Before We Begin: Places That Sell No Tickets
A category that gets left out
Part Three is about places you can go and see — with an address and a house number, places you can stand in front of.
But Zhabei has many other things that weigh no less than those, yet you cannot get in — and should not.
They are danwei (work units).
Danwei is a word with a certain age to it. In the era of the planned economy, a person's whole life hung almost entirely on one danwei: going to school here, working here, being assigned housing here, seeing the doctor here, retiring from here. Many of Zhabei's danwei have outlived the district of Zhabei itself —
- a primary school that ran for nearly a hundred years, was closed for nine of them, and then reopened;
- a middle school that started from a rented shopfront and ended up as a boarding senior high school covering 152 mu;
- a locomotive depot that stood west of the old North Station, watering, coaling and clearing ash for steam locomotives, and minding their engines for more than seventy years.
They sell no tickets. Walk up to the gate and you will most likely see only a school gate and a nameplate. Yet more than half of Zhabei's modern history happened behind gates like these.
One line of division
This book's Part Three gathers "notable sites" — sights, ruins and memorial places, open to the public. This part gathers "danwei" — schools, hospitals, factories and research institutes, which carry history but are not open to tourists.
There is only one test:
Is it "a place", or "an organisation"? A place can be visited; an organisation can only be understood.
Some things touch both. On the ground of the old North Station yard, what stood there first was an organisation (a locomotive depot), and what stands there today is a place (the railway museum). Such cases are filed by "which it first was", with both stretches of time set out clearly on the page rather than muddled together.
The first batch: three institutions
| # | Institution | Type | Location | Why it is worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zhabei No. 1 Central Primary School | Primary school | No. 199 Kangle Road | founded by Chen Heqin in 1928; one of the first public primary schools in the International Settlement to be founded and managed by the Chinese themselves |
| 2 | Xinzhong Middle School → Xinzhong Senior High School | Middle school | No. 48 Menggu Road → No. 400 Yuanping Road | a school founded by a trade guild, which went from three rented rooms on Tanggu Road to 152 mu on Yuanping Road |
| 3 | Shanghai Railway Locomotive Depot | Railway | west of the old North Station (the Qiujiang Road area) | began in 1905 as an "engine shed", servicing steam locomotives, and from 1978 was the home of the "Zhou Enlai" locomotive |
The author of this book has a connection with all three — he studied at the two schools, and was born at the locomotive depot. So this part will be written with a slight "bias": the sources are still given one by one, but the reading is allowed to be a personal one.
A few reminders
- None of the schools receives visitors. Please do not linger or take photographs at the school gate, disturbing teachers and pupils at their lessons. The locomotive depot is no longer on this ground; the half of the old site that can be entered is the railway museum — please come to it by way of Part Three.
- Names change. In the course of a century a school may have changed its name seven or eight times, and a locomotive depot has gone by three different names. This book consistently uses "the name of the time" and appends a table of its evolution to each entry.
- This category will grow slowly. Zhabei's hospitals, factories and research institutes each have their own story, and this book will add them as it goes.
- There are no illustrations in the book. To see the real thing, go and look for yourself at the address — but remember, one glance from beyond the school gate is enough.
So let us begin with a school that had rented only three rooms.