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THE
ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY - HONG KONG
presents
“The
Bund: Jewel of Shanghai”
by
Peter
Hibbard
on
Thursday,
5 June 2008
3F,
British Council, 3 Supreme Court Road
(please
note that this venue is next to Pacific Place, 5 minutes from
Admiralty MTR)
Drinks
Reception 6.30 pm; Lecture 7.30 pm
We
are delighted to welcome to Hong Kong Peter Hibbard to lecture on the
finest streetscape in East Asia, Shanghai’s legendary Bund.
Long-term Shanghai resident, Mr Hibbard is a historian and guide to
Shanghai, and the foremost expert on the Bund. In this lecture,
beautifully illustrated with photographs and documents over two
centuries, Mr. Hibbard tells both the history and present of this
magnificent promenade. Mr. Hibbard starts with its beginnings as a
muddy foreshore, to its conversion to a fine esplanade in the latter
19th Century, to the 1920s and 1930s when its monumental edifices
were constructed.
Numerous
parallels can be drawn between the massive regeneration of Shanghai
in the modern age and the heady, speculative years of the 1920s and
1930s when Shanghai came of age. But the story starts much earlier
than that – in the 1850s and 1860s Shanghai was one of the most
thrilling, dangerous and fastest growing cities on Earth. Beginning
in 1852 swarms of Chinese refugees escaping the Taiping Rebellion
(1851-64) illegally entered the sanctity of the ‘British
Settlement’. The British merchants and their consuls, who had
initially been against allowing Chinese into their patch of ‘little
Britain’, saw the prospect of rich rewards. With the election
of the first municipal council in 1854, the ‘Land Regulations’,
which provided an administrative framework, were altered to allow the
Chinese to reside and to rent or buy land in the British Settlement.
While
the Bund and its neighbouring streets with their trading houses,
banks and social institutions remained a largely British domain, the
Settlement area to its west was developed to accommodate the new
arrivals. Two British race courses were unceremoniously built over
as upwards of half a million Chinese poured in to the British
Settlement. Drinking champagne by the crate was the order of the day
and the original English street names were translated to those of
Chinese provinces and cities to keep everybody happy.
In
the early years of the 20th century, and particularly after the end
of World War I, booming business confidence found expression in a
desire to build big and tall. Money was pouring into the city in the
1920s and property and land values in on the Bund reached their
zenith in 1929 when the saying ‘Shanghai Mud, Shanghai Gold,’
had never rung so true - values had increased around 1,000% between
1923 and 1932. The population of the British Settlement, covering
just 8.3 square miles, had doubled to around one million between 1910
and 1930. Between 1920 and 1925, no less than seven new buildings
were built on the shores of the Bund and a tidal wave of
redevelopment was roaring westwards.
Mr.
Hibbard talks in this lecture of the history and present of many of
the most famous buildings on the Bund. These include the Asia
Building (No. 1), which housed the Shanghai offices of British oil
company Shell, the Shanghai Club (No. 3), which was the principal
social club for the British in Shanghai, the Russel & Co.
Building (No. 9), for the major British trading house and the HSBC
Building (No. 12), built in 1923 and perhaps the most magnificent
building on the Bund, complete with marble and wrought iron shipped
from England. Next was the Customs House (No. 13), which was built
in 1927 and is a fine example of British municipal architecture on a
grand scale, with a clock and bell built in England in imitation of
Big Ben, the Chartered Bank Building (No. 18), housing the Shanghai
headquarters of Standard Chartered Bank, then the Cathay Hotel,
subsequently the Peace Hotel, which was for seven decades the finest
hotel in Shanghai. Further along, the Jardine Matheson Building (No.
27) housed the powerful Jardine Matheson company, leading up to the
enormous compound of several buildings housing the His Majesty’s
Consulate-General of the United Kingdom (No. 33, The Bund).
Shanghai-based
Peter Hibbard has a background in urban planning and sociology, but
decided to turn his attention to the development of the Chinese
tourism industry in 1983. He was a visiting scholar at Hong Kong
University’s Centre of Asian Studies in 1985/86. He now
specialises in researching the historical development of tourism in
China and plotting the historical development of Shanghai. He has
produced a wide range of publications and is author of the Shanghai
section of Odyssey Guide’s “Beijing and Shanghai: China’s
Hottest Cities” and “The Bund Shanghai: China Faces
West”. Mr Hibbard is currently project historian for the
restoration of the north wing of the Peace Hotel and President of the
recently resurrected Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai.
Members
and their guests are most welcome to attend at HK$50 for Members and
HK$100 for Members' guests and $150 for others.
Royal Geographical Society (IBG) - Hong Kong
GPO Box 6681, Hong Kong
Tel: (852) 2583 9700
Fax: (852) 2140 6000
Email: director@rgshk.org.hk
Website: www.rgshk.org.hk
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