History

Shanghai’s foreign quarters were created in the wake of the treaties that opened China to outside trade in the mid-nineteenth century. The Shanghai International Settlement, formed in 1863 by the merger of the British and American areas, and the separately governed French Concession, operated for decades as legally protected enclaves where foreign banks, trading houses and residents lived under their own administrations. The Bund, the embankment fronting the Huangpu River, grew into the financial heart of this world. Commercial buildings in the Beaux-Arts style rose there around the turn of the twentieth century, but the great rebuilding came later.

The 1920s and early 1930s were Shanghai’s boom years. Money from trade, finance and speculation funded a wave of construction in which the new Art Déco language took hold. In 1929 Sir Victor Sassoon completed Sassoon House on the Bund, designed by the firm Palmer and Turner, with its luxury Cathay Hotel and the copper pyramid that has since weathered to pale green. Across the settlement, the Hungarian-Slovak architect László Hudec became the era’s defining designer. His Park Hotel, designed in 1931 and finished in 1934, rose to roughly eighty-four metres and remained the tallest building in Asia until 1963. The same years produced his Art Déco Grand Theatre (1933) and, by other hands, the Paramount (1933), the largest and most famous ballroom in the city.

The boom ended with the Japanese invasion and the Second World War, and the foreign concessions were dissolved in the 1940s. After 1949 the towers were repurposed rather than razed, and decades of relative neglect, paradoxically, preserved them. The Bund and the surrounding districts retain one of the world’s richest stocks of interwar architecture.