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People traditionally used rivers to orient themselves in the 
regions that make up today's Shanghai. Upstream areas were designated as li or "inner" and the downstream was wai or "outer." Waitan, the outer shoal, is a strip of muddy land between the Xinkai and Wusong Rivers. Originally, the waitan referred to an even larger strip of land on the Huangpu River's western bank, running between the old Shanghai town and the southern bank of Suzhou River, and dividing the land into inner Huangpu shoal and outer Huangpu shoal.
The "Bund", also called the "Section 1, Zhongshan Road East", is named after Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the predecessor of the democratic revolution in China. Starting from the Waibaidu Bridge at the confluence of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek in the north it extends some 1.5 kilometers to end at the Jinling Road East in the south with the Huangpu River to the east but by the west it is lined with 52 blocks of buildings. Whether you take a view at them in a distance or just take a walk along you can feel in both ways their vigorous and virile styles, solemn yet incomparable magnificence. Today, this "Exposition of Many Building Styles from Various Countries" is one of the landmarks of Shanghai.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the waitan 
was open countryside with bountiful traversing rivers. At that time, it became a popular spot for foreign residents to spend the weekend. They would travel in by boat, hunt birds, and have cook outs with wild game. In 1845, after a short period of negotiation, the waitan was ceded to the British, becoming part of the British Concession. Soon after, a British Consulate and a number of foreign firms began spilling into the area, building houses and towers on the Hunagpu River. That same year, the construction of the Huangputan Road came to a completion. The foreign residents called it "the Bund". The meaning of "The Bund" slowly evolved over time, referring in a more general sense to Western colonies in the Far East.
After 1949, the People's Government of Shanghai has made a large-scale renovation and transformation of the Bund. It has consolidated and raised high for three times the walls for flood control and on entering into the 1990s it has brought to completion the project of moving the walls for flood prevention further to the waterside, and widened the green belt along the Bund. In addition, erected here is a statue of Chen Yi, the first mayor of Shanghai after liberation and other new attractions as an electronic waterfall clock, a sizable artistic statue and a square for Huangpu River tours, thereby turning the Bund more beautiful and splendid.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Shanghai had already evolved into China's financial center, and large bank syndicates began largescale construction on the Bund, putting up large luxurious mansions and buildings. What had once been a narrow stamped dirt path for boat crewman and coolies had become a forest of tall buildings, the heavily trafficked "Wall Street of the Far East." With its blending of the classical and the modern, today "Bund" is still an economic hub, and Shanghai's finest restaurants, bars, and clothing boutiques are almost concealed within the Bund's grand classical architecture.
On the other side of the Bund is the Huangpu River. This heavily trafficked "golden waterway" is not only a key gateway for China's foreign trade and an important link between Shanghai's New Pudong District and the Pacific; it has also become an important venue for sightseeing. Every day, tour boats take off from "The Glory of Pudong", heading to places where Huangpu River and the Yangtze, the world's third great river, converge and meet the sea. This point, known as the "three merged waters", is located just outside the mouth of the Wusong River.
If you stand at the edge of the Huangpu River, you can peer across at the famous skyline of Lujiazui that includes the world famous "Oriental Pearl" Television Tower, the Jin Mao Tower, and the Shanghai International Convention Center.
At every dawning the Bund is a place for the people to do morning exercises for keeping fit, the daytime the venue of tourists while the place becomes lovers' paradise in the evening. At the time of lighting up, the artistic lights on all and every building along the Bund vie charms with that of the Oriental Pearl TV and Radio Tower opposite the Huangpu River, each trying to outstrip the other, making visitors Chinese and foreign gasp with admiration.
Towering along the Huangpu Bund is a group of tall 
buildings of unique styles. Here used to be the center in which the western powers at that time controlled the politics, economy and culture of Shanghai. At that time, many foreign consulates, banks, clubs, business headquarters and newspaper offices were all centered round here in the Bund area, presenting a cluster of buildings high and low of I different styles.
All these high-rises and buildings, though neither designed by the same architect nor put up in the same period, are by and large compatible to one another in styles and of a harmonious outline if taken as a whole. It can be regarded as a symbolic group of buildings in Shanghai and so later on, people like to call it a "Display of International Buildings in Shanghai".