St. Joseph's Church (Yangjingbang)

St. Joseph’s Church (洋泾浜圣若瑟堂, Yángjīngbāng Shèng Ruòsè Táng) is a brick Catholic church at 36 Sichuan South Road, in the Yangjingbang district just south of the Bund area. For decades it was the parish church of the French Concession and its foreign Catholics.

The land is another piece of the compensation the Catholic mission received in the 1840s for its seized church in the Old City. Chinese Wikipedia says the Yangjingbang plot had been the Zhang family’s ancestral hall outside the north gate. A small chapel for foreign residents went up beside the French consulate in 1850, and the present church was begun in April 1860 with a foundation ceremony attended by the French expeditionary commander and the wife of the French minister. It opened in 1861 with the first phase nearly finished.

The sources differ on completion. English Wikipedia says the church was built in 1860-61 by Fr Louis Helot and consecrated in 1862, and calls the style Romanesque with Gothic elements. Chinese Wikipedia says the main work was finished in 1868, holding 1,000 people, with the facade and bell tower completed in 1877.

The building is of brick and timber, faces east, and covers about 1,000 square metres. Its tallest point is the Gothic bell tower, over 30 metres high, with a cross on the spire. Until the 1920s this was the only Catholic church in the French Concession, and the French consul had a reserved seat inside.

In 1950 Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei (龚品梅), the first Chinese bishop of Shanghai, made it his residence. Red Guards closed it in August 1966 and a leather-goods factory took it over. It reopened in 1986, in a compound shared with Sichuan South Road Primary School, and was listed as a Shanghai Excellent Historic Building in 1994.

It is an active parish church. Chinese Wikipedia lists daily morning Mass and Sunday Masses, but no official timetable was found, so check before you go.