Jardine Matheson Building

The Jardine Matheson Building (怡和洋行大楼, Yíhé Yángháng Dàlóu) at Bund No. 27 was the Shanghai head office of Jardine, Matheson & Co., a British trading house that was among the first foreign firms in the city. Completed in November 1922, it stands on a lot the firm had held since 1845.

Jardine Matheson opened in Shanghai in 1843 and in 1845 took the land north of what is now Beijing East Road. The first house on the site was replaced by a larger building; a University of Bristol photograph record dates that building to 1851 and its demolition to 1920, while Chinese Wikipedia describes a three-storey East Indian-style block rebuilt in 1861.

The present building went up between 1920 and 1922 to a design by Moorhead & Halse (马海洋行, Mǎhǎi Yángháng), a British practice in Shanghai, and was built by the Chinese contractor Yu Chang Tai (裕昌泰营造厂, Yùchāngtài Yíngzàochǎng). It has a reinforced concrete frame on a site of 2,100 square metres, with 14,300 square metres of floor space.

The style is an English Renaissance revival, or Beaux-Arts in the English-language literature. The whole exterior is granite, rough-cut on the first two floors. Four marble Corinthian columns run across the middle of the facade from the third to the fifth floor, and a carved stone ram’s head sits at the centre of the second floor. At street level the building opens in large arched bays. Inside, the ground floor has marble walls and a marble floor.

Sources disagree about the storeys. Chinese accounts say the building was six storeys high and gained two more in 1983; English Wikipedia says five storeys, with one floor added in 1930 and another in 1983. Either way, the top floors are later additions and are easy to pick out above the cornice.

After the Pacific War began in 1941, Japanese forces entered the International Settlement and handed the building to Mitsui & Co. Jardine returned in 1946 but, with profits falling, let out much of the space to other firms. In 1955 the building passed to the state and became the offices of the Shanghai Foreign Trade Bureau, and it was known from then on as the Foreign Trade Building (外贸大楼, Wàimào Dàlóu).

The building now belongs to Jiushi Group. The ground floor has held a Rolex boutique since 2009, the upper floors house the House of Roosevelt restaurants and bar and a law firm, and in September 2018 the Jiushi Art Museum opened a gallery on the sixth floor. Museum opening arrangements should be checked before a visit.

The building has been on Shanghai’s first list of Outstanding Historical Buildings since 1989 and part of the nationally protected Bund group since 1996.