The Former Site of the General Headquarters of the Shanghai Workers' Pickets: A Stele on a School Campus

Basic information

This book's second piece in Part Three has written about the Oriental Library - that piece tells its life as a library, and the battle of 1927 in which it was "besieged but not stormed, so the books were saved". This piece is about the site itself: its house number, its stele, its campus, and what you see standing before the stele today.

One: First, Be Clear: This Site Is Now Inside a School

584 Baoshan Road is now the site of Shanghai Shibei Vocational High School.

Take care not to mix it up with other schools:

• it is not Shibei Middle School (365 Yongxing Road, founded in 1915);
• it is not the No. 60 High School (323 Qingyun Road);
• there are many schools in that area, but this plot is Shibei Vocational High School.

On the campus there are two things connected with 1927:

1. the monument to the "Former Site of the General Headquarters of the Shanghai Workers' Pickets" - erected by the Shanghai Municipal People's Government on 4 April 2014;
2. the "Historical and Cultural Corridor" on the boundary wall - built by Baoshan Road Subdistrict, using carvings and pictures to introduce the red sites on Baoshan Road.

A vocational high school campus is at the same time a municipal cultural relic protection unit. Students walk past the stele every day, to class, to play ball, and home again.

Two: 1977: First the "Location" Was Recognised

On 7 December 1977 the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee announced a batch of "memorial sites", and this was one of them, under the name:

The General Headquarters of the workers' pickets in the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers (the former Oriental Library)

The address registered at the time was 560 Baoshan Road, Zhabei District.

Announced in the same batch were the Huzhou Guild Hall (the former site of the Shanghai General Trade Union), the April 12 bloodshed site at the junction of Baoshan Road and Hongxing Road, and the "site of the Shanghai General Trade Union in the early May Thirtieth Movement" at No. 2 Baoshan Li, Baoshan Road.

The very category of "memorial site" says something - the Shanghai local gazetteer added a special note after that list:

A memorial site means the original building has been destroyed or its original appearance greatly changed, and a stele is erected to commemorate it.

In other words: from 1977 onwards the authorities acknowledged this place was worth remembering, but there was no building left to point to.

Three: 2014: A Stele Was Erected

On 4 April 2014 the Shanghai Municipal People's Government did two things:

• it announced this site as a Shanghai municipal cultural relic protection unit, no. S8(JN)-05, with the address given as 584 Baoshan Road;
• it erected the monument to the "Former Site of the General Headquarters of the Shanghai Workers' Pickets" on the campus of Shanghai Shibei Vocational High School, designating the school as a Shanghai municipal cultural relic protection unit.

According to the scope-of-protection document issued later, the protected area of this site is:

"a certain extent of environmental space around the lawn where the marker stele stands".

That sentence is plain, and it is exact. What is protected is not a building - the building was gone in 1932 - what is protected is a lawn and the stele standing on it.

The smallest unit of a municipal cultural relic protection unit is sometimes just a lawn.

Four: No. 584 and No. 560

Looking up this former site, one sees two house numbers:

They are not two places. The Oriental Library's original site was in the area of Baoshan Road and East Baoxing Road; after the building was destroyed in 1932, the plot was divided, roads were altered and house numbers renumbered, and the 1977 registration used No. 560 while the 2014 announcement used No. 584.

This book records both versions. To go there, look for 584 Baoshan Road (Shibei Vocational High School).

Five: March 1927, What Happened in This Building

This section gives only the briefest account; the full story is in the second piece in Part Three.

On 21 March 1927 the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers began, and the final battle was concentrated in Zhabei, where the main force of the Zhili-Shandong allied army of the warlord troops stationed in Shanghai lay. The five-storey reinforced-concrete block of the Oriental Library became an excellent strongpoint for the defenders.

To keep the library from damage, Zhou Enlai went in person to reconnoitre the ground and ordered the workers' pickets to besiege without assault, so as to break the defenders' morale; someone suggested that if it could not be taken they should simply set fire to the building, and he would not agree - "the library holds many documents, very precious ones; we must not destroy it".

At noon on 22 March, the defenders, with no help coming, tried to escape by the back gate and were all taken prisoner by the armed workers. The Oriental Library was taken, and not one book in the building was lost.

At once, the General Headquarters of the workers' pickets moved into the Oriental Library, and Zhou Enlai directed from here the assault on the North Railway Station. At six in the afternoon on 22 March, the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers was declared a complete victory.

From March to April 1927, the Commercial Press Staff Club inside the library remained in use as the General Headquarters.

A library, in the last five years of its life, did two things in turn: it held 460,000 volumes, and it directed an uprising.

Six: The Books Are Gone, the Stele Remains

In the January 28 Incident of 1932 the Oriental Library was destroyed by Japanese shellfire, and its 463,000 volumes were burned. This was the most painful loss in China's modern cultural history, told in full in the second piece in Part Three.

So this site carries two layers of memory:

When the stele was erected, the building had been gone for forty-two years.

Standing today on the campus of Shibei Vocational High School, what one sees is a lawn, a memorial stele, a teaching building and students coming and going. No five-storey block, no bookshelves, not one book from those years.

Yet the fact that "this was once the General Headquarters" has lived on to the present by means of one stele.

Seven: Why It Deserves a Piece of Its Own

Because it is the one of this group of red sites most easily "passed by on the way".

People going to Baoshan Road mostly look first for the Huzhou Guild Hall and the Commercial Press; the name of the Oriental Library often appears as a section inside the piece on the Commercial Press.

Yet in 2014 the municipal government gave it a protection number of its own (S8(JN)-05) and erected a stele of its own.

One number and one stele mean this: this is not an appendix to the story of the Commercial Press, but a separate position that needs to be remembered on its own.

And the way it is remembered is unusual - on the campus of a middle school. Memorial steles elsewhere face the road; this one faces the playground. Those who see it every day are teenage students, not tourists.

Connections

• Sub-district：Baoshan Road Subdistrict
• See also：Baoshan Road Subdistrict, The Commercial Press and the Oriental Library, The Former Site of the Shanghai General Trade Union, Zhabei Tourism Vocational School, Shanghai Railway Station, 5. A District Is Born, and Devastated

Sources: the former site of the General Headquarters of the workers' pickets in the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers (the former Oriental Library) is at 584 Baoshan Road (originally at the junction of Baoshan Road and East Baoxing Road); from March to April 1927 the Commercial Press Staff Club inside the Oriental Library served as the uprising's General Headquarters; on 7 December 1977 the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee announced it as a Shanghai municipal memorial site, with the address recorded as 560 Baoshan Road, Zhabei District; on 4 April 2014 the Shanghai Municipal People's Government announced it as a Shanghai municipal cultural relic protection unit (S8(JN)-05, 584 Baoshan Road), and erected the monument to the "Former Site of the General Headquarters of the Shanghai Workers' Pickets" on the campus of Shanghai Shibei Vocational High School, with the protected area defined as "a certain extent of environmental space around the lawn where the marker stele stands"; Baoshan Road Subdistrict built the "Historical and Cultural Corridor" on the school's boundary wall; the account that in March 1927 Zhou Enlai ordered a siege without assault and opposed setting fire to save the books, that after the Oriental Library was taken on 22 March the General Headquarters moved in and directed the assault on the North Railway Station, and that at six that afternoon the uprising was victorious, as well as the facts that the Oriental Library was built in 1924, held 463,000 volumes and was destroyed in the January 28 Incident of 1932, follow the Jing'an District People's Government's "The Search Begins with the Monument to the 'Former Site of the General Headquarters of the Shanghai Workers' Pickets' on the Campus", "Carry on the Red Gene and Strive to Be a New Person of the Times", the Jing'an District People's Government's "Red Culture on the Doorstep: 6 Routes to See All of Red Jing'an", the Shanghai Local Chronicles Office's "List of Memorial Sites in Shanghai" and its note that "a memorial site means the original building has been destroyed ... and a stele is erected to commemorate it", 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 Shangguan News's "It Was Once the 'First Library of Asia'" (Grade B); both versions, No. 584 and No. 560, are recorded without choosing between them; "the smallest unit is a lawn" and "two layers of memory" are the author's own synthesis, marked Grade C. See Appendix 4 for the full bibliography.