29 October 2026 · itineraries, first trip

Shanghai's Art Deco and treaty-port architecture: a self-guided walk from the Bund to the Concession

Shanghai has one of the largest collections of Art Deco buildings in the world, left by its 1920s and 30s boom. A walk for architecture-minded visitors: the Bund's banks and hotels building by building, the Peace Hotel and the Park Hotel, the apartment blocks and cinemas of the Concession, the shikumen lane houses, the Hudec story, where to go inside, and how to pair it with the Pudong skyline that answers it across the river.

People walking past the stone facades of the Bund in Shanghai

Between the First World War and the Japanese invasion Shanghai was one of the richest cities on earth, and it spent the money on buildings: neoclassical banks on the Bund, Art Deco hotels, cinemas and apartment towers across the Concession, and tens of thousands of shikumen lane houses in between. Most of it survived the decades of neglect that followed and much has been restored. For a visitor who likes buildings, Shanghai is a day’s walk through the 1930s with the twenty-first century across the water. This is the walk, in three sections, with where to go inside.

Section one: the Bund, south to north

Start at the south end by Yan’an Road and walk north along the river promenade with the buildings on your left, early morning before the crowds or late afternoon for the light. The highlights, by number on the Bund:

No. 2, the Shanghai Club (1910), now the Waldorf Astoria: the old British gentlemen’s club with the Long Bar, which you can enter for a drink.
No. 3 (1916), the first steel-framed building in Shanghai, now restaurants and galleries; go up for the terrace.
No. 12, the HSBC Building (1923), the grandest, with a dome and a mosaic ceiling in the banking hall that you can see from the public lobby; the bronze lions outside are replicas of the originals in the Shanghai History Museum.
No. 13, the Custom House (1927), with the clock tower that chimes the Westminster quarters, the Bund’s landmark.
No. 18 (1923), restored to a fashion and restaurant house, with a rooftop bar.
No. 20, the Peace Hotel (1929), Sassoon’s Cathay Hotel, the Art Deco masterpiece of the Bund with its green copper pyramid roof; the lobby, the Jazz Bar with its octogenarian band, and the Art Deco corridors are open to visitors, as the nights guide says.
No. 23, the Bank of China (1937), the one Chinese-designed tower, with a Chinese roof on an Art Deco body, built to be taller than the Cathay and stopped by Sassoon at one metre lower.
No. 27, the Jardine Matheson building and No. 29, the Banque de l’Indochine, and across Suzhou Creek the Broadway Mansions (1934) and the Astor House Hotel (1846 in origin), where Einstein and Chaplin stayed.

Cross Waibaidu Bridge, the 1907 steel bridge at the creek mouth, for the classic view back. Allow ninety minutes; the Shanghai itinerary places this on day one.

Section two: Nanjing Road to People’s Square

Walk west along Nanjing Road East, the old shopping street, past the 1930s department stores (Sincere, Wing On, Sun Sun, the Sun) to People’s Square, where the Park Hotel (1934) stands: Ladislav Hudec’s 22-storey Art Deco tower, the tallest building in Asia until the 1950s and the one that inspired I. M. Pei to become an architect. Across the square the Grand Theatre cinema (1933), also Hudec, and the old Shanghai Race Club (1934) with its clock tower, now the Shanghai History Museum, which is the place to see the Bund lions and the city’s treaty-port story in an hour. The rainy day guide has the museum.

Section three: the Concession

Take the metro or a taxi to the former French Concession and walk its plane-tree streets (the autumn guide says when the trees are best). The Art Deco here is domestic:

The Wukang Building (1924, the Normandie Apartments), Hudec’s flat-iron ship of a building at the junction of Wukang and Huaihai Roads, the most photographed building in the Concession.
Hudec’s own houses on Panyu Road and the Moller Villa on Shaanxi Road, a Scandinavian fairy-tale castle built for a shipping magnate’s daughter.
The apartment towers: Grosvenor House (1934) in the Jinjiang Hotel grounds, Cathay Mansions, the Picardie, Gascogne, the Astrid; walk in to the lobbies where you can.
The cinemas: the Cathay Theatre (1932) on Huaihai Road, still a cinema.
Shikumen lane houses: the stone-gated terraces of Xintiandi (restored, commercial, and the site of the Communist Party’s first congress museum), Tianzifang (lived-in and craft-shopped) and the unrestored lanes of Jing’an and Hongkou, as the second-visit guide describes. The shikumen is Shanghai’s own architecture, half Chinese courtyard and half English terrace.

Columbia Circle on Yan’an West Road, the restored 1920s American club and the Sun Ke villa by Hudec, is a good late-afternoon stop with coffee; the parks guide adds the Concession’s parks.

The lit facades of the Bund at night — The Bund lit at night, the time the 1930s buildings look most like themselves, with Pudong's answer across the river.

Who was Hudec?

László Hudec, a Hungarian-Slovak architect who escaped a Siberian prison camp in 1918 and arrived in Shanghai penniless, designed some sixty buildings in the city over the next twenty years, among them the Park Hotel, the Grand Theatre, the Wukang Building, the Moller Villa and the Christian Literature Society building, before leaving in 1947. His former home on Panyu Road is a small museum. He is the figure the architecture-minded guide talks about most.

The other side: Pudong

The point of the walk is the pairing. The Bund’s banks faced farmland across the river until 1990; now they face the Oriental Pearl Tower (1994), the Jin Mao Tower (1999, a pagoda in steel), the World Financial Centre (2008, the bottle opener) and the Shanghai Tower (2015, 632 metres, the twisting one). The observation decks guide picks a deck to go up; the view back to the Bund from the Pudong riverside at dusk is the walk’s last stop, by the ferry from the Bund’s south end.

Going inside

The Peace Hotel lobby and Jazz Bar, the HSBC banking hall, the Waldorf’s Long Bar, the Park Hotel lobby, the Shanghai History Museum, the Wukang Building’s ground-floor café, the Jinjiang Hotel grounds, the Moller Villa’s garden and the Hudec museum are all open without a ticket or for the price of a drink. The Bund buildings’ upper floors are restaurants and bars, which is the expensive way to see their interiors and worth it once, at sunset.

With a guide

Architecture is where a guide earns the day: the stories of the Sassoons, the Hardoons and the Kadoories, the gangsters who owned the cinemas, the refugees in the Hongkou lanes, the families who were moved into the Concession villas after 1949 and the ones moving back out now. We run this walk as a day guide booking and on the first day of the Shanghai essentials tour; for guests who want the full Hudec, a car between the Concession villas saves the feet for the Bund.