Tianhou Temple and the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce: A Century at Henan Road Bridge

Basic information

First, remember one address

470 North Suzhou Road — this patch of ground at the north end of the Henan Road Bridge deserves a piece of its own, because three identities are stacked on the one address:

• it is the Tianhou Temple — the largest official-style Mazu temple in Shanghai;
• it is the residence of the Qing envoys — where, before going abroad, Chinese officials stayed and offered sacrifice in Shanghai;
• it is the former site of the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce — one of the most weighty organisations of modern China's industrial and commercial world, which did business from here for decades.

Over more than a century this patch of ground changed from a place that "sent people out to sea" into a place that "spoke for the merchants". It is the stretch of the north bank of Suzhou Creek that most deserves not to be overlooked.

1879: why build a Tianhou Temple in Shanghai

The story begins with "going abroad".

After the 1840s China and the West dealt with each other more and more, and officials began to go beyond the country's borders. In those days the route abroad was essentially by sea, and Shanghai was the largest and earliest treaty port — most of those setting out on missions boarded their ships here.

But the officials met with an awkwardness in Shanghai: by the ideas and the law of the time, an official could not lodge inside the concession (including in the concession's hotels); and the rooms in the walled city of the southern town were cramped. Lodging for long in a guild hall was extremely inconvenient both for the officials and for the local government office that received them.

In 1879 Chonghou, the censor-in-chief who had been ordered to go on a mission to Russia, submitted a memorial, asking to "rebuild the Tianhou Temple in the Shanghai area, and build a residence for the envoys" — that is, to set up a formal reception institution in Shanghai.

The choice of site is interesting: two years earlier (1877) the Qing court had just bought back and dismantled the Wusong Railway — the ground where the first operating railway on Chinese soil had taught its lesson. Feng Junguang, the Su-Song-Tai circuit intendant, bought back along with it the official land that had been intended for railway offices. The newly built envoy residence and Tianhou Temple were set down on this official land.

1884: the Tianhou Temple and the envoy residence completed

In 1884 the Tianhou Temple and the residence of the Qing envoys were completed together, with a combined site of eleven mu, nine fen and three li (about 8,000 m²).

The Tianhou Temple was built with funds raised by the shipping merchants of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, and the Qing court specially granted it an inscribed plaque: "Wanliu Yangjing" — ten thousand streams, all looking up to this mirror. For a temple facing the open sea, no four words could be better.

Its layout was that of a standard great temple: a square on entering, then the stage and the galleries on either side, then the main hall enshrining the Tianhou, and behind the hall a sleeping-palace tower. The halls were lofty and open, carved and painted, and the incense burned very thick.

Why did the sea traders value it so? Because the Tianhou (Mazu) is the deity in charge of safety at sea. Merchants going to sea prayed here for protection, and officials going abroad burned incense here too.

The people who set out from here: the envoy residence

Beside it, the residence of the Qing envoys was the mansion where, in the Qing dynasty, ministers, envoys and special delegations stayed before setting out from Shanghai for the various countries.

The histories record two of the most famous names:

• in 1896 Li Hongzhang went on a mission to the countries of Europe and America — he stayed at the residence before departure and burned incense at the Tianhou Temple;
• in 1905 the five ministers were sent abroad on a tour of inspection at the end of the Qing — they too set out from here.

A stretch of China's road into the world began on this patch of ground. A Mazu temple and an envoy residence were, for that era, China's "gate of the nation".

A "piece of enclave inside the concession"

In 1899 the International Settlement expanded again, and the envoy residence and the Tianhou Temple were drawn into the concession.

What happened next was very particular: before the expansion the Chinese government had signed an agreement with the diplomatic corps — this land remained Chinese government land, outside the judicial and administrative control of the International Settlement. In other words, it became "a piece of enclave inside the concession" (some historical material says its special status was broadly the same as that of Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong).

The specialness of this "enclave" was soon put to use by revolutionaries: to launch marches and rallies in the concession, the crowds would usually gather first on this government land and then enter the concession. So it was with the revolutionaries of the 1911 Revolution, and so it was with the marching columns of the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925.

A piece of government land kept for the sake of "face" ended up as a rallying ground for resisters. The turning points of history often happen in the last places one would expect.

From envoy residence to chamber of commerce: the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce here

After the Qing dynasty ended, the envoy residence, being an official institution of the former dynasty, disbanded of itself. In 1915, with the approval of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, the buildings and the land were taken over for use by the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce.

The Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce — one of the most powerful merchants' organisations in modern China. On this ground it put up its own premises:

• the building was designed by the famous Atkinson & Dallas architectural firm, three storeys of reinforced concrete, and took three years to build;
• the large assembly room on the second floor had no beam above it, and was popularly called the "beamless hall"; it could hold more than 800 people at a time — one of the largest assembly rooms in Shanghai at the time, and the new building's formal name was simply "the assembly-room building";
• around 1920 a gateway was built on North Suzhou Road as the main entrance, with the five big characters "Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce" on it, decorated with four Corinthian columns.

From here the chamber of commerce produced a whole string of "firsts": the first commercial arbitration office, the first draft commercial code, the first goods exhibition hall, the first commercial library, the first Chamber of Commerce Monthly … in 1933 it even took part in the Chicago World's Fair, carrying Chinese goods out to the world.

(The Tianhou Temple was still there. The chamber of commerce made considerable alterations to the envoy residence, but kept the Tianhou Temple — so the place where officials had once burned incense and the "beamless hall" where merchants held their meetings were, for decades, neighbours in the same lane.)

The second half of the Tianhou Temple's life

The Tianhou Temple escaped the fires of war, but it did not escape the changes of the city.

• in the late Qing and early Republic it gradually declined, was at one point taken over by gambling tables, and fell into disorder;
• in the late 1970s, for municipal construction around Henan North Road, the main hall was dismantled and rebuilt in its original form in the Square Pagoda Garden in Songjiang — the "Tianfei Temple" you see in the Square Pagoda Garden today is the main hall of the Shanghai Tianhou Temple itself (listed as a protected cultural relic in 1993, restored in 2002 and its Mazu cultural content recovered);
• the two stone lions at the temple's gate were moved to stand in front of the Yu Garden — people of the old town pass them every day, and may never know where they came from.

And the other half of the story on this patch of ground is still going on:

• in 2017 the development of the Suhe Bay area completed the restoration of the chamber-of-commerce building;
• in 2019 the place was included in Jing'an District's red-tourism route;
• in 2022 pieces of the original fabric of the Tianhou Temple reappeared in the central green space of Suhe Bay — across more than a century, the Tianhou Temple returned, in another form, to the place it set out from.

What to see here today

• 470 North Suzhou Road (at the north end of the Henan Road Bridge): see the "Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce" gateway and the restored building, and read the three layers of story on one patch of ground;
• the Henan Road Bridge and the Suzhou Creek walkway: from here along the creek eastward is the direction of the Waibaidu Bridge, and westward you reach Sihang Warehouse — this is the best stretch of Suhe Bay to walk;
• for a longer look: the "Tianfei Temple" (the main hall of the Tianhou Temple) in the Square Pagoda Garden in Songjiang, and the stone lions in front of the Yu Garden;
• string it together with Sihang Warehouse and the Shanghai Railway Museum and you have a complete "Suhe Bay · Beizhan route".

Connections

• Sub-district：Beizhan Subdistrict
• See also：Sihang Warehouse, Shanghai Railway Museum and the Old North Station, The Former Residence of Wu Changshuo (Jiqing Lane), Beizhan Subdistrict

Sources: the lineage of the Tianhou Temple and the envoy residence follows the CPPCC United Front website's "Talking of the Shanghai Tianhou Temple", the Wikipedia entry "Residence of the Qing envoys", and the introduction "Tianfei Temple" on "Reading Jing'an" (cross-checked against several sources); the lineage and buildings of the chamber of commerce follow the Baidu Baike entry "Former site of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce", the Shanghai Fabu piece "The Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce That Took Part in a World's Fair as Early as 1933", and other public material; the relocation and reappearance follow Songjiang District's cultural-relic protection material and public reports on Suhe Bay. The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.