ChinaRhyming’s French Week #1 – Shanghai’s Quai de France, 1932

A picture from the French magazine Voila of Shanghai’s Quai de France (the French Bund or now Zhongshan No.2 Road East) from the Gutzlaff Tower. The Quai is now not nearly so busy of course, the buildings along the Quai are all gutted with just one or two poor restorations and the Gutzlaff Signal Tower was moved 23m north to its current location in 1993 and cladded with white tiles in 1999 – nice to see the original (or at least the third incarnation of the Tower, after two previous towers from 1865 and 1884, completed in 1907. Although in the French Concession the tower in its present form was built by the Dutch (and is about the Netherlands only contribution to Shanghai’s architectural heritage).

For some reason the invariably questionable Wikipedia has the Tower labelled as art-deco. Being constructed in 1907 this is of course nonsense, though the more recent cladding and painting might indicate an attempt to art-deco-ise the structure. Those of long enough vintage will remember that it was the Police Station for the Bund from the 1950s through to the early 1990s, then, around 1993, hosted the Bund Exhibition and is now, I think, a cafe of some sort.