INTRODUCTION

THE SHANGHAI BUND – that celebrated stretch of waterfront in China's most populous of cities – looms large in the western imagination. As a site of nostalgic partings and arrivals, the subject of fiction and the backdrop to film (Hollywood and Hong Kong alike), it is the stuff of urban legend. In fictional and quasi-historical depictions of ‘old Shanghai’, the bund is everywhere, and is written as a romantic setting around which the intrigues of the treaty port world are woven. Likewise the literature of finance and business, in which Shanghai has been described as the specific location of a littoral Chinese identity grounded in market capitalism and entrepreneurialism. For such histories, the towering buildings of the Shanghai Bund and its flashing neon streetscapes have become the classic symbols of Chinese economic strength and vigour.

The Shanghai Bund is perhaps one of the world's most recognizable skylines. Hugging the banks of the Whampoa river, it is one of China's most photographed and written-about urban localities (see Figure 1). Yet the bund is more than just a streetscape – it is the single most important spatial reminder of an entire social system and lifestyle that came to East Asia in the wake of British success over China in the first Opium War, and the arrival of Admiral Perry's gunboats in Japanese waters shortly afterwards. The treaty port system meant far more than import/export statistics and diplomatic manoeuvres. Above all it meant a social system of exclusion and exploitation that was unique in the imperialist movement of the western powers during the mid- to late- nineteenth century, and into the early years of the twentieth century. This system brought with it specific concepts regarding space and power, and transferred such concepts onto the environments of Asia's riverine and coastal ports. The most distinctive of these was the bund – a spatial form that emerged not only in Shanghai, but in many other ports open to foreign trade throughout mainland China, Taiwan and Japan.

Predictably, most work on bunds in the Anglophone Academy has tended to focus exclusively on Shanghai, and little has been written outside the regional confines of ‘China Studies’.