Behind the Bund: the second facade, 141 buildings and 30 blocks waiting their turn

Walk one block west from the river on almost any Bund cross-street and you leave the postcard. The “second facade” is the name Huangpu District gives to everything behind the riverfront row: the grid of narrow streets between the Bund and Henan Middle Road, from Suzhou Creek to Yan’an East Road. It holds most of the area’s old buildings, far more than the famous row, and most of its unsolved problems. This part of the topic explains what is there, why it was left behind when the riverfront was renewed, and what the district now plans to do with it.

Where exactly is the second facade?

The working definition comes from Huangpu District’s renewal action plan of 2023. The first facade is the front row on Zhongshan East-1 Road plus the first phase of Rockbund; the second facade is the area behind it, closed off by Suzhou Creek to the north, Henan Middle Road to the west and Yan’an East Road to the south. For planning purposes the district treats both together: its renewal area runs from Henan Middle Road to the river, 68 hectares in 30 blocks, numbered 160 to 191 with a few gaps. The first facade is a thin strip along the east edge of that.

How many buildings that is depends on the counter. Shen Sirui of the Shanghai Local Chronicles Office counted 36 riverfront buildings and 141 behind them, out of 177 from before 1949 in about 80 hectares. Of those 177, 98 are protected buildings, 35 “retained” historic buildings and 44 ordinary historic buildings, the three grades the city uses. In other words, four out of five of the old buildings are in the second facade, not on the river.

How old is the street grid?

Older than any building on it. Between 1854 and 1865 the English settlement laid out a network of 26 trunk roads south of Suzhou Creek: 13 running north–south and 13 east–west. The Settlements Gazetteer lists them. The north–south roads, counting west from the river, begin with Yangtze Road, Yuanmingyuan, Sichuan, Jiangxi and Henan roads. The east–west roads include Suzhou, Hong Kong, Beijing, Nanjing, Jiujiang, Hankou, Fuzhou and Guangdong roads.

The names have a rule behind them. In December 1865 the settlement authorities resolved that east–west roads would be named after Chinese cities and north–south roads after Chinese provinces. Before that, many streets had English names, and the gazetteer’s table of old and new names keeps them. Beijing East Road was Consulate Road. Hankou Road was Customs House Road. Fuzhou Road was Mission Road, Jiujiang Road was Rope Walk Road, Jiangxi Road was Church Street. Nanjing Road began as Park Lane.

Sichuan Middle Road shows the sequence on one street. It started as a dirt track called Bridge Street; it was made up and renamed Kiangsu Road in 1855 and became Szechuen (Sichuan) Road in 1865. It runs 1.2 kilometres from Yan’an East Road to South Suzhou Road and crosses 13 other roads, which is why Shen calls the blocks it divides “pocket-sized”.

The widths were settled early too. In 1854 roads took up 14.2 per cent of the settlement’s area. In July 1870 the Council resolved that its trunk roads should be at least 40 feet wide, and by the end of the 1880s almost all the old trunk roads had been widened and straightened to some extent. Most of what you walk on today was fixed by then, and most of these streets are now among the roads the city says it will never widen, the subject of the third part of this topic.

Who built behind the Bund?

The riverfront was for the biggest names. The streets behind were for everyone else who needed to be near them: Chinese banks, insurance companies, the telephone company, publishers, missions, theatres and the settlement’s own government. A walk along three streets shows the range.

Jiangxi Road: Chinese banks and the Council

The former Shanghai Municipal Council building, completed in 1922, fills the block between Hankou, Jiangxi, Fuzhou and Henan roads. It housed the government of the International Settlement; today’s plans call it the “old city government building” (老市府大楼).

The crossing of Jiangxi Road and Fuzhou Road (Jiangxi Road at Fuzhou Road) has four tall corners from one decade. The Kincheng Bank, facing the Council building across Jiangxi Road, was begun in 1924 and finished at the end of January 1926. Its designer was Zhuang Jun, one of China’s first generation of trained architects, working with a foreign firm; two storeys were added in 1940. Hamilton House, by Palmer & Turner, went up in 1931–33; the Metropole Hotel was completed in 1934; and the 17-storey Development Building on the south-west corner in July 1936.

One block north, at Hankou Road (Jiangxi Road at Hankou Road), the corners span forty years. The Mutual Telephone Company’s building, designed in 1908 by the firm 新瑞和洋行, is described by the gazetteer as Shanghai’s first reinforced-concrete framed building. Across Hankou Road, the Chekiang First Commercial Bank by Chen Zhi was begun in November 1948 and finished on 15 September 1951, a modernist bank completed under the new government. Beside the telephone building, the Chü Hsing Chen Bank was designed by Kwan, Chu and Yang for 14 storeys. Work stopped at the fourth floor in 1937, when the war with Japan began, and the upper floors were added only in 1988, in a simpler form than drawn.

Sichuan Road: insurance, chemicals and property

At the south end, the China Mutual Life Insurance building at 93 Guangdong Road (China Mutual Life Insurance Building, 93 Guangdong Road) dates from 1910. The gazetteer says architectural historians regard it as the first building in China faced in granite blocks. Further north, the Brunner Mond building at No. 133, completed at the end of 1922, has a sculpted seven-storey front; it reopened in 2019 as a cultural venue. At Nanjing Road the Liza Building (Jialing Building), Sichuan Road at Nanjing Road was put up by the property owner Silas Hardoon and named after his wife; it was completed in December 1937.

Museum Road and Yuen Ming Yuen Road: theatres and missions

The northern blocks, between Beijing East Road and Suzhou Creek, were the settlement’s institutional quarter. Huqiu Road (Museum Road) was Upper Yuen Ming Yuen Road and then Museum Road, after the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society building (Rockbund Art Museum). The gazetteer’s chapter on the Lyceum Theatre says the amateur dramatic club’s first theatre, a simple wooden building on this street, was the first Western-style theatre in China; its later building was sold to Chinese owners in 1929 and became the Christian Literature Society’s offices. Just north, at the South Suzhou Road corner, the nine-storey Capitol Building, Huqiu Road at South Suzhou Road, cinema below and offices above, was completed on 25 February 1928.

On parallel Yuanmingyuan Road stand the mission and association buildings that Rockbund restored, among them the YWCA Building, 133 Yuanmingyuan Road. The east–west lane between them, Dianchi Road (Jinkee Road), was Jinkee Road (仁记路), according to a list of old road names published by The Paper.

Why was it left behind?

The district’s own plan gives the reasons, and they are not about architecture.

Ownership. The riverfront row was swapped building by building between state bodies. The second facade is a patchwork. The plan lists enterprise property, military property, private property and religious property, often “public and private in the same building”, with many parties and long negotiations.

People. More than 2,000 households in the area still had no sanitation of their own when the plan was written. These are flats and lane houses in and behind the office buildings.

Scale. The two facades together hold more than 1.3 million square metres of historic floor space. The plan admits that some of it has been poorly maintained, short of modern services and “not shown at its value”.

Streets. Measured against the city’s own slogan, “buildings you can read, streets you can stroll”, the plan finds too few seats, too little room for walking and poor street frontages.

A 2019 report on the same problem counted more than 150 old buildings in the second facade, with about a million square metres of floor space and “more complicated” property rights than on the river.

What has been done so far?

Huangpu dates its second-facade programme from 2018, though several projects are older. By the time of the 2023 plan, five of the 30 blocks were finished or under way.

Rockbund (blocks 174 and 175). The northern blocks between Yuanmingyuan Road, Beijing East Road, Huqiu Road and South Suzhou Road (Rockbund phase 1 (blocks 174 and 175)) were the first. From the early 2000s David Chipperfield Architects restored and adapted eleven protected buildings there, together with the Chung On–Mei Foon building, and designed a new entrance and plaza for the art museum in the Royal Asiatic Society building. Arquitectonica designed five new buildings. When the collaboration ended in 2023, after 17 years, the lanes behind the buildings and Museum Plaza opened to the public for the first time.

Bund Central (block 179). The old Central Market block (Bund Central (block 179)) was rebuilt from January 2016. The old buildings kept their European style, with domes and arcades added to join four groups into one shopping complex; the first phase, the Meilun and Central buildings on Nanjing East Road, opened in September 2017.

The old Municipal Building (block 160). In 2019 the district called its protective renovation the pilot project for the whole second facade; test piling had begun that November.

Daimaru (block 163) is the fifth.

Single buildings have been done too. The Brunner Mond building’s 2019 renovation is the one Shen holds up as the model for Sichuan Road.

What happens next?

Twenty blocks are still to do, and five more are tied up in expropriation for redevelopment: 170B, 171, 172, 173 and 190. Blocks 171–173 are Rockbund phase 2 (Rockbund phase 2 (blocks 171–173)), between South Suzhou Road and Dianchi Road; it has been planned for years and is not built.

The plan divides the area at Beijing East Road and Jiujiang Road into north, middle and south zones, to be renewed block by block from north to south. The north starts with the five blocks in expropriation, with 166–168 to be studied next. The middle is built around Daimaru and Bund Central, to take the Nanjing Road pedestrian street further into the district. The south is to bring in finance, business and housing services.

The aim is stated in planning language: to “renew the Bund’s image” and make the area Shanghai’s most distinctive world-class central district for finance and culture. In practice that means two main uses, finance-led offices and shopping, and two that give the district its character, culture and housing.

The legal frame came in January 2025. The city’s plan for two renewal units covers the north and middle zones. Bund-01 runs from Suzhou Creek to Beijing East Road and west to Shanxi South Road, 35.75 hectares including 10.83 of water. Bund-02 runs from Beijing East Road to Jiujiang Road, 27.79 hectares including 5.24 of water. It calls them the “first-launch zone” of second-facade renewal, names a district-appointed company, Shanghai Bund Urban Renewal Investment and Development, as the body that coordinates the projects, and sets the height rules: base heights of 24 to 54 metres by block, with anything new inside a block to be essentially invisible from the street.

What will the streets be like?

The plan’s rules for the streets are more concrete than its slogans, and they start from what is already there. It protects the grid itself: blocks with complete edges, distinctive corners and continuous fronts that rise straight from the pavement as “street walls”, with public life on the street, moderate widths and tall buildings for the width of the road. These are the same qualities that the 1870 width rule and the 1880s straightening produced, now written down as things to keep.

Heights follow from that. A building on the street takes its height from its neighbours and from the proportion of the street; a building inside a block is limited by sight lines and set in stepped tiers, so it is hidden behind the street front. The 2025 unit plan turns this into numbers, as above.

Traffic is pushed to the edges. Through traffic is meant to use the three arterial roads that frame the area, Henan Middle Road, Yan’an East Road and Zhongshan East-1 Road. Inside, streets are to be traffic-calmed and parking supplied “moderately”. Underground walkways are to join neighbouring blocks to each other and to the metro, so that people arriving by train need not cross the busy edges at all.

The walking network is planned as a sequence from big to small: the Nanjing Road pedestrian street and the Bund’s riverside strip, then designated “slow-traffic” streets, then the lanes, inner streets and courtyards inside the blocks. Rockbund’s lanes and Museum Plaza, opened in 2023, are the first piece of that inner layer to exist.

Two items in the plan are reminders that people live here. It provides for one community food market, and one 110 kV electricity substation, to be built “invisibly”, in a form that blends into the historic blocks. Both are the kind of thing an office district does not need and a neighbourhood with 2,000 households cannot do without.

What the sources disagree on

How big the area is. Four figures circulate, each with a different boundary. The Bund historic area as designated is 101 hectares, across two districts. Shen gives about 80 hectares for the Huangpu part. The 2023 renewal area is 68 hectares in 30 blocks. A 2019 report gave 50.93 hectares and 30 blocks for the area between South Suzhou Road and Yan’an East Road, Zhongshan East-1 Road and Henan Middle Road. The 2025 renewal units add up to 63.54 hectares, including river water. None is wrong; they measure different things. Anyone quoting “the size of the second facade” should say which.

How many old buildings. The same 2019 report counted 17 “old big buildings” from before 1949 and more than 150 old buildings in all; Shen counts 141 non-riverfront buildings and 177 pre-1949 buildings including the riverfront. The 17 is presumably the large office blocks only, but the report does not say.

Who designed the Brunner Mond building. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer names a British architect, Graham Brown. Shen attributes it to the firm Stewardson & Spence. We have not seen the original drawings.

Where the Chü Hsing Chen Bank stands. The gazetteer’s chapter places it at the south-east corner of Jiangxi and Hankou roads in one sentence and at the Jiujiang Road corner in another.

What to look for

Start at Capitol Building, Huqiu Road at South Suzhou Road, on the corner of Huqiu Road and South Suzhou Road, and walk south down Huqiu Road. On your left are the restored Rockbund buildings; behind them, the lanes and Museum Plaza that opened only in 2023. The Royal Asiatic Society building (Rockbund Art Museum) building is the one with the museum entrance.

Cross to Yuanmingyuan Road and look at the YWCA (YWCA Building, 133 Yuanmingyuan Road) and its neighbours from the street. The plan wants a walker here to see only the street fronts; anything new is set back inside the blocks.

Walk west along Hong Kong Road to Sichuan Road, then south. At Nanjing Road the Liza Building (Jialing Building), Sichuan Road at Nanjing Road is on the corner. At Fuzhou Road look for the sculpture on the Brunner Mond building at No. 133. At the south end, the granite front of the China Mutual Life Insurance Building, 93 Guangdong Road faces Guangdong Road.

Turn west to Jiangxi Road. Stand at Jiangxi Road at Fuzhou Road and turn round: four corners, all built between 1926 and 1936. One block north, at Jiangxi Road at Hankou Road, compare the 1908 telephone building with the bank across the street finished in 1951, and look up at the Chü Hsing Chen Bank to see where the 1937 building stops and the 1988 floors begin.

Look at the Former Shanghai Municipal Council building (block 160) from Jiangxi Road. It is the one block on this walk that was a government seat, of the International Settlement and then of the city.

What is not there yet: Rockbund phase 2. The blocks between Dianchi Road and South Suzhou Road west of Huqiu Road (Rockbund phase 2 (blocks 171–173)) are the next in line, and the plan’s own numbers say twenty blocks are still to come after them.