Beijing's 99-Year-Young Catholic School Will Give You the Chills

Burbex Brin | Nov 23, 2018 8:30 am | Add a comment | 3184 reads

At the base of Baiwang Mountain in western Beijing, right at the back of the Military Field Hospital where soldiers occasionally patrol and ruined army ambulances sit rotting, that’s where you’ll find the Catholic School. Despite being completely gray, the brick building itself looks pretty youthful for being 99 years old. A tarnished bronze plaque on the front of the building proclaims that it is protected as part of the Beijing Cultural Relics Project.

That metal plate is a coffin plaque, a symbol of death. For buildings with that kind of protection, redevelopment is rarely permitted. They are more likely to fall down and be demolished than ever being brought back to life. The plaque also incorrectly states that the building was a Catholic Church, rather than a school. Ironically, it’s the building’s ability to change identity that has saved it from death.

Built in 1919 by the Catholic Dioses as a means to help bring Catholicism to China, the school was not only constructed from the typical gray Beijing bricks but also stolen materials from the grounds of the ravaged Summer Palace. The mantle above the door frame features three engraved stone tablets from the palace, and the palace’s quintessential white cut stone features heavily in the foundations of the school.

Following the Cultural Revolution three decades later, the school and the architecturally similar French church hidden deep in the hills nearby both served as military hospitals. As the grounds of 309 Field Hospital expanded, the building was turned over to storage, and then eventually forgotten. Occasionally, however, the school has raised its head from the grave. In 1997, the building featured in the film The Dream Factory (甲方乙方 Jiafang Yifang) starring bald-as-a-baby Chinese actor Ge You.

The extensive attic space once served as dormitories for Catholic students, soldiers, and later an army of migrant workers, but now you’re more likely to run into the occasional couple looking for a place to take some risqué photographs. The lower two floors, scrubbed clean of religion, have all the markings of a chapel space given their high ceilings and shadows of murals on the walls.

But to really understand this building, you must go deeper, and seek out the hidden tunnels beneath. There you’ll find the sunless subterranean cells of long-gone nuns, as well as a cylindrical refrigeration room, which while built a century ago, still sends icy blasts along the dark passages.

In a city of ephemeral structures, the Catholic School, who celebrates its centenary next year, looks ready to stand on stoically and watch another hundred years of change.