Yangtze Insurance Building

The Yangtze Insurance Building (扬子大楼, Yángzǐ Dàlóu) at Bund No. 26 is a narrow seven-storey office of 1920, built for a Shanghai insurance company and designed by Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng), the firm that also designed the HSBC building further down the Bund. It has a footprint of only 639 square metres and a mansard roof.

The Yangtsze Insurance Association (扬子水火保险公司, Yángzǐ Shuǐhuǒ Bǎoxiǎn Gōngsī) was founded by the head of the trading house Russell & Co (旗昌洋行, Qíchāng Yángháng) and held a near-monopoly on insurance for Yangtze River shipping. When Russell & Co went bankrupt in 1891, the insurer carried on as an independent British company with its head office in Shanghai. In the late nineteenth century it bought this lot from the Old Sassoon firm (老沙逊洋行, Lǎo Shāxùn Yángháng), itself bankrupt by then.

Sources differ on when building started. Chinese Wikipedia gives 1917 in one place and “after the First World War” in another; it agrees that the building was finished in 1920. The structure is reinforced concrete, with 4,374 square metres of floor space spread over seven floors.

The style is eclectic. The first two floors have rough-finished stone walls, a heavy cornice projects between the fifth and sixth floors, and across the middle of the sixth floor runs a short Ionic colonnade. Above that is the mansard roof.

After the Pacific War began in 1941, the Japanese army occupied the building. After the war other insurance companies rented space in it. In 1967 the municipal government took it over and installed the city’s grain and oil import-export company. It later passed to the Agricultural Bank of China (中国农业银行, Zhōngguó Nóngyè Yínháng), whose Shanghai branch uses it today; the official heritage list records it as the branch’s foreign-exchange office building.

The building was added to Shanghai’s third list of Outstanding Historical Buildings in 1999, as the first entry in that batch, and has been part of the nationally protected Bund group since 1996.