North China Daily News Building (AIA Building)

The North China Daily News Building (字林大楼, Zìlín Dàlóu) at Bund 17 was built in 1921–1924 as the headquarters of the North China Daily News (字林西报, Zìlín Xībào), the longest-running foreign-language newspaper in China, and was the tallest building on the Bund when it opened. Since 1996 it has been the AIA Building (友邦大厦, Yǒubāng Dàshà), the Shanghai offices of the insurer AIA, whose red letters stand on the roof.

The paper began on 3 August 1850 as the weekly North-China Herald, founded by the British merchant Henry Shearman, and its daily edition took the name North China Daily News on 1 June 1864. By the twentieth century it was closely aligned with the Shanghai Municipal Council and held the first rights to Reuters telegrams in Shanghai for thirty years. Henry Lester (雷士德, Léishìdé), a surveyor turned property magnate, became chairman of the publishing company; his architectural firm, Lester, Johnson & Morriss (德和洋行, Déhé Yángháng), designed the new building. The land at Bund 17 belonged to the Morriss family, who turned it into a 47 per cent shareholding in the paper and, after Lester died in 1926, took control of both the newspaper and the architectural practice.

Rebuilding of the site began in 1921. The structure was finished in June 1923 and the building opened in 1924, with an American firm (茂生洋行, Màoshēng Yángháng) as contractor. It occupies a plot of 1,106 square metres, has a floor area of 8,144 square metres and rises 40.2 metres. The front block on the Bund has eight storeys plus two pavilions on the roof and a basement, eleven levels in all; the rear block has seven.

The facade is symmetrical about the entrance, which is framed by heavy Doric columns under a marble lintel. Floors three to seven carry classical Doric columns, Renaissance-style reliefs and regular rectangular windows; the eighth floor has arched openings with paired columns and recessed balconies. Under the eaves, eight muscular stone figures hold up the cornice; the gazetteer records that they survived the Cultural Revolution because someone covered them in cement. Two female statues by an Italian sculptor that once flanked the entrance were destroyed in the same period. The two rooftop pavilions are in an Italian Baroque manner. The ground floor and mezzanine are granite shipped from a quarry near Tokyo; the upper walls are rendered cement. Inside, according to the gazetteer, the entrance hall has a white marble floor, black marble walls and a gold mosaic dome.

The newspaper shared the building with tenants. The most important was the insurance business the American Cornelius V. Starr (史带, Shǐdài) had started in Shanghai: on 4 March 1928 his Asia Life Insurance Company, known in Chinese as Youbang, rented the ground-floor hall and several floors and made the building its headquarters. Japanese troops entered the International Settlement in December 1941, the paper was shut down and AIA’s Shanghai business ended. Both returned after the war; AIA moved its headquarters to Hong Kong in October 1947, and the North China Daily News printed its last issue on 31 March 1951, a hundred years after its founding.

From 1951 the building housed the Inland River Shipping Bureau and other state offices and was renamed the Guilin Building (桂林大楼, Guìlín Dàlóu). AIA reopened a Shanghai branch in 1992, the first foreign insurer licensed after 1949, and in 1996 returned to Bund 17 through a property exchange, renaming it the AIA Building. After an eighteen-month refit it reopened in May 1998, and in July 2025 AIA renewed its lease on the whole building.