Xujiahui Cathedral
St. Ignatius Cathedral of Shanghai
(West side of Caoxi Bei Lu south of Xujiahui)
Phone: (021) 6438 2595 or
(021) 6438 4632
Services: 7:00 AM Daily, 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM Sunday
Admission: Free but requests donations
Nearest Public Transit: Xujiahui Station, Line 1
The St. Ignatius Cathedral (聖依納爵主教座堂) or Xujiahui Cathedral (徐家汇天主教堂) is a Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral, located on Puxi Road, in the Xujiahui district. The cathedral is attended by over 2000 people every Sunday.
Designed by English architect William Doyle, and built by French Jesuits between 1905 and 1910, it is said to have once been known as "the grandest cathedral in the Far East." It can accommodate 2,500 worshippers.
In 1966, at the opening of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards vandalized the cathedral, tearing down its spires and ceiling, and smashing its roughly 300 square meters of stained glass. For the next ten years the building served as a state-owned grain warehouse.In 1978 the cathedral was re-opened, and the spires were restored in the early 1980s.
In 1989, the first-ever Chinese language Mass was celebrated in St. Ignatius by order of Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian. The celebrants were Father Thomas Law of Hong Kong, Father Joseph Zen of Hong Kong (later named bishop and Cardinal of Hong Kong), and Father Malatesta of San Francisco.
In 2002, Wo Ye, a Beijing-born artist, and Father Thomas Lucas, a Jesuit from the University of San Francisco, began a five year project to replace the cathedral's stained glass windows. The new windows incorporate Chinese characters and iconography, and they are expected to be finished in time for the 2010 World's Fair in Shanghai.
Once known as St. Ignatius, this is Shanghai's great cathedral, opened by the Jesuits who'd had a church here as early as 1608 (today's structure dates to 1910). The Jesuits were invited here by a local high-ranking Ming Dynasty official, landowner, and scientist, Xu Guangqi (the district's name, Xujiahui, means "Xu Family Village"), who was himself converted to Catholicism by the Jesuits' most famous missionary to China, Matteo Ricci (1553-1610). Xu is buried in a public park named after him on Nandan Xi Lu, southwest of the cathedral. As a missionary center, the cathedral grounds once included a library, an orphanage, a college, a publishing house, and its own weather station. Today only the church, part of the school, and the recently reopened library remain. This largest of Shanghai's cathedrals, with space for over 2,500 inside, sports a gargoyled roof and twin red-brick spires which were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and rebuilt in 1980. Its vast interior of altars, stone columns, Gothic ceilings, stained glass windows, and paintings of the Last Supper and Stations of the Cross, is yet another chapter in Shanghai's living history of European architecture, though there is currently a multi-year project underway to replace the traditional Western-style stained glass with glasswork imbued with Chinese motifs and characteristics (for example, using a phoenix, the traditional Chinese symbol for rebirth, to signify the Resurrection).
