Dasheng Company Building

Dasheng Company Building

The Dasheng Company Building is a protected cultural heritage site of Shanghai.

Dasheng Company Building

It is now the Shanghai No. 1 Department Store, located at 830 East Nanjing Road. Completed in the 23rd year of the Republic of China (1934), it covers an area of 3,667 square meters, with a total floor area of 28,000 square meters, ten stories tall, and a height of 42.3 meters. It was designed by Kwan Sung-sing, Chu Bin, Yang Tingbao, and Yang Kuanlin from the Kwan, Chu and Yang Architects (K.Y.C. Architects), built by Fu Kee Construction Company, and features a reinforced concrete frame structure.

The building’s exterior is largely in the Art Deco style, but incorporates Chinese-style details and decorations. The ground floor exterior uses black marble from Qingdao as wainscoting, while the entire façade is clad in cream-colored glazed bricks. The lower five floors house the retail space, the sixth floor originally contained a restaurant, the seventh floor and above were originally used for entertainment venues, and the top floor features a rooftop garden for leisure activities. The interior features colored terrazzo wainscoting and flooring, with traditional-style decorative patterns. The interior column grid has wide spacing and employs waffle slab flooring to increase ceiling height. The steel windows were manufactured by Dadong Steel Window Company, electrical work was installed by Mei Yi Hydropower Engineering, and machine-made coal cinder bricks were used. The building is a monumental structure and one of the representative works of the renowned Chinese modern architectural firm Kwan, Chu and Yang Architects in Shanghai. The shopping mall was renovated in October 1986. The escalator inside the lobby was the first of its kind in China.

It was designated as a protected cultural heritage site of Shanghai in 1989.