Soong Ching-ling's Former Residence

Soong Ching-ling’s Former Residence (上海宋庆龄故居, Shànghǎi Sòng Qìnglíng Gùjū) is the garden house at 1843 Huaihai Middle Road where Soong Ching-ling (宋庆龄, Sòng Qìnglíng), the widow of Sun Yat-sen and later a vice-chairman of the People’s Republic, lived and worked from the late 1940s. It is kept much as she left it, and with Sun Yat-sen’s house on Xiangshan Road it is one of the couple’s two Shanghai homes preserved as museums under the same administration.

The main building dates from 1920. It is a white, nominally three-storey house of brick and timber in a German garden-house manner, with about 700 square metres of floor space. Whoever built it wanted a ship: the chimney is shaped like a ventilator on a deck, and sailing-boat and anchor motifs appear in the windows and blinds. The plot is L-shaped, and the lawn in front of the house is ringed by more than thirty camphor trees that are now over a century old.

Soong moved in after the war, from a smaller house on what is now Taojiang Road. Accounts differ on the date: the Shanghai housing authority gives spring 1949, while the city gazetteer, as cited by Chinese Wikipedia, says the house was allocated to her by a 1948 order and that she arrived in spring 1948. In August 1949 she accepted, in this house, the invitation to travel north to the political consultative conference that set up the new national government, and she was elected a vice-chairman of the Central People’s Government.

For the next decade and more the house doubled as an office. Her visitors here included Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Kim Il-sung. A service wing was added on the west side in 1953 for staff. From 1963 she spent most of her time in Beijing, where she died on 29 May 1981.

Within months of her death the city listed the house as a municipal protected site, on 22 October 1981, and a memorial was formally established that October. It opened to the public in May 1988. On 25 June 2001 the State Council added it to the fifth batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level, recording its significant period as 1948 to 1981.

The house was fully restored in 1990, 2006 and 2018. The last campaign corrected the tilting and uneven settlement of the main building, and the crews deliberately kept a layer of cement render from Soong’s own years rather than stripping it back to the 1920 finish.

The museum is run by the Shanghai Sun Yat-sen and Soong Ching-ling Cultural Relics Administration Committee, the same body that manages Sun Yat-sen’s house on Xiangshan Road. The ground floor holds the entrance hall, sitting room, dining room and studies; the bedrooms and offices are upstairs. Tickets are sold through the museum’s WeChat mini-program, and the museum states that no third party is authorised to sell tickets or guided visits.