Customs House

The Customs House (江海关大楼, Jiānghǎiguān Dàlóu) is the building with the clock tower in the middle of the Bund. Opened in 1927, it still does the job it was built for: it is the home of Shanghai Customs, and its clock still sounds over the river.

Customs officers have worked on this site since 1857, when the customs office moved here into a compound of Chinese official-style buildings. In 1893 that compound was replaced by a brick-and-timber building in a Western style with a clock tower and a bell. By the 1920s the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (汇丰银行, Huìfēng Yínháng) had rebuilt next door, and the Customs decided to rebuild too.

The foundation stone was laid on 15 December 1925 and the building opened on 19 December 1927. The architects were Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng), who had designed the HSBC building, and the designer named in the records is Wilson. The frame is reinforced concrete; the river front is clad in granite quarried near Suzhou, and the entrance is a portico of four Greek Doric columns. The east block is eight storeys, with the clock tower on top; a lower west block runs back to Sichuan Middle Road. The tower made this the tallest building on the Bund, overtaking the bank next door. Inside the entrance, the ceiling of the ground-floor hall carries eight mosaic panels of sailing ships, made of tens of thousands of coloured tiles.

The clock was made by J. B. Joyce & Co. of Whitchurch, England, and cost more than 5,000 taels of silver. It left London in August 1927; the crate weighed about 6.25 tonnes and was hoisted into the tower. It struck for the first time on New Year’s Day 1928. Four small bells played the Westminster quarters every fifteen minutes and a large bell struck the hour. The four dials are 5.4 metres across, each lit by 72 lamps. Three hanging weights drive the mechanism. Winding was done by hand and took hours, until an electric motor was fitted in the late 1950s.

The chimes have followed politics. At midnight on 1 June 1949 the clock was set back one hour as Shanghai adopted Beijing time. In 1966 the Westminster tune gave way to The East Is Red (东方红, Dōngfāng Hóng). In 1986, during Queen Elizabeth II’s visit, the Westminster chimes came back. From midnight on 30 June 1997, the eve of Hong Kong’s return, the tune stopped and only the hour was struck. Since 1 May 2003 The East Is Red has played again on the quarter hour. The small bells are now retired: the tune is a recording played through loudspeakers, while the hour is still struck. The mechanism has had four generations of keepers; the fourth, Wei Yunsi (魏云寺, Wèi Yúnsì), oils and checks it several times a week.

In front of the entrance, on the traffic island, a bronze statue of Sir Robert Hart, Inspector-General of the Chinese Maritime Customs, stood from 1927. It had been unveiled in 1914 further north on the Bund and was moved here when the new building went up. The Japanese authorities had it taken down in September 1943, and it is believed to have been melted for scrap.

On 16 February 1950 the Jianghai Customs became Shanghai Customs of the People’s Republic of China, and the building has been a customs office ever since. It is listed as no. 1A004 in the first batch of Shanghai Outstanding Historical Buildings and is part of the Bund Buildings group protected at the national level since 1996. The interior is normally closed; in autumn 2025 parts of it were opened by booking for an art season exhibition, which media described as the building’s first public opening.