A prestigious learning institute of old Shanghai.

This ratty natural history collection is a charming relic among a city rushing into modernity.

Rivers of cattle blood gone, a strange Escheresque building remains, the last of its kind.

Devoted Buddhists can earn enlightenment in the next life by crawling through this symbolic nostril.

A train ride to the middle of nowhere gives its passengers some of the most iconic views of Japan's seasons.

This one has sailed five times as far as Sir Francis Drake's famous ship.

In this cobwebbed old operating theater, you can practically hear the screams of the unanesthetized patients.

An abandoned tank sits in an empty London lot as a symbolic middle finger to local city planners.

A collection of machines designed to break things for science.

A hands-off space for graffiti artists to hone and display their skills.

Public access to clean drinking water was an instant hit among the masses.

A portly statue of a golden boy commemorates an unusual cause of the Great Fire of London: the sin of gluttony.

A 2000-year-old Roman amphitheater lies just below Guildhall Yard.

A Victorian natural history and ethnographic museum with wonderful turn-of-the-century, science-book-esque evolution displays.

This 1920s Dutch barge is now a floating bookstore.

This churchyard arbor is surrounded by hundreds of gravestones placed there by author Thomas Hardy.

The only university zoological museum in London houses extinct animals, bizarre natural history specimens, and a Micrarium of microscopic creatures.

The bronze uniforms commemorate the vital role of women during World War II.

Victorian-era Londoners really wanted to believe this 17th-century cistern was actually an ancient artifact.

A 300-year-old tea shop that brought tea to the English people, not to mention the Queen herself.

Buried for centuries, this hidden cellar is all that remains of London's medieval Whitefriars Monastery.

Lovers proclaim their unbreakable bond by leaving their names on locks fastened onto the Shoreditch fence in East London.

Rebuilt remains of a temple to Roman god Mithras.

This ornate Victorian marketplace was the setting for Diagon Alley and the Leaky Cauldron in the first ‘Harry Potter’ film.