The Bund

A mile of European banks and trading houses along the west bank of the Huangpu, built between the 1890s and the 1930s by companies that ran the China trade, and left standing when everything about the country that produced them changed. Stone, granite and bronze doors, facing a skyline across the water that did not exist in 1990.

It is the most photographed view in China and it is completely free. The promenade is raised above the road on a flood wall, it runs the length of the buildings, and it has no gate and no closing time.

What it costs

⭐ Free, open, unfenced, twenty-four hours.

What costs is going up: several of the buildings have rooftop bars, and the observation decks across the river in Pudong are all ticketed. The view from the pavement is the same view the bars charge for, from about eighty metres lower.

When to go

⭐ Early morning is the Bund’s best hour and almost nobody uses it. At seven the promenade belongs to people doing tai chi and the light is on the buildings rather than behind them.

The Pudong towers light up in the evening, and the promenade is genuinely packed at weekends. ⚠️ On public holidays the police operate one-way pedestrian flow and access restrictions on the promenade — it is managed like a stadium, because in 2014 a crowd crush here killed dozens of people.

⚠️ The metro stops early here. Last trains run somewhere between about 22:00 and 23:00 depending on the line and the direction — hours before the restaurants do. Shanghai is not Tokyo or Seoul in this respect and it catches almost every visitor once. Check the time posted on the platform before you settle in for the evening.

Getting there

East Nanjing Road station on lines 2 and 10 is the usual approach — come up and walk east, and the buildings arrive before the river does. Yuyuan Garden on line 10 is the southern end.

⭐ The ferry across to Pudong costs a couple of yuan on a transport card and is the cheapest boat trip in the city — a working commuter service, not a tour.

If you only have an hour

Walk north from Yan’an Road with the buildings on your left, and look up: the numbers are still on them and most carry the name of whoever built them. The former HSBC building at number 12 has a mosaic dome inside the banking hall, and the guards will generally let you stand in the lobby and look at it.

Then cross to the river wall at the north end for the view back down the curve, and carry on to the Garden Bridge over Suzhou Creek.

What people get wrong

Coming only at night. The buildings — which are the actual subject — are floodlit flatly and the crowd is at its worst.

And treating it as a viewpoint for Pudong rather than as architecture in its own right. The west bank is the older and stranger half.