The Bund's first facade: how the riverfront row was listed, bought back and given to people on foot, 1986–2025

The “first facade” is planners’ shorthand for the single row of buildings that faces the Huangpu River along Zhongshan East-1 Road: the banks, hotels and clubs everyone photographs. It is the part of the Bund that Shanghai protected first, emptied of government offices in the 1990s, sold back to banks, and in 2010 freed from the eleven lanes of traffic that ran in front of it. This is the story of those four moves, and of the rules that now decide how much of the city behind it can be seen from the river.

The buildings themselves, who designed them and when, are covered in How to read the Bund. This piece starts where that one ends, in the 1980s.

What “first facade” means, and who uses the term

The phrase belongs to Huangpu District’s planning documents. Its renewal action plan of 2023 divides the Huangpu part of the Bund historic area into two zones “by closeness to the river and by the order of development”. The first facade is the front row on Zhongshan East-1 Road, plus the first phase of the Rockbund project at the northern end. The second facade is everything behind it, as far west as Henan Middle Road, between Suzhou Creek and Yan’an East Road.

The same plan gives a one-line verdict on each. The first facade, it says, has “gradually completed” its change of use since the 1990s; the second still has to be speeded up. That is the official view of where the work stands.

The numbers make the difference concrete. Shen Sirui of the Shanghai Local Chronicles Office counted 36 buildings facing the river and 141 behind them, out of 177 buildings from before 1949 in roughly 80 hectares of the Huangpu side. So the famous row is about a fifth of the old buildings in the area. The rest is the subject of the second part of this topic.

How did a row of colonial banks become protected heritage?

The answer is: in stages, over about twenty years, with the protected unit growing from single buildings to the whole district.

1986: the city. The State Council named Shanghai one of its second batch of national historic and cultural cities. Mao Jialiang, director of the city’s Planning Bureau, opened a 2008 press briefing on heritage by saying that Shanghai “is not a city with a long history” by Chinese standards; its claim rests on how it urbanised from the mid-nineteenth century. The Bund is the core of that claim.

1988–1989: the first list. The Ministry of Construction and the Ministry of Culture asked cities in 1988 to survey their outstanding modern buildings. Shanghai’s survey produced a first list of 61 buildings, which were made municipal protected sites and given plaques in 1989.

1991: the first rule with teeth. The city government issued its Measures on protecting outstanding modern buildings. The 2008 briefing called them China’s first local government regulation on modern architecture; a 2024 Jiefang Daily account calls them the city’s first binding protection rule. They governed the work for eleven years.

1996: national listing. On 20 November 1996 the “Shanghai Bund building group” was announced in the fourth batch of national key cultural-relic protection units, the country’s highest heritage grade. How many buildings that covers depends on who is counting, as the section on disagreements below explains.

2002–2003: the area, not just the building. In July 2002 the city’s People’s Congress turned the 1991 measures into a local law, the Regulation on historic and cultural areas and outstanding historic buildings, in force from 1 January 2003. Two changes mattered. Protection could now cover a whole area as well as a single building, and a building no longer had to date from before 1949 to qualify; thirty years in use was enough. In 2003 the city drew 12 central-city historic areas totalling 27 square kilometres, about a third of the old urban area, and in 2005 added 32 in the suburbs and Pudong. The Bund heads the list of the twelve.

The Bund historic area as drawn is 101 hectares across Huangpu and Hongkou districts, from Yan’an East Road north across Suzhou Creek to Wuchang Road. Wenhui Bao counted 43 blocks in it in 2015, when it was named in the first national batch of “China historic and cultural districts”. In a 2024 reply to a proposal that the Bund bid for World Heritage status, Huangpu District called it Shanghai’s only national-level historic district, and set out what a bid would need without committing to a date.

To put the Bund in proportion: by 2008 Shanghai had 19 national and 163 municipal protected sites, and four batches of outstanding historic buildings amounting to 632 sites and 2,138 individual buildings.

Who was inside the buildings, and how did they leave?

Listing protects a facade. It does not decide who works behind it. For decades after 1949 the big Bund buildings housed government departments and state bodies; the former HSBC building at No. 12 was used by the city government itself until 1995. By the early 1990s the city wanted the Bund back as a financial street, and the instrument was the “swap” (置换): an occupying government office moved to a new building elsewhere, and a bank or financial institution paid to take the old one.

A company was set up for the purpose. The Shanghai Bund Housing Swap Company dates from November 1994. The best-documented swap is No. 12. The city government moved out in 1995, and on 12 December 1997 Shanghai Pudong Development Bank took the building for 1.7 billion yuan, restoring it before moving in. No. 12, the former HSBC Building

The process took a quarter of a century. In November 2019 Huangpu District told a renewal summit that the riverfront row had “essentially” finished its swaps. The exceptions were three: the Municipal Federation of Trade Unions in the former Bank of Communications building (Bank of Communications Building (Municipal Trade Union)), Shanghai Customs in the Customs House, and the municipal archives. The list of incoming tenants read like a directory of Chinese finance: the China Foreign Exchange Trade System, the Shanghai Clearing House, the National Interbank Funding Center and SPD Bank’s head office, with foreign names such as Bangkok Bank and AIA.

So the first facade went back to roughly the use it was built for, but without a fresh sale of the land: the state bodies that held the buildings exchanged them. That is part of why the change was faster on the riverfront than behind it, where, as the second part of this topic explains, ownership is split many ways.

Why did the Bund have eleven lanes of traffic?

By the 2000s the bigger problem was in front of the buildings. Zhongshan East-1 Road had become part of the city’s main north–south road network. In September 2009 Huang Rong, director of the city’s Construction and Transport Commission, gave the figures: a surface road 37 metres wide with eleven lanes in both directions, carrying half of all traffic crossing Suzhou Creek east of the north–south elevated road. About 70 per cent of it was through traffic that had no business on the Bund, and more than 85 per cent was cars.

His list of costs was frank. The road had changed the Bund’s historic look, it cut the riverside green strip off from the buildings, and it held back tourism and culture along the river. To reach the river from the buildings, a pedestrian had to cross all of it.

The city had already rebuilt the Bund once, in the early 1990s. Jiang Shujie, deputy director of the same commission, later drew the contrast: that earlier rebuild was “mainly about congestion”; the new one was about restoring the townscape and the Bund’s function.

How do you dig a motorway tunnel under a listed waterfront?

The city government approved the reconstruction in April 2007, timed for Expo 2010. It had three parts: the Bund tunnel under Zhongshan East-1 Road, and new Renmin Road and Xinjian Road tunnels under the river.

The Bund tunnel’s northern section was bored, not dug from the surface. The machine was a 14.27-metre earth-pressure-balance shield, the largest of its type in China at the time. Its tube carries six lanes on two decks, three each way, again a first for the country. The margins are what engineers remember. The shield’s crown came within 8 metres of the street surface; its base passed 1.46 metres above the tunnels of metro Line 2. Its edge runs 1.7 metres from the Pujiang Hotel (the old Astor House) and 2.8 metres from the 18-storey Shanghai Mansions. Thirty-three protected historic buildings stood along the route and were watched with fixed-point and remote monitoring throughout.

Above ground the cost was paid in detours. The 26-month build needed more than thirty changes to traffic layouts. The Waibaidu Bridge was taken away for repair and brought back. The Wusong Road sluice bridge over Suzhou Creek, beside it, was demolished for good.

This was not the first time the city routed infrastructure around old buildings. Mao Jialiang said in 2008 that all 78 metro stations built inside the Outer Ring, and the 152 or so under construction, had been placed to avoid nearby protected buildings. The Bund tunnel did the same thing, in less room.

What did people on foot get?

The plan for the surface came from an international design competition run from April 2007 by the Planning Bureau, the Municipal Engineering Bureau, the Huangpu River development office and Huangpu District. Mao Jialiang and his deputy Wu Jiang presented the result on 28 May 2008. It covered about 1.8 kilometres of waterfront, from the mouth of Suzhou Creek to the Shiliupu ferry terminal.

With through traffic underground, the surface road dropped to four lanes for buses and local access, plus two spare lanes for bus stops and short stops. The room saved went to people. The design kept the existing flood-wall platform along the river and widened it at key points; added a mid-level terrace between the pavement and the platform, mostly between Nanjing Road and Yan’an Road; and joined the levels with long ramps at 3–4 per cent rather than steps.

Four squares were planned at the places where crowds gather. Zhou Wei, head of Huangpu District, gave their sizes in September 2009:

• At the north end, the gate, wall and small buildings at the west entrance of Huangpu Park came down for a 1,884-square-metre plaza joined to the green space at Rockbund (West entrance of Huangpu Park).
• Chen Yi Square, at Nanjing Road at the foot of Nanjing Road, centred on the statue of Chen Yi, grew to 2,858 square metres.
• At Fuzhou Road a new mid-level square of 4,900 square metres, the largest, was planned as the “Bund finance square” (Bund finance square, at Fuzhou Road).
• At Yan’an Road a 2,566-square-metre square was laid out round the Gutzlaff Signal Tower square.

The pavement on the building side was widened where there was room, to as much as 12 metres.

The works passed acceptance in March 2010 after 33 months, and the tunnel opened to traffic on the morning of 28 March 2010. Jiang Shujie put the purpose in one sentence: to turn the surface of the Bund from a space mainly for cars into one mainly for people.

Who decides how much of the city can be seen behind it?

Once the row was protected and its road tamed, the remaining question was the skyline: what may rise behind it. The answer is now in a statutory plan. The January 2025 implementation plan for the two renewal units that cover the northern and central Bund sets out to protect “the overall pattern of the Bund and the classic outline of the first facade”.

Its rules are written as views. New, rebuilt or extended buildings in the second facade must not affect the first facade’s skyline. From the street, a new building inside a block should be essentially invisible behind the street-front buildings. From key viewpoints on the Pudong riverside, larger new volumes inside the historic area should also be essentially invisible. Base heights for each block fall into five tiers: 24, 30, 40, 48 and 54 metres. The plan allows one exception, a landmark of up to 200 metres in block 150 or 151 of the Bund-01 unit.

So the first facade is protected twice over: as listed buildings, and as an outline that the buildings behind it are not allowed to break.

What the sources disagree on

How many buildings the national listing covers. The Shanghai Urban Construction Archives say the 1996 listing took in 27 buildings and structures under the name “Shanghai Bund building group”. Huangpu District’s 2024 reply names nine: the Asia Building, the Shanghai Club, HSBC, the Customs House, the Palace Hotel, Sassoon House, the Bank of China, Jardine Matheson and the Banque de l’Indochine. It adds that most of the other riverfront buildings are municipal “outstanding historic buildings”. The difference is probably one of counting (individual structures within the group against principal buildings), but neither source explains its count, and we have not seen the State Council’s 1996 list itself.

How big Chen Yi Square became. The design presented in May 2008 said the square would “double” in size; the district’s figures in September 2009 said it would grow “by a third”, to 2,858 square metres. The scheme changed between the two dates; the later figure is the one tied to a number.

Whether there would be more green. The 2008 design said green space would stay about the same; the 2009 briefing promised about 23,300 square metres, 10 per cent more.

Whether the swaps are finished. The district’s 2019 statement and its 2023 plan both describe the first facade as essentially done. The three exceptions named in 2019 show that “essentially” is doing some work: the Customs House, for one, is still a customs office.

What to look for

Stand on the mid-level terrace at Fuzhou Road (Bund finance square, at Fuzhou Road) and look west. The road in front of you has four lanes, not eleven; the traffic you cannot see is in two decks beneath your feet. The terrace itself did not exist before 2010.

Walk the ramps. Between Nanjing Road and Yan’an Road the levels are joined by long, shallow ramps rather than stairs. The 3–4 per cent slope was a design target, chosen for crowds.

At No. 12 (No. 12, the former HSBC Building), the name over the door is SPD Bank’s. This was the city government’s headquarters until 1995. The bank paid 1.7 billion yuan for the building in a swap in 1997.

Compare three doors that did not change hands: the Customs House (Customs House), still customs; the former Bank of Communications at No. 14 (Bank of Communications Building (Municipal Trade Union)), still the trade unions; and, by 2019, the archives.

At the north end, stand by the Waibaidu Bridge and look at the hotel and the tall brick block across the creek, the Astor House Hotel (Pujiang Hotel) and Broadway Mansions (Shanghai Mansions). The tunnel passes under this junction within two or three metres of both.

What has gone: the eleven-lane road (now four traffic lanes plus two for bus stops), the Wusong Road sluice bridge over Suzhou Creek, and the gate and wall at the west entrance of Huangpu Park. What stayed: the pedestrian subways at Beijing Road and Nanjing Road, which the 2008 design kept while moving most crossings back to street level.

From Pudong, look back across the river. The 2025 plan was written for that view: nothing new behind the row should show above it, apart from what the plan allows west of the historic area.