The Bund is a broad waterfront boulevard along the Huangpu River, its grand European-style buildings facing the newer towers of Pudong across the water. In the novel, it is more than a landmark: it changes from a crowded, brightly illuminated spectacle into an exposed and almost empty nighttime landscape, and that shift makes it the setting where Margaret Campbell encounters a man who will become an important lead in the investigation. The riverfront’s competing images of grandeur and desolation give the place a role in both the book’s portrait of Shanghai and its chain of discoveries.

Setting and changing appearance

The Bund is characterized by stone-built buildings with domes, spires, and clock towers, a sweep of architecture that can briefly suggest Paris or London. Across the river, the rising office towers of the Lujiazui financial district form a sharply different skyline. From a car moving through the city, Li Yan sees a district where construction has outrun demand: thirty-storey buildings stand dark, with only a few scattered windows lit. Wet pavements, late-afternoon gloom, and the sound of ships’ foghorns make the riverfront feel subdued even as the monumental buildings dominate the view.

After night falls, the contrast reverses. The Pearl TV Tower and the large globe at its base shine green, and the empty office blocks become towers of orange, yellow, green, and blue light. A permanently anchored cruise ship, now a bar and nightclub, glows turquoise. Across the river, carefully arranged lighting picks out the Bund’s architectural details, while glass buildings and enormous advertisements compete along the north bank. Boats scatter broken reflections across the choppy water; above them, a cigarette-advertising dirigible moves through searchlights. Li is struck by the difference from Beijing’s fiftieth-anniversary illuminations. Nien Mei-Ling’s amused response underscores the contrast between the capital’s more conservative identity and Shanghai’s commercial display.

The same waterfront can look almost emptied of that spectacle. Later, Mei-Ling drives off the Bund into Yan’an Dong Road and takes Li to the Da Hu Hotel, a peeling, seven-storey concrete building beside a viaduct. On another arrival, Margaret Campbell crosses the Nanpu Bridge and travels north beside the river; the Bund emerges from rain as a mirage. Its old banks, consulates, and commercial buildings briefly make her imagine Shanghai in the late 1930s. A large stone hotel near Nanjing Road, once the Cathay Hotel, and statues that had been covered after the Communist victory and revealed again for the Republic’s fiftieth anniversary make the city’s shifts in power visible in its streetscape. Tourists crowd the promenade to photograph the Pearl TV Tower across the river.

A working riverfront in the investigation

The Bund is also part of the detectives’ practical geography. After visiting the construction site where bodies and body parts are being recovered, Li and Nien Mei-Ling move through the city against the backdrop of the riverfront and its changing lights. Later, they head toward the river to pursue their inquiries. At the south end of the Bund, the Huangpu River cruise booking office occupies a triangular granite building at the ferry terminal. The first cruise of the day is about to depart, and the office staff tell the detectives that An Wenjiang is already aboard: he drives the boat. Rather than wait two hours for his return, Li and Nien Mei-Ling hurry through the doors toward the quay.

This functional setting sits alongside the investigation’s unsettling medical facts. Li has to consider that the women may have undergone partial autopsies before their bodies were frozen, and he recognizes that carrying out live autopsies on eighteen women would likely have required more than one person. The Bund itself does not explain the crimes, but the river, ferry terminal, and routes through the city connect the case’s interviews and movements to a lived urban landscape rather than an abstract map.

Margaret’s predawn walk

The Bund becomes most consequential when Margaret goes out alone after a late-night phone call with Li Yan. Unable to sleep, she leaves her hotel to breathe cold air and walk beside the water. It is nearly a quarter to four. The lights and advertisements that had made the riverfront vivid earlier are gone; the six lanes are eerily empty, and only red navigation lights across the river mark the presence of Pudong’s financial district. A clock tower’s pale face hangs over the deserted street. A few taxis pass, slowing as their drivers assume the foreign woman wants a ride, but she waves them on.

Near the end of Nanjing Road, several taxi drivers gather around a brazier where a woman in a white jacket and round white hat serves soup from a steaming pot. Margaret crosses the six lanes and runs up to the promenade, where the vendor stands that had offered drinks, snacks, and film remain beneath open umbrellas. The fountain is dark. Leaning on the wall, she looks over the black river as a low, heavily laden barge passes with a single lamp in its pilot’s cabin. A distant foghorn carries over the water.

As she walks north, Margaret thinks about how unmoored she feels: she has returned to China because of Li, but cannot call it home, and her father’s death has left her feeling orphaned despite her mother still being alive. She plans to finish work on the Shanghai murders, re-examine a body in Beijing, and bring Xinxin south before deciding what comes next. The promenade’s emptiness gives this private uncertainty physical form, but the walk turns abruptly from reflection to danger. Near the locked gates of Huangpu Park, she hears movement in the bushes and turns back. Looking over her shoulder, she sees a man following her about a hundred metres behind.

Encounter and later recognition

Margaret runs toward the brighter, more open street. For a moment, the man disappears. Then, near the illuminated entrance to an underpass, she catches his face in the light: he is short and thick-set, with straggling hair, a broad face, and a conspicuous hare-lip scar. They look directly at each other before she runs to the taxi drivers and the soup vendor. The people around the brazier stare at her in astonishment; when she looks back, the man is gone. She cannot tell whether she imagined part of the pursuit, and at the time she does not report what happened to Li.

The Bund encounter gains significance only later. When Margaret sees an image of the suspected kidnapper, she recognizes him as the man who followed her on the promenade. She recalls that he had been close enough to touch near the underpass, and admits that she had dismissed the incident as a frightened woman overreacting to a stranger with a hare-lip. She also remembers seeing him again at the airport in Beijing while returning with Xinxin. Nien Mei-Ling connects Margaret’s description to the account Sun Jie had given of the man who followed his wife: he had also been described as Mongolian, with an ugly scar on his upper lip that might have been a hare-lip. The Bund thus becomes the place where a detail Margaret had treated as an isolated fright acquires investigative meaning. Its night walk turns a remembered face into a link between separate encounters and the kidnapping case.