There is a bend in the Huangpu River, a mile and a half of waterfront on the western bank, where the whole story of modern Shanghai is written in stone. Stand there at dusk and you can read it in both directions. Behind you rises a parade of granite and marble from the 1920s — banks, hotels, clubs, and customs houses built when this strip of mudflat was the richest address in Asia. Across the water, a forest of glass towers climbs into the clouds, none of them older than the 1990s. The Chinese call this waterfront the Waitan. The world knows it by a word borrowed from India by way of the British Empire: the Bund. It is, building for building, the most famous street in China, and everything about it — its name, its money, its architecture, its humiliations, and its triumphs — is the biography of Shanghai itself.
The Towpath
Before it was anything else, the Bund was a path of mud. The word itself comes from the Hindi-Urdu band, an embankment or levee, and that is precisely what the British found when they arrived in 1843: a rough towpath along the riverbank where trackers hauled junks upstream by rope, bordered by rice fields and reed marsh. Shanghai had been opened to foreign trade by the Treaty of Nanjing the year before, and the first British consul, Captain George Balfour, chose this stretch of riverfront, just outside the walls of the old Chinese county town, for the settlement he was empowered to establish. Under the Land Regulations of 1845, Chinese landowners leased plots along the towpath to foreign firms in perpetuity, and the great trading houses — Jardine Matheson, Dent and Company, Russell and Company — began building.
What they built first was nothing like what stands there now. The earliest Bund was a line of “compradoric” buildings: two or three stories of brick and timber with deep verandas, wide eaves, and shuttered windows — colonial architecture of the China coast, designed less for grandeur than for surviving the summer humidity and the typhoon season. The firms lived over their own offices; coolies worked the godowns along the water; sampans and opium clippers crowded the anchorage. The money, though, was already real. Shanghai sat at the mouth of the Yangtze, astride the trade of half a continent, and within a generation the sleepy county town had become the greatest port in China. Silk and tea went out; silver and opium came in; and the towpath along the river became the counting house of it all.
The Rebuilding in Stone
By the 1890s the verandas were coming down. Shanghai’s wealth had outgrown them, and a new generation of firms wanted buildings that said so. What followed, over four decades, was one of the great concentrated bursts of commercial architecture in history: a mile of banks and offices and hotels in granite, marble, and bronze, rising style by style — Beaux-Arts neoclassicism, neo-Renaissance palazzi, and finally, in the 1920s and 1930s, the sleek mass of Art Deco — until the waterfront became what guidebooks called a museum of international architecture, a gallery of fifty-two significant buildings in a single unbroken wall.
The men who drew it were, overwhelmingly, the architects of one firm: Palmer and Turner. Founded in Hong Kong in 1868, the practice opened its Shanghai office in 1912 and proceeded to design, by itself, roughly a dozen of the Bund’s landmarks — the great majority of what the eye rests on today. Its presiding genius in the Shanghai years was George Leopold Wilson, known to everyone as Tug, a Scot who arrived in China as a young draftsman and became the most sought-after architect on the coast. Wilson and his partners worked in the language of imperial confidence: rusticated granite bases, giant orders of columns, domes, and cornices, all rendered at a scale meant to be read from a ship in the middle of the river. But the stones were laid by others. The Bund was built, physically, by Chinese hands — by masons and carpenters and coolie laborers from the villages of the Yangtze delta, working for contractors who poured concrete on a waterfront of river silt, driving thousands of timber piles to keep a million tons of masonry from sinking into the mud. That the buildings stand straight a century later is a quiet monument to their craft.
How to Build a Cliff on Mud
Every architect who worked on the Bund faced the same adversary, and it was not the client. Shanghai stands on the alluvial silt of the Yangtze delta — hundreds of feet of soft, waterlogged mud and sand laid down by the river over millennia, with bedrock far beyond the reach of any foundation of the era. Nothing heavy could simply be set down on it. The solution, perfected by the Shanghai building trade in the early twentieth century, was the raft and the pile: buildings were floated on reinforced concrete rafts, or carried on forests of timber piles — Oregon pine, imported in vast quantities — driven deep into the silt and packed in concrete. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s palace alone rests on thousands of piles. It worked astonishingly well. The Bund’s great wall has settled, as everything in Shanghai settles, but it has settled more or less evenly, and a century later the facades run true along the waterfront like a cliff face that grew there naturally.
The materials, meanwhile, came from everywhere — which was the point. Granite for the bases came by sea; marble for the banking halls came from Italy; steel frames arrived from Britain; bronze work, mosaics, teak, and terrazzo were shipped in or fabricated in the city’s own increasingly sophisticated workshops. The construction boom of the 1920s was a gold rush in its own right, fed by the river of silver that the port handled, and it drew talent from across the world: British architects, Italian mosaicists, Chinese master builders, Russian draftsmen in exile after the revolution. Shanghai in those years was a city where a draftsman could become an architect and an architect could become rich, and the skyline they produced — north along the Bund, then west along the avenues to Laszlo Hudec’s Park Hotel of 1934, for half a century the tallest building in China — was their joint autobiography.
The Bank and the Clock
The twin sovereigns of the Bund were always numbers 12 and 13. Number 12 was the Shanghai headquarters of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, completed by Palmer and Turner in 1923 and instantly famous: at its opening the press called it the most luxurious building between the Suez Canal and the Bering Strait. Seven stories of neo-Renaissance mass were crowned by a dome modeled on the great domes of Europe; inside, a banking hall ran nearly seventy meters beneath a ceiling of glass and marble, its octagonal dome lined with mosaics — Venice, New York, London, Paris, the sun god and Ceres, the allegory of commerce itself — executed by Italian craftsmen and so fine that when a later regime covered them over with plaster and paint, they survived hidden for forty years until restorers uncovered them in 1997. Flanking the entrance sat two bronze lions, cast in England, named by Shanghai wits Stephen and Stitt after the bank’s managers, one roaring, one contemplative. Rubbing their paws for luck became a city superstition; the paws are polished bright to this day.
Next door, at number 13, rose the Customs House of 1927 — and above it, the clock. The Maritime Customs was the institution that made Shanghai work, a Chinese government service staffed at the top by foreigners, and its clock tower, also by Palmer and Turner, was designed as a deliberate echo of Big Ben: four great faces and a chime of bells cast to the same pattern as Westminster’s. Shanghai set its watches by it. Ships in the river set their chronometers by it. In a city that ran on credit and shipping schedules, the Customs House clock was the heartbeat, and its silhouette — tower, dome, and flagstaff — became, in postcards and cigarette advertisements and a thousand photographs, the very image of Shanghai.
The House of Sassoon
If the banks were the Bund’s power, number 20 was its pleasure. In 1929 Sir Victor Sassoon — heir to a Baghdad Jewish trading dynasty that had made fortunes in Bombay and then in Shanghai opium, cotton, and real estate — opened the Cathay Hotel atop his Sassoon House, a ten-story Art Deco statement capped by a green copper pyramid that still punctuates the waterfront. The Cathay was the most glamorous address in Asia. Its suites were decorated in national styles — the English suite, the American, the Indian, the Chinese; its tower restaurant looked out over the river traffic; its ballroom and bar drew Noel Coward, who wrote Private Lives there in four feverish days, and Charlie Chaplin, and Wallis Simpson, and every correspondent, aviator, and adventurer who washed up in the Paris of the East. Sassoon himself kept a suite at the top and threw parties that Shanghai talked about for years. The Cathay survives as the Peace Hotel — the name it took in 1956 — and its Old Jazz Band, musicians who played the ballroom in its prime and their successors, still plays the standards nightly for guests who come precisely to hear them.
Around the great trio, the rest of the wall fell into place: the Shanghai Club of 1910 at number 2, with its Long Bar — thirty-four meters of mahogany where, the legend ran, your position along the bar marked your rank in the pecking order of the treaty port; the North China Daily News building of 1924, voice of the British community and briefly the tallest building on the street; the Palace Hotel; the Yokohama Specie Bank; the house of Jardine Matheson, the princely hong that had been there from the towpath days. Each arrival raised the stakes. To be on the Bund was to have arrived; to be off it was not to count.
The One Chinese Skyscraper
There is one building on the Bund that does not speak English, and its story is the story of what the Bund meant to China. The Bank of China building at number 23, completed in 1937, was designed by Luke Him Sau — Lu Qianshou — a Chinese architect trained in London, working with Palmer and Turner. It was conceived in the 1930s, when a new Chinese government and a new Chinese business class were determined to reclaim the city’s skyline, and it was to be a declaration: the tallest building on the Bund, a Chinese bank outbuilding the British banks at last. The story that Shanghai tells is that Victor Sassoon, whose pyramid stood next door, objected furiously to any neighbor overtopping him, and that municipal politics did the rest. Whether or not the legend is exact, the finished building rose only about half its planned height — but what it lost in altitude it made up in statement. Its tower steps back in Art Deco setbacks capped by a squat pyramid roof that nods to Chinese temple forms; its entrance is framed in traditional motifs; its bronze doors carry coin patterns from ancient China. It is the Bund’s one great hybrid — a Western skyscraper wearing a Chinese face — and it was finished, pointedly, by the bank of the Chinese nation, in the year the Japanese invasion came down on Shanghai like a hammer.
Bridge, Garden, and Clock Tower
By the middle of the 1930s the city that the Bund fronted had become one of the largest on earth — some three and a half million people, the fifth or sixth greatest city in the world, handling more than half of all China’s foreign trade through the wharves that stretched north and south of the waterfront. The numbers were quoted then with awe and are quoted still: the banks of the Bund and the streets behind it held a concentration of capital unmatched between Europe and the Pacific, and the tall ships and coastal steamers crowding the Huangpu made the river itself part of the spectacle. Visitors arriving by sea never forgot their first sight of it — the wall of stone and the clock tower rising out of the flat delta landscape, looking, as more than one traveler wrote, like a piece of Liverpool or Manhattan that had drifted east and run aground on the edge of China.
The Bund was never only its buildings; it was the mile of riverfront life in front of them. At the northern end, where Suzhou Creek joins the Huangpu, the wooden bridge of 1856 — Wills’ Bridge — was replaced in 1907 by Waibaidu Bridge, the first all-steel truss bridge in China, hauled into place piece by piece and still carrying traffic today. Beside it lay the Public Gardens, established in 1868 as the first public park in China — except that, for most of their first sixty years, the public they served was foreign. The garden regulations barred Chinese from the lawns of their own city, and Chinese memory condensed the insult into a sign reading “No dogs or Chinese allowed.” Historians have searched for the literal sign and argued over whether it ever hung in exactly those words; what is not in dispute is the exclusion, and the bitterness it bred. The gardens were opened to everyone in 1928, but by then the phrase had already become one of the engines of Chinese nationalism. The Bund’s splendor was real, and so was the fact that it had been built by foreign power in Chinese territory, under treaties imposed at gunpoint. Both truths lived on the same waterfront, and Shanghai never let either one be forgotten.
Along the promenade itself, life went on in its thousands of daily scenes: the morning tai chi players and the evening crowds; the rickshaws and, later, the trams; the signal tower that announced the weather to shipping; the great bronze “Angel of Peace” raised after the First World War and carted off by an occupying army in 1943. And in the decades when the city had no money and no privacy, the riverfront parapet became the “Lovers’ Wall,” where courting couples stood shoulder to shoulder along a mile of balustrade because there was nowhere else in crowded Shanghai to be alone together. Foreign tourists photographed it as a curiosity. For Shanghai people it was simply life, conducted, like everything else in the city, in full view of the river.
Silence and Return
The end of the old Bund came in stages. The Japanese took the foreign city in 1941; the treaty ports themselves were abolished in 1943; and in 1949 the new government inherited the greatest street in Asia and had no use for it. The foreign banks had fled or been taken over; the buildings passed to the state. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s palace at number 12 became the headquarters of the Shanghai People’s Government — the bosses of the new China ruling from the marble hall of the old. The neon came down; the clubs closed; the clock tower chimed The East Is Red. For thirty years the Bund stood like a beached ocean liner: magnificent, obsolete, and perfectly preserved, because nobody had the money to tear it down or build over it. Shanghai would come to be grateful for that poverty. Almost every other treaty-port waterfront in the world demolished or overwhelmed its nineteenth-century fabric. The Bund survived entire because, for half a century, nobody could afford to touch it.
The return began in the 1990s, when Shanghai was let off the leash and chose, deliberately, to make its old financial street the emblem of its resurrection. The banks moved back in — Chinese banks now, and foreign ones as tenants in buildings their predecessors had built. The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s old home became the headquarters of the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank; the lions at the door got their polished paws back. Restorers peeled the paint from the hidden mosaics. Fashion houses and restaurants took the grand old pile at Bund 18 and won a UNESCO award for the restoration. And in 2010, for the World Expo, the city buried the arterial road that had roared along the waterfront in an underground tunnel, doubled the width of the promenade, and gave the Bund back, at last, to the people walking it.
The View Across the River
What the Bund is for, now, is the view. A hundred million visitors a year come to the promenade, and nearly all of them do the same thing: they stand with the old wall of granite at their backs and look east across the water at Lujiazui, where the Oriental Pearl Tower and the Jin Mao and the Shanghai Tower stack the sky. The photograph they take is the most eloquent image in modern China, and both halves of it are the Bund’s legacy. Behind the camera is the Shanghai that the treaty port built — its wealth, its humiliation, its flamboyant, mongrel, magnificent architecture, preserved by accident and restored by pride. In front of the lens is the Shanghai that answered it — a Chinese skyline raised in a single generation on the far bank, taller and faster and vaster than anything the old taipans imagined. The Bund began as a mud towpath where foreign traders were permitted to lease a strip of riverfront. It became the counting house of an empire, then a relic, then a museum, and finally what it is today: the place where the whole of China’s modern century — the opening and the closing and the opening again — stands in one unbroken wall of stone, facing the future it helped to make.
