Three on the Bund

This guide to Three on the Bund in Shanghai follows architect George Leopold Wilson's gamble in 1916, building the Bund's first steel-framed structure from imported German steel for an insurance house crowned by the city's first rooftop dome. You'll hear how that insurer lost its footing as Japanese forces closed in on Shanghai in 1937, how a bank moved in and fled again as Communist forces took the city in 1949, and how the building spent over forty years afterward filled with the drafting tables of a state design institute. Look up at the Baroque scrollwork on Wilson's original facade.