Holy Trinity Cathedral

Holy Trinity Cathedral (圣三一堂, Shèngsānyī Táng) is a red-brick church on Jiujiang Road, a short walk from the Bund. Shanghai people call it the Red Church. It was built for the British community and is now a Protestant church; Chinese Wikipedia describes it as the oldest surviving Protestant church in the city.

The British first worshipped in their consulate. A small church went up on this site in 1847, on land given by Thomas Beale of the firm Dent & Co. It was poorly built, needed repairs around 1850 to 1851, and was wrecked by a typhoon in 1862. The present church was begun in 1866, when the foundation stone was laid, and dedicated in 1869. Sir George Gilbert Scott, the English Gothic Revival architect, drew the design, but it was too expensive for the Shanghai congregation, and William Kidner (凯德纳) revised it. Chinese Wikipedia gives the cost as 70,000 taels of silver.

The church is built of red brick inside and out, on a Latin-cross plan about 47 metres long and 18 metres wide. Pointed arches run along the walls; only the entrance porch uses a round arch. The windows mix clear and coloured glass, which is usually explained by panes added over the years in memory of individual church members. Because Shanghai’s ground is soft, the builders reportedly drove more than 8,000 timber piles under it.

In 1875 the church was raised to the status of cathedral for the Anglican diocese and was commonly called Holy Trinity Cathedral, although English Wikipedia notes that this was more a habit of speech than a strict fact. A bell tower stood beside it. Chinese Wikipedia dates it to 1893 and English Wikipedia to 1901, so the date is unsettled. For years it was a landmark for ships arriving in Shanghai, before tall buildings of the 1930s overtook it. A boys’ school building on Jiujiang Road was attached to the church; the writer J. G. Ballard went to school there, and it appears in his novel Empire of the Sun.

The British congregation left in the early 1950s. The owners handed the church to the Shanghai government in 1953 and it passed to the Chinese Anglican church. It was one of four churches kept in Huangpu for joint worship in 1958, and was closed in August 1966. The spire was pulled down then, and the building was used for about forty years by district authorities, including as a cinema. It was returned to Christian bodies in 2005 or 2006, depending on the source, and the old school is now the office building of the national Protestant organisations.

The State Council listed it as a national key protected site in 2019. The sources disagree on when it reopened for worship, with one giving 2017 and another December 2022. No official page for visiting arrangements was found, so check access on arrival.