Shanghai Past, Future Meet on Huangpu River

To see a museum of Shanghai’s golden age, go to the Bund, where the monuments of international capitalism line the Huangpu River. To see a glimpse of Shanghai’s future, just stand in the same place.

The promenade along the meandering river was home to nearly 200 banks and finance companies in the two decades in the first half of the century that Shanghai boomed as Asia’s commercial center. After nearly 50 years in suspended animation during Communist rule, Shanghai is coming full circle as capitalism makes inroads once again in China.

Many of the buildings’ original owners are returning to the Bund to reclaim a rich heritage and herald hopes of fortunes to come. In the process, they are preserving Shanghai’s treasures--and possibly uncovering its secrets.

On June 9, the grande dame of the riverfront, the old Hongkong Shanghai Bank building, will reopen its giant bronze doors for business after 45 years as Shanghai’s City Hall. But in a Shanghai surprise, the tenant will not be Hongkong Shanghai Bank. After two years of negotiations, directors decided that at a reported $400 million, the price of nostalgia was too high and set up their headquarters across the river in the Pudong district.

The new occupant is Shanghai’s own Pudong Development Bank, which paid the price to preserve the architecture and absorb the prestige of the “grandest building east of the Suez.”

Like the Bank of China down the road, the Pudong Development Bank shelters a cache of safe deposit boxes in which Shanghai’s wealthiest residents, earlier this century, stashed their gold and jewels, love letters and property deeds. At the Bank of China, 3,000 of the 10,000 boxes reportedly haven’t been opened since 1949, abandoned or forgotten in the rush to flee the Communist takeover.

“We have the records. We know who the owners are,” says the caretaker of the Bank of China vault. “To open a box, you just need your passport and a key.”

The Pudong Development Bank has inherited less: The owners’ names have disappeared, although the keys still exist. Shanghai residents whisper that the bank will open the safe deposit boxes like a Shanghai time capsule, or allow people to try their long-kept keys in a tantalizing treasure hunt.

Some are skeptical that the safes were kept intact through the Japanese occupation and the Communist Party’s half-century tenure in the building.

“That doesn’t agree with anything I know about human nature or the Chinese character,” says Tess Johnston, a Shanghai historian. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Visitors to the bank, however, are sure to see one hidden treasure that has been uncovered. The entry hall’s marble-clad columns are topped by a dome with glittering tile mosaics depicting the great banking centers of East and West.

The politically incorrect celebration of capitalistic domination was blanketed in plaster during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. The Pudong Development Bank flew in masters from London to rescue the mosaics and commissioned the same architects who restored Windsor Castle to bring the bank back to its former glory.

To walk into the grand lobby is to be transported back to 1923, the year the bank debuted as the most prominent financial institution in Asia.

“Spare no expense but dominate the Bund,” were the instructions from Hongkong Shanghai Bank’s London headquarters, and the architects created an edifice that fulfilled both requirements, making it the most expensive building in the world at the time.

After the buildings were “donated” to the Chinese government after Mao Tse-tung took power in 1949, many of the fortress-like structures became official offices or even police barracks. Aside from a few broken statues and revolutionary slogans splashed on the walls of the bastions of capitalism, however, the new occupants had little money to rebuild, and thus little will to destroy. The result is a procession of amazingly preserved architecture--something rarely seen in Asia’s fast-growing cities.

Now 12 of the 16 main buildings along the promenade have been renovated and reoccupied. Prospective tenants are carefully vetted in an attempt to re-create the aura of the 1930s.

“Two things are important for the companies who occupy these special buildings,” says a representative of the Bund Buildings Transformation Corp., which acts as the landlord. “They must preserve the historical artifacts. And they must be big and powerful.”

And what does he know about the legendary safe deposit boxes?

“Oh, they’re empty,” he says with a wave of his hand. “They’ve been empty a long time.”

And what happened to the contents? “That,” he says, “is Shanghai’s secret.”