St Therese Church, Hengsha

Hengsha Church (横沙天主堂, Héngshā Tiānzhǔtáng) stands at Fengle village on Hengsha island (横沙岛, Héngshā Dǎo), in the Yangtze estuary east of Chongming. The island is young land, and the church tells how Catholic settlers came with it.

Who brought Catholicism to Hengsha?

The Baoshan gazetteer says Hengsha originally belonged to Chuansha County. In 1890 Catholics from Chongming and Haimen crossed to the island to reclaim land, and they brought the faith with them. By the end of the nineteenth century there were about 300 Catholics and a church. By the 1940s there were about 1,000, with a priest assigned to the island. The Shanghai Religion Gazetteer lists Hengsha among the parishes under the Tangmuqiao deanery of Pudong.

A church washed away

The district gazetteer gives the first church as founded in 1900, as the Church of St Thérèse. Around 1910 a tidal surge destroyed it, and it was rebuilt at Hongqi village on a 6,200 square metre site. Activity stopped in 1957, when the site became a school. It resumed in 1983.

The present church

The two Baoshan gazetteers do not agree about the 1980s. The older county volume says the church was rebuilt in 1984 and still stood at Hongqi village in 1987. The district volume says a new church was built on the present site in 1987, with 815 square metres, of which 529 is the hall and 286 the annexes, for 800 worshippers. The county volume adds that Catholics from the neighbouring island of Changxing also came to it. It was registered in October 1994 with 1,000 Catholics, and in 2005 Hengsha was transferred from Baoshan to Chongming.

What to look for

The church is a modern hall, built in 1987, and it holds no early fabric. What you can read in the layout is the scale: a hall for 800 people with annex buildings, on an island settled only from the 1890s. The setting itself, a flat island whose settlers arrived in the 1890s, is the story.