Asia Building

The Asia Building (亚细亚大楼, Yàxìyà Dàlóu) is the first building at the southern end of the Bund, at 1 Zhongshan East 1st Road. It was completed in 1916 as the McBain Building, took its lasting name from the Asiatic Petroleum Company a year later, and is now an art venue: the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum occupies its second and third floors.

The corner plot had a long commercial history before the present building. It passed from the British firm 兆丰洋行 to the American house Russell & Co. (旗昌洋行) and then to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company. In 1913 the McBain company began a new office block here, designed by the British firm Moorhead & Halse (马海洋行) and built by the contractor 裕昌泰营造厂. It was finished in 1916 and was the tallest building on the Bund. With its address of No. 1, it became known as “the first building on the Bund”.

In 1917 the Asiatic Petroleum Company took the building over; the gazetteer says it bought it, Chinese Wikipedia that it leased every floor except the second and third. The company, a subsidiary of Shell Transport and Trading and Royal Dutch, had opened its Shanghai office at 7 Jiujiang Road in 1907, and within ten years its sales covered about a quarter of China’s demand for petroleum. The building has been the Asia Building ever since.

The block is a reinforced-concrete frame on 1,739 square metres of ground, with a floor area of 11,984 square metres. It was built with seven storeys; an eighth was added later at the four corners of the roof, in 1938 or 1939 depending on the source. Both the Bund elevation and the East Yan’an Road elevation are divided into three parts horizontally and three vertically. The two lowest floors are faced in granite to form a base, and the floors above are brick. The base and the top are Baroque in manner, the middle section plainer and more modern, which is why the building is usually described as eclectic.

Two details are easy to pick out from the pavement. The main entrance on the Bund has four Ionic columns under a semicircular carved arch, and the recessed centre of the sixth and seventh floors carries four more giant Ionic columns. The corner where the two streets meet is cut in with a concave bay, and the same treatment is repeated at the four corners of the top floor to soften the square block.

Japanese forces seized the building after the Pacific War began in December 1941, and the company recovered it after the war. After 1949 the East China Petroleum Company took it over, and in 1959 the Shanghai Metallurgical Design Institute, the municipal housing administration and the Shanghai Silk Company moved in. In 1996, after a property exchange, it became the headquarters of China Pacific Insurance.

The building was placed on the municipal protection list in 1989 and is part of the Bund Buildings group listed at national level in 1996. Its recent use is cultural. The Jiushi International Art Centre was announced to open here around National Day 2019; in December 2021 Christie’s said it would move its Shanghai office and a 1,600-square-metre art space into the building the following spring; and on 31 March 2026 the Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum opened its main venue on the second and third floors, after a renovation led by gmp architects.