The Bund & East Nanjing Road

Shanghai's signature riverside promenade: a 1.5 km sweep of 1920s bank-and-trading-house facades on one side, the full Pudong skyline across the water on the other. It's free, always open, and the single view that explains the whole city.

The 1923 neoclassical dome once called 'the finest building between the Suez and the Bering Strait'. Inside the octagonal hall: 33 mosaic panels of the bank's 1920s branch cities, hidden under paint for decades and uncovered in 1997. One of the city's first ten 'heritage-building aesthetic-education spaces' (June 2026), run as 'Bund 12 · Impressions (外滩12号·印象)': since 2025 visits are free weekday tours — two slots at 11:30/12:00 (about 30 people each, per press reports), booked via SPDB's Chinese apps, entering from the Fuzhou Road 36 side door.

The green copper pyramid of 1929 — Sassoon House, once the Cathay Hotel and the most glamorous address in the Far East. A 2018 report said the Art Deco lobby was free to walk into (not rechecked since), and at night the Jazz Bar's veteran band (founded 1980, average age 80+) still plays; there is a minimum spend, reported at ¥418 a head in 2026.

A rare red-brick survivor in the Bund lineup — the 1906 Butterfield & Swire office building, five minutes south of where most tourists turn back. Restored over 940 days after a 2020 structural scare and reopened in late 2022, its atrium hides a 25-metre mural under a glass dome; the open spaces are normally walkable in business hours. Note the address: Zhongshan East 2nd Road, south of Yan'an Road.

The book-and-stationery street running west from the Bund, and the address of four of the city's oldest restaurants within 500 metres: Lao Zhengxing (benbang, 1862) at 556, Laobanzhai (Yangzhou-style, 1905; knife-fish noodles in spring) at 600, Wang Bao He (hairy crab and wine-lees dishes, 1744) at 603, and Xinghualou (Cantonese pastry, qingtuan queues, 1851) at 343. Shanghai Book City (465) and the Foreign Languages Bookstore (390) are the other reason to walk it. The city tourism bureau profiled the street in September 2025.

Bund No. 1 — the first building of the whole lineup, finished in 1916 in an eclectic classical style. Since late March 2026 it is 'Bund No. 1 · Jiushi International Art Centre', the new main venue of the Jiushi Art Museum: the ground-floor hall is free, the third floor has a terrace, reading lounge and art shop, and exhibitions are handled show by show — buy a ticket and you are legitimately inside a Bund landmark, which almost no other building here allows.

Bund No. 2, the 1910 neoclassical clubhouse of colonial Shanghai's British elite — home of the 110.7-foot Long Bar, once called the longest in the East. Today it is the Waldorf Astoria: order a drink at the faithfully recreated Long Bar or take afternoon tea and you're inside, no room key needed.

The free art space on the 3rd floor of Three on the Bund — the 1916 Union Building, Shanghai's first steel-frame commercial building and Palmer & Turner's first Shanghai work. Long known as the Shanghai Gallery of Art; the SGA gallery proper moved to Minhang in late 2024 and the Bund venue now runs as an art museum. Free, closed Mondays — but check the current programme before going. Enter from Guangdong Road, not the riverfront.

Three side streets a block south of Nanjing Road East where, in February 2026, the old-brand eateries displaced from Yunnan South Road reopened together: Da Hu Chun (shengjian, 1932), Hong Chang Xing (hotpot mutton, 1891), Xiao Shaoxing (white-cut chicken, 1943), Deda (Shanghai-style Western, 1897), Dexing Noodles (1878), Wufangzhai (zongzi, 1858), Xiao Jinling (salted duck) on Shanxi South Rd, and Xian De Lai (pork chop rice cakes, 1921) on Fujian Middle Rd, with Shao Wan Sheng on Jiangxi Middle Rd. Every shop opened with a bilingual menu; Xiao Shaoxing added an English-speaking server. The single most useful food address in the city for a first-time foreign visitor — and it did not exist before 2026.

The 1927 customs house whose clock tower gives the Bund its voice: on the hour the speakers play 'The East Is Red' over the river, as they have since 2003. It is still a working customs office — you admire it from the promenade. The interior opened to the public for the first time during the 2025 art season, and a centennial restoration is rumoured but unconfirmed, so there may be scaffolding.

Possibly the Bund area's best free walk-in interior: the 1926 East Asia Building's original banking hall, two minutes behind the riverfront on Sichuan Road. The 24-metre marble counter, wall panels and floor are 1926 originals, the vault keeps its Mosler door, and a black-and-white spiral staircase leads up to the second floor — no ticket, no reservation, open daily 10:00-17:00. Just register at the door.

The neon-lit pedestrian shopping street running from People's Square to the Bund — a 1.2 km river of people, department stores and heritage shopfronts. Worth walking once at night for the spectacle, even if you buy nothing.

A compact art gallery on the 2nd floor of Bund 18 — the 1923 Chartered Bank building whose 2002-04 restoration won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage Award of Distinction. Open Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, closed Mondays (per current exhibition notices), with shows alternating between free and ticketed. The building itself (luxury flagships below, rooftop bars above) is half the visit.

Bund No. 19 at the Nanjing Road corner — the 1908 Palace Hotel with its striped white-and-red brick Renaissance facade, one of the first buildings in Shanghai with passenger lifts. Today it is Swatch's artist-residency house: the ground floor is open in business hours, and it is NOT the Peace Hotel — that green pyramid next door is No. 20.

The only Bund tower with Chinese design in its DNA: finished in 1937 by Lu Qianshou with Palmer & Turner, crowned with a gentle green pyramidal Chinese roof, bracket-set eaves and lattice windows. Still a working Bank of China branch — step into the banking hall during business hours to see the marble columns and period detailing for free.

Bund No. 27, the 1922 neoclassical headquarters of Jardine Matheson — once the mightiest British trading house in Shanghai. Today it is The House of Roosevelt: restaurants, a club, and a top-floor terrace bar with one of the best straight-on views of the Lujiazui skyline.

Shanghai's flagship contemporary-art museum in the 1932-33 Royal Asiatic Society building — Art Deco with Chinese motifs, by the same firm that built half the Bund. Permanently free since May 2025: walk in Wed-Fri, reserve or queue on weekends; closed Mon AND Tue. The restored Rockbund quarter around it is a destination in itself.

Bund No. 32, opened in 2009 — the first new building on the Bund in some sixty years, and the answer to every visitor's 'wait, which one is new?': it was deliberately designed in 1920s-30s Art Deco style so it melts into the historic skyline. Lobby afternoon tea and the rooftop Sir Elly's Terrace are the easiest ways in.

China's first all-steel bridge (1908) and its only surviving camelback truss, spanning the mouth of Suzhou Creek at the Bund's north end. Free, open around the clock, and lit beautifully at night — stand mid-bridge for the Lujiazui skyline, or shoot the bridge itself from the creek bank with Broadway Mansions behind.

The former Astor House Hotel just north of Waibaidu Bridge — Shanghai's grand old hotel (founded 1846, present wings built 1908-1911) where China's earliest electric lights glowed in 1882 and Chaplin and Bernard Shaw stayed. Since 2018 it's the national securities museum: free, closed Mondays, no reservation for individuals. The ballroom was the Shanghai Stock Exchange's first trading floor (1990-97).

The brown-brick art-deco 'mountain' rising just north of Waibaidu Bridge — 1934, one of the Bund's three great towers alongside Sassoon House and the Bank of China. Renamed Shanghai Mansions in 1951, it is now a hotel; its 18th-floor terrace was for decades THE view over the Bund reserved for visiting dignitaries.