’, 钞票 tshau phiau ‘money’ — are Shanghainese.
• Mr. Weezy (Liu Liangji) — a rapper who, Sixth Tone reports, “raps exclusively in Shanghainese out of fear for the dialect’s future”. His 2015 single is My Town.
• 上海说唱 — not hip-hop but an older talk-singing form, a folk quyi genre that grew after 1949 out of Suzhou storytelling techniques and is performed in Shanghainese.

The stage: Huju and the farce

The oldest Shanghainese performance is Huju (沪剧), Shanghai opera, “typically sung in the Shanghainese dialect” in Wikipedia’s words, formerly called Shenqu, with its heyday in the 1920s and 30s. It is slower and clearer than speech and the older actors in Blossoms were compared to it. Beside it stands 滑稽戏, Shanghai farce, and its one-performer form 独脚戏, delivered in a deliberate mixture of Shanghainese, Mandarin and other dialects for comic effect — which makes it wonderful listening and a poor model. And Pingtan (评弹), the storytelling-with-lute that visitors are sent to in Shanghai teahouses, is in Suzhou dialect: close, and not the same. The Suzhou page explains how close.

Nursery rhymes

Children’s rhymes are the one kind of Shanghainese that is slow, repetitive, and recorded many times over, which makes them better learning material than their subject matter suggests. 摇啊摇，摇到外婆桥 — rock, rock, rock to Grandma’s bridge — is the best known and is on China’s intangible heritage list among the region’s rhymes. 笃笃笃，卖糖粥 — the rice-porridge seller’s knock — gave its name to an anthology of a hundred Shanghai alleyway rhymes from East China Normal University Press, and there are performances of it on Bilibili and YouTube.

Lessons and channels

ChinesePod ran a twelve-episode Shanghainese series, still in its library. YouTube has scattered lessons — Introduction to Shanghainese 上海话, and a channel of a Shanghai child teaching the language — whose activity I have not checked and which come and go. The Georgia Tech Fangyan Media Project documents a Shanghainese youth website of the 2000s, with its broadcasts and songs, and is history rather than a listening list. I could not verify the Shanghainese news programmes on Shanghai Media Group that are sometimes recommended, so they are not here.

How to use any of this

Watch B for Busy first, with Chinese subtitles, and do not try to understand it; let the sound of 侬 non ‘you’, 伊 yi ‘he, she’, 勿 veh ‘not’ and 啥 sa ‘what’ become familiar. Then Blossoms, an episode at a time. The course’s phrase list and the resources page give you the words to catch; the films give you the reason to.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Category: Shanghainese-language films
2. The China Project, 15 January 2021 — Flowers of Shanghai: “the dialogue is entirely in Shanghainese dialect”
3. Sino-Cinema, 23 January 2022 — review of B for Busy
4. The China Project, 11 February 2022 — B for Busy, Douban’s highest-rated Chinese film of 2021
5. Sino-Cinema, 13 February 2017 — review of The Wasted Times: at least half the dialogue in Shanghainese
6. Wikipedia: Dead Pigs
7. Wikipedia: Sinful Debt
8. Wikipedia: The House of 72 Tenants — a Cantonese film from a Shanghai play
9. Wikipedia: Blossoms Shanghai
10. Baidu Baike: Top Floor Circus
11. Sixth Tone: Hip-Hop Gives Chinese Dialects Fresh Expression — Mr. Weezy
12. Chinese Wikipedia: 上海说唱
13. Wikipedia: Huju
14. Wikipedia: Suzhou Pingtan — “the topolect being mainly Suzhou dialect”
15. 笃笃笃，卖糖粥：100首上海里弄童谣 (East China Normal University Press)
16. ChinesePod: Shanghainese channel
17. Georgia Tech Fangyan Media Project: the SHN website