Shanghai Club Building

The Shanghai Club Building (上海总会大楼, Shànghǎi Zǒnghuì Dàlóu) at 2 Zhongshan East 1st Road was the clubhouse of the Shanghai Club, the oldest and most influential of the city’s British members’ clubs. Since 2010 it has been the Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund, and the Long Bar on its ground floor is the reason most visitors walk in.

The club came first, the building second. In 1862 the club’s committee settled on a social club, and a British merchant named Fogg gave a plot of about 3.5 mu beside his firm’s premises on the Bund. Work began in 1863 and a three-storey brick-and-timber clubhouse opened in 1864. By 1909 the club had 1,300 members, three-quarters of them British, and anyone applying had to have lived in Shanghai for at least three months.

By 1905 the old clubhouse was worn out and the members decided to rebuild. The new design was by H. Tarrant, a British architect then with the Municipal Council’s Public Works Department; after Tarrant died, A. G. Bray finished it. Jardine Matheson, Brunner Mond, HSBC, the tramway company and the Aquarius soda-water works put up the money. The foundation stone was laid in 1909 and the Shanghai gazetteer records the building coming into use in January 1910; English-language accounts, including the hotel’s own, give January 1911.

What they built was a reinforced-concrete block of five storeys and a basement on 1,811 square metres of ground, described in the gazetteer as the first cement building in Shanghai. The facade is in three horizontal bands. Six large Ionic stone columns run through the third and fourth floors, the two ends step forward, and the roof carries a pair of turrets with semicircular arched openings. The interiors were fitted out by a Japanese architect working for Moorhead & Halse, modelled on Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel; English sources name him as Shimoda Kikutaro (下田菊太郎). The bar was decorated in the style of James I and the billiard room in the style of Elizabeth I.

The bar counter is what the club was known for. The gazetteer gives it as 30.6 metres long and calls it the longest bar counter in the world at the time. The hotel describes the present Long Bar as 34 metres of raw mahogany that once held the title of longest bar in the Far East.

The club’s earlier history had its own set pieces. When the former US president Ulysses S. Grant reached Shanghai on 17 May 1879, the club received him on 21 May and spelled out his name in gas jets along the roof cornice.

The Shanghai Club closed when Japanese forces occupied the building after December 1941 and reopened after the surrender in 1945. After 1949 the British members left. The building housed state purchasing offices, went to the International Seamen’s Club in 1956, and in 1971 was renamed the Dongfeng Hotel (东风饭店, Dōngfēng Fàndiàn). Shanghai’s first KFC opened on its second floor; the date is given as 8 December 1989.

Hilton took the building on and restored it as the Waldorf Astoria Shanghai on the Bund, rebuilding the Long Bar. The hotel dates the opening and the restoration to 2010; other accounts say 2008 for the handover and 2011 for the formal opening. The building was placed on Shanghai’s municipal protection list in 1989 and is part of the Bund Buildings group listed at national level in 1996.