The Bund in Half a Day: Which Buildings You Can Actually Enter

Shanghai & Hong Kong Museum of Banking History：Possibly the Bund's best free walk-in interior, and where this page sends you if the HSBC booking fails: the 1926 East Asia Building's original banking hall on Sichuan Middle Road, two minutes behind the riverfront. The 24-metre marble counter, the wall panels and the floor are 1926 originals, the vault keeps its American Mosler door, and a black-and-white spiral staircase runs up to the second floor. No ticket, no reservation, daily 10:00-17:00, last entry 16:30 - just register at the door. Twenty minutes, and do not expect English beyond the captions. Free walk-in is the 2025 policy, so ignore older guides describing a Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday booking system. the fallback for anyone who could not book the HSBC hall - 299 Sichuan Middle Road, near Jiujiang Road.

China Securities Museum (former Astor House Hotel)：The other free walk-in, at the far north end: the former Astor House Hotel at 15 Huangpu Road, just over Waibaidu Bridge. Founded in 1846, the surviving wings built 1908-1911; China's earliest electric lights switched on here in 1882, Chaplin and Bernard Shaw stayed, and the Peacock Hall ballroom was the Shanghai Stock Exchange's first trading floor from 1990 to 1997. A national securities museum since 2018: free, Tue-Sun 9:30-16:00 and to 16:30 at weekends and on holidays, closed Mondays, and individuals need no reservation - just the security check. The building is the interest; the exhibits are for finance people. Free luggage storage by the ground-floor desk, which is the fix for the Bund-wide 'no large luggage in heritage venues' rule. the north end of the Bund walk, right after Waibaidu Bridge - and do not navigate to the Pudong Hall, which takes group bookings only.

Bank of China Building：The one Bund tower with Chinese design in its DNA, and you can walk into it for nothing: Bund No. 23, finished in 1937 by Lu Qianshou with Palmer & Turner, under a green-glazed pyramidal roof with bracket-set eaves and openwork lattice windows. It is still a working Bank of China branch, so the banking hall keeps bank hours - weekdays 9:00-17:00, weekends 10:00-16:00 - and inside are black-marble counters laid out as the character 中, sixteen octagonal marble columns and an 'Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea' motif in the bronze ceiling ornament. Security at the door, no photographing the counters, no lingering: five minutes, quietly. five minutes on the way past, in bank hours - it is a branch, not a museum.

Binjiang Avenue (Lujiazui riverside)：The answer to 'where do I photograph the Bund': not from the Bund. The Pudong promenade, from the Museum of Art Pudong down to the Dongchang Road ferry pier, shows the whole lit facade in one sweep - free, quieter than the Bund itself, and with no official closing time. The cheapest way over is the 2-yuan ferry from Jinling East Road, which lands you on the promenade; the hour after lights-on is the crush, and it thins out south of the ferry pier. If you would rather be above the river than across it, our observation-decks page compares the three Lujiazui towers. the second half of a Bund evening - cross, then look back.

Bund Sightseeing Tunnel：Draft entry - our wording is not final. The glass capsule under the river, from the Bund promenade to the foot of the Oriental Pearl, is the most searched 'is this a scam' attraction in Shanghai, and the short answer is that it is a 50-yuan river crossing dressed as a ride: 2.5 to 5 minutes of strobe lights through a 646.7 m tunnel, against 4 yuan for one stop on metro line 2 or 2 yuan for the ferry. Neither the price nor the hours have any official text - platforms give three bundled tiers at 50 / 90 / 130 yuan and daily 9:00-22:30. The city's 'One River, One Creek' five-year plan of August 2026 says, verbatim, that the tunnel's renovation is to be promoted, with no dates, so hoardings would not be a surprise. skip it - the three better ways across the river are on our river-crossing page. → See “How to Cross the River”