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Tracing history of culture square
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SHANGHAI Culture Square is one of the city’s most popular performance venues, as well as one of the oldest.
Located at present day South Maoming Road, South Shaanxi Road, Middle Fuxing Road and Yongjia Road, the area that now houses the square was a French-owned dog racing track named “Yi Garden” in the 1920s. At the time, it was described as one of the Far East’s top gambling establishments. It was surrounded by hotels, dance halls and an open-air cinema.
When Shanghai was liberated in 1949, the hotels and dance halls were used as temporary exhibition venues. In 1952, the venue was converted into an indoor public center for political and cultural activities; hence its renaming to Shanghai Culture Square. The reconstruction process was completed in 1954.
By 1966, more than 600 political rallies and seminars had been held at Shanghai Culture Square, attracting more than 2 million participants. Of course, it was also used for events during the Culture Revolution.
A major fire destroyed much of the facility in 1969. In fighting the blaze, 14 people lost their lives.
A reconstruction plan was approved in the spring of 1970 and the square soon reopened as a public venue for stage performances and movies. Its sprawling open-concept design drew on some of the most advanced architectural technologies of the time. Heavy cotton door curtains blocked the freezing wind in the winter; while giant fans helped keep things cool in the hot summer.
The Korean opera “Flower Girl,” staged by Korean Pyongyang Opera House in 1973, was one popular show at the square.
“The show was great, everybody around me cried for the heroine’s fate,” says Lu Yue, a 59-year-old retiree. “That was the first time I entered the Culture Square. I always remembered the huge fans and countless seats in line.”
As other large-scale venues popped up around the city over the following decades, the square gradually fell out of favor with entertainment-seekers.
In the early 1990s, it was reborn as a stock exchange, and then later transformed into a sprawling flower market with hundreds of vendors.
In 2005, the government approved plans to revive the square as a cultural space. A 65,000-square-meter theater for musicals and other stage performances was completed in 2011.
With 2,010 seats, the re-born Culture Square has received about 1.2 million visitors and hosted world-class productions of musicals like “the Phantom of Opera,” “Elisabeth” and “Notre Dame Paris.” Despite it’s many iterations and guises, Shanghai Culture Square has long been one of the city’s leading cultural institutions.
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