The Bund

Where to start, and why there

Most people arrive in the middle, photograph Pudong and leave. The walk works better from the south end, a block back from the water at Holy Trinity Church.

It was begun in 1866 and consecrated in 1869, replacing a badly built church of 1847. The bell tower went up in 1893. It stopped being a church after 1949 and the spire came down. It is the oldest Protestant church still standing in Shanghai and was the Anglican cathedral here from 1875.

It is red brick, and everything else on this walk is grey stone, which is why Shanghainese called it the Red Church and still do. It was drawn in London by George Gilbert Scott, who also built the hotel at St Pancras and never came to Shanghai; an architect here, William Kidner, adapted it on site.

This is what the traders built first. Everything else is what they built next.

The building that governed the rest

The former Municipal Council building was finished in 1922, but the body that sat in it goes back to 1854. This was the Shanghai Municipal Council, and every other building on this walk answered to it.

It was elected by ratepayers, who for most of its life were British and American. It ran its own police, its own courts and its own volunteer army. Chinese residents paid into it from the start and got their first three seats in 1928.

Nobody here checked passports, which is why about twenty thousand Jewish refugees from Europe were able to arrive with no visa at all. In 1925 Settlement police shot into a crowd on Nanjing Road and the strikes that followed shut the city down for months. Japan took the Chinese districts in 1937 and entered the Settlement the day after Pearl Harbor; by 1943 Britain and America had signed the whole arrangement away.

In 1949 the new city government moved in here, which is why people still call it the Old City Hall.

The low brick one, and what it tells you

Number 9 is from 1901 and is the lowest old building on the Bund: three storeys, brick and timber rather than stone, with an arcaded verandah. Look at the banks on either side of it. That is two centuries standing side by side, and the low one is what the whole waterfront looked like before the money arrived.

The site belonged to Russell and Company, American traders who ran the Yangtze steamers and could not be matched on the river. The building became the head office of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the first Chinese-owned steamship line in the country, founded in 1872 on Li Hongzhang's idea: Chinese ships on Chinese rivers.

Five years later it bought Russell's entire fleet, wharves and warehouses. That was 1877, and the company still trades today. Keep it in mind when you reach number 23.

The bank, the clock and the money

Number 12 opened in 1923 and needed three street numbers to fit. It was the largest bank building in Asia at the time, and people called it the finest between the Suez Canal and the Bering Strait. Granite base, paired Corinthian columns, and a Greek dome — the only dome on the Bund.

The two bronze lions outside are copies, named Stephen and Stitt after two bank managers; the originals are in the Shanghai History Museum. Everyone rubs a paw on the way past. Inside is an octagonal hall whose mosaic ceiling shows eight cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Bangkok and Calcutta. That was the map that mattered.

HSBC was founded in Hong Kong in 1865 by a Scot, Thomas Sutherland, and opened here within a month. Shanghai is half the bank's name and still half its initials. From 1955 to 1995 this building was Shanghai's city hall — the government left the old council building and moved into the bank.

Next door, the Custom House of 1927 is the fourth on the spot; the first went up in 1845. Its tower is modelled on Big Ben and the clock, built by J.B. Joyce of Whitchurch in England, came out in pieces and was assembled up there. It plays the Westminster chimes, which were swapped for a revolutionary song during the Cultural Revolution and restored in 2003.

Take away the promenade and the traffic and this was the working port. Ships tied up along this bank and cargo cleared where you are standing, so the clock was not decoration — it told the time to crews on the river and men on the wharves, almost none of whom owned a watch. Customs duty was the largest source of revenue in the country, collected here by a service run by foreigners; an Irishman, Robert Hart, ran it for nearly fifty years.

The green pyramid, and the roof made to come second

The Peace Hotel of 1929 was built as Sassoon House and was the tallest building on the Bund when it opened. Its copper pyramid roof is nineteen metres tall and was the colour of a new penny; ninety years of weather turned it green, which is how you find the building from anywhere on the river. The older block joined to it, number 19, is the Palace Hotel of 1908.

Victor Sassoon came from a Baghdadi Jewish family whose fortune was made in Bombay and who moved it here in the 1920s, on his judgement that India was finished and Shanghai was not. He walked with a stick after a flying accident in the first war and kept an apartment under the pyramid. Noël Coward wrote Private Lives in this hotel in 1930, over four days flat on his back with influenza. Charlie Chaplin stayed here too.

Number 23, finished in 1937, is the last of the great buildings on this street before the war stopped everything, and the only one a Chinese architect co-led: Lu Qianshou, working in the Bank of China's own architecture department, jointly with Palmer and Turner — the same British firm that built HSBC and the Custom House.

Look up at it. A blue glazed tile roof with lifting corners, stone window screens cut with the character for longevity, Confucius on the frieze. Every other façade here speaks European and this one answers back.

The story everyone tells is that the first design was thirty-four storeys and meant to be the tallest thing on the Bund, that Sassoon objected because nothing was going to overtop his pyramid, and that he took it to the Settlement authorities and won. Historians argue about how much of that is true. What is not in doubt is what got built: seventeen storeys, and if you sight along the roofline it still finishes just under his.

Where the walk ends, and where it started

Number 24, from 1924, was the Yokohama Specie Bank, the largest Japanese financial presence in China, built by Palmer and Turner again — a British firm building for a Japanese bank next door to a Chinese one. After 1945 it went to the Bank of China.

Number 27 is Jardine Matheson. The building is from 1922 but the firm has held this ground since 1843, having taken lot number one, the first plot granted on the Bund. Two Scots founded it in Canton in 1832: William Jardine, a former ship's surgeon, and James Matheson. They dealt in tea, in silk and in opium, and the third paid for the other two.

When China moved to shut the opium trade down in 1839, Jardine sailed to London, lobbied the Foreign Secretary to send a fleet, and handed over a plan for how to do it. He got his war. That war produced the treaty, the treaty produced this port, and this port produced every building on this walk — including the church at the start of it. The firm is still one of the big Hong Kong houses.

The Garden Bridge of 1907 is the northern end. It was the first all-steel riveted bridge built in China, and every joint is riveted rather than welded because welding was not used for this yet. The steel was made in England and shipped out in pieces; in 2008 the whole span was floated away downriver, restored, and floated back. The corner building across the water opened in 1917 and is still the Russian consulate.

An earlier bridge here charged Chinese pedestrians a toll while foreigners crossed free. The protests got it replaced with a free one, and the Chinese name still means the free crossing. This creek was the northern edge of the original British settlement and the American one began on the far bank.

The other bank

Everything in Pudong is younger than 1990. Before that it was warehouses, docks and farmland. The Oriental Pearl came in 1994, Jin Mao in 1999, the World Financial Center in 2008 and Shanghai Tower in 2016.

Shanghai Tower is 632 metres, the tallest in China and second tallest in the world. The one with the opening is 492 metres and the stepped one, Jin Mao, is 420. The twist in the tallest is not decoration: it cuts the wind load, and that saved a fortune in steel.

The Oriental Pearl is eleven spheres on three columns, an idea taken from a Tang poem about pearls large and small falling on a jade plate. Its deck at 259 metres has a clear glass floor. The three tallest were designed by American firms — Gensler, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and Skidmore Owings and Merrill. The Oriental Pearl is the odd one out, designed here in Shanghai, and was the tallest tower in Asia when it opened.

Look at both banks at once and the point of the place arrives on its own. Behind you, Westerners built a city on Chinese ground for themselves. In front of you, China hired Western architects and built a city for itself. Same race to be tallest, ninety years apart, and the client changed.

Questions people ask