Sun Yat-sen's Former Residence

Sun Yat-sen’s Former Residence (上海孙中山故居, Shànghǎi Sūn Zhōngshān Gùjū) is a two-storey house at 7 Xiangshan Road where Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, Sūn Zhōngshān), founder of the Chinese republic, lived from 1918, and where his widow Soong Ching-ling (宋庆龄, Sòng Qìnglíng) stayed on until 1937. It was in the first batch of national protected sites in 1961 and has been open as a museum since 1988.

The house stands on what was Rue Molière (莫利爱路, Mòlì’ài Lù) in the French Concession, where it was No. 29. In 1918 a group of overseas Chinese in Canada bought it for Sun, who until then had been renting in Shanghai; he moved in on 26 June that year after returning to the city. The building is a south-facing villa with walls clad in small pebbles and a square lawn in front. The national register dates it to 1919; the city’s housing authority says it was built between 1910 and 1918.

Sun wrote here in the years after 1918, completing Sun Wen’s Theory (《孙文学说》) and his industrial plan for China (《实业计划》). The house also saw the meetings that led to the first alliance between the Nationalists and the Communists. The Comintern envoy Maring called on Sun here in 1922, Li Dazhao visited, and in 1923 Sun and the Soviet envoy Adolf Joffe issued their joint declaration. In November 1924, on his way north to Beijing, Sun held a tea for Shanghai journalists in the house. It was his last visit; he died in Beijing on 12 March 1925.

Soong Ching-ling lived on here for twelve years. The house became her base for receiving writers and activists; on 17 February 1933 she hosted George Bernard Shaw here, at what one participant later described as, in effect, a meeting of the China League for Civil Rights. She left for Hong Kong when fighting reached Shanghai in 1937, leaving the furniture with relatives and friends; it came back after the war. In 1943 the street was renamed Xiangshan Road and the house became No. 7.

In 1945 Soong gave the house to the government as a permanent memorial to Sun. The Shanghai municipal government took it over in 1949, and on 4 March 1961 the State Council placed it in the first batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level, as entry no. 9.

The house opened to the public on 14 March 1988. Most of the furniture is original and was arranged according to Soong’s recollection of the rooms in the 1920s and 1930s. The ground floor holds the sitting and dining rooms; upstairs are the study, bedroom, a small lounge and an inner balcony, with Sun’s books and maps on display. A seated bronze of Sun, unveiled on 25 September 2001, replaced an earlier standing figure from the 1930s on the lawn.

The building was restored in 2005 and again in 2015–16, and a maintenance campaign completed in 2025 repaired the pebble walls, the glass-chip terrazzo details, the roof and the wooden doors and windows. The museum is run by the Shanghai Sun Yat-sen and Soong Ching-ling Cultural Relics Administration Committee, which also manages Soong’s later home on Huaihai Middle Road.