Shanghai Stock Exchange Brand Guidelines: Astor House 1990, a Pudong Tower and the STAR Market

A share list in the 1860s, an exchange in 1891 and a reopening in 1990.

Share trading in Shanghai is older than the present exchange by more than a century. The Shanghai Stock Exchange’s own history says stock trading began in the city “as early as the 1860s,” and English Wikipedia dates the first share list to June 1866, in the International Settlement. In 1891 foreign brokers formed the Shanghai Sharebrokers’ Association, which the exchange calls “an early form of stock exchange.” English Wikipedia says the association registered in Hong Kong in 1904 and took the name Shanghai Stock Exchange.

In the 1920s two more exchanges opened, which the exchange’s history names as the Shanghai Securities Goods Exchange and the Shanghai Chinese Securities Exchange; English Wikipedia says the markets were amalgamated in 1929. By the 1930s, the exchange says, Shanghai had become the financial centre of the Far East, where Chinese and foreign investors traded stocks, bonds and futures. English Wikipedia records that trading came to a halt after Japanese troops occupied the International Settlement in December 1941 and resumed in 1946; the exchange says that in 1946 the Chinese securities exchange was renamed the Shanghai Securities Exchange Co., Ltd., and that in 1949 all securities trading venues were closed.

Trading returned in stages. According to the exchange, treasury bond offerings resumed in 1981 and stocks and enterprise bonds were issued in Shanghai from 1984. The present Shanghai Stock Exchange was founded on 26 November 1990 and began formal operations on 19 December 1990. Its first home was the Astor House Hotel on the old financial street by the Bund, which the exchange shows as its original site. English Wikipedia’s article on the hotel says trading took place in the ballroom of the west wing, while the east wing still ran as a hotel, and that eight stocks and 22 bonds were listed at the start. The hotel closed in January 2018 and reopened in December 2018 as the China Securities Museum, the same article says.

Two share classes, a composite index and two connections abroad.

The exchange began under the city’s control. English Wikipedia says it was a municipal “experimental point” until 1997, when the central government brought it, with the Shenzhen exchange, under central control; it describes the exchange today as a non-profit organisation directly administered by the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Shares trade in two classes: A shares priced in renminbi and B shares quoted in US dollars. The exchange lists its first foreign-currency B share in 1992, the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors scheme in 2002 and its first ETF, the SSE 50 ETF, in 2003.

Its headline measure is the SSE Composite Index. English Wikipedia gives its base day as 19 December 1990, the exchange’s first trading day, with a base value of 100, and says it was launched on 15 July 1991; the SSE 50 and SSE 180 indices sit alongside it.

Two links abroad shaped its recent history. Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, announced on 10 April 2014 and launched on 17 November 2014 according to English Wikipedia, lets investors in each market trade eligible shares on the other through their local brokers; the exchange marked its tenth anniversary in November 2024. Its partner is the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong, run by HKEX. On 17 June 2019, the exchange says, Shanghai-London Stock Connect opened with the first global depositary receipt listed under it on the London Stock Exchange, and an SSE office opened in London.

The same year brought a new board. The STAR Market, formally the Science and Technology Innovation Board, was first proposed in November 2018; the exchange dates its official launch to 13 June 2019. On 22 July 2019 Xinhua reported that trading had started with a first batch of 25 companies, and described the board as designed to finance companies in high-tech and strategic emerging sectors such as new-generation information technology, advanced equipment and new materials. Xinhua added that it was paired with a pilot registration-based system for initial public offerings.

How exchanges present themselves.

Stock exchanges sell something that cannot be held: access to a market. Most of their public image is therefore built from rituals, rooms and numbers rather than products. One common ritual is the ceremony around the opening or closing of trading. Borsa İstanbul, for example, says it announces the start and end of each session by ringing a bell symbolically, offers bell-ringing ceremonies to listed companies and other organisations, and hands guests a crystal gong hammer as a keepsake.

Rooms come next. Older exchanges often began in borrowed spaces: the Shanghai Stock Exchange reopened in 1990 in the ballroom of a hotel on the Bund before moving to a purpose-built tower in Pudong. Exchanges also show off their trading floors and technology: Borsa İstanbul lists a renewed trading floor and a primary data centre among its milestones. Exchange buildings themselves, from façades to statues at the entrance, become part of the identity.

Numbers carry the rest. Index names such as the SSE Composite or the BIST 100 work as brands in their own right, quoted daily in news reports and printed on tickers and screens. Listing ceremonies supply the backdrops that newly listed companies use in their own announcements, and cross-border links such as Stock Connect give exchanges a story to tell about reach.

Exchanges also publish a great deal: annual and integrated reports, investor-education material and milestone timelines. This guide uses those documents alongside independent dated sources, and marks clearly where a fact rests only on the exchange’s own account. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the exchanges’ own marks.

From a hotel ballroom to a tower in Pudong.

The exchange left the Bund for Pudong, across the Huangpu River. English Wikipedia says it has been housed since 1997 in the Shanghai Securities Exchange Building, a 26-floor tower designed by WZMH Architects of Toronto that rises 109 metres, with a flagpole adding a further 70; its article on the Astor House Hotel dates the move to 1998.

The exchange also reaches beyond China. It says it helped build the Astana International Exchange in Kazakhstan, whose opening ceremony it lists on 6 July 2018, and its milestones record agreements with exchanges including Euronext and the Japan Exchange Group in 2018. Its English-language site sits at english.sse.com.cn. In prose the full name matters: the short form “SSE” is shared with unrelated companies, including a British energy group.

For a design guide, the Shanghai Stock Exchange shows how an exchange can carry a long local history through a break of four decades and present itself again in a hotel ballroom and then a purpose-built tower. Compare HKEX, its partner in Stock Connect, and the Japan Exchange Group. For this guide we use lacquer red, ink, granite grey and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Shanghai Stock Exchange’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.