The argument
The Bund is famous for what Shanghai built between 1870 and 1940. This day is about what it built after 1990, and about the conversation the two halves of the river are having with each other. It is a programme for people who are interested in buildings rather than in views, although it has the best views in the city as well.
The morning is on the Pudong side, with time on the ground in Lujiazui; the afternoon crosses to the Bund so that the modern skyline can be read from the bank that predates it.
Jinmao Tower and Lujiazui
Jinmao Tower was approved as a project on 17 December 1992, broke ground on 10 May 1994, topped out structurally on 28 August 1997 and opened in 1999. It rises 420.5 metres with 88 floors above ground and three below, and about 290,000 square metres of floor area, and it was designed by the American practice SOM. The main structure stands on 429 steel pipe piles and the finished building is out of vertical by barely two centimetres, which is the detail engineers talk about. The observation gallery on the eighty-eighth floor covers 1,520 square metres.
It won the Illinois Structural Engineering Award in 1998 and took first prize among the ten classic Shanghai buildings of the fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic in 1999. It is the building that made Lujiazui legible as a district, and your guide will use it to explain how the whole eastern bank was planned in a single generation.
Lunch
Lunch on the Pudong side.
The Shanghai Tower observation deck
The Shanghai Tower observation deck, on the Pudong side of the river, is the one place from which the whole bend of the Huangpu reads as a single picture: the Bund's low classical frontage on the west bank, the trading houses behind it, and everything built on the east bank in the last thirty years. It is the only ticketed element of the day and it is included in the price shown.
The Bund from the far bank, then on foot
We cross to the west bank and walk the promenade. The Bund runs about 1,500 metres, and its western frontage carries 52 historic buildings in seventeen varieties of European classical style, over 120 in all with those behind, listed as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit in November 1996. Standing on the promenade with the modern towers behind you is the point of the day: your guide will compare what the 1920s bank buildings were trying to say about Shanghai with what the Lujiazui towers are saying now, and let you decide which argument is more convincing.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
