Shanghai Bund, Explore The City (1843-1937)

After the urbanization of the Bund in Shanghai in 1843, the development function was ultimately located in two main aspects: bank finance and public space. The author mainly focuses three questions while conceiving this paper: How did the urbanization of modern Shanghai start from the Bund? How did the Bund evolved into the"Oriental Wall Street"in the 1930s from the place stationed by the multitudinous business firms in early days? How did the area along the bank of Huangpu changed into the most important public space from the busy wharf area?The urbanization of the foreign settlement in modern Shanghai started from the Bund, the fundamental reason is that the Bund occupies the unique geographic location in Shanghai, but this potential geographic factor can display the superiority as long as certain conditions are met. The Bund is situated in the junction between Huangpu River and Suzhou River, its position is unexampled to other places in Shanghai in terms of security, trade as well as the link with the county. But it was not until 1843 that the Huangpu beach was also a desolate area, only a few of natural villages was located, Li Jiachang and periphery area were bisically military—use land. After opening the port, the westerner shortly leased the land of Huangpu beach completely, and quickly built a row of"South Asia"foreign firm constructions. In less than ten years, great changes took place. Obviously the political might factor played a key role in the urbanization of the Bund. Dagger Society Uprising in 1853 made the population structure of the foreign settlement change from"multi-separation"into"multi-mixed", The large number of immigrants moving into the foreign settlement laid a foundation for the large-scale urbanization, and enabled the Bund's further urbanization to have the support of the overall economy development.The banks standed in great numbers in the Bund in 1920s~1930s, so the Bund was called"Oriental Wall Street". Throughout the historical process of its formation, we can be clearly aware of many inevitability which played role in it. In a long period of time after opening, the Bund organizations were primarily foreign firms. "Commercial King"were in the monopoly of trade as well as many subsidiary service associated with trade including financial service, which had great relations with the form, content and quantity of trade, as a result, the early foreign-funded banks were excluded strongly by foreign firms. But along with the opening up of a series of trade ports and the consequent sharp rise in the trade quantity, the foreign firms had difficulties in undertaking the complex financial service, HuiFeng Bank emerged as the times required. In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, on the one hand, the expansion of Sino-foreign trade further intensified the demand of bank service, on the other hand, after entering the stage of imperialism, the power mainly used the way of capital export including setting up bank, compulsory and so on, multitudinous international well-known firms came to China, HuaDaoYongSheng, Citygroup, East Huili and Yokohama Zhengjin contained. In 1897 the first Chinese-funded bank—Bank of China International Trade was established in the Bund, although its establishment may be motivated by bank profit, or stemmed from the need of industry development in the late Qing dynasty, under the background of foreign-funded banks'complete monopolization for the Chinese financial industry, its establishment had self-evident significance to resist foreign-funded banks.The Bund is the most important public space in modern Shanghai. Its formation, on the one hand, was closely related to the change of economic function, on the other hand, the management idea and scientific rationality of life style in the foreign settlement were inseparable. In a long time after opening up, the economic function of the Bund was dominated by the foreign firm's trade, so many barge wharfs standed along the HuangpuRiver shore in the Bund. Therefore, the environment of public space came under tremendous influence. With the change of economic function into bank finance, the former days of wharf full of noisy and chaotic scenes gradually elapsed, the Bund environment greatly changed for the better. The managers of the foreign settlement such as金能亨attached great importance to the construction of public space in the Bund, both Industry Services Bureau's management idea of taking public interest as the supreme criterion and the demand for public space determined by theforeigners'life style contributed to promoting the public space in the Bund to become more perfect. Of course, the colonial color of the Bund was strong, colonization was expressed extremely undisguisedly through the Bund park, sculpture building and Shanghai Association, Sassoon building and so on.