The Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing), signed at the end of the first Opium War in 1842, marked the beginning of large scale foreign intervention in China by legalizing international trade in five key ports: Canton (Guangzhou), Shanghai, Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), and Amoy (Xiamen). The terms of the Treaty were complex and heavily weighted in favour of the British, and it was not long before other nations had signed similar treaties of their own. The British and the French in particular were quick to recognize Shanghai’s location at the mouth of the Yangtze and Huangpu Rivers as the ideal “gateway” for trade with the Chinese market.

The word bund simply means an embankment and in the early days of western settlement in Shanghai there were in fact several areas known as “bunds”. These included the Suzhou Creek Bund, the Yang Jing Bang Bund, the Defense Creek Bund (or West Bund) and the Huangpu Bund, also known to locals as “Waitan”. The names of these other bunds gradually fell out of use as the Huangpu Bund grew in importance.

The initial removal of existing landowners and the acquisition of sites along the Huangpu Bund began to the north by Suzhou Creek and extended as far south as Canton Road (today’s Guangdong Lu). Each plot was pegged out at a distance of 30 feet from the river’s edge to preserve the ancient towpath used for pulling barges and boats along the river by rope. The remaining layout was largely unplanned. Today the narrow surrounding streets and awkwardly positioned buildings on the Bund are a direct result of this ad hoc land grabbing.

During this first phase of construction the area around the Bund was extremely muddy, unstable and low lying, causing several serious building issues. Maintaining the road along the Bund was problematic due to the subsidence of the banks of the river and stable building foundations had to be constructed using concrete rafts fixed on top of wooden pilings that were then allowed to sink into the mud during construction. An entrance step to a building could be as high as 2 meters above ground at the start of construction, but it would sink to ground level with the weight of the building.

By the end of 1843, eleven foreign businesses had established premises along the Bund. These were mostly two storeyed brick and wood structures designed by the merchants themselves rather than architects. Due to a lack of western builders in Shanghai they were largely constructed in a Chinese rather than a western style. A small number of foreign style buildings began to appear on the Bund by the end of 1846 and by 1847 the Bund boasted 24 commercial premises, 25 private residences, five stores, a hotel and a clubhouse.

At the Bund’s northern end stood an old fort. It now belonged to the British consulate, though the site itself was abandoned. A few meters from the shoreline a boat wreck accumulating silt had created an artificial island, and suggestions were made to join this island with the mainland and turn it into a public park. In 1864, the British Consulate agreed and Shanghai’s Public Garden was opened to the public on 8 April 1868. The area was elevated above the waterline using mud dredged from the Yang Jing Bang Bund. The park provided an exclusive, segregated environment. This land reclamation however caused treacherous currents at the intersection of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek. In 1905 40,000 tonnes of mud were excavated from bunding works in front of the German Consulate building in Hongkou and added to the north and east of the park to remedy this problem.

The second wave of building at the Bund from the late nineteenth century until around 1920 saw approximately half of the older buildings rebuilt using reinforced concrete and the addition of some grand new structures. Buildings were mostly six to eight storeys and some were even up to ten storeys high. By 1920 this bustling financial and trading hub boasted the tallest buildings in Asia.

Sanitation was continuing to be a major problem for Shanghai. Alongside the Bund the preserved ancient towpath had rapidly deteriorated into a muddy, stinky and festering dumping ground for the area’s rubbish and raw sewage. It wasn’t until 1919, after comparing the Bund to some of the world’s most famous and handsome streets, that a decision was made to reclaim 35 feet of the Huangpu River, allowing the road to be widened and extensive landscaping to beautify the foreshore.

In the 1920’s 11 buildings (about half of which were over eight storeys high) were erected and ageing structures such as the Palace Hotel were replaced. Foreign governments and companies built their most prestigious, most ornate and most imposing buildings in various styles including Gothic, Baroque, Romanesque, Classic and the Renaissance along the Bund, giving it a very eclectic feel. The massive Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building on the corner of Fuzhou Lu, erected at the start of the 1920s, was the most expensive building ever constructed in Shanghai up to that time. The city’s skyline now resembled any ornate Italianate and neoclassical skyline in Europe.

By the 1940s the Bund housed the headquarters of many, if not most, of the major financial institutions operating in China. However, these were gradually moved out after the Communist victory in 1949, and the hotels and clubs closed down or converted to other uses. The statues of colonial figures and foreign worthies that had dotted the riverside were also removed.

For decades the historic buildings of old Shanghai languished into disrepair. However in the late 1970s and 1980s the change in China’s economic policies allowed the buildings on the Bund to be restored and gradually returned to their former uses as financial institutions and hotels.

A series of typhoons that hit the city at this time motivated the council to widen the road to 10 lanes and raise the level of the embankment to its present level at around 10 meters above street level. Today, the land around the Bund has gradually subsided to such an extent that the Huangpu River now flows above the level of Nanjing Lu.

In 1994 the lights were turned on along the bund at fixed times in the evening and in 1996 the automatic lights-controlling center was set up in order to control the lights of more than forty buildings along the Bund.

An application was lodged in 2003 for UNESCO World Heritage status at the Bund. While it is true that most of the buildings were designed by architects from Britain, France, America, Russia and Japan, it is a little-known fact that many of Shanghai's pre-1949 Western-style buildings, including those on the Bund, were the work of China's first generation of architects (the Bank of China building by Lu Qianshou, for example).

There is little doubt that the Bund has seen a great many changes since construction began over 160 years ago. However now, as then, it remains the quintessential symbol of both old and new Shanghai, a reminder of Shanghai’s power, influence and prosperity and Shanghai’s most enduringly famous landmark.