05. July 2023

This lovely ca. 1935 advertising booklet for the Astor House Hotel from our collection has a centerfold map & offers the perfect opportunity to take you on a journey through old Tianjin, the second biggest foreign settlement of Republican China. Tianjin, or Tientsin as it was once called, is located 140km South-East of Beijing on the shore of the Bohai sea and its Chinese name translates to "Heavenly Ford" or "Ford of Heaven". After the end of the Second Opium War in 1858 the Treaty of...

04. June 2021

Bank of Communications on the Bund No. 14. The modern Art-Deco style building, combined with Chinese elements, was designed by Austro-Hungarian architect C. H. Gonda. Construction was interrupted in 1937 because of the Second Sino-Japanese War and it was only completed by 1948 making if the last classic building to be erected on the Shanghai Bund. The Bank of Communications was founded in 1908 and emerged as one of the first few major national and note-issuing banks in the early days of the...

21. May 2021

The Yuanli Pawnshop is a three-story, masonry-timber building constructed in 1932. It is surrounded by 15 meter high and 50 centimeter thick walls with a steel vault in the center of the structure. It's owner Lu Tuanxiao had previously operated several pawnshop in Wuxi, Jiangsu province before expanding to the Shanghai International Settlement. By the 1940s Yuanli had become the largest pawnshop in Shanghai. Today it is a museum and can be visited free of charge on 203 Wuding Lu or in VR on...

16. May 2021

Designed by Austro-Hungarian architect C.H. Gonda and inaugurated in February 1926, it was lauded as Gonda’s “triumph in style of architecture new to Shanghai.” BEA was founded in Hong Kong in 1918 with the idea to blend East and West, essentially by embracing the style of a Chinese, family-run bank but also adopting modern accounting and banking methods. Already in 1920, BEA opened its first branches in Shanghai and Ho Chi Minh City. Today it remains the largest independent local Hong...