Curated Itinerary
Art Déco in Shanghai: A Walking Tour from the Bund
Five buildings from the Bund to Nanjing Road West: Sassoon House, the Bank of China, the Customs House, Broadway Mansions and the Park Hotel of 1934.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Sassoon House (Fairmont Peace Hotel), Shanghai to Former Park Hotel Shanghai, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
Shanghai built in the Art Deco manner between the wars, and the Bund is where the money was. Five buildings, from the 1929 Sassoon House to the Park Hotel of 1934, within two kilometres of each other.
What you see
The walk starts with Sassoon House (1929), the green pyramid at the corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road, Sir Victor Sassoon’s Cathay Hotel, and continues along the waterfront to the Bank of China Building, which wears a green-tiled Chinese roof over an Art Deco frame, and to the Customs House, whose clock tower the city calls Big Ching.
Across Suzhou Creek stands Broadway Mansions, the brick cliff where the foreign press watched Shanghai fall in 1937. The last stop is the Park Hotel (László Hudec, 1934), 83.8 metres above Nanjing Road West and the tallest building in Asia for nearly thirty years.
How to do it
On foot, five stops, 3.9 kilometres measured on the streets, about three hours. Four stops are on the Bund, within a kilometre; the Park Hotel is a twenty-minute walk inland.
When to go
October to April. The Bund is crowded at weekends and at sunset, when everyone comes for the skyline.
Read the article
The magazine has a longer piece on this walk, with a photograph of each building and the history behind it: Art Deco in Shanghai, from the Bund to Nanjing Road.
Step by step
Sassoon House (Fairmont Peace Hotel), Shanghai
The green pyramid at the corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road is where Jazz Age Shanghai checked in: Sir Victor Sassoon’s Cathay Hotel of 1929, still pouring…
Bank of China Building, Shanghai
At No. 23 on the Bund, where Shanghai's great financial row faces the Huangpu River, the Bank of China Building stands as one of the most sophisticated…
Shanghai Customs House
The Shanghai Customs House at number 13 on the Bund is one of the most storied buildings in East Asia, its clock tower — known affectionately as Big Ching…
Broadway Mansions, Shanghai
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.
Former Park Hotel Shanghai
For nearly three decades after its completion in December 1934, the Park Hotel — formally the International Hotel (国际饭店) — stood as the tallest building in…
Download for tour navigation
PDF is the stop list with GPS, to print or keep on the phone. GPX for Garmin / Komoot / OsmAnd. KML for Google Earth and Maps.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
To keep the route in the app instead of opening it once, download the KML above and import it into Google My Maps — Create a new map, then Import: the route then sits among your own maps in Google Maps, with the stops and our notes attached to each one.