A Big Ben with Chinese Characteristics: The Customs House as Urban Icon in Old and New Shanghai[*]

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

A huge clock, made at Whitechurch by Messrs. J. B. Joyce and Co…has been sent to Shanghai, for the new Chinese Maritime Customs House. The clock, weighing nearly 30 tons, will probably be the Big Ben of the Far East…[1]

The Times (London), 22 Sep. 1927

The Customs House is always there – it’s the most dependable, stalwart building on the Bund. It’s like a hundred-year-old person that can endure anything.

Zhang Xiaochun, (ed.), Xingzou Shanghai (Walking Shanghai) (Shanghai, 2002), 4

1

This essay will trace the rise to fame, enduring iconicity and shifting meanings of the 'huge clock' and 'stalwart building' alluded to above, which remain two of the most recognizable objects on the Bund, a waterfront esplanade that has been called the city’s top tourist attraction and the 'most Shanghai-like' part of the city
Figure 1.[2] Two themes will be emphasized in this discussion of the Customs House (sometimes called the Custom House) and its clock, which can be thought of as iconic features of a district that is itself iconic. One is continuity: the way the Customs House and its clock remained for almost 80 years prominent fixtures in a city that has undergone profound transformations, including a mid-1900s transition from a semi-colonial, subdivided treaty port with foreign-run enclaves to a unified, completely Chinese-run metropolis.[3] The other theme is change over time, since the significance of these two objects has evolved and shifted.

2

The Customs House still stands exactly where it did when it opened for business in December 1927. Images of
Figure 2the building (shown standing alone or in the company of nearby structures of similar vintage) and of its clock (which Westerners living in the city in the 1920s immediately nicknamed 'Big Ching') continue to grace postcards, billboards and maps.[4] They also continue to show up in documentaries and feature films (as an instant visual clue to where the story is set); appear on the covers of scholarly studies and travel magazines aimed at China-bound residents of East Asian cities such as Taipei and Tokyo; and be used in advertisements and on maps and guides to local entertainment published in Shanghai.[5]

3

A recent
Figure 3(2004) Chinese language guidebook gives a good sense of the continuing iconicity of the Customs House and the ways that images of its clock are currently used.[6] The cover shows a line of brightly lit elegant, five-to-eleven storey buildings dating from the later stages of China’s treaty-port century (1843-1943). At one end stands the former headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank ('HKSB'), a domed structure that abuts the Customs House to the south and was built in 1923 by a Western architect famously instructed to create an edifice that would 'dominate the Bund'.[7] At the other end of the shot stands the Cathay Hotel (now part of the Peace Hotel), an art deco building located about a quarter of a mile north of the HKSB building that has a distinctive pyramid-shaped green roof and opened for business in 1929.[8] But drawing the viewer’s eye most of all, and standing between these two signature buildings, is the neo-classical Customs House.

4

Some transformations have affected the look of the Customs House, such as the carved wooden mural commemorating the Red Army’s usage of the building during the 1949 Communist 'liberation' of Shanghai — added in 1989
Figure 1. Other transformations have altered its sound: Big Ching’s Westminster chimes initially struck out Western melodies on the quarter hours, but by the 1960s they were playing 'The East is Red', a Chinese folk tune turned Maoist anthem.[9] But .
Figure 5the changes of greatest interest are ones that have left the Customs House physically unaltered, yet changed in meaning. One such transformation, of special concern here, has been underway since the mid-1990s, when a new set of signature buildings (including the space needle-like Pearl of the Orient Radio and Television Tower and the pagoda-like Jinmao Tower) began to shoot up in Pudong (East Shanghai), a district that stands directly across the Huangpu River from Puxi (West Shanghai) Bund and that as recently as the late 1980s had an undistinguished low skyline.[10] The appearance of this competing skyline, which contains buildings that are among the tallest on earth, has not only made the Customs House (with its eleven floors plus a clock tower) seem less towering than it once did, but also has made it start to seem less a symbol of a place than a symbol of a time, an icon less of Shanghai than of 'Old Shanghai' (a common term now for the city’s incarnation as a treaty port). In general, while the Customs House was once treated in many texts as a displaced piece of another part of the world (a British object in a Chinese setting), it is now as likely to be understood as a displaced piece of another era.

5

A bit of general background on Shanghai’s physical layout and complex administrative structure c. 1927 is crucial because the metropolis of that time was different in so many ways from contemporary Shanghai. The first thing to note about Old Shanghai was that it was three cities-within-a-city, each of which had its own police force, laws and administrative structure. It owed its hybrid form to a series of treaties granting foreigners special privileges in various Chinese ports that the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) had
Figure 6been forced to sign in the wake of a string of military defeats that began with the Opium War (1839-42). One of the city’s three main districts was the French Concession, a straightforwardly colonial enclave whose top official was appointed by and answered to Paris. Another was a Chinese Municipality, which by late 1927 was under the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party. Finally, there was the International Settlement (sometimes called the 'Foreign Settlement'), which contained the Customs House and most of the Bund.

6

The Settlement was not a colonial outpost of a single foreign power but rather a self-governing multinational enclave run by a locally elected body, the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC). This Council, which represented local business interests, tended to be dominated by Britons and Americans, with the former wielding the greater influence.[11] The Settlement was the larger of Old Shanghai’s two foreign-run districts and the most economically vibrant and globally famous part of the metropolis. The Bund formed the eastern edge of its main business district, with a small southern piece of the esplanade extending into the French Concession.

7

The Customs House’s location in the Settlement influenced its fate in many ways. For example, the enclave’s close ties to Britain (in Chinese the enclave was sometimes called the Ying Zujie or 'English Concession') made it natural for the Times to compare the building’s clock to Big Ben and for local Britons to dub it Big Ching. This Big Ben-like nickname fitted in very nicely with a notion prized by many Shanghailanders (as Anglophone residents of the Settlement were often called), which was that the enclave was not really part of China, just a displaced piece of the West that happened to be surrounded by Asia (an 'outpost' of civilization at the edge of a giant barbarous land, tiny Western 'republic' that had magically appeared and grown 'as if by enchantment' on alien soil, and so on, according to the most flowery and boastful texts by local Americans and Britons).[12]

8

Shanghailanders admitted that, due to its location, their 'Eastern home' had inevitably come to be influenced by Chinese styles, habits and so forth.[13] They also knew that, though initially reserved exclusively for foreigners, the Settlement (like the French Concession) had since the mid-to-late 1800s been a place where the vast majority of denizens were Chinese. Still, many clung to a vision of it as Chinese in location, cosmopolitan in character and Anglo-Saxon at its core. This matched up well with a nickname whose second half might flag a Chinese location ('Ching Dynasty' was then a common romanization for China’s last line of emperors, in pinyin the 'Qing Dynasty') but whose two halves when combined directed attention to a London icon.[14]

9

The quasi-colonial or semi-colonial nature of Old Shanghai and the dominant position of Shanghailanders within the Settlement (until the district fell to Japanese invaders in December 1941 and then was integrated into a unified Nationalist Party-run Chinese city when Japan surrendered in 1945) are important to keep in mind. The Customs House’s associations with foreign power affected its meaning in its early years and continues to affect its meaning to this day, even though the treaty-port system was dismantled in 1943, when the World War II Allies renounced the claims of their nationals to special privileges in Chinese cities. And the fact that the building became an icon within an enclave that had an Anglophone governing class explains why, in the sections immediately following, though some works in Chinese will be mentioned, the lion’s share of attention will be given to texts in English, the main language through which the international reputation of the Customs House was formed during the final years of the treaty-port era.

Landmark and Icon

The Customs House next attracts attention [as you walk down the Bund]. It was built in 1893, in the place of the old Chinese building … In the centre of the main building, a clock tower, supplied with a four-faced clock, by Pott of Leeds, striking the Westminster chimes, rises to a height of 110 feet…The elevation is a very handsome one.

Rev. C.E. Darwent, Shanghai: A Handbook for Travellers and Residents (Shanghai, 1920), p. 8

The Customs House standing at the centre of the Bund [has a] big clock that is said to have been made in England and to be a work of exquisite craftsmanship able to keep time with extraordinary accuracy. It sets the standard for Shanghai; when citizens pass by, they always check to see if their watches are right.

Niao Longsheng, Youhu zhinan [Guide to Shanghai] (Taipei, 1942), 23

10

Modifying a familiar adage, can we say that some buildings are born to be landmarks, others achieve this status and still others have it thrust upon them? If so, then the 1927 Customs House clearly belongs in the first category, and the two quotations above, which describe its ancestors and its significance to local residents c. 1942, direct our attention to phenomena that paved the way for its rapid achievement of this status.

11

Just as people born to greatness often have famous parents, the 1927 Customs House was part of a renowned lineage. The 'old Chinese building'
Figure 7 that began to serve as the local base of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service (IMCS) in 1854 (right after the founding of this curious semi-colonial institution, which was technically just a part of the Chinese government, yet run largely by Westerners) was famous enough by the 1880s for its picture to serve as the sole illustration accompanying the 'Shanghai' entry in an American reference book.[15] The 1893 Tudor-style structure built to replace it became even better known.
Figure 8One sign of its prominence is that,
Figure 9in a spectacular 1923 mural painted inside the HKSB building, which had panels devoted to each city where the firm had a branch, it is one of two structures used to stand for Shanghai.

12

Figure 10Given the footsteps in which it followed, it is unsurprising that the 1927 Customs House immediately became a local landmark. Indeed, it became a landmark while still under construction: its postcard debut (a key moment in the biography of any modern landmark) took place before Big Ching was placed atop it , and the local press began to extol the virtues of the clock even before the Customs House opened for business.[16]

13

If it were inevitable that the 1927 Customs House would, like earlier Shanghai headquarters of the IMCS, become a local landmark, however, we have not yet explained why it went on to achieve the status of icon. Big Ching became a more internationally famous symbol for the Bund, the Settlement, and Shanghai itself than the earlier Customs Houses, the grand HKSB headquarters next door, or other signature buildings on the Bund, such as the Shanghai Club and the Cathay and, inland from the waterfront, the Racing Club (home to the city’s second best-known clock tower).

14

When it comes to iconicity, size matters. Consider the height of the Eiffel Tower, the massiveness of the Colosseum, and so on. The 1927 Customs House, which rose to roughly three times the height of its 1893 predecessor, was initially the tallest building in the city. By the end of the 1920s, when the Cathay (which was about as tall) was built up the street from it, its height began to seem less striking. And in the 1930s, two markedly taller buildings arrived. One was the Broadway Mansions, located just north and a bit west of the Bund. The other, which remained the tallest structure in Shanghai for decades, was the Park Hotel, which stood about a mile due west of the Cathay on the famed shopping street of Nanjing Road, a thoroughfare whose Race Course, hotels, department stores and neon lights were sometimes treated by contemporary Chinese writers (and occasionally by foreign journalists) as equally or even more representative of Old Shanghai’s special qualities than the buildings of the Bund.[17] But even after the arrival of the Park Hotel, the Customs House remained a strikingly big edifice. Not only did it remain as tall as any other waterfront building, it was also colossal in girth, containing even more internal square footage than the HKSB headquarters, then the second largest bank building in the world.

15

In addition to size, a good location can help a building become an icon – and here, too, the Customs House was fortunate. In ports, icons tend to be visible from the harbour (Chicago’s Sears Tower), and either span (the Golden Gate Bridge) or stand near to (the St Louis Arch) major waterways. The Customs House was easily visible to approaching ships and stood right beside the city’s main river. Placement near sites that are already famous can smooth the road to iconicity as well, and the Customs House had this going for it, too. Already noted is its proximity to the HKSB headquarters, which texts from the time celebrate as a great 'commercial palace' and 'magnificent' part of the waterfront.[18] And a couple of doors down from these two structures stood the Shanghai Club, home to the fabled 'longest bar' in the world. To the north, near where the Cathay would be built, stood an elegant British Consulate; a famous statue of Sir Robert Parkes (a diplomat who had helped establish the International Settlement, which evolved out of originally separate British and American enclaves); and the Public Garden (a recreation ground famous for its Victorian-style bandstand and infamous for discriminatory rules that until 1928 kept its grounds off-limits to all Chinese other than servants attending foreigners, as well as for a sign on one of its gates that according to a widely believed urban legend read 'No Dogs or Chinese Allowed').[19]

16

In addition to its size and prime location, the Customs House was linked to a semi-colonial institution, the IMCS, whose nature and reputation paralleled that of Shanghai in general and the Settlement in particular. Many Chinese as well as Western writers of the treaty-port era regarded the Settlement as the most cosmopolitan and modern part of a city that was unusually cosmopolitan and modern – and owed its international prominence to trade and its links to the world beyond China. A Chinese language guidebook of the 1930s neatly sums up Shanghai’s contemporary reputation in this way: even citizens of China who could not name the nation’s capital knew that Shanghai was a great modern metropolis through which new products, ideas and fashions flowed into the country.[20] Foreign writers similarly stressed that Shanghai was the Chinese city where advanced ideas arrived first and made the deepest impact – and routinely attributed this quality to the International Settlement’s cosmopolitanism.[21]

17

Many institutions, including the British-run HKSB, certainly contributed to the rise of the metropolis, but banks tended to be associated with individual countries and hence could not be seen easily as both distinctively modern and distinctively multinational – and it was not just one but both of these features that defined the Settlement. More emblematic institutions were ones with ties to varied countries, such as the SMC, which always had members of several nationalities, and the IMCS.

18

Foreigners involved in the Customs Service, such as Ulsterman Sir Robert Hart (who headed it for decades and after death was honoured with a statue erected on the Bund near the Customs House) claimed that their intent was merely to help the Beijing government get its rightful share of revenues – something that, they insisted, the inefficient, corrupt Chinese customs service in place prior to 1854 had proved unable to do. But from the late 1800s onwards, Chinese patriots decried the institution as imperialistic and unfair. Was the IMCS a wonderful example of benevolent cosmopolitanism, as its defenders claimed at the time and some Western historians would later argue? Or was it a thinly disguised handmaiden of imperialist exploitation? Or was it something in between?[22] Debate continues. But what is certain is that the IMCS has often been seen as symbolizing much that was good, bad or simply unusual about the treaty-port system of which the Settlement was such an economically vital and politically sensitive part. This may be why, though its first Shanghai headquarters looked much like many other local buildings, contemporary English language works on the city often mentioned or showed it.[23] The Headquarters was already important, in other words, before either of the new Customs Houses, 1893 or 1927, were even built. This meaningful context illuminates the way the 1927 Customs House may well have been born an icon.

Early Commentary on Big Ching

Banks of lights from faintly delineated skeletons – the skyscrapers of the New York of the Far East – dazzle the traveler approaching Shanghai… [And soon added to] this panorama that so amazes visitors [will be a] new Customs Building, covering one city block with a clock-tower nearly 300 feet above the street level, and flanked by two wings that will render it a replica of the famous office buildings of London and New York.

Shanghai’s New Billion-Dollar Skyline', Far Eastern Review, Jun. 1927, 254

From the northern end of the Bund looking south, there is a line of big buildings […] but the two that especially catch one’s eye are the Cathay Hotel and the Customs House: the Cathay with its pointed golden tip, which often glistens in the sunlight, the Customs House with its automatic chiming clock that lets everyone in Shanghai know what time it is.

Ni Yiying, Shanghai (Guangzhou, 1938), 84

19

What did Shanghailanders and foreign visitors think about Big Ching during the late treaty-port era? As the first epigraph to this section reminds us, the building was the subject of considerable advance publicity, but here only commentaries published after 1927 will be discussed.[24] And as the second epigraph points out, the Customs House often received detailed discussion in Chinese language texts, but here, for reasons already noted, works in English will get most attention.

20

A good place to begin discussion of early Western commentaries is with an article that provides one of the most detailed accounts of the building ever published: 'Shanghai’s new Customs House: the greatest building achievement of the year in China'. This piece, which ran in the Far Eastern Review in 1928, was written by architect H.F. Wilkins, who calls the Customs House a '$4,250,000 monument to foreign trade' that is 'massive in design, massive in structural detail, and massive in size.'[25] Though Wilkins never uses the words 'icon' or 'symbol', he does claim that the 'clock tower, containing "Big Ching"…is Shanghai’s newest and most outstanding landmark'. His writing makes it clear that, while he is taken with the building’s appealing look, he is even more impressed by its state-of-the-art mechanical features (many specially designed in Britain), from an 'inter-office automatic telephone system' to an 'intricate maze of cogs and levers' that kept all time-pieces in synch – no small feat as there was 'a clock in nearly every room'.

21

Figure 11Other early commentators drew attention to similar things: the accuracy and abundance of the building’s clocks, the ease with which Big Ching could be seen from a distance, the cost, monumental size and all around modernity of the structure. And this style of commentary continued into the 1930s, a decade that is alternately praised and reviled (and often celebrated and criticized simultaneously) as the one during which all of the things that made Old Shanghai special reached peaks of different sorts. The city c. 1930 is imagined as having been especially hedonistic, exciting, crime-ridden, fast-paced, fashionable and cosmopolitan. Shanghai at that point was, according to lore and legend, a metropolis of unlimited opportunity but also unspeakable oppression, a 'paradise for adventurers' but a hell on earth for the disadvantaged, as Chinese and also some foreign writers of the time and of later periods have put it.[26] The city in the 1930s has most frequently served as a backdrop for films and is most often invoked by the décor and sometimes even the names of nostalgia-themed 'Old Shanghai' restaurants, bars and coffee shops, including one called ‘Bonami’ that recently opened inside of the former HKSB headquarters and affords a view of Big Ching .

22

Figure 12A good feel for the image of the Bund in general and the Customs House in particular in the 1930s is provided by 'Cosmopolitan Shanghai, key seaport of China', a National Geographic article by W. Robert Moore.[27] Published in 1932, it had much to say about the waterfront. First, its main illustration (taken by Moore himself) is of the Bund and has become among the most frequently reproduced images – if not the most frequently reproduced image – of Shanghai’s waterfront. On the right side of the photograph is a monument built to honour local residents who died in World War I. On the left side, one sees a line of buildings standing a bit to the north and across the street from this waterfront statue. Three tall structures stand out: the HKSB building (at the left hand edge of the frame), the Customs House, and the Cathay Hotel.

23

Moore’s prose throughout the article also strikes what have become standard themes. He portrays Shanghai as a 'cosmopolitan' place defined by the 'commingling of foreign and Chinese elements', with 'up-to-the-moment' districts such as the Bund heavily influenced by the West, yet also an 'old Chinese settlement, or Native City', where life 'takes much the same course that it followed before steamship screws began stirring up the muddy Whangpoo [Huangpu] around the fishing junks and sampans'. The contrast between old and new is, more generally, presented as a subset of a more important contrast: that between what is Chinese and what is Western.[28] He does note that some 'Chinese, quick to appreciate' the 'upward direction of city-building' symbolized by the structures lining the Bund, 'have begun erecting tall department stores, tea houses, guild halls, and other structures which bring them financial advantage and modernize the appearance of Shanghai.' For the most part, however, in classic Orientalizing fashion, he equates China with the past (and a single, flattened out, stagnant one), the West with the forward-looking and the modern. Clearly, Moore sees the IMCS and its clock-towered building as important symbols of a city that has been transformed by foreigners into a fast-paced centre of international trade, which has a 'bold skyline of steel and concrete' and a 'wide Bund' that 'throbs with the kaleidoscopic march of motors, electric trams, and other traffic'.

24

Not everyone who visited Shanghai in the 1930s viewed the waterfront buildings so positively. In addition to Chinese writers who claimed that the city had become a place that contained even more layers of hell for the disadvantaged than there were floors in its tallest buildings – and pointed to the foreign-run enclaves as the places where social inequities were sharpest – there were foreign critics such as Christopher Isherwood: 'Seen from the river…the semi-skyscrapers of the Bund present, impressively, the façade of a great city. But it is only a façade. The spirit which dumped them upon this unhealthy mud-bank, thousands of miles from their kind, has been too purely and brutally competitive.'[29]

25

Isherwood’s view was, however, a minority one among Westerners of the day, most of whom describe as appealing rather than disturbing the fact that Shanghai had buildings that were so far from others of 'their kind' – and hence evoked a pleasant sense of the familiar in what otherwise seemed an exotic setting.

An Old Icon in a New China, 1949-89

The Shanghai Customs House and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters – these are two buildings standing on the Bund that provide historical evidence of the terrible ways that imperialism oppressed the Chinese people and stripped China of its sovereignty.
Shanghai waitan Nanjing lu shihua (A history of the Bund and Nanjing Road) (Shanghai, 1976), 74

26

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took control of Shanghai in 1949, the built environment presented a problem, since many of the city’s largest structures and most attractive open spaces were linked to activities (gambling, shopping for luxury goods) or phenomena (imperialism, discrimination against Chinese) that the Communists had criticized during their rise to power. Hence dramatic things had to be done to many famous sites to show that a new, purer order had been established.

27

The impossibility of leaving old buildings such as the Customs House alone is underscored by texts such as the 1976 popular history quoted from above, which was written while the Cultural Revolution wave of radicalism was still cresting in Shanghai. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this sort of anti-imperialist rhetoric was only prevalent during the last stages of the Maoist era, as it can be found in publications of the 1950s and the first part of the Reform period (1978—). Here, for example, is what a locally published 1983 guide to the city has to say about the Puxi waterfront:

The famous Bund [is] a symbol of Shanghai [and many visitors] take pictures here with the buildings rising up to the heavens serving as an ideal background... Yet, do you know that these solid buildings are also like books of history in stone, recording the story of the invasion of China [following 1839]? These buildings have witnessed military aggression, political intervention, cultural infiltration, [and] economic plunder.[30]

28

Tearing down signature buildings was an obvious but costly option. A more appealing alternative was to alter these structures in symbolically meaningful ways – and then celebrate these transformations as indicative of a dark past left behind for a brighter future. It was here that a problem became an opportunity, as the buildings could be treated as useful things that had been inherited and could be put to use after being symbolically cleansed, as opposed to permanently polluted objects that needed to be destroyed. Thus the HKSB headquarters became for decades home to the new Municipal Government (though now it is once again a financial institution – the headquarters of the Pudong Development Bank), and the Racing Club on Nanjing Road became the main public library (though when a grand new public library was built in the 1990s, it became an art museum, which it remains to this day).
Figure 13Another illustrative transformation, which in this case did not change the basic function of a famous site, involved the Public Garden. The CCP claimed that this had been a morally polluted site even after new rules had been introduced that allowed people of all nationalities to use it on equal terms. This was because a small entrance fee was added in 1928 that, though seemingly trivial to foreign and Chinese middle-class residents, was more than ordinary workers could afford to spend. In addition, as late as the Civil War era (1945-49), according to CCP texts, this recreation ground had not been fully freed from links to foreign privilege, since the Nationalists allowed American troops to use this and other open spaces as drill grounds. It was only in 1949, according to this line of argument, that the park became a true public space that all Chinese felt fully belonged to them. This tale of the park’s 1949 'rebirth' and purification was repeated in many books and on a plaque that stood for decades on the Bund.[31]

29

What then of the Customs House? It continued to serve its same basic function after 1949, but there was a major difference: the IMCS moved with the Nationalists to Taiwan (where it continued for a short time there to have foreign as well as Chinese employees), while the newly formed People's Republic of China's customs service became one in which no Westerners were involved. But perhaps because this change in function was subtle, various things needed to be done to the building itself and styles of representing it to show that it had been cleansed. Thus when an image of the Customs House was shown on the cover of a 1951 handbook to 'New Shanghai' (a term commonly used even then to set the current city off from the treaty port of old), the structure was shown standing behind a sea of marchers waving red flags.[32] And, as previously noted, Big Ching’s chimes were reset to strike a tune more fitting to New Shanghai.

30

Figure 15There is more to the story of the CCP’s treatment of buildings with ties to imperialism, though, than can be captured via a simple list of things added and taken away and functions changed. This is because the CCP also took general steps to try to alter the place that all of these edifices had in the overall symbolic geography of the city. They did this by putting up new buildings and monuments away from the river, and by celebrating some relatively obscure older structures not located on the Bund. New maps of and guides to the city, for example, were designed in ways that diminished the importance of the waterfront, emphasizing instead either Shanghai’s place in a new national order (e.g., by putting Maoist slogans where images of the Customs House and HKSB headquarters would once have gone) or by highlighting new landmarks.

31

One important addition to the urban landscape that can be understood as part of the second strategy was a giant Sino-Russian Friendship Exhibition Hall. Located a couple of miles away from the river, this structure – which had to be renamed within a few years of being erected in the 1950s, since the supposedly 'eternal' ties between the two countries frayed early in the 1960s – was sometimes shown on the cover of new guidebooks
Figure 1.[33] Other related steps included the building of a 'People’s Park' and a 'People’s Square' (a site for state rituals) on the grounds of the old Race Course, and the elevation of two French Concession buildings, both located a bit south and west of People’s Square, into revolutionary shrines: the site of a 1921 founding congress of the CCP, and former residence of Sun Yat-sen, a figure whom the Nationalists have always claimed as their own, but whom the Communists also venerated. In other parts of the city, symbolically charged building activities also took place (e.g., a monument to the revered revolutionary writer Lu Xun went up north-west of the Bund). The result was that by the 1960s, the buildings of the Bund had to share their places on postcards and book covers with various new or newly important buildings, monuments and open spaces.

32

In the end, however, such strategies aimed in part at diminishing the symbolic significance of and generally de-centring the Bund were only partially successful– something that was acknowledged via familiar uses of the Customs House on the covers of some Maoist era maps.
Figure 17
Figure 18[34] To make up for the limited impact of attempts to shift attention away from the Bund and its most famous buildings – attempts that even led to the production of one 1975 guidebook with a section on Shanghai in which the Customs House is neither mentioned nor shown (a crane blocks the reader’s view of it in a shot of the waterfront)[35] – new stories about the waterfront were employed to minimize the stigma of the district’s links to imperialism.

33

One such story, relating to the district’s main park, has already been noted, but there were other kinds of tales used to achieve comparable results. For example, from the 1950s through the 1980s, buildings such as the Customs House were often described as having been designed by foreign architects but actually built by hardworking Chinese labourers and skilled Chinese craftsmen. In some renditions of this story, a delicate balance was struck between decrying the injustice of the system of foreign privilege that had allowed the enclaves to exist and presenting the 'tall buildings of the Bund' as comprising a 'Monument to China’s craftsmanship and artistic skill' (as the title of a subsection of one tour book put it).[36] Such an approach focused on the post-1949 patriotic uses to which its buildings have been put helped make possible the Bund’s re-emergence as a celebrated district.

Symbol of the Past in a Futuristic City

34a

There are few stretches of real estate as closely tied to a city’s history as the Bund...It still conjures up images of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, when the city was home to gangsters and warlords, and a combustible, polyglot population of British, Europeans, Japanese and Russians.

The epitome of glamour and decadence before the 1949 revolution, the city was punished for its capitalist excesses afterwards. The Bund, like Chinese capitalism itself, was left to wither.

With few exceptions, the Bund’s iconic buildings – the Customs House, the Peace Hotel, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank – languished, mostly empty or underutilized, decaying in a time warp of ossified bureaucracy and confusing preservation rules.

But as Shanghai re-establishes itself as the country’s commercial capital, the Bund is also undergoing a face-lift to revive it as a symbol of the city in the 21^st century.

Richard McGregor, Financial Times, 31 May, 2004

The municipal government plans to submit an application to the country’s cultural authorities requesting the nomination of the Bund as a candidate for the [UNESCO] World Heritage list.

The scheme, however, encountered criticism from nationalists…

It can not [sic] be denied that the buildings drop shadows on the feelings of Chinese people, but [the Bund was part of a city that] made great achievements in developing modern industry and commerce. It is symbolic of Chinese openness and the birthplace of Shanghai-style culture.

Shanghai Daily, 9 Jul. 2004, p. 3.

'Look at this – this is yesterday', [the businessman in the rooftop restaurant] said, gesticulating at the Bund, ‘and that is tomorrow,’ pointing at Pudong.'

Andrew Wilson, Guardian, 6 Mar. 2004.

34b

Between them, the newspaper articles excerpted above introduce the main issues to consider when taking stock of the current fate of the Customs House in particular and the Bund in general. McGregor’s piece highlights the increased attention being paid to restoring the waterfront including improved landscaping and the refurbishing of the Peace Hotel. The Customs House has received less specific attention to date, but is likely to get a good deal soon, as a local newspaper recently warned of the damage that time and neglect had done to its famous features.[37]

35

The Shanghai Daily article excerpted above, meanwhile, underscores the ongoing contestation around the historic meaning of the Bund. Some Shanghai residents would like to tone down the tendency, particularly strong during the late Maoist era, to harp upon the degree to which their city was contaminated by the treaty-port period, so that it will be possible to simply celebrate old waterfront buildings as aesthetic marvels, rather than view them with disdain or ambivalence. There is some resistance, however, to these efforts to, in a sense, depoliticize the Bund, and the tension between the two positions alluded to in the Shanghai Daily piece is mentioned in other recent Chinese newspaper articles that discuss plans to promote the Bund as the logical candidate to become the first site in the city to be accorded UNESCO World Heritage status.[38] One old theme that is given new significance in some recent articles on the World Heritage issue, is that Chinese hands built the most famous neo-classical and art deco structures of the Bund. Hence, the argument goes, these buildings can legitimately be considered part of China’s cultural heritage.

36

The most significant development related to the Bund to occur in recent decades, however, has not taken place west of the river. What has most altered the meaning of the Customs House has been the rise of new skyscrapers over in Pudong. Now, in contrast to the past, the tallest old buildings of the Bund are things to be gazed down upon well as gazed up to, and they are seen as redolent not of what modernity is today but what modernity used to be.

Conclusions: Learning from Big Ching

37

It has recently become fashionable to frame the histories of urban centres as 'biographies' of these cities, and when telling the story of urban icon, one can also easily use anthropomorphic language, as I have above in references to some such objects being 'born' to greatness and to Big Ching being part of a 'lineage', and so on. Particularly tempting might be to think of icons as having careers, in which case we might think of the Customs House as being in danger of losing its job to the upstart Pearl of the Orient Tower. And yet, in the end, the arc of the story of the Customs House is not so simple. The rise of Pudong has not stripped the buildings of the Bund of their symbolic resonance, but altered their meanings. And, as noted above, many of them are now not dying but being restored. More than that, representations of them are, if anything, becoming harder than ever to avoid by those who wander the streets of Shanghai. In comparative terms, it is true, within Shanghai itself images of Pudong have probably by this point surpassed those of Puxi (in all settings other than those explicitly tied to the past, such as nostalgia-themed restaurants), yet the total number of representations of both skylines in public settings has probably been increasing. Similarly, the sheer number of Shanghai publications dealing with the city has grown so much in the last decade that, even factoring in the tendency of a rising percentage of these to show only one or more Pudong structures on the front, there has been no overall decrease in the number of times the Customs House shows up on the cover of a new book.

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What this suggests is that in Shanghai, as well as perhaps other cities that in like fashion are celebrated as sites of dramatic juxtaposition, there can be as much a symbiotic relationship as a competition between new icons and the aging ones that they begin to challenge and seem headed to replace. If the city tries to lure tourists, foreign investors and international events by proclaiming itself a place with an interesting past, as well as an impressive present and a potentially glorious future (as Shanghai now insistently does), then maintaining the look and stressing the significance of older icons becomes important. A Parisian case in point is worth keeping in mind. The Eiffel Tower may ultimately have stripped Notre Dame of its ability to stand for 'Paris' tout court, but this church has continued to serve as a potent symbol of a specific period in the lifespan of the metropolis. And just as the Pearl of the Orient Tower derives some of its meaning from the existence of the Bund across the river, the Eiffel Tower might not have seemed like such an important symbol of Parisian modernity c. 1889, had there not been physical reminders of earlier times still standing in the city.

39

Icons associated with either modernity as currently defined or seen as harbingers of the future, the Shanghai case suggests, are likely to benefit from the presence of nearby reminders of the past. The Pearl of the Orient standing alone (or presented as a counterpart to icons of other cities) can be striking,
Figure 19 but nothing sets it off to better advantage than juxtaposing it visually with a treaty-port era building such as the Customs House. Likewise, in their heyday the buildings of the Bund seemed most special when described as standing out as distinctively Western objects that had been 'transplanted' (a common term) into a Chinese setting, or when visually juxtaposed with modes of transportation, built structures, or crowds of people that would have seemed out of place in Liverpool or Chicago. In those days, a sense that Shanghai was something special came, in part, from the interplay of old and new, but more so from other sorts of mixtures. Now, however, the city’s biggest distinction is precisely the commingling of eras, and this means that Big Ching can – and often does – for the iconicity of the Pearl of the Orient Tower what rickshaws and sampans passing in front once did for the Customs House. This suggests that the story of Shanghai urban icons, and perhaps those of many other cities, need to be seen as tales of relationships as well as of individual lifespans or careers. City biographers would do well to pay close attention to the company that their subjects keep.

[*] I am grateful to many people, though none of them should be held responsible for any of my arguments below. Most of all, I want to thank Vanessa Schwartz and Phil Ethington (for organizing the truly inspirational conference for which this essay was originally written, and for the guidance and patience they have shown during the revision process) and the participants in that workshop as a group (for lively presentations and wide-ranging discussions that were a model of collegiality and interdisciplinarity in action). I also want to thank Megan Kendrick (for her efficient and always good-natured help with logistics during the conference and afterwards); Carolyn Cartier and Susan Glosser (for their insightful comments on an earlier draft); Roberts Bickers, Iain Black, Yomi Braester and Jeffrey Cody (for steering me toward illuminating works, including their own fine publications or unpublished manuscripts on related topics); Tom Gieryn and IU graduate students who took the urban studies course he and I taught together and the ones that I have taught solo (from whom I have learned a great deal); and Lynn Pan and Elizabeth Perry (for conversations about Shanghai held over the course of several years, sometimes while looking close-up at the very buildings described below, that have shaped profoundly my understanding of the city).

[1] The clock-making firm remains proud of this time-piece; see the image of it and comments concerning its history at the J.B. Joyce and Co. website, in the 'Company History' section; http://www.jbjoyce.com/index.htm (visited 27 Jul. 2004).

[2] The Bund’s status as Shanghai’s top tourist site is asserted in the latest edition of the Lonely Planet’s Shanghai: City Guide (Victoria, 2004), 2; a reference to it as the most 'Shanghai-like' part of Shanghai can be found on a local website devoted to encouraging foreign investment in Shanghai, www.sh.com (visited by the author 31 Jan. 2004). On Bunds in general, see Jeremy Taylor, 'The Bund: littoral space of empire in the treaty ports of East Asia', Social History, 27, 2 (May 2002), 125-42. For a good photographic history of Shanghai’s Bund, with multiple images of many of the buildings discussed in this essay and a bilingual explanatory text, see Lou Rongmin, (ed.), Waitan lishi he bianyan (The Bund: History and Vicissitudes) (Shanghai, 1998).

[3] There has been an explosion of interesting work on pre-1949 Shanghai published recently in Chinese, Japanese and Western languages, but very few good historical works that move between the treaty-port era and the recent past. A notable exception, on which I have relied heavily here, is Marie-Claire Bergère, Histoire de Shanghai (Paris, 2002).

[4] According to a popular English language handbook, by the 1930s the term 'Big Ching' was in general use; see All About Shanghai and Environs: A Standard Guidebook (Shanghai, 1934-35), p. 45.

[5] Leaving aside guidebooks – a large category – the following are some examples of relatively recently published books with covers featuring the Customs House, included here to suggest the range of such publications as much as their quantity. See Takahashi Kosuke and Furuya Tado et al., Shanhai shi (A History of Shanghai) (Tokyo, 1995); 20 Shiji Shanghai wenshi ziliao wenku (Shanghai, 1999); Shanghai yiri (One Day in Shanghai) (Shanghai, 1990); Tom Bradby, The Master of Rain (New York, 2002); Alison McLeay After Shanghai (New York, 1995); Linda Wong, Lynn While, and Gui Shixun, Social Policy Reform in Hong Kong and Shanghai: A Tale of Two Cities (Armonk, NY, 2004). See also the covers of Yeh Wen-hsin (ed.), Shanghai bainian fenghua (One Hundred Years of Shanghai Elegance and Talent) (Taipei, 2001); Rebecca Weiner, Shanghai at Your Door (New York, 2003), part of the Culture Shock! guidebook series; Shanghai by Night: Map’n’Guide (np., 2001), a contribution to the 'Groovy Map' series; Lynn Pan, Tracing It Home: A Chinese Family’s Journey from Shanghai (New York, 1992); and Shanghai shihua (Shanghai history) (Beijing, 2000), a part of the Bainian Zhongguo shihua (A Century of Chinese History) series.

[6] Xue Jiaguo et al., Cong Shanghai waitan dao Jiangnan guzhen (From the Shanghai Bund to the Old Towns of the Lower Yangzi) (Shanghai, 2004).

[7] On this building, see Xue Liyong, Waitain de lishi (The History and Buildings of the Bund) (Shanghai, 2002), 73-94, and especially Iain S. Black, Between Tradition and Modernity: Hongkong Bank Building in Hong Kong and Shanghai, 1870-1940 (Quebec, 2001).

[8] For general background on Shanghai’s architecture, see Wu Jiang, Shanghai bai nian jinazhu shi (A History of One-Hundred Years of Shanghai Architecture) (Shanghai, 1997). For basic background on the Bund’s architectural landmarks, see Jon W. Huebner, 'Architecture on the Shanghai Bund', Papers on Far Eastern History, 39 (Mar. 1989), and Pan Ling (Lynn Pan), In Search of Old Shanghai (Hong Kong, 1982), 31-49.

[9] For the history of this Maoist anthem (and a sense of what it sounds like), see the section devoted to it at www.morningsun.org.

[10] See Seng Kuan and Peter G. Rowe (eds.), Shanghai: Architecture & Urbanism for Modern China (Munich, 2004). Prior to the 1990s, the term 'Puxi' – literally, West of the Huangpu – was rarely used, since people assumed that the Bund constituted the eastern border of Shanghai proper. Recently, though, as Pudong has come to be seen as an integral part of the metropolis, rather than a district across the river from Shanghai, the term 'Puxi' is increasingly used to refer to the Bund and all that lies west of it.

[11] Two good recent discussions of British influence in the Settlement are Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900-49 (Manchester, 1999); and idem, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (New York, 2003).

[12] Phrases such as these can be found in many works of the 1920s and 1930s, such as F.L. Hawks Pott, 'An introduction', which opens the third edition of Shanghai of To-day (Shanghai, 1930); as well as in earlier works.

[13] For uses of 'Eastern home', see, for example, 1843 — Shanghai — 1893 (Shanghai, 1893), 62-63.

[14] For Big Ben’s continuing iconicity, see 'Big Ben Tops London Icons List', BBC story dated 10 Mar. 2003, found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2835609.stm, viewed online on 9 Jun. 2004.

[15] The American Cyclopedia: A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge (New York, 1881), 824.

[16] One of the best online sets of images of Shanghai postcards, which includes ones that portray nearly all of the structures and open spaces discussed in this essay, can be found at http://www.talesofoldchina.com/postcard/pstd_list.cfm (last visited 27 Jul. 2004). See also Eric Politzer, 'Shanghai in the mirror', Postcard Collector, 21, 5 (May 2003), 36 and 42.

[17] On Nanjing Road’s significance, see Sherman Cochran (ed.), Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945 (Ithaca, NY, 2000); Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1999); and Yomi Braester. "A Big Dying Vat" – the vilifying of Shanghai during the Good Eighth Company Campaign', Modern China, 31, 4 (2005), 411-47.

[18] O.M. Green, 'Introduction', to the second edition of Shanghai of Today (Shanghai, 1927), 13.

[19] For background on the park and the debate over the precise wording of its notices limiting Chinese access, see Robert Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, 'Shanghai's "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed" sign as history, legend and contemporary symbol', China Quarterly, 142 (Jun. 1995), 444-66.

[20] Ni Yiying, Shanghai (Guangzhou, 1938), 2.

[21] In addition to already cited works, see Mark B. Dunnell, 'The republic of Shanghai', Overland Monthly (Nov. 1894), 473-481.

[22] For my understanding of the Customs Service and the debates surrounding it, I am indebted to Robert Bickers for sharing his insightful unpublished paper, 'After Hart: history and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service', delivered Sep. 2003 at Queen’s University, Belfast (cited here with the author’s permission). For a positive account of the Customs Service, see John K. Fairbank et al. (eds.), The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907, vol. I (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 1-34. For a harshly critical one, see Xiang Hua (ed.), Shanghai shihua (Shanghai history) (Shanghai, 1971). For a fascinating discussion of the IMCS, see the poignant two-part memoir by Perry Anderson (whose father worked in the institution), 'A belated encounter', London Review of Books, 30 Jul. 1998, 3-10, and 20 Aug. 1998, 28-34.

[23] For a contemporary guidebook’s take on the 1893 Customs House’s importance, see An Official Guide to Eastern Asia: Trans-continental Connections Between Europe and Asia, vol. IV: China (Tokyo, 1915), 234; a sample use in a foreign reference book is Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada, vol. XV (Madrid, 1927), 963-966; for an example of its image being integrated into a recent nostalgia-themed publication, see Wang Anyi, Zhaodao Shanghai (Looking for Shanghai) (Shanghai, 2001), 208; and for an example of its image being used in a patriotic illustrated history of modern China, see the cartoon-filled work for children, Wang Rufeng, Zhongguo jindai shi (Hangzhou, 1998), 286. Guidebooks that include multiple images of the 1927 Customs House include Ni, Shanghai, and All About Shanghai and Environs.

[24] Other examples of advance publicity include two articles that appeared in the North China Herald, the leading English language weekly: 'The Customs House chimes' (6 Oct. 1927, 59) and 'The Customs House clock tower', (21 Aug. 1926, 351).

[25] H.F. Wilkins, 'Shanghai’s New Customs House', Far Eastern Review, Feb. 1928, 72-7.

[26] On the interplay of utopian and dystopian images of Old Shanghai, in addition to many previously cited works (Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights; Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road; Ni, Shanghai, etc.), see the 'Introduction' to Frederic Wakeman, Jr, and Wen-hsin Yeh (eds.), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley, 1988), 1-14 and esp. 5.

[27] W. Robert Moore, 'Cosmopolitan Shanghai, key seaport of China', National Geographic (Sep. 1932), 310-35.

[28] This emphasis in Western texts on Old Shanghai as a place defined primarily by juxtapositions of 'East' and 'West' predates the 1930s, of course; see, for example, Dunnell, 'Republic of Shanghai', as well as newspaper articles such as 'Shanghai, city of color and smells, an Oriental Paris transplanted', New York Times, 25 Feb. 1923.

[29] Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden’s Journey to a War (New York, 1939), 237.

[30] China: Shanghai (Beijing, 1983), 34-5.

[31] For citations to relevant works on the park in particular, see Bickers and Wasserstrom, 'Shanghai’s "No Dogs or Chinese Admitted" Sign'.

[32] Xin Shanghai bianlan (A handbook to New Shanghai) (Shanghai, 1951); see also the photograph in Shanghai de gushi (The Shanghai Story) (Shanghai, 1963), 9, which shows the Customs House covered with banners celebrating the tenth anniversary of the city’s Liberation.

[33] A Guide to Shanghai (complied in Shanghai, but published in Hong Kong, no date — though internal evidence, e.g., what is shown and not shown, suggests the 1980s).

[34] Before 1949, the Nationalists had likewise tried but largely failed to de-centre the Bund. See Kerri MacPherson, 'Designing China’s urban future: the greater Shanghai plan', Planning Perspectives, 5 (1990), 39-62; and Seng Kuan, 'Image of the metropolis: three historical views of Shanghai', in Seng and Rowe, (eds.) Shanghai, 84-95.

[35] China Travel: Shanghai Hangzhou Nanjing Wuxi Suzhou (Beijing, 1975), p. 27.

[37] China: Shanghai, 34-39, which also refers to the buildings demonstrating the 'infinite ingenuity of the 6hinese working class'.

[37] 'Historical clock in need of renovation', 17 Mar. 2003, Shanghai Daily – accessed at http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/17/content_315617.htm, site last visited 2 Mar. 2005.

[38] See, for example, the discussion of the Bund and the World Heritage issue in Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), 23 Jul. 2003, accessed online 21 Dec. 2003, at www.jfdaily.com.