Old airplanes over the Shanghai Bund

From the middle of the 19th Century until the outbreak of the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, the Shanghai Bund was the most prestigious, powerful, and renowned downtown city scape east of the Suez Canal, a thriving hub for the Chinese and foreign traders, industrialists, financiers, smugglers, entrepreneurs, gangsters, romantics and exiles who’d made Shanghai the most powerful city in the Orient. I fell in love with Shanghai’s  municipal history during the researching and writing of China’s Wings — one of the more outstanding side effects of the project. Shanghai is a fascinating and dynamic city, and when I visited in the spring of 2005, I was surprised to discover how much of its 1920s and 30s architecture still exists.

A few weeks ago, I did a bit of writing about the Shanghai Bund for RedBANG, a European-style graphic design company working in China. So far, RedBANG has used the copy on the packaging of their “The Bund Shanghai” microfiber lens cloth promotional product and in the About section of The Bund Shanghai’s Facebook page (where they’ve been posting some spectacular old and new photos).

That made me think I should post all the old China’s Wings and CNAC photos I’ve collected that show the Shanghai Bund into one photo gallery. All of these photos come courtesy of the Edward P. Howard collection: