Zhabei District Children's Palace: the second school of the 1960s

Basic facts

This section is about one half of a single building. The other half is the Science and Technology Station — two doors, one building, the same children.

One building, a place for two kinds of children

No. 151 Zhijiang West Road, a six-storey block.

In an age when "there was not much to do for entertainment", this building was something special to the children of Zhabei: it was not like a school — no exams, no uniform; nor like a park — you could go there in the rain.

It was called a Children's Palace.

Inside there were more than twenty classrooms, a small theatre, a dance studio. At weekends and in the winter and summer holidays children came here from every school, to learn dancing, singing, drawing, the accordion.

Schools did not teach these things, and families could not teach them either. In that era a child of an ordinary working-class family who wanted to touch a piano, or to stand on a real stage, had almost nowhere else to go.

What the Children's Palace taught

The Palace's strength was the arts. In the language of the day it was the arts-leaning half of "an out-of-school educational institution joining science and art in one".

The classes it offered, roughly by category:

"Examination centre" sounds ordinary now; at the time it was a big thing — it meant that a child of Zhabei could sit, in this building in his own district, for a certificate recognised nationwide, without travelling to the city centre.

The small theatre was the heart of the building. Children rehearsed here, performed here, and here heard applause from an audience for the first time. For many people the first idea of what "a stage" was came from this little theatre.

In that era a district had only one such place

To understand the weight of the Palace, one has first to understand where a child of Zhabei in the 1960s could go.

Almost nowhere.

• housing at home was tight, several people to one room;
• what there was to play in the lanes was marbles, flipping picture cards, rolling iron hoops, knee-bumping "cockfights";
• to see a film you went to Xinghuo Cinema, and the ticket had to be saved up for;
• the park was Zhabei Park, and going there meant a bus ride.

The Palace was the only place that was "indoors, free (or very cheap), and had a teacher to teach you".

It answered not only "there is nowhere to go" but one other thing: it let a child find out what he could do. A child who could only roll an iron hoop in the lanes might walk into the dance studio and discover for the first time that his body could make a beautiful movement; a child who had never touched a keyboard might sit down at the organ and discover for the first time that he had an ear.

That is what "a second school" means — not extra coaching, but discovery.

From the 1960s to the 1970s: palace and station

Some ten years after the Palace went up, another institution grew inside the same building: the Zhabei District Youth Science and Technology Station (1970s).

One leaned to the arts, the other to science and technology. Children called them "the Palace" and "the Station", and chose by what they wanted to learn: to dance, the Palace; to build a model boat, the Station.

Two doors, two kinds of children, one building.

Later the two merged into the Station-Palace — both names kept, as if unwilling to let either half vanish.

The story of the Station half is told in another section.

What one classroom can leave behind

This section has no chronology.

No war, no demolition, no monument. The Palace was simply there; the building may have been refurbished and the classes may have changed, but it was doing a very slow thing: year after year, taking children into a classroom and teaching them a little of something they could not learn elsewhere.

What kind of place does a district need?

It needs factories, hospitals, schools. These are easy to understand, because they answer "must". But there is another kind of place, which answers "may" —

You may learn to dance. You may learn to play the fiddle. You may stand on a stage.

The building put up at No. 151 Zhijiang West Road in the 1960s did exactly this. It produced nothing except the words "I can".

Connections

• Sub-district：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict
• See also：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict, Zhabei District Youth Science and Technology Station, Zhabei Tourism Vocational School, Xinghuo Cinema, Zhabei Park

Sources: that the Zhabei District Children's Palace was built in the 1960s and the Zhabei District Youth Science and Technology Station in the 1970s, and that the two later merged as the "Station-Palace"; that the institutions stood at No. 151 Zhijiang West Road (a house number of 249 is also recorded, see below), that the building has six storeys, a total area of about 3,250 square metres and more than twenty classrooms, that it contains a small theatre, a dance studio and an audio-visual classroom, that it offered training in dance, choral singing, piano, accordion, drama, fine art and craft, and that it housed an examination centre of the Beijing Dance Academy, a Shanghai examination centre of the China Academy of Art and a photography training point, are based on the Baidu Baike entry "Shanghai Zhabei District Station-Palace", the same entry on 360 Baike, the entry "Shanghai Zhabei District Station-Palace" in the Chinese Encyclopaedia, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission's List of Shanghai Youth Activity Centres, Children's Palaces and Science and Technology Stations (2014), and the introduction to the base printed in Passport (Experience Handbook) of Shanghai Pengpu Middle School (Grade B; "the 1960s" and "the 1970s" are summary formulations for which no exact year was found, and are Grade C); one discrepancy over the house number: the Education Commission's list and the Pengpu Middle School introduction both give "No. 151 Zhijiang West Road", while Baidu Baike gives "No. 249 Zhijiang West Road"; this entry records both and chooses neither. The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.