Shanghai’s Architectural Story: Art Deco Bund, Lilong Lanes, and Sky-High Pudong

You can read most of Shanghai’s last hundred years by walking three kilometers in a straight line. Start on the Bund. Cross the Garden Bridge over Suzhou Creek. Walk into the lilong lanes of Hongkou or the former French Concession. Then look across the Huangpu River to Pudong. That sequence — 1920s Art Deco, low-rise shikumen lanes, supertall skyscrapers — is the city’s architectural argument in three acts.

Most general Shanghai trip planning lives in the Shanghai Travel Guide. This piece is narrower: which buildings, which neighborhoods, and in what order, to actually see how Shanghai built itself.

The Bund: Twenty-Six Buildings That Tell Shanghai’s First Modern Story

The Bund is the most concentrated stretch of pre-1949 European-influenced architecture anywhere in Asia. Twenty-six surviving buildings line about 1.5km of the Huangpu’s west bank, built mostly between 1900 and 1937. They are a mix of neoclassical, Renaissance Revival, Romanesque, and — for the most ambitious of them — full Art Deco. They were built by trading houses, banks, and hotels for a city that thought it was permanent.

The ten buildings worth knowing by name, north to south:

• No. 2 — Shanghai Club (1910): British neoclassical, once home to the longest bar in Asia. Now the Waldorf Astoria.
• No. 12 — HSBC Building (1923): The crown of the Bund. Domed neoclassical, modeled on the Reichsbank in Berlin. Walk inside to see the original tiled ceiling in the entrance hall — one of the few public Art Deco interiors in China still intact.
• No. 13 — Customs House (1927): The clock tower is a near-replica of Big Ben. Still a working customs office.
• No. 18 — Bund 18 (1923): An early 20th century Italianate facade restored in 2004; now a high-end mall but the structure survives.
• No. 19 — Peace Hotel North (1929): Pure Art Deco. The interior — green marble lobby, ironwork, the famous octagonal atrium — is the single best Art Deco interior open to the public in Shanghai. Coffee at the Jazz Bar inside costs about 80 yuan and you can sit as long as you like.
• No. 20 — Peace Hotel South (1908): Originally the Palace Hotel, French Renaissance.
• No. 23 — Bank of China (1937): The last great pre-war Bund building. A hybrid of Art Deco and traditional Chinese roof forms — the architect, Lu Qianshou, was explicitly trying to invent a Chinese modernism.

In my experience, the right way to see the Bund is twice. Once at night for the skyline reflections, which is what everyone does. Once on a weekday morning around 8am, when the lobbies are open and you can walk into the HSBC building and the Peace Hotel without crowds. The morning visit is the one where you actually understand the architecture.

Lilong and Shikumen: The Vernacular Shanghai Most Visitors Miss

If the Bund is Shanghai’s banker layer, the lilong is its everyone-else layer. Lilong means “lane neighborhood” — a planned cluster of two- to three-story townhouses arranged around shared central alleys, with a main gate facing the street. The signature building type inside them is the shikumen (“stone gate house”), named for the carved stone door frames that fronted each unit. Between roughly 1870 and 1930, the lilong was the dominant housing form for ordinary Shanghainese — at the peak there were over 9,000 of them and 60 percent of the city lived in one.

Most have been demolished. The surviving stock is concentrated in the former French Concession, parts of Hongkou, and a few protected pockets near Xintiandi and Tianzifang. Walking through them is the closest you will get to the pre-1949 daily city.

Where to walk shikumen lanes that are still real

Jianguo West Road and the lanes off Shaanxi South Road — In the former French Concession, this grid is still mostly residential. Look for unmarked alley entrances between commercial buildings; if there is a metal gate and someone watching it, you have found one. You can usually walk in if you are quiet. Laundry hangs from bamboo poles across the lanes. This is what shikumen life still looks like.

Bugaoli (Beletra Garden) — A 1930s lilong off Huaihai Middle Road where Zhou Enlai lived briefly. Better-preserved than most; partly restored as a cultural site but not over-renovated.

Tianzifang — The opposite end of the spectrum: a lilong block converted in the 2000s into a maze of small shops, cafes, and galleries. The architecture is intact; the use is entirely commercial. Worth one visit if you want to see what restoration-as-shopping-district looks like. Skip if you have already done Xintiandi, which is the same idea executed with more money.

The honest answer about Xintiandi vs Tianzifang: Xintiandi is a more polished restoration with international brands; Tianzifang is denser, scrappier, and has more independent shops. Neither is residential anymore. The residential lilongs are the unrestored ones two blocks away from both of them, and those are the ones worth your time.

The shikumen interior, if you want to see one

Two museums let you walk through restored shikumen interiors: the Shikumen Open House Museum in Xintiandi (30 yuan, open daily) and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Residence on Xiangshan Road (free, closed Mondays). The Shikumen museum is a faithful 1920s domestic interior; the Sun residence is a specific historic figure’s actual home. If you only have time for one, the Shikumen museum gives you the better sense of how the space worked for an ordinary family.

Pudong: Three Towers Decades Apart, One Skyline

Pudong’s skyline is the most aggressive piece of city-building of the last 30 years. In 1990 the east bank of the Huangpu was farmland and shipyards. Today it is Lujiazui, a dense cluster of supertall towers anchored by three landmarks built roughly one per decade.

Oriental Pearl Tower (1994, 468m): The kitsch one. Pink spheres on a tripod base; the design language is unmistakably 1990s and was already dated within a decade. Skip the observation deck unless you want to be in the photo of the others.

Jin Mao Tower (1999, 421m): By SOM (Adrian Smith). Pagoda-influenced setbacks; still one of the most architecturally serious supertalls in Asia. The interior atrium of the Grand Hyatt at the top — 33 floors of cylindrical void — is worth the price of a coffee at the Cloud 9 bar.

Shanghai World Financial Center (2008, 492m): The “bottle opener” tower. Kohn Pedersen Fox; the rectangular hole at the top was originally a circle and was changed after public objections to it resembling the Japanese rising sun. Observation deck on the 100th floor for 180 yuan.

Shanghai Tower (2015, 632m): Currently the second-tallest building in the world. The exterior twists 120 degrees from base to crown to reduce wind load. The observation deck on the 118th floor is 220 yuan and includes the world’s fastest elevator. If you only do one Pudong observation deck, do this one — the view back across the Huangpu to the Bund is the single best architectural-history view in the city.

Where to stand for the classic Pudong photo

The standard Bund-side viewpoint runs from about the Peace Hotel south to Yan’an Road, with the steps between Nanjing Road and the river giving you the best framing. This is also where the crowds are. Better alternative: walk south along the Bund promenade past Jinling Road to the area in front of the Yacht Club. Same skyline, half the crowd, and you get the older bend of the Bund buildings in the foreground.

For the reverse angle — looking from Pudong back at the Bund — take the Sightseeing Tunnel under the river (50 yuan, mildly silly experience) or the Bund Tourist Tunnel ferry (2 yuan, the local option). Walk along the Pudong waterfront promenade to a spot opposite the Peace Hotel. The Bund is best photographed from the Pudong side at dusk, when the historic facades are warmly lit and the river still has color in it.

One Walk That Connects All Three Eras

The clearest single walk for the Shanghai architectural story is about 4km and takes 90 minutes without stops, or half a day if you actually look at things. From north to south:

1. Start at Suzhou Creek and the Astor House Hotel (Pujiang Hotel), the oldest Western-style hotel in Shanghai (1846 founding, current building from 1910). It is small, frequently overlooked, and the lobby is open to walk-ins.
2. Cross the Garden Bridge (Waibaidu Bridge), a 1907 steel truss bridge. The Russian consulate sits on the north corner; the Broadway Mansions (1934 Art Deco apartment block) is on the other.
3. Walk south down the Bund with the Huangpu on your left. Stop inside the HSBC Building (No. 12) and the Peace Hotel (No. 19) — both lobbies are free to enter during business hours.
4. Cut west at Nanjing East Road and walk into the older shopping arcades. Continue to People’s Square, where the Park Hotel (1934, by Laszlo Hudec — held the record for Asia’s tallest building until 1952) faces the square.
5. Walk southwest into the former French Concession along Maoming or Shaanxi roads. This is your lilong-and-shikumen segment. Look for unmarked lane entrances; the texture changes block by block.
6. Take Metro Line 2 east to Lujiazui. Walk through the riverside promenade and look back at where you started. The Bund is now the postcard across the water; you are standing in what was farmland 35 years ago.

That single walk does in one afternoon what most multi-day Shanghai itineraries do across separate visits. The advantage of doing it in sequence is that the architecture starts to read as a conversation rather than as isolated landmarks.

Five Architects Whose Names Are Worth Knowing in Shanghai

• Laszlo Hudec — Hungarian, worked in Shanghai 1918 to 1947. Designed the Park Hotel, the Grand Theatre, and the Wukang Mansion (1924 — a Flatiron-style apartment on a fork in the road in the former French Concession, easily the most photographed individual building in Xuhui district).
• Palmer & Turner — British architectural firm responsible for the HSBC Building, Bank of China, Peace Hotel North, and Customs House. Half of the Bund, basically.
• Lu Qianshou — Chinese architect of the 1937 Bank of China Building, the first major attempt at a modern Chinese architectural language on the Bund.
• Adrian Smith (SOM) — Designed Jin Mao Tower (1999) and later the Burj Khalifa. Jin Mao is his cleanest Asian building.
• Gensler — Designed the Shanghai Tower (2015), with the structural twist that defines current Pudong.

What’s Honestly Worth Skipping

What guides recommend	What I figured out after several trips
Oriental Pearl Tower observation deck.	You came to see Pudong; you do not want to be inside Pudong’s most dated building. Use Shanghai Tower or Jin Mao instead.
Bund at night only.	The 8am weekday walk is when the lobbies are open. That is when you actually see the buildings, not just the facades lit by floods.
Tianzifang plus Xintiandi.	Pick one, then go walk a residential lilong block off Jianguo West Road. The two restored projects are the same idea twice; the unrestored lane is what you actually came to see.
Sightseeing Tunnel under the Huangpu.	It is the most expensive way to cross. The 2-yuan ferry from Jinling Road is the local option and a better experience.

Practical Notes for an Architecture-Focused Visit

• Best time of day for the Bund: 8am for the interiors and morning light; 6:30pm for the skyline reflections. Avoid noon — the buildings face east so the facades are in shadow.
• Reservations: The Shanghai Tower observation deck can sell out on weekends; book a day ahead on Trip.com or the official WeChat mini-program.
• Getting around: Metro Line 2 connects most of this — People’s Square, Nanjing East Road (for the Bund), and Lujiazui are all stops on it. Trip is around 4 to 6 yuan per ride.
• Best book to read first: Edward Denison’s Building Shanghai (2006) is the standard reference and reads well.
• How long to budget: The compressed version of this walk fits in one long day. To do it properly, two days. If you want to plug it into a full Shanghai trip, the Shanghai Travel Guide covers food, transit, and general logistics. For fitting Shanghai into a longer China route, see the China Itinerary Guide.
• Getting in by train: If you are arriving from Beijing, the high-speed rail is 4.5 hours; the China High-Speed Train Guide covers booking and station-of-arrival choices.

One last thing worth knowing: almost everything pre-1949 you see in Shanghai is technically the second or third iteration of the building on that site. The Bund has been rebuilt at least three times since the city was opened to foreign trade in 1843. The lilong lanes were a 19th-century replacement of earlier wooden housing. Shanghai’s defining quality has always been replacement at speed — the Pudong skyline is just the current chapter.

Photos courtesy of Unsplash and Pexels.