Waibaidu Bridge

Waibaidu Bridge (外白渡桥, Wàibáidù Qiáo), the Garden Bridge in older English usage, carries Zhongshan East 1st Road over the mouth of Suzhou Creek at the north end of the Bund. The riveted steel truss bridge was finished on 29 December 1907. It was the first steel truss bridge over the creek, and city publications call it China’s first all-steel riveted bridge.

Before 1856 the only way across the lower creek was by ferry. In 1854 a group of foreign merchants led by Charles Wills of Jardine Matheson formed the Soochow Creek Bridge Company, raised 12,000 dollars and built a wooden bridge 450 feet long and 23 feet wide, with a section on the Hongkou side that could be raised for ships. Work began on 1 December 1855 and finished in October 1856. Wills’ Bridge charged a toll, one copper cash a person and double for carts. After the British and American settlements merged in 1863 the toll doubled and was collected only from Chinese; foreign residents’ carriages and servants crossed free. Chinese residents answered by setting up free ferries nearby, and the words bai du, free crossing, attached themselves to the place.

In November 1872 the Shanghai Municipal Council bought the toll bridge for 40,000 taels and ended the charge. In 1873 it spent 19,000 taels on a free wooden bridge a few steps to the west, 37 feet wide, which opened in September that year. It took the name Garden Bridge from the Public Garden, now Huangpu Park, at its southern end; in Chinese it became Waibaidu, the outer free crossing. Wills’ Bridge was dismantled.

By 1888 the council wanted something sturdier. In 1903 its engineer Charles Mayne compared a wooden bridge costing 83,000 taels and lasting twenty years with a steel one at 200,000 taels lasting fifty, and the council chose steel, partly because double tram tracks were to cross; the tram company put up £3,500. Seventeen tenders came in. Howarth Erskine of Singapore won the steelwork contract at £17,000, the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company of Darlington fabricated the steel, and a Westminster firm inspected it on the council’s behalf. The first pile was driven in August 1906. The bridge was finished on 29 December 1907, opened to traffic in January 1908, and carried trams from May 1908.

The structure is two simply supported through-trusses of 52.12 metres each, 104.24 metres in all and 18.4 metres wide, with an 11.2-metre carriageway. The abutments are reinforced concrete on timber piles; the single midstream pier is hollow concrete.

From August 1937 the bridge was the practical boundary between Japanese-held Hongkou and the rest of the International Settlement, and Japanese sentries decided who crossed. In 1945 inspectors found the abutments sinking and cracked, with the girder bearings being pulled out; emergency propping in 1946 and repairs in 1947 followed. The tram tracks and wooden deck came off in 1964, and the bridge was overhauled again in 1965, 1978, 1985 and 1991–92. By 1987 it carried about 27,000 vehicles a day, and the Wusong Road flood-barrier bridge opened in 1991 partly to relieve it.

In March 2008 the bridge was closed, cut into its two spans and floated by barge to a shipyard for the largest overhaul since it was built. About 160,000 rivets were re-fixed and some 63,000 replaced. The spans returned to their piers in February 2009 and the bridge reopened in April 2009.

Waibaidu Bridge was listed in the second batch of Shanghai Outstanding Historical Buildings in 1994, and the district gazetteer counts it among the Bund Buildings group placed under national-level protection in 1996.