Broadway Mansions

Broadway Mansions (百老汇大厦, Bǎilǎohuì Dàshà), now the Shanghai Mansions hotel (上海大厦, Shànghǎi Dàshà), is the brown brick tower at the north end of Waibaidu Bridge, where Suzhou Creek meets the Huangpu. It was completed in 1934 as a hotel and apartment block for foreign residents. With Sassoon House and the Bank of China it was one of the three tall buildings of the Bund, and until the Pudong towers went up its eighteenth-floor terrace was the usual place to look down on the city.

The site had been a tram depot of the British-owned Shanghai Electric Construction Company. The Shanghai Land Investment Company (业广地产公司, Yèguǎng Dìchǎn Gōngsī) developed it. The design is credited to Bright Fraser of Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng), with Sin Jin Kee (新仁记营造厂, Xīnrénjì Yíngzàochǎng) as main contractor. Work began in 1930 and finished in 1934 at a cost of five million taels of silver.

The building is a steel-framed tower on a splayed plan with four wings, so that most rooms face outward and get light. The steelwork came from Dorman Long in Britain. Above a base of dark red granite the walls are faced in brown Taishan brick, and from the eleventh floor the mass steps back in stages. Decoration is minimal: a band of Art Deco-style trim at the eaves and little else, which is why some writers treat it as an early sign of Shanghai’s high-rise buildings turning toward modernism. Sources count its storeys differently, from 19 to 22, and give heights between 76.7 and 78 metres.

The original layout put restaurants, lounges and a barber on the ground floor, apartments and guest rooms on floors two to sixteen, a small restaurant on seventeen, and special suites with a large balcony on eighteen, with plant and water tanks above. A garage held 80 cars, and a ramp let cars park on the roof.

Tenants were heads of foreign firms, their senior staff and newspaper people. After fighting broke out in 1937 the Japanese military occupied the building, even though it stood in the International Settlement. After 1945 the Nationalist government took it over as a guesthouse of the Officers’ Moral Endeavour Association (励志社, Lìzhìshè), and from November 1948 the Shanghai office of the US Joint Military Advisory Group was based here.

After 1949 it became a state guesthouse. In August 1949 Chen Yun chaired the Shanghai financial and economic conference in the building. On 1 May 1951 the municipal government renamed it Shanghai Mansions; the old name had come from Broadway, the street it stood on, now Daming Road (大名路, Dàmíng Lù). Zhou Enlai brought visiting leaders to the eighteenth-floor terrace, among them Khrushchev in October 1954 and President Pompidou of France in 1973.

The building was renovated in 1985 and has belonged since 1988 to the Shanghai Hengshan (Group) company. It still runs as a hotel, and keeps three pieces of its original equipment: a grand piano of 1932, an English snooker table of 1934 in the English Bar, and a hand-operated Otis lift that has been in service since 1934.

Broadway Mansions was listed in the first batch of Shanghai Outstanding Historical Buildings in 1989. It is also one of the buildings that make up the Bund Buildings group, which the State Council placed under national-level protection in 1996.