An Old Peking Mystery Building Takes a New Twist – Chaonei No. 81

Back in 2009 (not long after I started this blog) I posted on the rather remarkable old French Barouqe style buildings at Chaonei No. 81. This sort of building was rare enough in Peking and, of course, with all the destruction in Beijing and the removal of the old that has gone on in the last few decades it’s rather amazing they’ve survived. Anyway, after I posted Ed Lanfranco, who knows more about old Beijing than most, wrote informing me of the building’s provenance as a former American Missionary compound built around 1910 that later became the California College in China (related to the University of California). You can read Ed’s history of the buildings here.

Now, however, another twist. The New York Times’s Beijing Journal has written about the buildings which still remain empty and in some state of disrepair. Apparently they now belong to the Catholic Diocese of Beijing. Now, while the old ghost stories about the building are known – most older buildings in Beijing have such stories attached to them. This article offers a few other possible histories of the building that I’ve never heard before – that it was built by the Qing authorities for the British residents of Peking and also that it was built as a private residence for the French manager of the company that built the railway connecting Beijing to Hankou in Hubei Province.I’ve never heard either of these tales before.

What is perhaps most remarkable though is that nobody at all seems interested in restoring the building or doing anything interesting with it – even though the Diocese says that it believes it would cost only (and I say “only” in relation to the ridiculous amounts thrown at new architecture in Beijing) US$1.5mn to refurbish.

Seems the mystery continues…meanwhile the building continues to fall into an ever worsening state of disrepair.

A much better picture exists on the New York Times website