The Former Site of the Shanghai General Trade Union: Nineteen Days at the Huzhou Guild Hall

Basic information

This book's sixth piece in Part Three has written about the Huzhou Guild Hall - that piece set it beside Sanzeng Lane and told of "a central organ hidden in a shikumen house". This piece is about the site itself: its house number, its gateway, its stele, its restoration, and what can still be seen today.

One: First It Was a Guild Hall, Not a Trade Union

In 1900 merchants from Huzhou, Zhejiang - Qian Xinzhi, Shen Lianfang and others - raised funds to build a Huzhou Guild Hall in the Huiwen Road area of Zhabei.

What was a guild hall for? Fellow-natives gathering, storing coffins, mediating disputes, and putting up fellow-natives passing through. In those years every native place in Shanghai had its own guild hall, and the Huzhou people's was a large one: covering more than ten thousand square metres, enclosed by a 2.5-metre brick wall, its main gate facing east, with the four characters "Huzhou Guild Hall" carved on the gatehouse plaque; inside, a long passage, and on the right the first building, a five-bay two-storey shikumen house, and further in, single-storey buildings of three courtyards and three halls, along with a stage and side rooms (outbuildings for housing coffins).

A typical native-place guild hall, with nothing whatever to do with revolution.

From 1900 to 1927 it stood quietly for twenty-seven years.

Two: 21 March 1927, It Was Taken

On 21 March 1927 the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers broke out.

The Huzhou Guild Hall became the site of the Zhabei forward command. The workers' pickets, with the help of students from Shanghai University, Fudan University and Jinan University, took the guild hall.

Why attack a guild hall? Because it had a wall, a courtyard, many rooms and a position in the heart of Zhabei, making it a ready-made strongpoint that could be defended.

At six in the afternoon on 22 March, the uprising was declared victorious. Two days later -

Three: 24 March: A Banner Went Up

On 24 March 1927 the Shanghai General Trade Union moved into the Huzhou Guild Hall to work.

Above the entrance hall hung a red banner with white characters reading "Shanghai General Trade Union". On either side of the entrance hall, one room served as a reception room and one as the workers' pickets' guard room; pickets with rifles on their shoulders and belts at their waists stood on both sides, checking the papers and badges of those going in and out.

The main hall and the second hall housed the communications section, the general affairs section, the propaganda department and the organisation department, as well as the editorial office of Pingmin Daily and the Guomin News Agency.

A native-place guild hall became, within a single day, the workers' headquarters of a city.

Four: What Happened in Those Nineteen Days

Those nineteen days were astonishingly dense:

502 unions, 820,000 members - those two numbers remain in the historical record, but what deserves remembering more is that courtyard on the night of 12 April: more than ten thousand people crowded into the open yard of a guild hall, in the rain, refusing to leave.

The next day, the guns sounded on Baoshan Road.

Five: The Gateway Survived

In the January 28 Incident of 1932, Japanese shellfire destroyed the main buildings of the Huzhou Guild Hall. In the same war the Commercial Press, the Oriental Library and Deng Zhongxia's former residence on Baoshan Road were all lost.

Only the brick gateway survived (another account says part of the western side rooms remained).

After the founding of the People's Republic, railway bureau staff dormitories and a teaching building of Shibei Middle School were built on the site one after another. The plot of a guild hall was cut into the fragments of several generations' daily life.

Then came a long "recognising it again":

From "memorial site" to "cultural relic protection unit" to "exhibition ground" took nearly half a century.

Six: Why There Are Several House Numbers

Looking up this former site, one runs into several addresses; they are listed first here, to save a wasted trip:

Nobody wrote it down wrong; it is that the same plot changed house numbers and changed points of reference over ninety years.

The guild hall originally had an east gate (on Huiwen Road) and a north gate (on Zhongxing Road); after the building was destroyed in 1932 and the plot was later divided up for dormitories and school buildings, "which road to count from" became several different accounts.

This book records them all without choosing between them. To go there, look for 828 Zhongxing Road.

Seven: Why This Piece Stands Alone

The Huzhou Guild Hall appears three times in this book: the chronicle treats it as a date in 1927, the sixth piece in Part Three treats it in contrast with Sanzeng Lane, and this piece treats it as a site - from the guild hall of 1900, to the gateway of 1932, to the memorial site of 1977, to the protected unit of 2014, to the exhibition ground of 2025.

A place is not remembered all at once. First people did things here, then war wiped the house away, then people came back half a century later, nailed a plaque to a house number and made a relief on a wall, and only at the end was there a room to tell passers-by about those nineteen days.

Connections

• Sub-district：Baoshan Road Subdistrict
• See also：Baoshan Road Subdistrict, Sanzeng Lane and Huzhou Guild Hall, The Former Site of the General Headquarters of the Shanghai Workers' Pickets, The Site Where Revolutionary Masses Bled and Died in the April 12 Incident, Wang Shouhua, 5. A District Is Born, and Devastated

Sources: the Huzhou Guild Hall was built in 1900 with funds raised by Qian Xinzhi, Shen Lianfang and others, natives of Huzhou, Zhejiang; it stood between 155 and 163 Huiwen Road (the main gate facing east, today 201 Huiwen Road; the north gate on Zhongxing Road, now No. 828), covering about 11,000-13,000 square metres, enclosed by a 2.5-metre brick wall, with three courtyards and three halls, a stage and side rooms; on 21 March 1927, in the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers, the Zhabei forward command was set up here, and the workers' pickets took it with the help of students from Shanghai University, Fudan University and Jinan University; on 24 March the Shanghai General Trade Union moved in, a "Shanghai General Trade Union" banner hung in the entrance hall, and a reception room, a pickets' guard room, a communications section, a general affairs section, a propaganda department and an organisation department were set up, along with the editorial office of Pingmin Daily and the Guomin News Agency; on 25 March Zhao Shiyan held a press conference, on 27 March the Shanghai Workers' Congress elected Wang Shouhua chairman and raised the flag, on 28 March a new standing committee was formed, and by the end of March the union organisations under the General Labour Union numbered 502, with 820,000 members; in the early hours of 12 April KMT troops surrounded the guild hall and seized the workers' weapons, tens of thousands of workers retook it in the rain that day, and that night more than ten thousand workers slept in the open in the courtyard to guard it; in the January 28 Incident of 1932 the building was destroyed by Japanese shellfire, with only the brick gateway surviving (another account says part of the western side rooms); on 7 December 1977 it was announced as a Shanghai memorial site, on 4 April 2014 as a Shanghai municipal cultural relic protection unit (S8(JN)-04, 828 Zhongxing Road), in June 2021 it reopened after restoration and exhibition, and in June 2025 the exhibition ground at the former site of the Shanghai General Trade Union opened to the public; sources include Jiefang Daily - Shangguan News's "Red Marks in Shanghai's Protected Buildings: The Former Site of the Shanghai General Trade Union", "Let's Go and Check In! The Red Headquarters of 94 Years Ago Is Brand New Today!", The Paper's "'Four Histories' Study and Education: Nine Important Places Here in Jing'an", the Shanghai Local Chronicles Office's "List of Memorial Sites in Shanghai", the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism's "Reply Approving the Scope of Protection for the Seventh and Eighth Batches of Major National Cultural Relic Protection Units and Shanghai Municipal Cultural Relic Protection Units (Announced in 2014) ...", and the Baidu Baike entry "Former Site of the Shanghai General Trade Union" (Grade B); the several house numbers are recorded together without choosing between them (828 / near 822 Zhongxing Road, 201 / 155-163 Huiwen Road, the junction of Huiwen Road and Zhongxing Road); "a place is not remembered all at once" is the author's own synthesis, marked Grade C. See Appendix 4 for the full bibliography.