The brick cliff above Suzhou Creek – the apartment-hotel where the world’s press watched Shanghai fall in 1937, and the classic view of the Bund was invented.
At a glance
- Type
- Apartment hotel
- Period
- 1930-1934
- Style
- Art Deco
- Location
- North end of the Bund, Shanghai, China
- Coordinates
- 31.2459, 121.4856
- Architects
- Palmer and Turner (Bright Fraser)
Overview
Broadway Mansions rises nineteen storeys of brown brick in stepped masses at the meeting of Suzhou Creek and the Huangpu, closing the Bund’s parade like a Deco fortress gate. Completed in 1934 as luxury serviced apartments, the tower’s upper terraces command the panorama of the Bund and Pudong that has defined Shanghai’s image ever since.
History
From 1937 the building housed the Foreign Correspondents’ Club; reporters watched the Battle of Shanghai from its roof as bombs fell on the creek below. Japanese officers, then American officials, then the new China’s honoured guests succeeded each other; renamed Shanghai Mansions, it hosted state delegations through the Mao era and returned to hotel life with the city’s reopening – its registry a chronicle of the Shanghai century.
Architecture and Design
Palmer and Turner massed the brick in Manhattan-style setbacks with Deco banding at the crown; apartments came with Jazz Age fittings and creek-front loggias. The eighteenth-floor terrace remains the connoisseur’s vantage for the Bund’s curve – the postcard angle photographers have worked for ninety years.
Cultural significance
With the Garden Bridge at its feet – the steel Waibaidu of 1908 – Broadway Mansions composes Shanghai’s most filmed historical tableau, shorthand for the treaty-port era in every period drama. It is a listed Heritage Architecture of the highest grade.
Visiting today
The hotel welcomes non-guests to its lobby and, with reservation, the terrace restaurant’s Bund view; the Waibaidu bridge and Hongkou’s literary quarter adjoin.
Getting there
Tiantong Road metro station is five minutes’ walk; the Bund promenade begins across the Garden Bridge.
Sources and resources
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →Record researched and written by Luigi De Marchi for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
📷 Become a Cultural Heritage Online photographer
Share your photos of places: they stay published under your name as the author. The more they're seen, the more you get noticed — and soon a contest will reward the most appreciated photos.
Log in or sign up free to add a photoIs this page about you?
This page is read by travellers and heritage enthusiasts who find it on Google. Tell us how you are connected to this place and we will take it from there.