| Hi Jianshou, You are right. When you live near a place it becomes familiar and even the most magical places can easily get forgotten. That's certainly true for me in London. I have to say though that I cannot imagine the Bund losing its power to amaze me! Even now after some 20 business trips to China, most of them arriving or departing from Shanghai, I cannot imagine an overnight in China without a walk along the Bund at nightime. It has to be one of the most magical places in the world! And that is despite its past association with greed and exploitation. The buildings of the Bund seem to have been designed by the mainly Western architects to declare aloud the greatness of the Western powers. They were certainly well built. And yet now you Chinese have done an even better job over in Pudong. So the IFC is well above the Jin Mao tower now!! Wow! Last time i was there it was moving close. I cannot wait to see it - and the lighting design they choose for it. The Bund is definitely the name given worldwide to the riverside of Puxi. Its origin is not an English word, however, but from a Hindi / Urdu word 'band', which we British brought with us from India in the early days of the International Settlement of Shanghai. It means "an artifical embankment or quay built in a muddy place", and in fact there were bunds on the International Concessions all the way up the Yangtze. There are remains of them in Nanjing (there are even some of the old English street lamps along the embankment), and in Wuhan (on the Hankou waterside) as well as other places. A lot of Hindi words have come into English from our colonial presence in India - words like jungle, bungalow, pyjama, loot -- and even Mandarin, the word we used for Chinese government officials and the "official Chinese" they spoke. We Brits did a lot of mixing up, and have a lot to answer for, as well as leaving some good things in place. |
Visited Bund Again Today