Beizhan Middle School: A School Named After a Railway Station

Basic facts

This section is about a school, not a sight. The school does not receive visitors; please do not linger or take photographs at the school gate.

First, the name: a district name older than the school

In the name of Beizhan Middle School the two words "Beizhan" are far older than the school itself.

"Beizhan" is the station name of the Shanghai North Station — the old North Station. It is at the same time the name of a locality, and today Zhabei still has a Beizhan Subdistrict.

But it was also once the name of a district. Traces of it remain in the lineage of the primary school in Part One of this book: in 1951 it was called "the Shanghai Beizhan District No. 1 Central Primary School", and only in 1956, along with the district name, did it become "the Shanghai Zhabei District No. 1 Central Primary School".

That is to say: first there was Beizhan District, and afterwards Zhabei District — and Beizhan Middle School was founded only after the district name had been changed.

When the school opened in 1969, Beizhan District had already been gone for thirteen years. Yet it picked the old name up — like an old doorplate left at the school gate.

The opening of this section is precisely a footnote to the sentence that runs through the whole book: the "north" in Zhabei is north of the railway station.

1969: the primary school closed, and a middle school opened on the same ground

The first site of Beizhan Middle School was in fact vacated by others.

In the lineage of Zhabei No. 1 Central Primary School there is an entry:

1969: closed; the site was turned into Beizhan Middle School.

So this middle school was not built on empty ground; it opened by taking over a primary school's building — and the place it took over is No. 199 Kangle Road, where Zhabei No. 1 Central still stands today.

Nine years later things were reversed once more:

1978: reopened, as the Shanghai Zhabei District No. 1 Central Primary School; in the same year approved by the Municipal Education Bureau as a district-run key primary school.

The primary school came back, and the middle school had to give way. Beizhan Middle School moved away from Kangle Road, and the site recorded in the sources thereafter is No. 830 Haining Road.

A school's site often says more about its period than its name does. In 1969 the primary school made way for the middle school; in 1978 the middle school made way back for the primary school. Those nine years of give and take are what this school looked like at the very beginning.

No. 830 Haining Road: one house number that housed several schools

No. 830 Haining Road is not a "clean" plot of land. It is a well-known school site of old Shanghai.

A school founded in 1912 and merged away by 1998, a middle school founded only in 1969, a nine-year school set up in 1995 — all of them have come and gone through this one house number.

In the years of the War of Liberation Xiangdong Middle School was also one of the underground activity strongholds of the CCP in Shanghai, and was called the "bulwark of democracy". So No. 830 is half the sound of reading, and half something else.

Two things must be owned up to here:

1. The site of Nanyang Girls' Middle School is variously given. Official promotional material of Jing'an District says the Nanyang Girls' Middle School site was in the neighbourhood of Xizang North Road and Kaifeng Road (today's Jing'an Joy City); while several encyclopaedias say No. 830 Haining Road was its old site. A school that ran for more than eighty years had more than one building, and the two accounts need not contradict each other — but this book can go no further, and will not allot rooms for them.
2. The exact start and end years of Beizhan Middle School and Xiangdong Middle School at No. 830, this book has not found. All that can be certain is this one thing: in 1998 Xiangdong Middle School moved away from No. 830; and in a directory of around 2000, Beizhan Middle School's address was No. 830 Haining Road.

There is another account: before 1943, No. 830 was the old site of the International Settlement's Hicks Police Station. This appears in only one personal reminiscence, a lone piece of evidence, doubtful, and is recorded here for reference.

The Huochetou Stadium: the railway system's own ground

This piece is about Beizhan Middle School, but to say how Zhabei's "railway families" lived you cannot get around a stadium.

It is called the Shanghai Huochetou Stadium, at No. 955 Gonghexin Road.

The name "Huochetou" is itself a piece of institutional history. In the 1950s the national railway system built sports grounds named "Huochetou" as sports venues of the railway workers' own. And the occasion for this goes back even earlier than the grounds:

In the autumn of 1951 the Ministry of Railways held a national railway football tournament in Beijing. The Shanghai Railway Administration team took part and won the championship among the teams inside the Pass (outside the Pass, because the railways were developed, several teams were organised separately). Yet at that time the railway workers still had no sports or fitness venue of their own.

There were results, but no ground — and that is how this stadium in Shanghai came to be:

What it served was not only athletes. The stadium was open to railway workers and their families; the big competitions of the Shanghai Railway Administration and the former Shanghai Railway Sub-Bureau were all held here; after the rebuilding it also arranged training and competitions for the relevant municipal and district schools and sports schools, and received foreign teams such as the Korean railway football team and the Japanese National Railways football team. Beside two steel rails there also came men like Qu Bo, a player of the national football team.

Later still, it took on several big events along with the city:

• In May 1993, when the East Asian Games were held in Shanghai for the first time, this became a training venue for the football and weightlifting events;
• In July 2013, on the basis of the stadium, the Shanghai Huochetou Sports, Culture and Leisure Theme Park was set up, covering nearly 25,000 square metres;
• In 2022, for the 17th Shanghai Municipal Games, it hosted all the matches of Group C and some of the matches of Group B in the baseball event.

And its most famous "exhibit" is a real locomotive.

At the main gate stands a steam locomotive with "Jianshe 957" on its front — "Jianshe" is its class; the engine stands on two rails, weathered by wind and sun, some parts already rusted. Not far away several green-painted carriages have been converted into offices, screened by the shop signs and not easily noticed without a careful look.

A steam locomotive hauling green-painted passenger carriages was once one of the most classic images of China's railways. Today steam locomotives are basically gone; to see one at the gate of a stadium is nostalgia — and aptly named.

Today, coming out of Exit 1 of Zhongshan North Road Station on Metro Line 1 and walking about 680 metres, you can see this black locomotive under the elevated road from afar. The ground now has 1 standard football pitch, 1 400-metre standard running track, 1 silicone-PU basketball court, 1 five-a-side caged football pitch, 1 badminton hall (6 courts), and 1 standard rostrum and a spectator stand of 1,619 seats. It is all year round the main venue of the workers' sports meets held by the successive administrations of the Shanghai Railway Administration, and a place for Shanghai's running clubs and football lovers to work out.

A closing word

The relation of this piece to the ones before it is worth pointing out.

The author of this book did not study at this middle school. The one who studied there is his father.

So this piece is unlike the previous three: Zhabei No. 1 Central and Xinzhong were classrooms the author himself sat in; the locomotive depot was the yard where he was born; while Beizhan Middle School is a place-name he never entered, yet has always been hearing.

As for his father's few years in that building — this book has no material, and does not intend to speak for him.

All that can be written for him are the parts outside that can be verified:

• his middle school was called "Beizhan" — that was the name of a railway station, and also of a district that has since been abolished;
• the school was at No. 830 Haining Road, a house number through which several schools came and went;
• and the place where the children of "railway families" played football and held sports meets was called "Huochetou".

A middle school, a stadium: neither name is a formal one — one comes from a railway station, the other from a locomotive.

In Zhabei, even the characters on a school gate come from the railway.

Sources: the change of Beizhan Middle School in 1969 from the old site of Zhabei No. 1 Central Primary School, and the primary school's reopening in 1978, are based on the lineage page of the official website of Zhabei No. 1 Central Primary School (now the Shanghai Jing'an District Zhabei No. 1 Central Primary School), the same source already used in this book's piece on Zhabei No. 1 Central Primary School; the renaming of "Beizhan District" to "Zhabei District" (1951/1956) is based on the same lineage page; the move of Xiangdong Middle School (descended from the Nanyang Women's Normal School of 1912, reorganised as Nanyang Girls' Middle School in 1927, and renamed under its present name around 1966) in 1998 from No. 830 Haining Road to No. 48 Menggu Road and its merger into Xinzhong Middle School's junior division is based on the school profile of Shanghai Xiangdong Middle School (reproduced from the same source on several platforms); Beizhan Middle School's address being No. 830 Haining Road is based on the unofficial directory A Directory of Ordinary Middle Schools in Zhabei District before 2000 and a Shanghai middle-school telephone directory (both Grade C); that No. 830 Haining Road was the old site of Nanyang Girls' Middle School and later the headquarters of Tanggu School is based on the "Tanggu School" entries in Kuaidong Baike, Hudong Baike and Youxiao.com (Grade C); the account that the Nanyang Girls' Middle School site was in the neighbourhood of Xizang North Road and Kaifeng Road is based on the official route description of Jing'an District's "Tongzhou Suhe" City Walk (Grade B); the account that No. 830 was once the site of the Hicks Police Station is quoted from the Sina blog Returning to Primary School (2018, personal reminiscence, Grade C, a lone piece of evidence, doubtful); all the lineage data of the Huochetou Stadium (the football tournament of 1951, the preparations in 1956, the completion in 1957, the damage in the Cultural Revolution, the decision to rebuild in 1978, the start of work in July 1980, the completion in December 1986, the facilities of the two phases and the spectator capacities) are based on the website of the People's Government of Jing'an District, Shanghai, "Jing'an's Old Stadium Was Once a Training Venue of the East Asian Games" (1 July 2020) and "This 'Jianshe 957' Carries the Sports Memories of Several Generations of Shanghai" (12 October 2022); the training venue of the 1993 East Asian Games, the theme park of 2013 and the baseball matches of the 2022 Municipal Games are based on the above two articles and "Following the Map to Check In · the Shanghai Huochetou Stadium" (Toutiao "Shanghai Sports", 5 September 2024); the reception of the Korean railway football team and the Japanese National Railways football team, today's facilities, and their "daily management by Shanghai Xintiejin Materials Co., Ltd." are based on the Baidu Baike and Hudong Baike entries "Shanghai Huochetou Stadium" (Grade C). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.