The hongs: how Shanghai's foreign trading houses rose, changed and left, 1843–1958

The short answer. A hong (行, háng) was a trading house. The word came with the foreign merchants from Canton, where trade had been funnelled through licensed Chinese “hong merchants”, and in Shanghai it was attached to the foreign firms themselves: 洋行, yángháng, “foreign hong”. The Treaty of Nanking of 29 August 1842 ended the licensed monopoly at every port where British merchants lived and named Shanghai among the five cities where British subjects and their families could settle. The Land Regulations of 1845 then let them take permanent leases along the river. The Bund is lined with banks, insurers and shipping offices because it began as a row of hong lots, and the early hongs rebuilt on them as they grew. By the Shanghai gazetteer’s count there were 24 foreign firms in 1848, 88 in 1865, 280 in 1891 and 643 in 1911. Most began in opium and tea, moved into shipping, insurance, cotton mills, wharves and property, and were joined, and sometimes beaten, by Chinese managers who learned the business from inside. Jardine, Matheson & Co. (怡和洋行, Yíhé Yángháng) transferred its mainland assets on 1 October 1954; the Sassoon businesses were transferred in 1958.

What was a hong, and why do the hongs’ buildings fill the Bund?

Start with the word. Wikipedia’s articles on the word and on Ewo say that the Chinese name Jardine’s carried, 怡和 (Yíhé, “happy harmony”), was borrowed from an earlier Canton hong run by the hong merchant Howqua (伍秉鉴, Wǔ Bǐngjiàn), and one account says that hong was known for upright dealing. The firm took over a name with a reputation. At Canton before 1842 foreign merchants had to trade through the licensed hong merchants; the treaty text describes exactly that practice.

Article V of the Treaty of Nanking removed that. China agreed to abolish the practice “at all Ports where British Merchants may reside”, and Article II named Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai as places where British subjects, “with their families and establishments”, could live. The treaty was signed on 29 August 1842 aboard HMS Cornwallis and ratified in Hong Kong on 26 June 1843. Shanghai began direct trade with the West in 1843, and the economists Wolfgang Keller, Ben Li and Carol Shiue report that by 1853 it already handled more than half of China’s foreign trade.

Land came next. Local officials and the British consul took a year to settle the rules for renting land, and the Land Regulations were published on 29 October 1845. Foreign tenants paid a single annual rent of 1,500 cash per mu (a Chinese land measure of roughly one-fifteenth of a hectare) to the Chinese government and a one-time deposit to the owner, and the lease could be ended only by the foreign tenant, which made it permanent in practice. Households were limited to 10 mu, a rule the gazetteer says was not strictly kept. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer gives the first deeds: 59 in the first batch, covering 535.844 mu. British deed No. 1 went to Dent & Co. (宝顺洋行, Bǎoshùn Yángháng) for 13.894 mu leased in May and June 1844 at a deposit of 99,880 cash per mu, with Jardine’s 18.694 mu in November 1844 recorded as No. 3. The Dent plot and its neighbour, the hong 和记 (Héjì), both lay on the waterfront. Deposits rose with the demand: 60 to 120 thousand cash per mu in 1844–45, about 40 to 80 taels by the gazetteer’s conversion, and 170 to 540 thousand cash by 1855.

The Bund buildings you see today stand on those leases, rebuilt since. No. 27, the Jardine Matheson Building stands on the plot the firm took in 1845; a cottage went up that year, a larger building was finished in 1851, and the present one, by Moorhead & Halse (马海洋行, Mǎhǎi Yángháng), was begun in 1920 and completed in November 1922. The hongs were the landlords who made a street.

Who came first, and what did they sell?

The question “who was first” has several answers, and the sources do not agree. Wikipedia says Russell & Company, the American house, was “the first firm to be established in Shanghai”, but the same encyclopaedia’s other entries and the University of Zurich chronology put its Shanghai branch in 1846, with the head office moving from Canton in 1852. Wikipedia’s history of Jardines says it began trading in early 1843 and was the first to register a Bund lot; Dent & Co. opened an office the same year at No. 14; Gibb, Livingston & Co. (仁记洋行, Rénjì Yángháng) opened a branch in 1844; and the Baghdadi house David Sassoon & Co. is dated by the historian Chiara Betta to 1845. The gazetteer’s deed numbers, with Dent first in line, are a third kind of evidence, and none of these settles the matter, because a lease, an office and a deed are different events. What the sources do agree on is that by 1848 there were enough firms to count.

The gazetteer’s count for that year is 24 foreign firms, 21 British and 3 American, among a little over a hundred foreign residents. In 1850 the North-China Herald’s first number printed a list of the foreign residents of Shanghai: 210 people, of whom 111 were hong employees and principals, 68 family members, 13 missionaries and 7 consular staff. More than half of the foreign community worked for a hong. By 1852 there were 41 hongs (27 British, 8 from British India and 5 American) and by 1855 there were 53 (28 British and 6 American).

What did they sell? The gazetteer says plainly that the larger early British and American hongs began in opium smuggling, and it names Jardine, Swire and Russell, although Swire did not reach Shanghai until 1867. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1860 gives a snapshot for the year 1858: Shanghai took 25,122 chests of Malwa opium and 7,238 of Patna, the table valued the drug at about £4.9 million of £12.0 million in imports (the printed table does not quite add up to its own totals), and the entry notes that silk exports had greatly increased since 1855 while tea exports had fallen because of the disruption of communication. Opium, valued at about 41 per cent of the year’s imports, was the drug side of the business, and silk and tea were the staples going out, so a hong could easily trade all three.

Even the opium story has a disputed date. Wikipedia’s Shanghai timeline for Jardines records a policy adopted in 1872 to end significant involvement in the drug, yet the firm’s archive at Cambridge holds opium memoranda for 1870 to 1875, mostly 1875, with statements of stocks and sales at Amoy, Shanghai and Swatow. Wikipedia also says that by the early 1870s David Sassoon & Co. handled around 70 per cent of the Indian opium traded, a figure it does not source. Both are better treated as claims than as measurements. How the Settlement’s own Council handled the drug from 1880 is told, with figures, in opium under licence.

Who were the compradors, and how did they become rivals?

A comprador (买办, mǎibàn) was the native manager a foreign house employed. The word began with servants who bought food for European households in Canton and Macao; later it meant the Chinese manager through whom a firm bought and sold tea, silk, cotton and yarn, and who worked in foreign-owned banks. Posts could run in families: both Xu Run and Zheng Guanying, below, entered the business through an uncle who was already a comprador.

Three men show what it could become. Xu Run (徐润, Xú Rùn) was fifteen in 1852 when he left a Suzhou school after a few months and joined Dent & Co. as an apprentice under his uncle Xu Yuting (徐钰亭), the firm’s comprador, at ten Mexican silver dollars a month. He became a comprador himself, earned commissions on the firm’s business, and later became a senior manager at the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company. Tong King-sing (唐廷枢, Táng Tíngshū, 1832–1892) joined Jardines in 1861 and was made its Shanghai comprador in 1863, later chief comprador over its other ports; from 1873 to 1884 he was general manager of China Merchants. Zheng Guanying (郑观应, Zhèng Guānyìng), born in 1842, went to Shanghai at sixteen, worked first at the British firm Overweg and Company, where his uncle was comprador, then for Butterfield & Swire, and started his own business after he turned forty-one.

Then the apprentices became competitors. The China Merchants Steam Navigation Company was founded in Shanghai on 16 December 1872 under Li Hongzhang (李鸿章, Lǐ Hóngzhāng), and its bureau opened formally on 17 January 1873. Its general manager was the man who had been Jardines’ comprador. In 1874 China Merchants, Jardines and Butterfield & Swire each ran six steamers on the Yangtze, against seventeen for Russell & Company’s Shanghai Steam Navigation Company, which had been set up in 1862 with a capital of 1 million taels. Within three years the American line was gone.

How did China Merchants buy Russell’s fleet in 1877?

The best account is a despatch by George F. Seward, the US consul-general, written on 30 January 1877 and printed in the American Foreign Relations series. Russell & Company had agreed, subject to shareholder approval, to sell the vessels and other property of the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company to the Chinese company for 2 million taels: half before 31 March, and the balance in quarterly instalments of 50,000 taels at 8 per cent. The company had 22,500 shares of 100 taels, which had been selling at 60 to 66, and Seward calculated that holders would get about 103 taels per share, nearly 56 per cent above market. He wrote that the American company “disappears from the waters of China” and that the American flag gained a prominence it would perhaps never regain there; he put the Chinese company’s reinforcement at eighteen or twenty ships.

Other accounts differ on the price. A Japanese study of the purchase by Kitamura Hironao (1961) gives 2,200,000 Shanghai taels, and the China Merchants company’s archive page and Chinese Wikipedia give 2.22 million taels for the steamship interests and Bund properties together, saying the company moved into the former Russell north building in March 1877. Edward Cunningham (金能亨, Jīn Néngxīng), the Russell partner who had proposed Yangtze shipping around 1859 and raised the 1862 capital, also founded the Yangtze Insurance Association, the first insurance company headquartered in Shanghai. In December 1877, according to the SOAS catalogue, China Merchants and Butterfield & Swire’s China Navigation Company signed a pool agreement.

Russell & Company itself lasted until 1891, when it became Shewan & Company. The Yangtze Insurance Association survived it. Its building, No. 26 on the Bund, was put up by Palmer & Turner in the years around 1920 on a lot the company had bought from the Old Sassoon firm. Russell’s other river land passed on. China Merchants built its head office at No. 9 in 1901 on what had been Russell’s garden. The Danish Great Northern Telegraph Company rented a building on Russell’s plot at No. 7 from 1881, and ownership of that land passed to China Merchants after 1891. English Wikipedia says the building at No. 6 was commissioned by Russell, and it was later occupied by the Imperial Bank of China.

What happened to Dent, and what did the 1866 crash do?

The failure of the London discount house Overend, Gurney and Company in 1866 set off bank runs that hit many firms. Dent & Co. was forced to shut its Hong Kong office, a bankruptcy petition was filed in the Supreme Court of Hong Kong on 29 June 1867, and the firm is said to have officially folded that year, its headquarters moving to Shanghai after the Hong Kong collapse.

Dent’s Shanghai site did not vanish. Bund No. 14 passed to the German Deutsch-Asiatische Bank, which put up a four-storey Renaissance-style building there in the 1880s, and the present building on the plot is the Bank of Communications Building of 1948. Xu Run, the apprentice from the comprador section, ran out of money in 1883: on 21 November 1883 he declared himself insolvent with debts of about 2.52 million taels, handing over real estate and shares, and in 1884 he was removed from China Merchants. A Chinese popular article, not Xu’s own memoir, is the only source here for these details.

One account says Dent also lost at least £200,000 to a Portuguese clerk at Shanghai. It rests on a single account and is not repeated as fact here; the collapse is stated only as the 1866 run and the 1867 petition.

How did the Baghdadi houses change the hongs?

The Sassoons, Hardoon and the Kadoories came from Baghdad by way of Bombay, and they did not look like the Scottish and American houses. David Sassoon (1792–1864), born in Baghdad, was treasurer of the city between 1817 and 1829, moved his family to Bombay in 1830 or 1832 (sources differ), and founded David Sassoon & Co. there in 1832 as a counting house at 9 Tamarind Street, in banking and property. His son Elias David Sassoon (1820–1880) was sent to Canton in 1844. The firm’s China offices are dated by Betta to 1843 at Hong Kong and 1845 at Shanghai, and Betta says the Shanghai office stayed the main focus of its China operations for a century.

The firm also split. After David died in 1864, Elias left in 1867 after quarrels with his brothers and founded E. D. Sassoon & Co., with, in the words Wikipedia quotes from Jackson, “modest offices in Bombay and Shanghai”. Sixth Tone and a Chinese firm dictionary date the founding of the new firm to 1872 instead, and the dictionary says the names 老沙逊 (Old Sassoon) and 新沙逊 (New Sassoon) came into use after the second firm was formed. In the Edwardian years E. D. Sassoon’s capital was £1.25 million to £1.5 million, against about £0.5 million for the older firm.

The new firm’s biggest change was to turn cloth from a cargo into a factory. In 1879 E. D. Sassoon & Co. bought the bankrupt Alexandra Mills in Bombay, and by the Second World War it owned 15 cotton mills with over 30,000 employees. In 1907 Britain agreed to phase out opium exports to China over a decade, and the firm withdrew from the drug; Maisie Meyer writes that the trade conducted by Baghdadi merchants ended in 1917. The firm had done more than ship it: Betta reports that by the 1880s the Sassoon firms were keeping their opium records in English, ahead of smaller Baghdadi traders, and the gazetteer says that in the late nineteenth century Silas Hardoon and the older Sassoon firm jointly ran the foreign-opium exchange (洋药公所, Yángyào Gōngsuǒ).

The Sassoon house also trained the people who competed with it. Silas Hardoon (哈同, Hātóng), born in Baghdad (the gazetteer gives 1846–1931; Betta and Wikipedia give 1851), went to work for the Sassoon firm; the gazetteer says it sent him to Shanghai in 1873, while English Wikipedia says 1868 and a University of Zurich database has him in Hong Kong first. In 1886, says the gazetteer, he moved to the property department of New Sassoon, and in 1901 he opened Hardoon & Co. (哈同洋行) to deal in property. He bought large amounts of land on and near Nanjing Road, built houses to let, and became the richest foreigner in Shanghai, the gazetteer says; a city government page credits him with the lane houses of Cichang Lane and Ci’an Lane off East Nanjing Road.

Elly Kadoorie (1867–1944), also Baghdad-born, reached Hong Kong in 1880 and began as a clerk at E. D. Sassoon & Co. before becoming a broker; his brother Ellis (1865–1922) had been with David Sassoon & Sons. A review of Jonathan Kaufman’s The Last Kings of Shanghai says Elly worked for the Sassoons along the China coast and that his business ideas differed from theirs by his late teens.

The Sassoons were also a political presence: Betta reports that until 1904 the Baghdadi members of the Shanghai Municipal Council were partners in Sassoon firms.

Why did the hongs stop being traders?

Because a hong that owns a river frontage, a wharf, a ship and an insurer earns money from many things besides the goods it carries. Look at Jardine’s list. It formed the Shanghai & Hongkew Wharf Co. in 1875 as general managers, and added the Old Ningpo Wharf in 1883 and the Pootung Wharf in 1890. It formed the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company in 1881, which ran until 1939. It founded the EWO Cotton Spinning and Weaving Co. in 1895, described as the first foreign-owned cotton mill in China, then the Ewo Yuen Press Packing Company in 1907, the Ewo Cold Storage Company (powdered eggs) in 1920, and the EWO Brewery, built in 1935–36 and a public company from 1940. The gazetteer says that by the early twentieth century Jardines alone had fourteen enterprises in Shanghai. Its head office was officially based in Shanghai from 1912.

Butterfield & Swire shows the same path from a smaller start. John Samuel Swire went to Shanghai in 1866, and he and Richard Shackleton Butterfield formed the partnership that opened its Shanghai office on 1 January 1867 to handle Swire’s textile shipments; the partnership ended in 1869 and John Swire & Sons kept the name. The firm took the Chinese name 太古 (Tàigǔ), “great and ancient”. It formed the China Navigation Company in 1872 with Alfred Holt’s backing to run steamers on the Yangtze and the coast, created a Hong Kong sugar refinery in 1884 to break Jardine’s monopoly, and founded the Taikoo Dockyard in 1900.

Smaller houses did the same on a smaller scale. Gibb, Livingston, whose Shanghai office stood at 100 Jinkee Road, built in 1908, was agent for insurers such as North British and Mercantile and Allianz, for the Ben Line of Steamers, P&O and others. The gazetteer adds that by the 1890s three of Shanghai’s four large foreign-owned cotton mills were Anglo-American, and that between 1895 and 1913 foreigners opened 43 sizeable plants in the city.

And then there was property. The gazetteer says the earliest foreign firm whose main business was property was Lester’s 德和洋行 (Déhé Yángháng), founded in 1870, followed by the Shanghai Land Investment Company in 1888, the British firm 泰利 in 1900, Hardoon’s house in 1901, an American realty company in 1902 and an Anglo-French land company in 1905. Henry Lester, born in Southampton in 1840, came to Shanghai around 1863 (or 1867, depending on the source), worked for the Municipal Council, joined the property dealer Smith’s estate agency and took it over; in 1913 he reorganised the firm with George Johnson and Gordon Morriss as Lester, Johnson & Morriss, which became a leading architectural practice, and he retired in 1916. His will set up the Lester Trust, which built the Henry Lester Institute of Medical Research and designated 1 million taels and four plots of land for a new Renji Hospital.

How many firms, how much property? The numbers in context

There is no continuous series of Shanghai’s foreign firms, but the gazetteer offers a ladder of snapshots that is better than nothing. Here they are with the British and American shares.

Year	Foreign firms	British	American	British share
1852	41	27	5	66%
1855	53	28	6	53%
1865	88	58	6	66%
1891	280	175	12	62.5%
1901	432	194	55	45%
1911	643	258	59	40%

Read across: the total grew about sixteen-fold in 59 years and 2.3 times between 1891 and 1911, while Britain’s share fell from two-thirds to two-fifths, as other nationalities came in. The number of foreigners is a different scale. In 1850 there were 210; in 1865, 3,180 in the former British and American settlements plus 460 in the French; in 1870, after the number had fallen as many left following the Taiping rising’s defeat, 1,666 in the International Settlement; about 15,000 around 1900; 62,000 in 1936; and 86,000 in 1942. In the International Settlement in 1935, 38,915 foreigners included 3,346 working in industry, 3,848 in commerce and 440 in banking and insurance.

The sources give no firm count for the 1930s. Sixth Tone says that more than 1,800 foreign firms from 34 countries opened in Shanghai between 1843 and 1949, but that is a cumulative total of openings, not a count of firms at any one time, and it should not be compared with the 643 above.

Property figures are scattered and mix currencies. For land, the gazetteer’s table of appeals against the 1907 assessments shows what the hongs held on the Bund and behind it: Jardine’s Lot 19, bounded by Peking, Museum and Szechuen Roads, was assessed at 40,000 and reduced to 35,000 taels on appeal, while Bund Lot 24, held by E. and R. D. Sassoon, was cut from 90,000 to 80,000 (the table gives no unit, so these are probably per mu). In 1907, of the appeals against house assessments, 30 per cent were brought by one firm, 30 per cent by New Sassoon and 15 per cent by Atkinson & Dallas, so three firms accounted for three-quarters of the appeals. Sixth Tone, citing the historian Tang Peiji, estimates New Sassoon’s Shanghai real estate at 13.3 million taels in 1921; the Sassoon corner on the Bund and Nanjing Road, bought in the 1870s (1875 at 6,500 taels per mu in the gazetteer; 1877 at 80,000 taels in Sixth Tone), was worth 1.7 million taels by the 1920s. The gazetteer puts the book value of real estate held by Victor Sassoon’s direct subsidiaries at 86.893 million yuan in 1941; the two figures are in different currencies and cannot be compared.

How did the 1930s end the hongs’ world?

The peak in buildings came late. Victor Sassoon (1881–1961) became a main owner of E. D. Sassoon & Co. after his father and his uncle both died in 1924, with his uncle’s widow Mozelle Gubbay; their combined business assets were valued at £15 million. In 1923 the firm had bought the majority of Arnhold & Co., which controlled the Cathay Land Company. Then came the blocks. Sassoon House, by Palmer & Turner, was built in 1926–29 on the Bund and Nanjing Road corner, stands 77 m high and opened as the Cathay Hotel in 1929; the ground floor held two banks and shops, floors three and four were E. D. Sassoon’s offices, and the upper floors were the hotel and the family’s rooms. Cathay Mansions, Grosvenor House (4.25 million yuan for land and building, annual rents of 337,000 yuan) and the Embankment Building (1935, 282 flats, on the site of a lane estate the Sassoons had bought in 1887) followed. The gazetteer explains the tall blocks by the Settlement’s tax on land by area, not floor area.

But the boom was also an exit. The gazetteer says that from 1932, as the Japanese threat grew, Sassoon began selling Shanghai property. In 1937 Japan’s invasion closed Swire’s northern China and Shanghai interests. Glen Line, the shipping line whose offices were No. 28 on the Bund, used the building until 1937, after which Japanese forces occupied it. After war with Japan reached the Settlement in December 1941 Jardines moved its main office to London; the Japanese army occupied Yangtze Insurance’s building, Mitsui & Co. took the Jardine building, and the Japanese seized the Cathay Hotel and other Sassoon holdings after 8 December 1941.

The Kadoories lived through it differently. Elly and Horace stayed in a room above the stables of the Marble Hall on Bubbling Well Road under the occupation, while Lawrence’s family went to the Chapei internment camp; The hongs came back in 1945: Jardines returned in 1946 and rented out space; China Navigation returned to Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1945;

How did the hongs leave, 1949–1958?

After 1949 the exit was gradual and negotiated, and it was not complete until the late 1950s. Chi-kwan Mark, quoted by Grace’s Guide, gives national figures for British business in China: 236 British businesses holding 53 per cent of British capital had been liquidated by the end of 1952, 93.1 per cent by 1956, and the last British firm closed in 1959. Those figures are for China as a whole, not Shanghai.

For Jardines the sequence is better documented. In January 1954 the firm announced that it had ceased to act as general managers of the EWO Cotton Mills; by the end of 1954 it had sold, moved or closed all its mainland operations, selling the brewery at a loss; and the Cambridge catalogue records the transfer of the China offices’ assets and liabilities to the state-operated Chung Hwa Development Company on 1 October 1954. From 1955 the Shanghai Foreign Trade Administration used the Bund building. For Swire, a company history says the 1949 victory led to the loss of its Chinese properties, which were nationalised without compensation; John Swire & Sons opened a Shanghai office again in November 1993. For Sassoon, the gazetteer says the Shanghai businesses were transferred in 1958 to the 中华企业公司 against unpaid tax, after Victor Sassoon had sold properties piece by piece and moved E. D. Sassoon’s headquarters to Nassau.

The buildings stayed and went to other uses. No. 27 became the offices of the Shanghai foreign trade bureau and its companies in 1955 and is on the list of first-batch protected buildings of 1989. No. 26 was taken over by the municipal government in 1967 and now belongs to the Agricultural Bank of China. The Asia Building passed to the East China Petroleum Company. Three on the Bund, built for a Canton marine insurer, passed from the Mercantile Bank to the municipal government in 1952 and became a design institute. The North China Daily News Building, designed by Lester’s firm, lost its paper on 31 March 1951 and was used from then by the Inland River Shipping Bureau. The Kadoories’ house was handed on with the family’s consent: on 1 June 1953 Song Qingling (宋庆龄) founded the China Welfare Institute Children’s Palace there. Hardoon’s Aili Garden was taken over by the city in 1949–1955 and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building, now the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, was built on it.

What do the sources disagree on?

Quite a lot.

• The first firm. Wikipedia says Russell was “the first firm to be established in Shanghai”; its own Shanghai branch is dated 1846. Jardine is said to be first to register a lot in 1843. The gazetteer has Dent holding British deed No. 1 (leased May or June 1844) and Jardine No. 3 (November 1844), and elsewhere says deed No. 7, 18.92 mu, was leased by Jardine in 1844. A traveller’s guide says Jardine was first to put up a building on the Bund, in 1851; Wikipedia’s building article says a cottage went up in 1845.
• Jardine and opium. Jardines adopted a policy in 1872 to end significant involvement, according to the firm’s Wikipedia timeline; the Cambridge catalogue lists opium memoranda for 1875.
• When Sassoon began. David Sassoon & Co. founded 1832 in Bombay; the Chinese dictionary says the “Sassoon, Sons & Co.” business was founded in Shanghai in 1832. E. D. Sassoon is dated 1867 or 1872. Victor Sassoon came to Shanghai in 1923 (the gazetteer, Sixth Tone), “the 1920s” (a 2006 magazine), or moved the headquarters in “the early 1930s” (a 2026 review); the company’s own Shanghai headquarters opened at Sassoon House in March 1930.
• Hardoon. Birth 1846 or 1851; arrival 1868, 1873 or 1874; the date he left Sassoon (1882 or 1886); the cost of paving Nanjing Road with ironwood blocks (600,000 taels according to the gazetteer and Chinese Wikipedia, which Chinese Wikipedia repeats from it).
• Russell’s sale. Price 2 million taels (the Seward despatch) or 2.2 million (Kitamura; the China Merchants archive page).

What to look for

Walk north along the Bund from Yan’an Road, and the hongs appear in street-number order.

• No. 1, the Asia Building. Russell & Company’s land, then China Merchants’ land, became an oil company’s headquarters in 1917. It was the tallest building on the Bund when completed.
• No. 3, the narrow building with its main door on Guangdong Road, was built for a Canton marine insurer.
• No. 6 and No. 7 stand on Russell plots; No. 7 had three Bund entrances, one for each cable company.
• No. 9, the red-brick China Merchants building, is on Russell’s old garden. It was bought from the Americans in 1877 and rebuilt in 1901, and it is the plainest physical record of the compradors’ company winning.
• No. 14, the Bank of Communications Building of 1948, is on Dent’s first lot. Nothing of Dent survives there; the plot is the clue.
• No. 17 housed the North China Daily News, designed by Lester’s firm.

Stop at the corner of Nanjing Road. The Palace Hotel on the south corner hosted the International Opium Commission in February 1909. Sassoon House, on the north corner, is the one with the green pyramid roof, built on the plot the Sassoons bought in the 1870s. Then continue north to the Jardine end:

• No. 26 is the Yangtze Insurance Association’s building, on a lot bought from the Old Sassoon firm.
• No. 27, on the corner of Beijing Road, is the Jardine Matheson Building: look for the rough-cut granite of the lower floors, the four marble Corinthian columns across floors three to five, and the carved ram’s head at the centre of the second floor. The cottage of 1845 and the building of 1851 stood on the same lot until 1920.
• No. 28, across Beijing Road, is the Glen Line Building, built on a lot first held by the German house Siemssen & Co.

Away from the river, East Nanjing Road holds the lanes Hardoon is credited with. The Kadoories’ Marble Hall at 64 West Yan’an Road is the Children’s Palace; it is closed to the public, though visitors can wander the grounds. Hardoon’s garden is gone: the Shanghai Exhibition Centre stands on its land.