Discover Shanghai
The Bund
外滩
A 1.5km riverside promenade lined with twenty-odd colonial-era banks and trading houses, facing the Pudong skyline across the Huangpu. Chinese guides call it the city's soul; it is the one view that explains Shanghai in a single glance.
The story
What makes this place special
The Bund was the waterfront of the foreign settlements - a British settlement first, merged with the American one into the International Settlement in 1863 - and from around 1900 it filled up with the banks and trading houses that made Shanghai the financial centre of East Asia. The HSBC building at No. 12, finished in 1923, was said at the time to be the grandest between the Suez Canal and the Bering Strait; the Customs House next door at No. 13 went up in 1927 with a clock and bell made in England and modelled on Big Ben. In the 1990s a flood levee about 10m above street level was built along the river and Zhongshan Road was widened to ten lanes; the promenade was rebuilt and reopened on 28 March 2010, before the World Expo, which is why the walkway now feels like a raised deck.
What you’ll discover
You walk a raised stone promenade about 1.5km long with the Huangpu River and the towers of Pudong on one side and an unbroken wall of 1900s-1930s stone facades on the other. The buildings are numbered, and the recognisable ones in order from the south are the Customs House with its clock tower, the HSBC building with its paired bronze lions and its restored mosaic ceiling in the entrance hall, and at the north end the Peace Hotel on the corner of Nanjing Road. At the far north the promenade ends at the Waibaidu (Garden) Bridge, a riveted steel truss over Suzhou Creek, with the small 1907 Gutzlaff signal tower on the river side.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Walk into the lobbies. Most of the Bund buildings are working banks and hotels and you can simply go in - the HSBC entrance hall at No. 12 with its restored dome mosaics is the single best interior on the street and almost no one on the promenade knows it is there.
- The promenade is the view of Pudong. For the view of the Bund itself you have to cross the river - the Pudong-side walkway opposite, or a Huangpu ferry, which costs almost nothing and is a two-minute crossing that tour boats charge many times more for.
- Walk one block inland. Yuanmingyuan Road and the Rockbund block behind No. 17 are the same architecture without the crowd, and the raised Bund itself hides the street-level detail of the buildings.
- The lights on both banks are switched off at a set hour each night, and on ordinary weeknights that can be earlier than visitors expect - do the night view before 10pm rather than after dinner.
- The underpass crossings, not the surface, are how you get between the promenade and the buildings; Zhongshan Road is ten lanes and jaywalking it is not realistic.
- On Chinese public holidays the promenade is crowd-controlled with barriers and one-way flow, and at New Year it can be closed. Avoid the first days of October and the Lunar New Year week if you can.
When to come
Two different visits: just after sunrise, when the promenade belongs to people exercising and you can photograph the facades without crowds, and the hour after dusk for the lit skyline. Mid-afternoon is the worst of both. Winter air is clearer; summer evenings are humid and very crowded.
Getting around
Good. The promenade is a flat, smooth, wide paved deck with lifts and ramps at the main access points from street level, and benches along it, so a wheelchair or a bad knee handles it well. The constraints are distance - the full walk is about 1.5km each way with no way to cut across the road - and the underpasses, some of which have long ramps rather than lifts. The historic lobbies have steps at some doorways. The Waibaidu Bridge has a level footway.
Worth knowing before you go
The elevated promenade gets shoulder-to-shoulder after 19:00. Walk the stretch south of Yan'an East Road, or cross to the Pudong side at Lujiazui for the classic photo of the historic bank row instead.
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