Thursday Doors: The Bund, Shanghai

This week for Thursday Doors, am continuing my series of door posts from my trip to Asia last summer. Last time I posted pictures of our tour of Xintiandi, a hip shopping tourist district in Shanghai.

The Bund, on the Western Bank of Huangpu River, is the next stop on the tour. “Bund” means an embankment or quay. The buildings of the Bund are height restricted and built to look European. (There is even a clock tower that chimes like Big Ben in London!) They stand in contrast with the buildings on the opposite bank of the river, which boasts the modern skyscrapers of Lujazui in the Pudong District. Pudong is the location of the Shanghai Tower, as of this writing the world’s 2nd tallest building with the highest observation deck.

As I mentioned in the previous post about Xintiandi, we didn’t have great weather the day we were in Shanghai. Clouds can be seen below in the panoramic picture, and rain on the ground in front of the doors. These doors open into sober establishments like department stores, hotels, or banks. Many of them are labeled (so you can tell them apart?)

I took all of these pictures from the window of a moving tour bus, so the angles can get a little creative, but at least I stayed dry!

Even though there are no doors in these other pictures, I’m including them anyway, because no post about the Bund would be complete without a View from the Top of Shanghai Tower. The clouds add mystery to this view from above. The tower practically has its own weather:

And a view of the Eastern Bank, taken from an evening river cruise.

The Bund is a study in contrasts: the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the two faces of Shanghai.

Thursday doors is a weekly feature in which door lovers share their pictures from doors all around the world. Stop by Norm 2.0’s blog to say hello and see some of the others.