A revised version of this paper was published in the Journal of Modern Chinese History, Vol. 4, no. 1 (2010), pp. 1-27

(please quote only the published version - pdf at bottom of paper)

“Shanghai!

Shanghai, sixth city of the World!

Shanghai, the Paris of the East!

Shanghai, the New York of the West!

Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, the fishing village on a mudflat which almost literally overnight became a great metropolis.”¹

“Fifth AVENUE, the Strand, Unter den Linden, the Rue de la Paix, and The Bund, – five great thoroughfares of the world, each with an elusive individuality which unites with the others to form an imaginary barrier to that mystic hinterland […] On one side flows the Huangpu upon whose waters sturdy grey battleships and swift destroyers, flying the flags of many nations, swing lazily at anchor. They convey a poignant touch of homeland and personal safety. On the other side rise buildings which might have been transplanted from along the Thames or the banks of the Seine. From the sedate and ultra­conservative British Consulate and Law Courts, set deep within green, close clipped lawns, past white marble hotels and office buildings, the Bund swings in a wide semicircle to include the twin towers of the Daily News and the golden dome of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.”²

While Shanghai evokes mixed images of glamour, exoticism, Sino-western hybridity, the Bund has become its metonymic name par excellence. The Bund ranks first in any introduction to the city in contemporary guides as THE place to go to discover the wonders of Shanghai and its now sanitized and non controversial past. Current accounts usually point to the bizarre architectural heritage that the municipal government lately, but definitely has chosen to turn into a tourist attraction for domestic and foreign consumption alike. Although the Bund fell into complete obscurity – literally – after 1949, it returned to life with brightly illuminated façades in the late 1980s and, more recently, with expensive and chic coffee-terraces on top of its ‘old’ buildings.

The present essay aims to tell a different story and to unveil a much more complex and multi-layered history. It relies on a large body of materials, especially visual sources, to document the transformation of an undistinguished space – a riverfront – into a central place of political, social and architectural contest. Our exploration starts from the earliest visual records of the place by Western or Chinese residents and travelers and move into the late 1940s. While brief references will be made to the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, this essay focuses on the late Qing and Republican period. In terms of geographical coverage, our focus will be on the « conventional » Bund, namely the section of the riverfront that extended southward from Soochow Creek (Suzhouhe) to the border with the French Concession.⁴ For photographs, however, we had to identify and glean them from a variety of sources, mostly books published before 1949.

Paintings may be considered as a questionable source for the historian, at least when taken as an “actual” source about reality in the past. Our approach, however, has been to test the limits of these – on the surface – imaginary renderings of the Bund. Of course, there was no reason to question the intent of the painters, most of them anonymous artists, to give a fair view of the riverfront. Yet, as for drawings and paintings by military painters, there is a significant margin for imagination, beautification, and other involuntary or voluntary modifications. Arguably, the stakes in landscape are much less salient than when it comes to come up with a visual report on a battle and other heroic moments. There is less risk of a major deformation. The artists, however, could have simplified the view, or skipped an ugly building or ”improved” it with a more decent appearance. While we had access only to the reproductions published in Arts of Asia, the quality was high enough, especially after digitizing, to allow for close-up examination of individual buildings.

Photographs, contrary to paintings, provide a reliable view of reality. In our case, we were dealing with panoramic views of the Bund that left no room for “framing” the picture. What is on the photograph was there. The issue was to find as many images as possible that covered the entire Bund through its pre-1949 history. In the same way as the riverfront had attracted the eye of painters, photographers also endeavored to provide panoramic views of the Bund. They were initially limited in their attempt by the technology of the time that did not allow wide-angle shots. Creativity and skills, however, made up for this deficiency and the Bund was photographed section by section. Eventually, the photographer reconstituted a panoramic view in the darkroom.⁶

In using these visual materials, we had to address several issues. The first one was collecting a representative sample of pictures to enable us to see the transformation of the Bund over time, but also to have the possibility of comparative views. We tried to build a series that would cover as narrow time intervals as possible. The table below shows that our temporal coverage is quite dense, even if large gaps subside. Yet all the major transformations took place during periods that preceded our views by just a few years. While we may have missed a few buildings, we believe that our net came out with almost all the major structures that were erected along the Bund. A second issue was the dating of the paintings and the photographs. For the former, we relied on the dates provided Eric Politzer in his Arts of Asia paper, although we made a careful study of their content to assess their credibility.⁸

Time frame of the Bund views

Painting	Photograph
ca 1849-1850
ca 1854
ca 1857
ca 1862
ca 1867-1868
ca 1879	1873 & 1876-1878
	1893 & 1894
	1898-1900
	1907-1908
	1913
	1916-1918
	1937-1938

The third source we mobilized for this study is maps. They were useful in several ways. First, because maps sometimes display specific buildings, we were able to ascertain the existence of buildings at a certain point in time, even if the accuracy of commercial maps is sometimes questionable. Second, maps provided the exact location of the buildings represented in our images. The general views of the Bund we used – both paintings and photographs – hardly showed any details about the space between the buildings, even when there was an empty yard. The streets are either not represented or hidden from view both in paintings and photographs. Perspective also introduced a deformation in assessing which building was where, or simply to make sure a building was indeed on the Bund (and not in the background). To overcome this problem, we reconstituted the cadastral lots on maps and traced their transformation over time.¹⁰ Another problem in the written records is that buildings are usually referred to by the name of their occupant rather than by the structure itself. Conversely, some companies remained on the same spot, but rebuilt their premises two to three times. Finally, some companies moved their offices to different locations on the Bund. In other words, one can be led to believe there is a new building where there is only a change of owner or tenant. To avoid seeing a new building where there was only a new tenant, we had to trace the occupancy of the buildings. The second case – reconstruction of premises – was of course easier to solve through the visual record, while the “intra-Bund” moves were indeed limited.

By going back and forth between the maps, the images and the textual records on individual buildings, we were able to build a small database that identifies almost every building on the Bund and provides a timeline of its transformation. We then matched the transformation of the buildings over time with the visual sources. There remain a few gaps for minor buildings that we were not able to identify. Finally, although this was not exactly within the scope of our project, we also tracked down the fate of these buildings up to the 1980s and supplied a link to views of the Bund in present-day Shanghai.¹² Some authors argue this was part of a general process of appropriating words from various colonized countries as British imperialism made its progress to the east and to ‘mark’ newly conquered spaces with a symbolic meaning.¹⁴ On later maps, as on the 1864-1866 cadastral map,¹⁶ or the 1890 ‘Cadastral plan of the (so-called) English settlement’¹⁸ Ten years later, however, the riverfront is clearly labeled the « Bund ».²⁰ Before Westerners were allowed to settle in Shanghai on a small strip of land north of the walled city, the riverbank had been in use for many centuries. Of course, only the section that followed the riverfront along the city wall was actually used as a mooring and transshipment area. The reason for the distinction of an « outside » bank is one of geography in relation with the walled city. The upper stream of any river was called li 裡 (internal, inside); the lower stream was called “wai”.²² While the southern section hosted warehouses, wharves, and mooring areas, the northern section had very little relevance as it had no specific function besides a « rope walk » as we shall see below. The « active » part of the riverfront was named « shiliupu » after the administrative system that divided the walled city and its suburbs into various districts (pu).²⁴

Before the opening of the harbor to foreign trade, the riverbank had no special equipment or infrastructure for junks or sampans. Although there was an active domestic and international trade going through Shanghai, ships simply used the riverbank as it was, except around the Eastern gate (Dong men) where a sort of embankment had been built. Depending on the time of the day, low or high ebb, the river left open a stripe of sand (tan). The name in Chinese took its origin from there. The only specific feature was a pathway traced by boat pullers along the riverbank. It was called xiandao (纖道), or “Rope path (or walk)” and constituted the only way along the river. When Westerners came to Shanghai, the area along the river north of the Walled city was just that rope path.²⁶ Article 3 of the Land Regulations set the location and width of the main streets within the settlement. One of the four main arteries was designated as “Old rope walk” (舊纖道) with its width defined by Chinese Customs at 2.5 Chinese chi (7.5 meters).²⁸ Obviously technological progress would make the use of ropes to pull boats quickly irrelevant, but the rule remained in force. As a result, the riverfront remained free from construction and eventually transformed into a major 1,500-meter long thoroughfare.³⁰ Little was done in terms of actual planning before 1854, but as early as 1846 the first mud roads were traced through the flat land: Barrier Road, Park lane, Rope Walk Road, etc., and the Bund³²

For about two decades, the Bund was left in its original state, even if private initiative started to transform it with the addition of jetties. Over time the path along the river was widened and covered with a mix of ashes and refuse. In the 1849-1850 painting one can see that the riverbank remains pretty much in its “natural” state, even if jetties can be seen protruding from the bank. In 1861, a pavement was created along the Bund as part of a general plan to improve the conditions of roads.³⁴ Consolidation was achieved by plating wooden posts all along the riverfront as the 1862 painting or a photograph of the Customs House show³⁶ The work of filling the area to create the garden started in 1866 and was completed in August 1868.³⁸ Later, the enhancement of the Bund also benefited from the new technologies. Public lighting came on the heel of the establishment of the first gas company in 1865. The Bund was among the first streets to benefit from the new facility that same year when the previous oil lamps were taken down. Electricity followed not much longer later, in 1882 and again the Bund, along with Nanking Road, was first graced with the new electrical lamps. Having been built almost on barren land, the appearance of the early streets remained quite elementary. In 1865, the SMC started to plant trees along the major arteries, starting with the Bund.⁴⁰ Little progress was made, however, due to the lack of human presence in the French Concession. The French quarter still looked much like a Chinese suburb.⁴² Yet, while more jetties were being constructed, the riverfront remained in a pitiful state. In 1867, the French consul, Brenier de Montmorand, described it in 1864 as “a badly drained and hardly leveled ground, often cut by large cracks after heavy rain. It narrowed between the low tide mark, a large strip of sand from which the summer sun caused unhealthy exhalations, and a few non-aligned and unassuming houses. In day time, it looked deserted and dreary; at night it was hardly lighted by a few badly kept gas lamps.”⁴⁴ The Messageries Impériales company built its own wharf by 1863, but serious talks about improving the riverfront did not start until the following year.⁴⁶ Eventually, that section was completed in 1867 with the cost borne mostly by a special tax on the lots along the newly build 30-meter wide Bund with several floating jetties.⁴⁸

The Chinese section of the Bund was the responsibility of the local authorities, but little work was done until the late 19^th century. From the various records we have, it seems the anchorage was left much to its original layout, with boats mooring in front of the city walls and loading and unloading of the larger junks performed by small crafts. Due to its central role as a transshipment harbor between North and South China, and one of the major outlets for the Jiangnan area, a whole district had developed outside of the walled city since at least Ming times, as one painting shows. By the mid-18^th century, there were 27 small streets that ran through the area.⁵⁰ On an average year, there were about 1,200-1,300 large ships (1,000-3,000 piculs of freight/80-240 tons) and 2,500-2,600 smaller crafts (less than 1,000 piculs/80 tons) that came through. Altogether this represented a total freight of about 280,000 tons.⁵²

As part of the modernization efforts of late Qing reformers, an arsenal and shipyard, the Jiangnan Arsenal (江南製造局) was established south of the walled city. To facilitate traffic, a first effort was made to improve the road along the Huangpu.⁵⁴ This improvement came with the establishment of the first proto-municipal organs in 1895. As with the “Committee on roads and jetties” in the British Settlement, the new organ, the South City Roadworks Board (Nanshi malu gongchengju 南市馬路工程局) was concerned by the construction and maintenance of roads. The history of this proto-municipal body has been well studied.⁵⁶ After its renovation, it came under strict supervision with new regulations about taxes, hygiene, traffic, shop signs, etc.⁵⁸

Western visions of the Bund

The history of Shanghai has been told many times as a “success story” entirely due to Western presence. Without the least hesitation, a 1934 guide of Shanghai boldly stated that “less than a century ago, Shanghai was little more than an anchorage for junks, with a few villages scattered along the low, muddy banks of the river.”⁶⁰ Of course, by the 1930s, the Bund had developed into a complex and sophisticated area where work easily overlapped with leisure. “The handsome boulevard is flanked by a park space which extends to the river-edge with its unobstrusive landing stages, where tenders bring passengers from great ocean liners.”⁶² Nevertheless, if Shanghai came to be represented in a way that magnified its aspect and symbolized Chinese modernity, the way in which Westerners and Chinese perceived and described the city, especially the Bund, differs widely. Whereas the Bund figures prominently in all Western renditions of Shanghai, Chinese writers were far less sensitive to its assumed grandeur and glamour. The Western bias, however, was a late development. The first travelers to Shanghai were impressed by the Chinese Bund – obviously the only developed place before Westerners settled in Shanghai – and failed to harbor the prejudices of those who followed their tracks some years later.

The first visitors to Shanghai, Lindsay and Gutzlaff, reached the city in 1832. While they spent most of their time trying to obtain the right to trade in Shanghai, they did not fail to note the brisk trade that was taking place in the harbor. Lindsay reported quite favorably on the local facilities: “Commodious wharfs and large warehouses occupy the banks of the river, which is deep enough to allow junks to come and unload alongside of them; in the middle it has from six to eight fathoms, and is nearly half a mile in breadth”.⁶⁴ These fairly positive visions of the city and its original Bund, along the walled city, would slowly give way to derogatory comments or simply complete omission with the rise of the English Bund.

When one reads through the travel accounts by early travelers to Shanghai, however, it becomes obvious that the Bund was not yet on their mental map. While a few words of praise are usually said about the British/International Settlement, it is about the buildings, the streets, and the modern appearance of the place: “Shanghai […] is laid like a city at home. It extends along the harbor for the distance of three miles and has a breadth of one mile”. We learn that the streets are macadamized, drained with brick sewers and illuminated by “an abundance of public lamps”. Then the early-1860s visitor turns his eyes to the houses, although we do not know if it is a general comment or a description of the houses on the Bund: “The residences of the merchants are large and elegantly finished, and admirably constructed for comfort. The rooms are high and airy, with windows opening to the surface of the floor upon a wide piazza”.⁶⁶ The author gives credit to the original towing-path and its preservation and successive widening for giving Shanghai a “noble quay along the entire length of its river-front”. A newly arrived German banker expressed the same view: “The beautiful city lay before us. With its lovely quay and high regal palaces, the city made a magnificent impression. This was, however, actually only the English settlement”.⁶⁷ The duplication of similar embankments in other Western settlements is said “to have made the Bund a prominent feature of European progress throughout China” (this also applied to Japan as "Bunds" were erected in cities like Yokohama). In 1867, however, the riverfront was still lined with only wooden pillars due to “the high cost of granite in this alluvial region”. At low ebb, a wide mud-bank of about 30 meters extended from the timber facing the roadway. The tidal movement explains why long sloppy jetties, as can be seen on the 19^th-century paintings, were built to secure an approach at all stages of the tide.⁶⁹

Close to the turn of the century, the riverfront seems to have taken shape both materially, but above all in people’s mind. The SMC seems to have decided to preserve the Bund into a major harbor area. In fact, while jetties and iron pontoons were constructed, actual wharves never developed along the bank. No ships or large vessels were allowed at the Bund. They could only moor at a distance and rely on cargo boats for loading and unloading.⁷¹ This commentary somehow echoes that by Wang Tao arriving in Shanghai in 1848. But the contemporary British traveler continues his description: “The Bund is wide and spacious, and kept in splendid order by the members of the Municipal Council […] On one side is a broad pathway lined with trees that throw a pleasant shade upon the ground and keep off fiery rays of the sun when he feels his strengths in the hot months…. On the other side are the business houses, which are also residences, and which have been built […] with such artistic beauty and disregard of expense as would give the natives [the Chinese] the idea that the owners are all men of fortune before they began to trade”.⁷³ It existed by itself and stood as the most concrete evidence of Western modernity and achievement in Shanghai. With the characteristic enthusiasm of the time, the same author states that “there is a profound consciousness in many of them [Englishmen] that England’s mission is to elevate the world. This idea exalts commerce, and drives out the meaner motives in connection with it, by surrounding it with beautiful houses, and exquisite gardens, and lines of charming trees.”⁷⁵

This line of discourse was usually continued and magnified in the following decades. In the first Western guide of Shanghai in 1904, the Bund comes first on the list of “Routes with chief objects of interest”. It is described as “one of the most interesting, famous, and handsome thoroughfares in the world”, with the Shanghai Municipal Council as the valiant designer and protector of public interest that “fought against all attempts of the shipping interest to construct wharves for shipping” and made it “the great lung and promenade of Shanghai”.⁷⁷ The Bund is also a place that extols the apparent cosmopolitan nature of Shanghai. There is movement, there are people from all over the world, they all go along the same street.

As waves of travelers and residents moved into Shanghai, the Bund became the main focal point, the place that gave Shanghai an identity, while the original city – the city once surrounded by a wall and canals – fell into oblivion. That part was unconsciously erased from history. Myth overpowered history. The Bund had come out of nothing: “The splendid Bund, bounded on one side by sightly bank and club, steamboat and insurance building, and on the other by the Whangpoo River, is the city’ pride and glory. It is hard to realize that this wide, white road, humming with life and swept by costly automobiles, was once nothing but a well trodden tow-path bordering a marsh.”⁷⁹ The tone is almost lyrical. The British Bund was no longer a place for trade and shipping, except for “a few launches and cargo boats” that seem to be there by tolerance. With stronger words than in the first edition of his guide, Darwent attributed this success to “the men of a past generation who fought and won the battle for this freedom of the Bund foreshore from all-devouring commerce.”⁸¹ By the beginning of the decade, the technology was available to erect high and heavy structures on Shanghai’s soft and water-filled soil. The 1921 edition of the guide predicted that “it is possible that in a few years time the entire Bund frontage will be filled with six-story buildings”.⁸³

Neither the French nor the Chinese sections of the Bund were ever able to receive but a very slight, and often derogatory, comment in the writings of British travelers. The French section partly redeemed itself through its installations. In 1899, the Quai du Whampoo is praised for its “fine wharves at which the big Yangtzse steamers load and discharge their cargoes and […] beyond which stretch, far as the eye can reach, the crowded tiers of the Chinese shipping”.⁸⁵ There were indeed differences between the various sections of the Bund, but as one can see from the visual record, a wide range of activities took place along the riverfront. The presentation of the ‘English’ Bund as a place for rest and leisurely walks fails to reflect the actual diversity of the place and its actual role as a bustling workplace.⁸⁷ There are two problems with this description of Shanghai in 1848. The first one is the date of writing which, while unclear, was about three decades after Wang actually took his trip to Shanghai. While he may have kept a diary, his 1891 publication, first serialized in a newspaper, is the only evidence we have.⁸⁹ There was less than a dozen buildings scattered along the riverbank, from the British consulate to the Russell & Co. compound. None of them could be confused with potential skyscrapers. Actually, the building of the Chinese Imperial Customs even appears as the tallest structure on the riverfront. The only major difference was certainly style, but quite opposite to the elegant Chinese Customs, Western buildings were sturdy and square, though their colonnades and balconies gave them an airy aspect. The unusual façades may have been an element of surprise, especially the columns which certainly gave the impression of “reaching to the clouds”. Wang Tao also noticed the flags that hung in front of many buildings, either the company flag or the flag of the country the company represented.⁹¹

The testimony of Wang Tao has remained an unchallenged view of early-treaty port Shanghai in Western and Chinese literature.⁹³ Quite interestingly, it is not unlike the mythical and romanticized view of the later Bund we have inherited from the 1920s-1930s. What this parallel between the record by Wang Tao and visual sources suggests, apart from the issue of a distorted memory, is that the confrontation of textual records, from which historians elaborated their interpretation both of the appearance of mid-nineteenth century Shanghai and the reaction of a young Chinese literati to this scene, calls for a second and more cautious reading of these textual records. While the paintings by themselves would be a questionable source, their systematic study through time and confrontation with early photographic records actually provides a solid basis for a “visual reconstruction” of the early Bund and an alternative tool through which to reassess the textual record.

The first image of the Bund Wang Tao recalls actually  does not seem to have made a lasting impression on him. At least, it failed to attract him for a visit or casual stroll. In the diary he kept at various times between 1858 and 1860, Wang Tao usually mentions the various places he went to with his friends or by himself. The Bund is mentioned only once, after he had taken a trip to Hongkou, across Soochow Creek.⁹⁵ In fact, one has to observe that in Chinese textual sources, the “Bund” failed to become the icon that figures so prominently in Western writing about the city.

A close examination of a Chinese city guides published through the Republican period confirms the lack of interest for the Bund. This may be due to their pragmatic approach to the city that the guides usually describe very systematically under every aspect. These guides are less conceived to assist for a tour of the city, like the Darwent or All about Shanghai guides with their “tours” of the various sections of the city, than to introduce the reader to the various resources Shanghai offered. The city is defined geographically, but it has no center to start from. It is divided into various themes (government, industry, leisure, etc.) rather than districts or areas. Even the photographic record in these guides fails to offer a glimpse of the Bund. It appears almost furtively in one guide through a picture of the Public Garden or of the W.W. I Memorial. There is no way to say whether this was a conscious choice or simply the result of their editorial structure, but obviously the Bund was not an element of pride in Chinese guides.⁹⁷

Although the waitan (Bund) was absent from city guides, it eventually came to be associated to Shanghai as a synonym for the city’s name. The waitan epitomized Shanghai, not necessarily physically, but rather for its lifestyle, attractions and dangers. A 1942 guide, Da shanghai, devotes two short sections to “tan”. One section “Huangpu tan” presents the Bund as the “point of origin” of the International Settlement, but immediately proceeds to describe it as the “Wall Street” of the city, with a high concentration of banks from all over the world. No other aspect of the Bund is mentioned, safe for the impressive architecture of these financial establishments. The other sections of the riverfront are glossed over. In another section the author explains to the traveler the meaning of “Shanghai tan” as the metaphor for the city as a whole, a place of pleasure for the rich, a fine example of a modern city of the 20^th century, but also of traps and disillusions.⁹⁹ Quite clearly, the visual record left a very different imprint about the Bund on people’s mind than written sources. There is a striking difference, however, between the Western and Chinese visions in the twentieth century. While the former wrote about it as an ode to their accomplishments in Shanghai, the latter used it to convey a sense of urban modernity.

Architectural Development and Change of Function (1849-1949)

The status of Shanghai, as one of the principal entrepots between Europe and China, was mirrored by the architectural development of its waterfront. From its initial period as a meager outpost of mercantile enterprise the Bund quickly became the main stage for showcasing the city’s growing stature as a nexus of trade and finance. By tracing the growth of its physical form we gain some insight as to how Shanghai saw itself and wanted to be seen by the outside world.

The Bund in the International Settlement went through three successive waves of renewal. Of course, the erection of new buildings did not take place at the same time during these periods of transformation. Yet on most locations buildings were torn down and resurrected two to three times. In this section we shall examine the architectural renewal that took place on the bund over a century. This study includes three visual narratives that attempt to take the reader along the Bund at three different periods.

From the 1850s to the early 1870s, the Bund was lined with one- or two-story buildings [“A stroll along the Bund in the nineteenth century” (Narrative ID42)]. While they may have looked impressive to the newcomer, as Wang Tao recalled it, the buildings distinguished themselves more by the architecture than by the actual height. Chinese temples or guild halls in the walled city were far more impressive. The first generation of buildings was made up of constructions that often combined both offices and living quarters. Some companies were able to acquire a large track of the riverfront where, like and Dent, Beal & Co. or Russell & Co., they established a large compound made up of several constructions. Later, these compounds were parceled out and gave way to new individual structures.

The second wave of construction was spread over a few decades starting from the 1880s to around W.W.I [“The Shanghai Bund at the Turn of the Century” (Narrative ID44)]. There was a double transformation. On the one hand many original lots were subdivided and opened up space for entirely new buildings. On the other hand, many existing edifices underwent their first transformation from their original neo-classic style to an equally pompous though more massive appearance. The third and last wave of construction – the one that gave the Shanghai Bund its present allure – took place over a single decade between 1920 and 1929, even if a few more additions were made in the 1930s [“The Billion Dollar Skyline: Shanghai\'s Bund in 1937” (Narrative ID36)]. The following table lists all the buildings that sprang from ground during these two fateful decades. This spate of construction is a direct reflection of the formidable growth and urge for modernization that engulfed the city before the Sino-Japanese war.

The Third Wave of Construction on the Bund (1920-1937)¹⁰¹

A Trading Port: The City’s Early Days

The site for the first European settlement at Shanghai lay on marshy agricultural land crossed by numerous canals. The defensibility of these canals, complimented by British gunboats on the Huangpu, were important considerations for Sir Henry Pottinger, the chief British delegate at the Treaty of Nanjing, in selecting a site for the new settlement. The area’s suitability as a trading site, capitalizing on Shanghai’s role as a center of commerce, was also taken into consideration in the delineation of a rectangular parcel of land stretching from Soochow Creek south to the Yangjingbang, a distance of roughly two-thirds of a mile along the banks of the Huangpu.¹⁰³ When these rights lapsed in the 1850s, maintenance of the Bund was taken up by the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) who preserved the waterfront as open space while building jetties to meet the demands of steam navigation. In 1862 the SMC began the first extension of the roadway and in the process extended the land area beyond the high-water mark to double the original thirty feet.¹⁰⁵ Due to the low-lying topography, high water table, and unstable soils, the area that was to become the Bund posed numerous difficulties when it came to laying out basic infrastructure that would haunt Shanghai for decades to come. Roads suffered from slips and the sinking away of banks. Before construction could begin on any building the lot’s ground level had to be raised considerably to assist drainage.¹⁰⁷

In the nineteenth century, the hong served both a residential and commercial purpose. The building’s back rooms or upper floors were reserved for accommodation, while the ground floor or a covered veranda provided office space. The number of people in each hong could range from two to three partners, five to ten European clerks, and up to fifty Chinese staff.¹⁰⁹

From a structural perspective commercial compounds, as well as most other buildings along the Bund in the late nineteenth century, adopted what was known as a “compradoric” style of architecture. By no means based on sanctified principles of design, this description drew its name from the world of trade and the intermediary figure of the comprador. A comprador was a local resident, or someone fluent in the regional language, hired to facilitate trade and translate between European factors and local merchants. Shanghai’s first European-style buildings were built with local labor from European designs and directed by a Chinese foreman, thus giving rise to the name. Assembled by local Chinese builders according to plans or specifications either imported or drawn up on the scene by the Western firms, the buildings utilized local materials and building techniques. These structures often had verandahs, tile roofs and were generally one or two stories in height.¹¹¹ While a more technical assessment of the buildings’ architecture might be British Colonial, the term compradoric does recognize the vital role played by local labor in actualizing the Bund’s first buildings.

Within the overall label of British Colonial, these early structures adopted a variety of decorative idioms among which Greek Revival and Italianate elements held pride of place. As trade developed, various remodeling efforts “strengthened [the buildings] into massive proportions and modified … by the addition of the indispensable veranda.”¹¹³

While Charles Dyce, a thirty-year resident of Shanghai, lamented in his memoirs that “the community was almost entirely commercial … [all] were there to supply in one form or another the wants of trade” not every building on the Bund was given over to the financing of, or trading in, tea, silk, and opium.¹¹⁵ The Shanghai Club’s first building, located on the southern end of the Bund on land purchased from the Shanghai Recreation Fund, is a good example of Shanghai’s early architecture (1864). The building’s symmetry, pediment, and columns all provide a link with Classical styles while the arcade, porches and decorative simplicity are indicative of its colonial situation. This did not mean, however, that it was sparsely furnished. In his 1904 guide to the city, Charles Darwent wrote the Shanghai Club had “all the appointments of a first-class club – two large dining rooms and private ones, two billiard rooms, card-rooms, library of 16,364 books, an oyster bar, reading-room, kitchen on the top storey … There are twelve residential rooms.”¹¹⁷ Complementing this growth were Shanghai’s own nascent industrial facilities that could now supply some of the materials that earlier had to be imported. Even some of the firms that had their beginnings in mercantile activities began to take advantage of the property boom by speculating in land and property, sometimes with great financial success.

The transformations of the Shanghai skyline caused by these developments are readily visible in the photographic record. Maybon’s 1873 photograph of the Bund reveals a well-developed settlement with almost a dozen ships anchored in the river but with still the appearance of a quiet harbor with few major structures on the riverfront. The French Bund, located south of the International Settlement, presents a few large buildings, while even further distant the low white hong of the Chinese merchants are visible along the city wall (See map).

In a 1908 view the scene is completely different. Steam has replaced sail, the buildings are taller, and factories crowd along Soochow Creek and the stretches of the Huangpu north of the Garden Bridge. Likewise, a change in architecture is apparent as a larger variety of buildings jostle for space on the Bund. Limited to six-stories in height, the Bund’s large buildings stood on wooden pilings driven into the silt and there was always the risk of unequal settling during construction.¹¹⁹

This generation of buildings populating the turn-of-the-century Bund fell into several categories: remainders of the compradoric/British Colonial style, Renaissance Revival, and a variety of other Revival styles. The remaining Colonial buildings were the legacy of the nineteenth century’s successive renovation and remodeling of earlier structures. A good example of this is the old Pustau & Co. building that by 1907 was occupied by the Yokohama Specie Bank, a transformation indicative of the overall move from trade to finance. The structure, built in 1865, is clearly two-storey in a 1876 panorama of the northern bund. It is difficult to tell if the louvered shutters of the second floor fronted a porch or a series of rooms, but by 1907 the growing pressure on real estate necessitated the occupation of every available inch. In order to solve this dilemma, the earlier two-storey structure, with its arched ground floor, simply received a third floor continuing the fenestration and design of the second level (See the Yokohama Specie Bank building). The Colonial style with its verandahs and gardens was no longer appropriate for Shanghai’s larger and larger companies who increasingly turned to new technologies and styles to build their “public face” on the Bund.

Renaissance revival was one of the most popular styles for turn-of-the-century construction along the Bund. Some examples along include the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank, the Banque Belge pour l'Etranger, and the Great Northern Telegraph Company. Neo-Renaissance architecture drew from a wide variety of influences, but its origins in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italian and later French buildings provide a clear palette of basic forms. These motifs included rusticated masonry, especially on the ground floor, quoins anchoring the building’s corners, symmetrical facades, arched windows, and pilasters. These elements all contributed to the recreation of earlier European structural forms. Some buildings also minimized the windows of the uppermost floor in order to recall the mezzanine floor of original Renaissance buildings. More formal in their appearance, Renaissance revival was widely used by banks. Given the prevalence of banks and other financial institutions on the Bund by the first decade of the twentieth century, it is not surprising to see the adoption of neo-Renaissance design in the second generation of Shanghai’s buildings.

Finally, the Bund was also home to a few buildings that stood out as individual examples of less-popular Revival architecture or as unique unto themselves. From 1892, the new Customs House lorded over the Bund with its 110-foot bell tower. The Tudor Revival influence on Shanghai’s second Customs House is visible in its fenestration and layout. Built out of red brick with white Ningbo stone facings with a red French tile roof, the guidebook, “All About Shanghai” referred to the Customs House as “one of the finest structures in Shanghai, its lofty clock tower a striking feature of the Bund skyline.”¹²¹ Launches from the Custom Shed’s pier also shuttled passengers the twelve miles to ocean liners on the Yangtze.¹²³ While being careful to reserve pride of place for his own countrymen, Darwent commented in his 1904 guide to the city that “this club must be accorded the next place to the Shanghai Club in importance, as the headquarters of the influential German community in Shanghai.”¹²⁵ At this point in Shanghai’s history, there was no attempt to introduce a hybridized, if still deeply imperial, form of architecture, like the Indo-Saracenic style that later found expression in Lutyen’s designs for New Delhi. Of course, the International Settlement was not a unitary entity but rather a complex mix of dozens of nations with competing economic and national interests, but the lack of any “Shanghainese” architecture, at least at this period, is certainly notable.

An eclectic mix of buildings and styles of architecture, uniformly looking to Europe for architectural inspiration, now vied for prominence along the western side of the Huangpu. Empty spaces were being quickly filled in and any lateral extension would have to mean the annexation of a neighboring lot or two. Darwent, in his guide to the city, found Shanghai’s Bund quite pleasing, he wrote “the plastered buildings are in the Classic style, many of them are architecturally very fine. They look much more suitable to a sub-tropical climate than the dull red-brick erections that are unfortunately becoming the rule.”¹²⁷ The city’s factories, mostly located north of the Bund in the American Settlement, engaged in cotton spinning, silk filatures, feather cleaning, match making, meat packing, paper making, and flour milling.¹²⁹

The Billion Dollar Skyline: The Apex of the Bund

If we take the amount of building on the Bund as a barometer of economic success, as Shanghai entered the 1920s business was booming. By the middle of the 1930s Shanghai’s Bund had reached the apex of its development as part of the International Settlement. Often called “The Billion Dollar Skyline” the Bund was a proud representative of a city growing  into a major regional industrial, financial, and mercantile powerhouse. Beginning in the 1910s residents of Pudong, living across the river from Shanghai proper, would have witnessed the steady heightening of the Bund. While the second wave of growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had filled out the Bund’s empty spaces to make a continuous built-up streetscape, the final period of architectural development that in turn replaced the Neo-Renaissance buildings was of an order of magnitude larger than its predecessor. Technology, like the safety elevator, steel frames, and reinforced concrete, combined with increasing demand for office space on Shanghai’s premier business street to create the grand new buildings that still grace the city’s riverfront (See Map).¹³¹ The close connection between Edwardian Baroque and commercial ventures has also been termed “big business classicism” as its tenants were usually drawn from the great international companies of the day.¹³³

A second, non-commercial, example is the second building of the Shanghai Club. The Shanghai Club, perhaps the most exclusive club in the city, was also the oldest social establishment on the Bund and a hub of (principally British) activities. The last edifice to house the Club, designed by BH Tarrand, opened in 1911. Like its other Edwardian Baroque counterparts on the Bund, the Shanghai Club adopted many neoclassical elements. Six ionic columns mark the façade, the building is split into three horizontal divisions by strong bands that visually recall a column, and numerous neo-classical decorations like pedimented windows and carved floral swags grace the exterior. The two turrets atop the building’s front corners, however, add a rather fanciful element and appear almost Indo-Saracenic in style. Inside the club furnishings matched the elaborate exterior. A Grand Hall measuring ninety by thirty-nine feet was on the ground floor accompanied by a bar, billiards rooms, a news room, and a grand dining hall. Forty guest bedrooms occupied the second and third stories. While the new club buildings increased the space available to the club, there were mixed reviews form members who felt the new building, while certainly grander, was not as comfortable.¹³⁵

The Bank of China building, the last major construction project on the Bund before the Communist takeover, perhaps stands as the best representative of a fusion of styles and motifs between European and Chinese principles of design. While there were no complete structures on the Bund that adopted Chinese styles in their exterior, the Bank of China building perhaps comes the closest to using indigenous architectural features. The green-glazed tile roof and decorative motifs on the structure’s façade are certainly influenced by local traditions. Although built by a European company, Palmer and Turner, one of the leading architects on the project, Lu Qianshou, was Chinese. Chronologically the last building to go up on the Bund, the Bank of China is The Bank of China stands as one of the only spaces on the Bund exhibiting an external combination of Chinese and European design in a modern building.

Shanghai’s final wave of building, with few exceptions, remained tied to the architectural inheritance of Europe. The city’s development must be weighed against the architectural continuity Shanghai shared with London as a site of imperial development. While not so strong an expression of European imperialism as found almost contemporaneously in the form of Lutyen’s Delhi, the architectural projection of cultural, social, and economic power on the Shanghai Bund was nevertheless significant. Classicism, in the form of Edwardian Baroque and Renaissance Revival, was regarded as both authoritative as well as, through the fusion of classical form with modern conveniences, modern. These principles provided visual demonstrations of the connection between Shanghai’s urban space and corollary institutions in London.¹³⁷

The Bund in the post-revolutionary period

The glamorous Bund – a glamour that overshadowed a more complex reality as seen before – started to shatter after the takeover by the Communist armies in May 1949.

The Bund fell into oblivion in revolutionary Shanghai. Even if Chinese travelers coming to the city would certainly make the walk to the Bund and have their picture taken, such opportunities became rare with the enforcement of a rigid system of control on the movement of population. Apart from cadres and some technicians (which Shanghai had plenty and actually “exported” to other provinces), few people were allowed to travel. Trade no longer brought the flow of merchants that had made Shanghai famous. The workforce came to be recruited almost exclusively locally, with very few exceptions, after the mid-1950s. Foreign visitors were limited to technicians from the socialist bloc and only very occasional delegations from Western countries set foot in China. Tourism, both domestic and international just dried up.

The city was required to turn itself form a place where “consumption” dominated – and corrupted its people – to a “productive” socialist urban entity. The Bund ceased to be a marker of Chinese urban modernity. On the opposite, it came to be seen as a legacy of Western colonialism. The buildings were simply taken over by the new authorities. Quite symbolically, the new municipal government and the Party Committee elected their quarters in the building of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Their political condemnation of imperialism notwithstanding, there was no destruction by the new authorities as little capital was made available for infrastructures under the new regime. The little funding available went to the renovation of slum quarters and building of workers’ villages. Many of the features that make a place a city disappeared from Shanghai. One can find a reflection of that in the virtual disappearance of city guides compared to the several yearly publications to be found before 1949. We were able to trace only two such guides, one for 1957 and the other for 1980 when Shanghai started to regain some clout on the national scene.¹³⁹ The Bund, even under its Chinese name, simply does not exist. Nowhere throughout the text is there any reference to the riverfront or to any buildings thereon (not even in their official capacity as the seat of local administration, including the municipal government). The term waitan (Bund) creeps in almost inadvertently in the very last pages of the guide where the schematic map of the major commercial arteries is provided: Nanjing donglu does start from waitan.¹⁴¹

Little was done to maintain or enhance the buildings along the Bund or even to the Bund itself until the early 1990s. After the takeover of the city, the municipal government mostly reorganized the wharves and jetties, removing some of them to the south, tearing down scattered constructions to make way for green space.¹⁴³ The dam that runs along the Huangpu was elevated from 5.8 to 6.9 meters. For a while, the municipal government fiddled with the idea of transforming the riverfront quite radically. There was a project of building an elevated highway over the original Bund. It would have connected with the massive bridge built next to the Garden Bridge and at the feet of the former British consulate. Fortunately, the project was abandoned, even if the Bund was enlarged and turned into a ten-lane highway (all trees were cut down in the process). A parking accommodating 200-300 vehicles was installed inside the newly built dam. The planned renovation of the Bund was completed in September 1992. Other additions were rather cosmetic, like the erection of a statue to commemorate the heroes of the revolution in Shanghai in the middle of the Bund garden (which again lost a large part of its green tracks to concrete) and one in honor of the first mayor of Shanghai, Chen Yi, in front of Nanjing lu.

The municipal Bureau of Urban Planning started to work on a scheme to preserve the buildings on the Bund by 1984. Basically, it defined the stretch to be protected, from the Suzhou River (Soochow Creek) to Yan’an donglu (ex. Edward VII Ave), and from the riverfront to Henan lu. Two years later, it regulated the conditions for new constructions, limiting their height, and on the protection of green areas along the Bund. Seventeen buildings were also listed as landmarks to be protected. It took another five years for a general scheme to be adopted for the same area, slightly extended to the northern bank of the Suzhou river. Altogether, a total of 40 buildings now came under the protective scheme of the Bureau of Urban Planning.¹⁴⁵

The new scheme included a detailed classification of all the buildings in the area defined in 1984. All the buildings along the Bund were retained either as “to be protected” (baohu jianzhu 保護建築) or “to be safeguarded” (baoliu jianzhu 保留建築). In fact, these categories crossed historical lines as both historical (namely pre-1949) and more buildings could be found in both categories. They could be rehabilitated, but their original appearance had to be preserved. Behind the first fronting blocks, most buildings fell under the category of multi-story or high-story buildings (whatever that meant) and could either be torn down and rebuilt or remodeled to fit present-day requirements for business (See map).¹⁴⁷ Yet, what the plan defined as the “northern part” of the Southern Bund was actually the southern section of the former French Bund. The plans of the municipality seem to have left out the stretch of riverfront between Yan’an donglu (ex. Edward VII Ave) and Xinkaihe lu (ex. Place du Chateau d’eau) that formed the French Bund (Quai de France). The apparent rationale behind these choices may be one of history. On the one hand, the “British Bund” formed a remarkable row of historical buildings that link Shanghai to its colonial past. On the other hand, the selected section of the French Bund is associated to Shiliupu (十六鋪), the historical riverfront of the former walled city. Both sections have a relationship with a past that had to be balanced.

Conclusion

In the 1990s and 2000s, as in the 1930s, the focus remained firmly centered on the “British Bund”. While its buildings are a legacy from Shanghai’s colonial past – something that was definitely erased during the first three decades of the regime – they are now being viewed in a different perspective by the city’s leaders. The city has invested in a somptuous illumination sheme to highlight the buildings on the Bund and emphasize Shanghai’s glamour. The buildings have been voided of their historical content or substance. The colonial past has been pushed back into the fold of history and only the thin surface of its heritage, reinterpreted for both domestic and international consumption, is being promoted. The Bund has become a “heritage” in a quasi UNESCO definition, a set of historical monuments worth preserving for their own sake, but not for what they represent historically. Worth preserving for what they convey in the current search of Shanghai for a new identity, or a renewed identity as the city reconnects with the world. That process is not unique to Shanghai. China has been in the grip of a “nostalgia” for the “old” – actually a real industry. But beyond the commercial aspects, this phenomenon reflects the need of the population and its leaders to reevaluate and reinvent the past in the context of the post-Deng reforms.

In Shanghai, this reevaluation was nurtured by a reconstruction of the collective memory of the colonial past.¹⁴⁹ Any search on the Internet generates hundreds of links and thousands of photographs. Many times, one encounters serious approximations about the history of the Bund (one guide even states the Bund has been in existence for hundreds of years), superficial references to its glamorous past (most often by Westerners), etc. Yet, it is clear that the Bund/外滩 has become fully part of Shanghai’s memory and claim for glamour on the worldwide stage.