Gutzlaff Signal Tower

The Gutzlaff Signal Tower (外滩信号台, Wàitān Xìnhàotái) is the slim concrete tower at the southern end of the Bund, at 1A Zhongshan East 2nd Road. For most of the first half of the twentieth century it told ships on the Huangpu what the weather was doing and what time it was. In 1993 the whole tower was moved 22.4 metres to make room for a wider road, and since October 2026 the ground floor has held a visitor centre and a display on the history of the Bund.

The station is older than the tower. In 1883 the French Municipal Council decided to set up a weather signal station where the Yangjingbang creek met the river, and it opened on 1 September 1884. It was run by the Jesuit observatory at Xujiahui, whose director also directed the station, and it began as a wooden mast beside a small hut from which warning flags and a wind ball were hoisted. The name on official papers, 郭实猎信号台, refers to the Prussian missionary Karl Gützlaff.

Storms broke the wooden mast in 1901 and again in July 1906. The council decided that month to build something permanent and chose the design of an architect named Marti over one by a railway engineer. The contract was signed in February 1907 for 10,247 US dollars, and work began in March. The result is reinforced concrete on timber piles: a base 11.3 metres wide and 4 metres high, a shaft 36.8 metres tall, and a 9-metre mast for the time ball on top, 49.8 metres in all. The Shanghai gazetteer records completion in July 1908, with signals hoisted from 23 June that year; newspaper accounts date the tower to 1907. The two-storey annex at its foot was enlarged in 1926–27, which gave the complex the outline it has now.

The routine was precise. Flags showing the wind at the mouth of the Yangtze went up at 10:00 and 16:00, the day’s forecast or storm warning at 11:30, and at noon the ball on the mast dropped to give ships the time; from 1909 a light marked 21:00 as well. The Maritime Customs adopted the station’s signal code for its lighthouses in 1898, and from 1931 customs ports across East Asia used the Shanghai code. After a typhoon in July 1915, Customs added a gun at Lujiazui, fired whenever the black typhoon ball was hoisted, a practice that lasted until 1940.

Service was suspended when Japanese forces occupied the concessions in December 1941 and resumed in reduced form; after 1945 the station became part of the Shanghai Weather Bureau. A Bund weather station worked again from January 1953, but telephones and radio had taken over its job, and on 15 February 1957 the Shanghai Central Meteorological Observatory closed it.

The move came in October 1993, during the second phase of the Bund reconstruction, when Zhongshan East Road was widened. The 400-tonne tower was shifted 22.4 metres toward the river in one piece, at a cost of 5.4 million yuan, and the annex was rebuilt. The complex reopened in June 1995 as the Bund History Exhibition Room, described as China’s first street museum. The tower was listed among Shanghai’s outstanding historical buildings in 1994 and as a municipal protected site in 2014.