Nissin Building

The Nissin Building (日清大楼, Rìqīng Dàlóu) at No. 5 Zhongshan East 1st Road, on the corner of Guangdong Road (广东路, Guǎngdōng Lù), was built in the early 1920s as the Shanghai office of the Japanese shipping company Nisshin Kisen Kaisha (日清汽船株式会社). It is a six-storey granite block in a restrained neoclassical manner, and it was put up with Japanese money.

Nisshin Kisen Kaisha was formed in 1907 by several Japanese shipping lines, among them Osaka Shosen and Nippon Yusen. In August 1919 the company applied to the Shanghai Municipal Council for permission to build an 87-foot building on the site. The architects were Lester, Johnson & Morriss (德和洋行, Déhé Yángháng), the firm founded in 1913 by the British property developer Henry Lester. Construction began in 1921. Sources differ on when it finished: most give 1925, one account of the architects gives 1921.

The company was short of money, and by several accounts a Jewish investor paid for part of the work, reportedly the upper three floors. That is why Chinese writers sometimes call the building a Japanese–Jewish joint venture.

The facade is granite throughout and reads in three bands: the first and second floors as a base, the third to fifth floors as the body, and the top floor set apart by a band of relief carving between the fifth and sixth floors. Decoration is sparing. Writers on the Bund describe the restraint as Japanese in character, and it is easiest to see by comparison with the heavier Union Building across Guangdong Road. The site covers 1,280 square metres and the building has 5,484 square metres of floor space.

In March 1932 the Soviet news agency TASS opened its Shanghai bureau here. After Japan’s defeat in 1945 the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the state shipping concern, took the building over. After 1949 it passed to the Shanghai Maritime Bureau (上海海运局, Shànghǎi Hǎiyùn Jú), whose long tenancy gave it the nickname 海运大楼, the Shipping Building.

In 1993, as the city set out to bring banks back to the Bund, the municipal government assigned No. 5 to Huaxia Bank (华夏银行, Huáxià Yínháng). The city listed the building as an Outstanding Historical Building in its third batch, under the name of its Japanese owner, and in 1996 it was included in the Bund Buildings group protected at the national level. Since the 2000s the upper floors have been let to restaurants; Chinese Wikipedia dates the conversion to 2006. The building remains an office and restaurant block with no public interior of its own.