Banque de l'Indochine Building

The Banque de l’Indochine Building (东方汇理银行大楼, Dōngfāng Huìlǐ Yínháng Dàlóu) at Bund No. 29 is a small building by Bund standards: three storeys, 21.6 metres, built in 1914 for a French bank. Its size shaped its best feature. With only three floors to work with, the architects made each one more than seven metres high, the highest average storey height on the Bund.

The Banque de l’Indochine was formed in Paris in 1875 by a group of French banks. It opened a Shanghai branch in 1899. The lot at No. 29 had been used by the Russo-Chinese Bank from 1896; when that bank moved down the Bund to No. 15 in 1907, the Banque de l’Indochine moved in.

The bank then pulled down the old house and commissioned Atkinson & Dallas (通和洋行, Tōnghé Yángháng), a British practice in Shanghai, to design a new one. Sources differ on when work began, 1911 or 1912; it was completed in 1914. The contractor was the Chinese firm Xie Sheng (协盛营造厂, Xiéshèng Yíngzàochǎng).

The result is a classical front with Baroque trimming. The base takes up about two-fifths of the height and is clad in Suzhou granite. Two Ionic columns of polished Qingdao granite run through the second and third floors in the middle of the facade, and the second-floor windows are framed as a Palladian motif. The entrance is where the Baroque appears: Tuscan columns of polished granite carry an entablature and a semicircular arch, and above them sits a broken pediment with scroll volutes. The granite is confined to the river front and the eastern bays of the side walls; the rest of the building is finished in scraped stucco.

Inside, the ground floor was a single banking hall carried on six Ionic columns, with a long oval glass vault in the ceiling. The upper floors were flats for staff, arranged around a central light well.

The branch kept trading through the Japanese occupation, which sources attribute to the neutrality of the Vichy government. The bank withdrew from Shanghai in 1955. In 1956 the municipal housing bureau took the building over and renamed it Dongfang Building (东方大楼, Dōngfāng Dàlóu); for years it housed the traffic division of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau.

China Everbright Bank (中国光大银行, Zhōngguó Guāngdà Yínháng) moved in in 1995 and still occupies the building. A conservation project begun in 2010 cleaned the facade, removed air-conditioning units, restored the hall’s glass ceiling, wooden doors and marble floor, and added LED lighting to stand in for the daylight the glass vault once provided.

The building has been on Shanghai’s first list of Outstanding Historical Buildings since 1989, and since 1996 it has been part of the Bund group of buildings protected at national level.