Chartered Bank Building (Bund 18)

Bund 18 (外滩18号, Wàitān Shíbā Hào) is the five-storey former Chartered Bank Building (麦加利银行大楼, Màijiālì Yínháng Dàlóu), begun in 1922 for the British Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China and restored in 2002–2004 as a complex of shops, restaurants, bars and an art space. Its restoration won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage award in 2006.

The Chartered Bank opened its Shanghai branch in the late 1850s. Its Chinese name, Maijiali, is said to come from its first Shanghai manager, and for about a century its compradors were mostly drawn from the Xi (席) family of Dongshan on Lake Tai. In 1892 the bank moved to this plot, taking over the three-storey brick-and-timber premises of the Oriental Bank (丽如银行, Lìrú Yínháng), which had collapsed. That building was damaged by a fire at the Palace Hotel next door, and rebuilding was then held up by the First World War. Construction finally started in 1922, to a design by Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng), with a British contracting firm (德罗·考尔洋行, Déluó Kǎo’ěr Yángháng); it was completed in 1923.

The front block facing the Bund is a square, reinforced-concrete building of five storeys on a site of 1,755 square metres, in a Renaissance manner with the usual three-part elevation. The ground floor is faced in granite, with a large carved metal door in the centre. Above it, the middle section of the second and third floors is recessed behind a pair of tall Ionic columns running through both storeys, with floor-to-ceiling windows set back between them. A cornice projects above the fourth floor, and the three windows of the fifth floor are divided by two smaller columns, under a roof terrace. Inside, the hall had a black marble floor and white marble walls. A rear block on the older part of the site was rebuilt in reinforced concrete.

The bank kept its Shanghai branch going after 1949, longer than most foreign banks, but moved its office to 185 Yuanmingyuan Road, and in 1955 the building was renamed the Chunjiang Building (春江大楼, Chūnjiāng Dàlóu). State enterprises then used it, among them the Shanghai Household Textiles Company and the Chinese-Polish Joint Stock Shipping Company (中波轮船公司, Zhōng-Bō Lúnchuán Gōngsī).

Restoration began in 2002 under Kokaistudios, a practice founded in Venice in 2000 by Filippo Gabbiani and Andrea Destefanis, and finished in 2004. Twenty workers spent about three months cleaning the stone exterior; salts were drawn out of the interior marble; and the lobby floor, which had settled more than ten centimetres, was re-laid in small marble pieces that hide the slope. In 2006 the project received an Award of Distinction in the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation. The building reopened as Bund 18, with luxury boutiques on the lower floors and restaurants and bars above. Since 2019 it has also housed the Jiushi Art Space (久事艺术空间, Jiǔshì Yìshù Kōngjiān) of the Jiushi Art Museum, which stages exhibitions here.