Glen Line Building

The Glen Line Building (格林邮船大楼, Gélín Yóuchuán Dàlóu) at Bund No. 28 is a seven-storey office block of 1922 on the corner of Beijing East Road, built for a British shipping agency. Its later tenants tell the story of the Bund after 1937: the Japanese military, the US consulate, Shanghai’s radio station, and now the Shanghai Clearing House.

The lot first belonged to the German trading house Siemssen & Co (禅臣洋行, Chánchén Yángháng); sources differ on whether it bought the land in 1856 or 1868. After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the property passed to a British firm, Glen Line Eastern Agencies (怡泰公司, Yítài Gōngsī), which ran passenger services between Shanghai and Japan and held the China agency of the Glen Line, the shipping company whose name the building carries.

Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng) designed the new building, and it went up between 1920 and 1922. It is reinforced concrete, 27.5 metres tall, with about 11,000 square metres of floor space on a site of under 1,800 square metres. The main entrance is on Beijing East Road, not on the Bund.

The design is classical in its bones and eclectic in its details. The first two floors are faced in granite cut with deep horizontal joints. The arched entrance on the river side is flanked by Ionic columns of granite; the three doors on Beijing Road make do with plainer Tuscan columns. Floors three to five have bay windows and balconies in places, string courses and cornices stress the horizontal lines, and at the seventh floor the centre of the block steps back to form a small tower. Inside, the corridors on every floor have mosaic floors, the main offices have parquet and hardwood trim, and one room on the sixth floor keeps its original wood wainscoting.

Glen Line used the building until 1937. After the Battle of Shanghai, Japanese forces occupied it, and the Yokohama Specie Bank, whose own building stands a few doors south at No. 24, used the ground floor until 1945. After the Japanese surrender the owners leased the building to the US Navy and to news agencies including the Associated Press. The US consulate worked from here from September 1945 until it closed in April 1950.

In March 1951 Shanghai People’s Radio Station (上海人民广播电台, Shànghǎi Rénmín Guǎngbō Diàntái) moved in and stayed for 45 years. The station left in October 1996 for the Shanghai Broadcasting Building. The Shanghai Clearing House (上海清算所, Shànghǎi Qīngsuànsuǒ), an interbank clearing institution founded in 2009, occupies it now.

The building was listed in the second batch of Shanghai Outstanding Historical Buildings in 1994, under its Beijing East Road address, and has been part of the nationally protected Bund group since 1996.