Looking north from the Sichuan Road Bridge where the Suzhou River flows slowly, the first building you can see is the Shanghai General Post Office Building. It not only bears witness to the historical vicissitudes of the postal industry in the past century, but also the largest postal building still in use in China. Today we go back to the days when the carriages were far away and the letters were very slow to read the story of the building's past.
Shanghai General Post Office Building
The Shanghai General Post Office Building is located at 276 North Suzhou Road.
The building was designed by The British Merchant Sijiusheng & Co. and built by Yu Hongji Construction Factory, laying the foundation stone in December 1922 and completing in November 1924. The total construction cost of the building is about 3.2 million yuan in silver dollars, and the construction area is 25,294 square meters.
▲ The General Post Office building, which was completed in 1924
The Shanghai General Post Office Building is a masterpiece of Eclectic architectural forms in Europe. Reinforced concrete frame structure, one underground and four above ground. U-shaped plane, circled in the southeast corner, is the center of the composition. On both sides are the main façade, with simplified Corinthian column columns that run through three floors. At the corner is topped by a clock tower that crowns the Baroque dome in the Italian style popular in the 17th century. On each side of the bell tower is a group of three sculptures. One group is a model of transportation and communication cable for each person, symbolizing the development of transportation and communications such as railway, maritime and post and telecommunications. Another group of centerers is Mercury, the merchant god of Roman mythology, who is god's messenger in mythology, embodying postal communications. On its left and right sides is the god of love, which means that postal communication is for people to communicate their feelings.
▲ The atrium inside the General Post Office building
▲Roof bell tower and sculptures
The business hall on the second floor of the Postal Building covers an area of 1200 square meters, which is spacious and bright and magnificent, known as the "first hall in the Far East".
▲The business hall known as the "First Hall of the Far East"
The Shanghai General Post Office Building is the largest and earliest postal landmark building still in use in China. It is not only a witness to the history of China's postal services, but also creates good material conditions for the development of China's modern postal industry. There is now a Postal Museum.
▲The exhibition area on the first floor of the Postal Museum
▲The exhibition area on the second floor of the Postal Museum
On September 25, 1989, the Shanghai General Post Office Building was listed as an excellent modern building in Shanghai and a municipal cultural relics protection unit. On November 20, 1996, the General Post Office building was announced as a national key cultural relics protection unit.
The General Post Office Building has witnessed the vicissitudes of Shanghai in the past hundred years, and it itself contains many memories of time, many stories have occurred here, and it has added a strong sense of humanity to it, which makes people reminisce.
The building has been restored and renewed
In 1999, a two-year-long restoration of the building began. The postal building was renovated in order to repair as old as possible and restore the original appearance of this magnificent old building. Before the start of construction, we consulted the drawings, old photos and text materials of the building left by the Shanghai Postal Archives, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Nanjing Second Historical Archive, etc.; found the employees who entered the General Post Office in the 1940s to recall the layout and function of the building; also invited relevant experts to conduct a comprehensive "physical examination" of the structure of the building, and asked the teachers and students of the Art Department to restore and peel off the plaster roof that had been originally painted white in the building.
▲The restored "cream cake" type plaster ceiling
The restoration process has not been smooth sailing. Because the postal building has a basement, the water in the basement causes some steel rust and concrete carbonization, affecting the structure of the building. How to reinforce these reinforcements and concrete? One is the traditional solution of hitting steel plates, similar to "patching" the building, the price is cheaper; the other is reinforced with carbon fiber, and a thin sheet of paper-thick carbon fiber can play a role in reinforcement, which was a new material at the time, and the price was nearly 10 times more expensive than the former. After much discussion, the expensive but easier carbon fiber restoration scheme to maintain the original appearance of the building was adopted.
In addition, the mosaic pattern of large areas of floor tiles in the "First Hall of the Far East" has also been destroyed. According to the pattern and material of the old floor that has been preserved in the building, the floor tiles that are consistent with the original floor tile pattern are specially customized.
Today, whether it is a large area of flowers and a sleek mosaic floor tile floor in the "First Hall of the Far East", a business counter railing decorated with a copper ear of wheat, or a copper chandelier hanging from the ceiling, it is no different from the "First Hall of the Far East" presented in the archives of that year, showing a dignified and elegant atmospheric beauty.
▲ Counter railing restored according to old photos
On the spiral staircase at the entrance of North Suzhou Road, the copper carvings and the copper anti-slip strips on the stairs are still old objects from nearly a hundred years ago. The multi-headed chandelier on the ceiling, in addition to replacing a few bulbs, is still the one installed in 1924. The pink-pink-green gypsumboard ceiling pattern known as the "cream cake" that surrounds the chandelier is stripped from layers of white paint that were later added and repainted according to the color of the time.
▲ The staircase nearly a century ago
The story of the building
When the building was completed, the fourth floor was occupied by senior foreign employees and their families. Zoya, an American, came to Shanghai in the 1930s with her father, who was working at shanghai post at the time, and lived in the building for 14 years.
▲ A photo of Zoya living in the building
In 2005, after learning about the establishment of the Shanghai Postal Museum through the Los Angeles newspaper in the United States, she donated her old photos and precious stamps that she had collected for many years to the museum. In April 2006, Zoya, who was nearly eighty years old, was invited to revisit the postal building and returned to her "postal hometown", reminiscing about her beautiful adolescence and reuniting with her childhood friends more than 60 years later.
▲ In 2006, Zoya revisited the building and visited the Postal Museum
Building punch point
Rental mailbox 1741
The building also witnessed the glorious course of Revolution, Reform and Construction of Shanghai Post. It records important events in the history of Shanghai Post.
Located at the corner of Tiantong Road, North Sichuan Road, the underground floor of the building was originally a mailbox room, with a large area, thousands of mailboxes, for commercial banks and individuals to rent. From 1938 to 1945, the underground party of the post office rented box No. 1741 for secret communication, which was used to send progressive books and periodicals, accept party documents and mail sent from the base area of northern Jiangsu. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, P.O. Box 1741 continued to be used to receive mail sent from the northern Jiangsu base area, Yan'an, Hong Kong and other places.
The mailbox is currently on display in the exhibition hall on the second floor of the Postal Museum.
Gun holes in the window glass of Room 332
If you have seen the movie "Battle of Shanghai", you will definitely be impressed by the General Post Office building. In the spring of 1949, on the eve of dawn in Shanghai, the Chinese People's Liberation Army launched a campaign to liberate Shanghai. In order to protect the building and the post office from destruction, the underground party general branch of the Shanghai Post Office of the Communist Party of China mainly adopted the strategy of persuasion and surrender, and after all aspects of work, finally won the victory in the struggle to protect the bureau, and finally except for one or two bullet holes, the Shanghai Post Building was almost intact and returned to the hands of the people, without losing a single piece of mail, damaging a piece of equipment and losing a single archive. Now when you walk into Room 332 of the General Post Office building, you can still see a gun hole in the window glass.
▲ Gun holes left on the glass of room 332 of the building
Shanghai Postal Museum
Opening hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday (9:00-17:00, last admission at 16:00, national holidays will be announced separately)
Museum entrance: Wednesday and Thursday please take 250 North Suzhou Road, Saturday, Sunday and holidays please take 395 Tiantong Road
Museum open area: Wednesday and Thursday open the second floor exhibition area, Saturday, Sunday and holidays open the second floor exhibition area and the first floor atrium exhibition area
Admission: Free
Best photography location
Sichuan Road Bridge
Zhapu Road Bridge
South Suzhou Road
Source: Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, Shangguan News
Editors: Ruan Tianlin, Wu Weijia
Source: Shanghai Release
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