The Customs House, Shanghai

The Customs House was built as the headquarters of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and symbolizes Shanghai's importance as one of the world's leading trading ports during the early 20th century. Together with its neighbor, the HSBC Building, it forms one of the Bund's most iconic architectural ensembles.

Designed by the architectural firm Palmer & Turner, the Customs House was completed in 1927. The building occupies a site of about 5,722 square meters and provides roughly 32,680 square meters of floor space. It is designed in the Greek Revival Neoclassical style, with a granite-clad exterior, monumental colonnades, and symmetrical proportions. Inside, the grand entrance hall is richly decorated with marble, gold leaf, and an octagonal dome surrounded by colorful mosaics, reflecting the prestige of the institution it once housed.

The building's best-known feature is its 90-meter clock tower, inspired by London's Big Ben. The four clock faces, each more than five meters in diameter, were manufactured by the British firm J. B. Joyce & Co. and shipped to Shanghai in 1927. Their mechanism still operates today, and the famous Westminster chimes ring every fifteen minutes, making the clock one of the Bund's most recognizable sights. The Customs House continues to serve as a customs office and remains one of Shanghai's finest examples of early 20th-century civic architecture.