The Bund

The Bund — a term derived from Anglo-Indian usage for an embanked waterfront — runs for roughly two kilometres along the west bank of the Huangpu River. The buildings that face it, constructed between the 1870s and the 1930s, represent the architecture of Shanghai's role as the primary treaty port and the financial capital of East Asia in that period.

Twenty-seven heritage buildings are numbered along the waterfront, including the former HSBC building (1923, now Pudong Development Bank), the Customs House (1927, with a clock tower modelled on Big Ben), and the Palace Hotel (1906, now the Waldorf Astoria). The architectural range covers Neoclassical, Art Deco, Renaissance Revival, and Beaux Arts — a compressed survey of the commercial architecture of the Western world in the late imperial and interwar periods.

The buildings are largely in use as banks, luxury hotels, and restaurants, making them accessible interiors as well as facades. The Fairmont Peace Hotel — the original Cathay Hotel, opened by Victor Sassoon in 1929 — is the most celebrated; its Jazz Bar has operated almost continuously since the 1930s.

The promenade opposite, widened in 2010, provides the viewing platform for the Pudong skyline across the river — the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jin Mao Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Centre, and the Shanghai Tower form a sequence of landmark buildings that has become the city's most reproduced image. The contrast between the European Neo-classical facades on the west bank and the 21st-century financial towers on the east is the defining visual experience of Shanghai.