The route in one line
This walk runs from the Bund north-west along Suzhou Creek as far as Sihang Warehouse and back - roughly two kilometres in which Shanghai's modern history is unusually legible, because the buildings have not moved and the bridges are still the ones that carried the traffic.
We start on the Huangpu promenade and finish on the same bank, so the day is one continuous line on foot with the car never needed in the middle.
The Bund promenade
The Bund is a mile of riverside walk on the west bank of the Huangpu, and the buildings facing it are the densest concentration of historic commercial architecture in the country: 52 on Zhongshan East No. 1 Road in seventeen varieties of European classical style, over 120 in all with those behind, listed by the State Council as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit in November 1996. Your guide reads them in order of date - the British consulate of 1873, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank of 1923, the Customs House of 1927 with its clock, Sassoon House of 1929, the Bank of China building of 1937, the only one on the row designed and built by Chinese architects, and the Bank of Communications building of 1948, the youngest. The names are the history: this was where a treaty port became a financial city.
The Suzhou Creek bridges
Where Suzhou Creek meets the Huangpu stands Garden Bridge, the Waibaidu Bridge - the first all-steel riveted bridge in China and the only surviving unequal-height truss bridge of its kind. The first version went up in 1856 as the Wills Bridge, the second in 1876, and the third, the one you walk across, dates from 1907. The creek itself is a bridge museum: about 21 kilometres through the central city carrying 29 bridges, with a long-term plan for 48. Heading upstream, the crossings come quickly - Waibaidu, then Zhapu Road, Sichuan Road, Henan Road, Shanxi Road, Fujian Road, Zhejiang Road and Xizang Road: eight bridges in the two kilometres from Sihang Warehouse to Waibaidu. Zhejiang Road Bridge, rebuilt in 1906 on a fish-belly steel truss, is one of only a handful of its type left in China; Sichuan Road Bridge of 1878 is nicknamed the Post Office Bridge after the building beside it.
Sihang Warehouse and the postal building
On the north bank at Xizang Road stands Sihang Warehouse, built as the joint godown of four Chinese banks, a six-storey reinforced concrete block whose south face was the only side open to the creek and the foreign concessions beyond. In 1937, during the battle of Shanghai, Xie Jinyuan of the 88th Division held it for four days and nights with a few hundred men; the shell damage on the north wall has been deliberately preserved, and the memorial hall and Jinyuan Square are beside it. A short walk east along the north bank is the Shanghai Post Museum, in a building of 1924 by the British firm Stewardson and Spence, whose second-floor hall was once called the finest in the Far East and whose clock tower carries a three-metre dial. Lunch is on the way; it is payable locally and not in the price shown.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
