The former site of The Jinan Station of the Jinpu Railway was originally located in the northeast corner of the former commercial port in Tianqiao District, Jinan City, Shandong Province, which is customarily called the "Old Railway Station" by the people of Jinan, and began construction in 1908 and was completed and put into use in 1912, the architect of the building was designed by the famous German architect Hermann Fischer, whose design blended the Gothic style and the German Baroque architectural style. The railway station once formed a magnificent German-style architectural complex with the surrounding Jinan Railway Bureau and Railway Hospital, as an important symbol of the former Jinan, witnessed the changes of the commercial port and even the whole of Jinan.
It was demolished in July 1992 amid opposition from the citizens of Jinan. A new Jinan Railway Station was built on the original site. After the demolition in the 1990s, the design level of the reconstruction plan was unpopular and the contrast was too large, and the case has always become one of the most well-known cases of urban renewal failure, making the people of Jinan more and more vocal in calling for reconstruction, but also triggering questions about improper reasons and how to be authentic.
It was not until 2013 that it was proposed to use sightseeing facilities to partially the North Square, but it only accounted for about 1.7% of the square, but the plan was postponed around November of the same year. The government department does not take a position on the progress and planning of the project.
As soon as the railway station was completed, it was widely praised by architects and people at home and abroad, and became the most famous railway station in the Far East. Many outsiders know the old railway station first, then know Jinan, remember the old railway station, and remember Jinan. In the Travel Guide to the Far East, published in West Germany after World War II, the railway station was listed as the "first stop in the Far East". Lao She taught at Qilu University in the early 1930s and lived in Jinan for four and a half years, and this railway station is mentioned many times in his works. When the film "Big Waves and Sands" was filmed in the late 1920s, the station was also used as one of its location locations. In the architectural world, the railway station became a typical example of the design of railway stations at that time, and was used as an example in the architecture textbooks of Tsinghua University and Tongji University. The building has also been a compulsory subject for foreign architects, and a professor at a University in the United Kingdom once spent 40 minutes introducing the train station.
Before the demolition of the railway station, there were many citizens flocking to see the old station, which occupies an important position in their lives, and even many families almost went out as a whole to help the old and the young, and take photos.
Fischer's son, who used to bring a group of German experts to provide free repairs and maintenance for the old station every year, was furious when he heard the news, and said that he would never come to Jinan again and would never forgive the Chinese officials who made the decision.
The demolition of the railway station is still regretted by some scholars and experts to this day, and it has been repeatedly mentioned that some sharp scholars have written books accusing it of being the first of the "Ten Barbaric Projects in China" and "the expression of no culture". Similar demolitions of modern excellent buildings occurred in the 1990s, except for the railway station, the Japanese Gendarmerie Headquarters Building, the German Telegraph Building, etc. were demolished in the same period, and the reasons for this include both the drive of interests and the problem of ideology and concepts.
China's concept of protecting modern cultural heritage was initially limited to "revolutionary cultural relics", lacking a broader content, and compared with ancient cultural heritage, the significance of modern cultural heritage is often ignored, lacking sober understanding and public support. At that time, the awareness of cultural relics protection and the public opinion atmosphere of the whole society for building demolition were not as strong as now, and when the railway station was demolished, it was not even a jinan municipal protected cultural relic.