Thrills and Wo on Bank of China Building: On a Girder 200 Feet Above the Ground PRECARIOUS perch at the junction of two steel girders near the top of the new Bank of China building, with a whistling wind plucking playfully at one's coat-tails and trousers, and with the knowledge that false step can mean a very swift and unpremeditated descent to the ground twelve or thirteen floors below, gives one an increased sense of respect for the men whose daily task it is to build Shanghai skyscrapers.
Some men are born to such stunts, and apparently like it, otherwise there would not be any steeplejacks; others, like reporters and photographers, have it thrust upon them end are glad to get down to the Bund once more.
Gelling up the first five floors. is sy. One enters a lift in Yuen Ming Yuen Road, and is wafted up at good speed; while this lift looks more Tike a glorified packing ease than anything else, it carries six or seven coolies and heavy pieces of stone fronting up and down all day long und is as smooth running and as rapid 'a8 any of its chtomium-and-
Up one Might of stairs, and a long flat Foot, piled high with bricks, pipes, slabs of Stone and masonry, planks of wood, sand and 2 dozen other things, ie encountered. At the far end of this roof is q lanky, grumbling crane which extends to the top of the front part of the bank building which, when completed, will tower for eighteen stories above the Shang-hal water-front, a fitting monument the skill of the architects and the dignity of this city as the Afth largest the world.
Upward progress now becomes more and more dificult for the lay= man, although the workers seem 10 get about with no sense of handicap whatsoever. To get to the twelfth Moor it Is first necessary to clamber rough, conerete stairs, some of them still in their "forms," with a wary eye on the look-out for pro-Jecting pipes and heavy planks. These stairs end with the tenth floor, and to get to the floor above it Is necessary to stumble up the wooden irms™ themselves.
'A Rude Ladder The eleventh floor, and five more to go, and not a staircase or a lift sight. SULL, there must be a way up, aS men are hammering away right it the top. A hurried search, and rough, splintery Indder about eight we nine feet long is found lying in a corner. A. hatchway in the wooden planks which form the present floor 3 of these upper floors is discovered rear it, andthe ladder, about two feet too short, is placed' in position.
bit of wobbling, a scramble and a and the' twelfth floor is The same procedure, with the same Jadder, gets one up to the thirteenth floor, which ig the last floor at the iniament on which one can walla in any degree of safety, and comfort. The next three "oors"—the word is 9 polite euphemism—are merely a few bleak-looking girders which, no mat-or how broad they may look lying, Jaround in Jinkee Road, seem to have got very' much narrower when they fare one's only means of support 200 feet in the air. The wind seems 10 be three times as strong, (00, us it Was on The Bund, and it was not exactly a zephyr there.
Down below, the streets are fied with busy people and trafic, and no one seems to be the least interested in one's warties. The novice may look straight downward ly with hanging on to the nearest girder till the bank stops birling around, Looking outwards is not so bad, and is rather like being an aeroplane. The whole of the city stretches out in. view, and the Shanghai Ills loom clearly up on the horizon, while the Whangooo River wrigeles lazily out of sight. The bustling roar of the city is lost far the only sounds to break the being the noise of the wind, the whining of the crane cables and a hammering on the floors immediate.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.