Deutsch English Home About us Travel information Suggestion Contact us online-booking Impression Testimonial. The Bund The Bund The bund (Waitan) is an Anglo-Indian term for the embankment of a muddy waterfront. The term is apt: mud bedevils Shanghai. Between 1920 (when the problem was first notice) and 1965, the city sank several metres. Water was pumped back into the ground, but the Venetian threat remains. Concrete rafts are used as foundations for high-rises in this spongy mass.Its muddy predicament aside, The Bund is symbolic of Shanghai. In faraway Kashgar and Lhasa, local Chinese pose for photographs in front of oil-painted Bund facades. Constant throngs of Chinese and foreign tourists pad past the porticos of the Bund’s grand edifices with maps in hand. The buildings themselves loom serenely, oblivious to the march of revolutions: a vagabond assortment of neoclassical 1930s downtown New York styles, with a pompous touch of monumental antiquity thrown in for good measure. To the Europeans, the Bund was Shanghai’s Wall Street, a place of feverish trading, of fortunes made and lost. One the most famous traders was Jardine Matheson & Company. In 1848 Jardine’s purchased the first land offered for sale to foreigners in Shanghai and se up shop shortly after, dealing in opium and tea. The company grew into one of the great hongs (a ’hong’ is literally a business firm), and today it owns just about half of Hong Kong. At the north-western end of the Bund were the British Public Gardens (now called Huangpu Gongyuan). Famously, a sign at the entrance announced ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed’. Or at least that is how posterity remembers it: in actual fact the restrictions on Chinese and dogs were listed in separate clauses of a whole bevy of restriction on undesirables. The slight, however, will probably never be forgotten. The Bund today is in the process of yet another transformation. The building identified by a crowing dome is the old Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, completed in 1921 with much pomp and ceremony. For many years it housed the Shanghai people’s Municipal Government and was off-limits to curious travelers. Now it belongs to the Pudong Development Bank. Other Bund fixtures are being sold off, and will no doubt be dusted off and clean up. Home, About Us, Travel Information, Suggestion, Contact Us, Online-booking, Impression, Testimonial and professional tour guide. Please contact us! All rights reserved

The Bund

The Bund

The bund (Waitan) is an Anglo-Indian term for the embankment of a muddy waterfront. The term is apt: mud bedevils Shanghai.

Between 1920 (when the problem was first notice) and 1965, the city sank several metres. Water was pumped back into the ground, but the Venetian threat remains. Concrete rafts are used as foundations for high-rises in this spongy mass.

Its muddy predicament aside, The Bund is symbolic of Shanghai. In faraway Kashgar and Lhasa, local Chinese pose for photographs in front of oil-painted Bund facades. Constant throngs of Chinese and foreign tourists pad past the porticos of the Bund’s grand edifices with maps in hand. The buildings themselves loom serenely, oblivious to the march of revolutions: a vagabond assortment of neoclassical 1930s downtown New York styles, with a pompous touch of monumental antiquity thrown in for good measure.

To the Europeans, the Bund was Shanghai’s Wall Street, a place of feverish trading, of fortunes made and lost. One the most famous

traders was Jardine Matheson & Company. In 1848 Jardine’s purchased the first land offered for sale to foreigners in Shanghai and se up shop shortly after, dealing in opium and tea. The company grew into one of the great hongs (a ’hong’ is literally a business firm), and today it owns just about half of Hong Kong.

At the north-western end of the Bund were the British Public Gardens (now called Huangpu Gongyuan). Famously, a sign at the entrance announced ‘No Dogs or Chinese Allowed’. Or at least that is how posterity remembers it: in actual fact the restrictions on Chinese and dogs were listed in separate clauses of a whole bevy of restriction on undesirables. The slight, however, will probably never be forgotten.

The Bund today is in the process of yet another transformation. The building identified by a crowing dome is the old Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, completed in 1921 with much pomp and ceremony. For many years it housed the Shanghai people’s Municipal Government and was off-limits to curious travelers. Now it belongs to the Pudong Development Bank. Other Bund fixtures are being sold off, and will no doubt be dusted off and clean up.