Immaculate Heart Church on Nu Jiang Road

The Immaculate Heart Church on Nujiang Road (怒江路圣母圣心堂, Nùjiānglù Shèngmǔ Shèngxīn Táng), at 624 Nujiang Road in Putuo District, is the successor to a village church whose buildings were torn down in 1978. Its story is mostly one of disappearance and slow rebuilding.

What was the old church at Wangjiache?

The Putuo District Gazetteer says the Immaculate Heart Church began in 1849, when a Shanghai priest named Shen Liang bought 1,800 square metres at Wangjiache (王家车), in what was then the farmland of Zhenru. It had five main rooms and thirteen annexes and opened formally in 1857 with 81 parishioners. By around 1909 the congregation was about two hundred. The Japanese army burned the main hall during the war, though services continued, and the congregation repaired and enlarged the church in 1948.

Why did it vanish?

After 1949 the church was repaired in 1952, and about a thousand worshippers came to Mass. Religious activity stopped in 1959. The rooms were then used as homes, lent to a nursery in 1970 and pulled down in 1978, when farm housing was built on the site.

How did the congregation come back?

From December 1989 parishioners met in a home at 24 North Lane, Wangjiache, where Fr Ai Zuzhang (艾祖章, Ài Zǔzhāng) of Xujiahui said Mass once a month. In 1991 the diocese authorised a new Immaculate Heart church on over 1,300 square metres in Changzheng township, and it raised 200,000 yuan for the project in the early 1990s. The Religion Gazetteer’s list of open churches names an Immaculate Heart Church at 624 Nujiang Road, which this entry treats as the result; the gazetteers do not state the opening date.

What to look for

On the gate, a plate gives the church’s English name as “The Immaculate Heart Church on Nu Jiang Road”, with a letterbox beneath. The church replaces a village hall that once drew a thousand worshippers at Mass.