How to read the Bund: one waterfront, three rebuildings, 1845–1948

The short answer. The Bund you see is the third waterfront on the same strip of land. The first, from the 1840s, was a row of two-storey merchant houses with verandahs; only the British Consulate survives from it. The second, from about 1900 to 1916, was brick and tile, four to seven storeys, and much of it still stands at the south end. The third came in a rush after the First World War, when banks with London, Tokyo and Chinese money put up the granite buildings that now face the river, ending with the Bank of China in 1937 and the Bank of Communications in 1948. The quickest way to date a Bund building is by its stone. Granite from the ground to the roof usually means the 1920s. Granite only at the base, with tile, brick or render above, usually means earlier.

The reason a single strip of riverbank was rebuilt three times in eighty years is money. In 1869 the most valuable land in the Settlement, at the Bund end of Nanjing Road, was valued at 6,000 taels a mu. By 1933 the same corner was valued at 360,000. As the land grew dearer, a two-storey house on it made less and less sense, and banks that wanted to look permanent were ready to pay for the site.

Why the river frontage, and why it stayed public

The Bund began as a towpath. Before foreign trade, teams of trackers hauled grain junks up the Huangpu along its west bank, and when the first Land Regulations were drawn up in 1845 the Chinese authorities kept that right of way. Hawks Pott and the 1921 history by Lanning and Couling both read the regulations the same way: a strip two zhang five chi wide, about 30 English feet, had to stay open between the buildings and the river. The merchants who rented the riverside lots drove piles at that distance in front of their houses and filled in behind them, and the filled strip became a road. Each lot holder built his own stretch, 25 feet wide, in mud.

The lots themselves went first and fastest. In 1844 Lancelot Dent of Dent & Co. rented 13.894 mu from Chinese farmers and paid a deposit of 99,880 copper cash a mu, while another British firm took a Bund lot for 7,000. The 1845 regulations set a common annual rent of 1,500 cash a mu, payable to the Qing government, and moved the rest of the price into a one-off deposit to the owner. When the title deeds were finally printed, on 31 December 1847, deed No. 1 of the British register went to Dent and No. 3 to Jardine, Matheson & Co. for 18.694 mu. Within ten years the going deposit had risen from 60,000–120,000 cash a mu to as much as 540,000.

What the merchants built was modest. The first foreign houses, put up at the end of 1843 north of the Yangjingbang creek (now Yan’an Road), were small. Through the 1850s and 1860s the hongs on the Bund were one- or two-storey brick-and-timber buildings wrapped in arcaded verandahs, a type British builders had worked out in India and South-East Asia for heat and rain. Pott calls them “compradoric” bungalows. By 1854 there were 120 foreign firms east of Henan Road, and until the end of the century there was no building in Shanghai above six storeys.

The open riverbank between the buildings and the water was never fully settled. The lot holders treated the foreshore in front of their lots as theirs; the Municipal Council, citing the regulations of 1854 and 1869, treated it as surrendered for public use. The grass in front of the hongs was chained off. In 1885 Chinese residents petitioned for the lawns to be opened, and in 1886 the Council asked the lot owners, who agreed provided their rights over the foreshore were not affected. The lawn from the Public Garden to the Customs shed was opened, and six benches went on the bank between Nanking and Peking Roads. The Council kept the arrangement alive by putting the chains back for one week each January.

What the land was worth

The Council taxed land by assessed value, and its assessments are the clearest measure of why the Bund was rebuilt. A ratepayers’ resolution of 1867 set the basis at 4,000 taels a mu for the best Bund lots and as little as 40 for vacant land at the back of the Settlement. In 1874 the gazetteer’s figures give up to 7,000 taels a mu near the Bund against 400 by the old city moat, a ratio of more than seventeen to one.

The gap stayed wide as the Settlement grew. In the 1911 schedules the Central District, the old British Settlement with the Bund along its east side, was 2,220 mu out of 17,094: about 13 per cent of the land, assessed at 66.2 million taels out of 141.6 million, about 47 per cent of the value. An average mu there was worth about 29,800 taels, three and a half times the Settlement average. The Council’s own comparison table, printed in its report for 1922, shows the gap widening: the Central District’s average was 2.9 times the Settlement’s in 1903 (13,549 taels against 4,603), 3.6 times in 1907 and 4 times in 1920 (41,503 against 10,476). The old centre was pulling away from the new suburbs even as the suburbs filled up. By 1933 the Settlement average had reached 33,877 taels a mu, nearly twenty-six times its level of 1865, and the Nanjing Road corner of the Bund 360,000.

Land at those prices does not stay under a two-storey house. The Shanghai Club, Jardine, Matheson and the British Consulate held their lots for the whole century; most other numbers changed hands, and each new owner built higher.

Reading the numbers: who was behind each door

The best record of who actually occupied the Bund is the Desk Hong List, the annual business directory published in Shanghai. Its editions for 1882, 1904, 1924 and 1941 are scanned on the Internet Archive, and read side by side they show the Bund turning from a row of trading houses into a row of banks.

In 1882 the street is listed under two names, “Yangtsze Road” and “The Bund”. Trading houses hold most numbers: Russell & Co. at 6, Brand Brothers at 10, E. D. Sassoon at 20, Gibb, Livingston at 22, Mackintosh, Dodgson at 25 and Jardine, Matheson at 27, with the P&O shipping office at 24. At least four numbers are banks: the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank at 12, the Chartered Mercantile at 15, the Oriental Bank at 18 and the National Bank of India at 26. An architect called H. Lester gives his address as No. 1; forty years later the firm he founded would design No. 17.

By 1904 at least six numbers are banks, and they are new names: the Imperial Bank of China at 6, the German Deutsch-Asiatische Bank at 14, the Russo-Chinese Bank at 15, the Chartered Bank at 18, the Mercantile Bank of India sharing 27 with Jardine, and the Yokohama Specie Bank at 31. The telegraph companies have come to 7, the North-German Lloyd shipping line to 19.

The street directory of 1924 shows banks at eleven numbers. In July 1941 the count is eight, among them the Bank of Taiwan in its own building at No. 16, and No. 15, once the Russo-Chinese Bank, is the Central Reserve Bank, the bank of the Japanese-backed government in Nanjing. Through all four editions three numbers do not change: the Shanghai Club at 3, Jardine, Matheson at 27, and British courts or consular offices at 33.

These counts come from OCR text of old scans, and some digits are lost, so they are minimums. The pattern is not in doubt.

The first rebuilding, 1900–1916: brick, tile and the first lifts

The oldest buildings on the Bund today date from the turn of the century, and they share a look: a stone base one or two storeys high, walls of brick, white tile or render above, and a busy roofline of gables, turrets or small domes.

The China Merchants Building at No. 9 is the plainest survivor. China Merchants bought Russell & Co.’s Shanghai fleet and Bund property in 1877 for 2.22 million taels and in 1901 built its head office on Russell’s old garden: red brick, arched windows and a two-storey verandah, close to the old hong type. Next door, the Great Northern Telegraph Building at No. 7 stands on Russell land too; the Danish company had rented the old house there from 1881 and opened Shanghai’s first telephone exchange in it the next year.

The Russo-Chinese Bank at No. 15, finished in 1902 or 1903 to a German design, was the first building in Shanghai faced in white ceramic tile. The Imperial Bank of China at No. 6, head office of the first modern bank founded by Chinese, went up around 1906 (sources differ by a year or more) in a granite-faced Gothic with pointed gables. The Palace Hotel at No. 19 carries “1906” over its door, but that is the year of the drawings; it opened in 1908 with the first passenger lifts in Shanghai and in 1909 hosted the International Opium Commission. The Shanghai Club at No. 2, opened in 1910, was the first reinforced-concrete building in the city by the gazetteer’s account, and its ground-floor bar, 30.6 metres long, was billed as the longest in the world.

The Council’s building rules of 1903 capped ordinary buildings at 85 feet unless the Council agreed otherwise. Between 1910 and 1915 nearly 4,000 new buildings went up in the Settlement, and owners on the Bund and Nanjing Road rebuilt higher where they could. The McBain Building at No. 1, begun in 1913 and finished in 1916, was the tallest on the Bund when it opened; in 1917 the Asiatic Petroleum Company moved in and the building took the name it still has. The Union Building at No. 3, completed in 1916, was the first steel-framed building in Shanghai and the first Shanghai commission of the architects Palmer & Turner, who had opened an office in the city in 1912.

The Banque de l’Indochine at No. 29, finished in 1914, shows how expensive stone still was. It is granite only on the river face and the first bays of the side walls; the rest is render. The storeys are the tallest on the Bund, over seven metres each.

The bank of the river moved as well. In 1904 the Council cut a ten-foot strip off the front of the Public Garden to widen the Bund to 60 feet, and the Waibaidu Bridge was rebuilt in steel in 1907 because the new trams needed double tracks across Suzhou Creek. The bridge took part of the Astor House Hotel’s land, and the hotel was rebuilt further back.

Why the 1920s: war, confiscation and one architect’s office

The great rebuilding came in a burst between 1920 and 1929, and three things lined it up.

The first was the war. German property in China was confiscated after 1918, and three Bund lots changed hands at once: the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank’s building at No. 14 went to the Bank of Communications in 1919, Siemssen & Co.’s lot at No. 28 to the agents of the Glen Line, and the German Club at No. 23 to the Bank of China. Pott, writing in 1928, describes “feverish activity” after the war, with old Bund buildings giving way to new ones costing millions, some of it paid for out of wartime profits. Building plans passed by the Council in 1921 alone were valued at about 21 million taels.

The second was the river. In 1919 the Council began a reclamation about 50 feet wide along the foreshore from Peking Road to Avenue Edward VII. When it was finished in 1920 the Bund had a 55-foot carriageway for trams and fast traffic, a rank for cars and carriages and a separate 30-foot road for slow traffic, with the frontagers paying 10,000 taels towards it. A wider road meant room for taller fronts.

The third was one firm. After the Union Building, Palmer & Turner designed, on the Bund alone, the Yangtze Insurance Building (about 1920), the Glen Line Building (1922), the Chartered Bank (1923), the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (1923), the Yokohama Specie Bank (1924), the Customs House (1927) and Sassoon House (1929), and later Broadway Mansions across the creek. That is why so much of the Bund looks as if one hand drew it.

HSBC set the tone. It commissioned the building in 1919, and its Shanghai manager, Alexander Stephen, told the architects to spare no expense and dominate the Bund. The result, opened on 23 June 1923, took three Bund numbers, 10 to 12, and 9,338 square metres, the largest site and the widest front on the waterfront. Its neighbours followed in granite: the North China Daily News at No. 17 (1924), faced at the base with granite shipped from near Tokyo; the Yokohama Specie Bank at No. 24 (1924), close enough to the Chartered Bank at No. 18 to pass for its twin; the Jardine Matheson Building at No. 27 (1922), granite all over; and the Nissin Building at No. 5 for a Japanese shipping line. At No. 18 the Chartered Bank built its new front block in 1922–23 in front of its old one, so the property still has two buildings, front and back.

The Customs House at No. 13 was the Chinese government’s own building on the Bund: the Maritime Customs had been on the site since 1857. Begun in December 1925 and opened on 19 December 1927, its clock tower made it the tallest point on the waterfront; the clock first struck on New Year’s Day 1928.

How high? Sassoon House and the Bank of China

The North China Daily News building was the tallest on the Bund when it opened at 40.2 metres. Sassoon House at No. 20, finished in 1929, nearly doubled that: 77 metres to the top of its green copper pyramid. The gazetteer calls it the first Bund building faced in granite, though Jardine’s building of 1922 is granite all round too. Victor Sassoon put offices on the lower floors, the Cathay Hotel above them and his own flat at the top. The Sassoon firm had bought the corner plot in 1875 at 6,500 taels a mu.

What happened next door is told in two ways. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer, compiled from the Council’s archives, says the Bank of China planned a 34-storey tower in 1934; Sassoon objected to anything higher than his own roof, the Council refused a permit, and the bank built 17 storeys, 30 centimetres lower than Sassoon House. A 2017 study by the Shanghai Banking Museum went through the Council’s board minutes for 1933–36 and found no record of the dispute. It points instead to the silver crisis of 1934, the bank’s own budget and a rule tying a building’s street-front height to the width of the road in front; the bank’s board had already approved an 18-storey plan in April 1934. The 34-storey scheme was Palmer & Turner’s concept drawing. Both versions agree on the result: the Bank of China stops just short of Sassoon House.

The Bank of China is also the one building on the Bund where a Chinese architect led the design. Lu Qianshou (陆谦受, Lù Qiānshòu), an architect in the bank’s own building department, gave a steel-framed tower a shallow pyramid roof of blue glazed tile, stone brackets in the form of dougong under the eaves and window grilles in Chinese patterns. The structure was topped out in 1937 and finished during the war.

The last building in the row came after it. The Bank of Communications at No. 14, designed by C. H. Gonda’s office, was begun in 1946 and completed in 1948, a plain late Art Deco block with almost no ornament. It was the final addition to the Bund before 1949.

After 1949, and back

Within a few years of 1949 most foreign firms had left and their buildings were assigned to state offices. In 1955 HSBC gave up No. 12, which became the seat of the Shanghai municipal government for forty years. The Palace Hotel and Sassoon House became the two wings of the Peace Hotel; Jardine’s building went to the foreign trade bureau; No. 15 went through a succession of bureaus.

From the early 1990s the city moved finance back. Huaxia Bank was given No. 5 in 1993; the China Foreign Exchange Trade System took No. 15 in 1994; China Everbright Bank moved into No. 29 in 1995; China Pacific Insurance took No. 1 and the American insurer AIA returned to No. 17 in 1996, both through property exchanges. The municipal government left HSBC’s building in 1995, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank opened its head office there on 23 June 1998, seventy-five years to the day after HSBC. The Bund group was listed as a national protected site in November 1996, its dates given as 1906–1937.

What to look for

Stand on the riverside promenade opposite the Customs House. In the 1840s this was foreshore and mud; the strip between the buildings and the water was filled in stages, among them a band about 50 feet wide in 1919–20. In front of you the clock tower and HSBC’s dome are the 1920s at full scale. Read the base of every building: rough granite blocks at street level are the rule.

Walk south to No. 9 and No. 7. The red brick and verandah of the China Merchants Building are the nearest thing left to the hong type of the 1860s. Compare them with the Nissin Building at No. 5, granite from top to bottom, built twenty years later.

At No. 6, look for the gables. The Imperial Bank of China is small and pointed among square neighbours, a sign of the decade before the banks grew big.

At the corner of Nanjing Road, look at the two hotels together. The Palace Hotel (1908) is white tile and red brick with a flat roof that replaced its lost pavilions after a fire in 1914; Sassoon House (1929) is granite and vertical lines. The step from one to the other is the step from the first rebuilding to the second.

At No. 15, look at the walls. The tile of the Russo-Chinese Bank was new in 1902; its neighbour at No. 14, the Bank of Communications, is the last building of the row.

At the north end, go into the Bund Origin compound. The British Consulate of 1873, with its arcade, verandah and raised floor, is the only building here from the first Bund. The Gutzlaff Signal Tower at the south end tells the other half of the story: in 1993, when Zhongshan East Road was widened again, the whole tower was moved 22.4 metres toward the river.

What is gone. None of the verandah hongs of Jardine, Dent or Russell survives; the German Club is under the Bank of China; the tram tracks that justified the steel bridge were taken off it in 1964. The directories, not the buildings, are the record of them.