Waitan’s stone-fronted promenade along Shanghai’s Huangpu River

Waitan, better known in English as the Bund, is the stretch of historic waterfront where stone-fronted banks and hotels line the west bank of the Huangpu River opposite Shanghai’s modern towers. This riverside promenade grew into a showcase of early twentieth-century commercial architecture during the treaty-port era, when Shanghai emerged as a major hub for finance and trade in East Asia.

A riverside gallery of early twentieth-century facades

Waitan extends for roughly 1.5 km (about 1 mile) along the western bank of the Huangpu River between Waibaidu Bridge in the north and Yan’an East Road in the south, forming an elevated promenade above the embankment.The Bund is a 1.5-kilometer elevated waterfront promenade The river here curves gently, so that the line of buildings forms a broad arc facing the high-rise district of Lujiazui across the water in Pudong. The promenade is paved and largely open, with balustrades, benches and wide views along the river in both directions.

On the landward side of this walkway stands a continuous row of substantial masonry buildings, many completed between the 1910s and 1930s, which earned Waitan the nickname “museum of buildings”.To the west of the promenade stand fifty-two early-twentieth-century buildings Their facades draw on Gothic Revival, neoclassical, Renaissance Revival, Baroque Revival, Beaux-Arts, Art Deco and early modernist styles, with strong cornice lines, pilasters, towers and projecting bays giving the whole frontage a formal rhythm. Together they form a dense cross-section of the European and North American architectural languages that foreign banks, clubs and consulates brought to Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century.

Banks, clubs and consulates along Zhongshan Road

The street running behind the riverfront buildings is Zhongshan East 1st Road, part of Zhongshan Road, which defines Waitan as an urban address in Shanghai’s Huangpu District.Waitan is a section of Zhongshan Road in Shanghai Many addresses on this stretch began life as corporate or institutional headquarters in the treaty-port era and retain that grand scale and decorative ambition. The former Shanghai Club, completed around 1910–1911 and now incorporated into a hotel complex, once served as a British gentlemen’s club and sat prominently near the southern part of the Bund frontage.The Shanghai Club on Zhongshan Dongyilu was newly erected in 1910 Its facade is organised in strong horizontal bands with tall windows above a ground floor articulated by arches and engaged columns.

Further north along the same line stands the former HSBC Building, completed in 1923, which has long been regarded as one of the grandest bank buildings in Shanghai.The HSBC Building dates from 1923 Nearby, the Customs House, dating from 1927, rises above the street with a prominent clock tower that echoes the proportions of London’s Big Ben and has become a familiar marker in skyline photographs.The Customs House (1927) is a canonical Bund building A short distance away, Sassoon House, better known today as the Peace Hotel and completed in 1929, introduces an Art Deco profile with its stepped form and distinctive green-tinted roof crowning the corner at Nanjing East Road.

From treaty port to layered cityscape

Waitan’s emergence as a dense band of foreign-style architecture began after 1843, when Shanghai was opened as a treaty port and foreign powers gained the right to establish settlements and trading houses along the Huangpu waterfront.The Bund became a site of early foreign settlements after Shanghai was opened as a treaty port Early buildings were relatively modest, but by the 1920s banks, insurance companies and shipping firms from Britain, France, the United States, Russia, Japan and other countries had commissioned ever more imposing headquarters and clubs to line this frontage.The boom decade was the 1920s, when banking and insurance companies built neoclassical and Art Deco buildings The result was an almost continuous terrace of stone and concrete, facing the river with colonnades, pediments, cupolas and clock towers.

After the treaty-port era ended in the mid-twentieth century and foreign concessions were abolished in 1943, the buildings along Waitan were taken into Chinese ownership and many were adapted for new uses under the government of the People’s Republic of China.After 1949 the buildings became state-owned and many were repurposed The former HSBC Building, for example, later housed the Shanghai municipal government and now accommodates the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank.The HSBC Building was built in 1923 and is now used by Shanghai Pudong Development Bank In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a number of facades and interiors were restored and adapted for hotel, restaurant and cultural uses, but the external silhouettes and materials of the waterfront remained largely intact, preserving the early twentieth-century profile that contrasts so strongly with the steel-and-glass towers of Pudong across the water.

Visiting Waitan: what travellers from Western Europe should know

• Waitan lies in Shanghai’s central Huangpu District along Zhongshan East 1st Road on the west bank of the Huangpu River, opposite the high-rise district of Lujiazui in Pudong.
• The promenade is level and paved for its length, but reaching it from the inland streets involves crossing multi-lane roads and using pedestrian crossings or underpasses that may include flights of steps.
• The area around Waitan forms a dense urban district, with Nanjing East Road’s commercial street meeting the riverfront near the Peace Hotel, so a visit combines river views with inner-city streets.
• The official language is Chinese and the currency is the renminbi (yuan).
• Entry requirements depend on your nationality; UK travellers can check the FCDO travel advice at gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice, Irish travellers the Department of Foreign Affairs at ireland.ie.

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Frequently asked questions about Waitan

Where is Waitan in Shanghai?

Waitan occupies a section of Zhongshan East 1st Road along the west bank of the Huangpu River in Huangpu District, facing the Pudong skyline across the water.

What should visitors expect when walking along Waitan?

Visitors walk an elevated riverside promenade lined on one side by early twentieth-century stone-fronted banks and hotels and on the other by open views of the river and skyscrapers.

What makes Waitan distinctive compared with other areas of Shanghai?

Waitan is distinctive for its continuous row of historic foreign-style buildings from the early twentieth century, preserved along the riverfront and set directly opposite Pudong’s contemporary high-rises.