Dajing Pavilion

Dajing Pavilion (大境阁, Dàjìng Gé) is a temple pavilion built on the only surviving stretch of the wall that once enclosed Shanghai’s old walled city. The main hall stands partly on the wall itself, so a visit gives you both a Daoist temple and a short section of the city’s defences.

Shanghai county built the wall in 1553 to defend against pirate raids, and put four arrow platforms on its north side. In the Wanli reign a temple to Guandi (the deified general Guan Yu) was built on one of them, the Dajing platform. The main building was rebuilt as a three-storey pavilion in 1815, and in 1836 an archway inscribed “Dajing” was added, which gave the pavilion its present name. It burned in 1853 and was soon rebuilt. It was damaged by Anglo-French forces in the Second Opium War, rebuilt in 1865 and repaired again in 1892.

In 1912 most of the county wall was demolished to make way for a ring road, but the stretch around Dajing Pavilion was kept. After 1949 the pavilion was first used by Daoists as a tea-gathering place, and in the 1960s it became a factory workshop. It was listed as a municipal protected cultural relic in 1959 under the name Dajing Guandi Temple, and listed again in 1984 together with the wall as the Shanghai Ancient City Wall and Dajing Taoist Temple. A rebuilding project funded with 9 million yuan finished in April 1995, and the pavilion and the neighbouring wall were then opened to the public.

The entrance is on the inner side of the wall, through an archway inscribed “Dajing”. Steps lead up to the main hall, which honours Guan Yu. Its first floor is on the ground, and the second and third floors sit on the wall and project partly beyond its outer face. An opera stage stands in front of the hall, and a hall to Yuexia Laoren (月下老人), the matchmaker deity, stands to the east. The building also holds a small museum with photographs of old Shanghai.

Sources disagree on the street number: Chinese Wikipedia gives 259 Dajing Road and English Wikipedia gives 239.