China Bank of Communications Building Shanghai

The Bank of Communications Building is located at No. 14 on

the Bund The Bund or Waitan (, Shanghainese romanization: ''Nga3thae1'', , ) is a waterfront area and a protected historical district in central Shanghai. The area centers on a section of Zhongshan Road (East Zhongshan Road No.1) within the former Shang ...

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

. The building was designed in a modern

Art-Deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the United ...

style, combined with Chinese elements, by Hungarian architect

C. H. Gonda Charles Henry Gonda (22 June 1889 – 1 April 1969), professionally known as C. H. Gonda, was a Hungarian architect famous for his ultra-modern style of building. He was active in Shanghai throughout the 1920s–1940s and began working on his f ...

. It is an eight-story concrete-frame structure, framed by black marble around the doors. The building is now occupied by the offices of the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions.Shea

History

The first European buildings on the site were constructed in 1880, after several German banks joined with a local Chinese businessman to form the

Deutsch-Asiatische Bank Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB) () was a foreign bank in China. Its principal activity was trade financing, but together with English and French banks, it also played a role in the underwriting of bonds for the Chinese government and in the financ ...

. The bank then constructed four smaller buildings on the current site. During

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, both China and Japan declared war on Germany, and the bank lost its holdings in China. In 1919 the China Bank of Communications took over the holdings of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank, including its properties in Shanghai. The Bank of Communications had been founded in 1908. It opened a branch in Shanghai the same year, and grew rapidly throughout the 1920s and 1930s. It made plans to construct a new headquarters on the current site, but these plans were disrupted in 1937 after the Japanese occupied Shanghai during the

Second Sino-Japanese War The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) or War of Resistance (Chinese term) was a military conflict that was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. The war made up the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Th ...

. After the Japanese surrendered in 1945 the bank returned, and completed its construction of the current building in 1948. It was the last building to be completed on the Bund before the Communists took control of Shanghai in 1949.

References

Bibliography

* Shea, Marilyn
"The Bund - Picture Guide to Historic Buildings"
. The University of Maine. 2007. Retrieved September 22, 2012. {{coord missing, Shanghai Bank of Communications Buildings and structures in Shanghai The Bund Bank headquarters in China