Fuyuantang: The Samaritans of old Shanghai

It’s easy to miss in the chaos of the old city, but those who take a moment to stop at 95 Yaoju Nong, a crooked street in the middle of the old quarter, will find two embossed lions coiled on the face of a stone medallion. 

This symbol, embedded in a concrete wall, is all that is left of the headquarters of the Tongren Fuyuantang, once Shanghai’s largest charity. 

Eighteenth-century Shanghai saw a flowering of benevolent societies and public works throughout the walled city, but the most ambitious charity was established in 1800 by a consortium of Shanghai’s wealthiest clans, Tongren Fuyuantang.

A historic need 

Distinctively painted death barges were a well-known sight on the river, as recognizable and inevitable as opium hulks.

For poor Shanghainese, the Fuyuantang was the Red Cross, Salvation Army and UNICEF combined -- donating food, money and clothing to the poor, sheltering orphans and the homeless.

The Qing officials in Shanghai at the time were little more than Beijing parasites. They aggressively collected taxes but provided no municipal or public services. 

So the Fuyuantang cleaned streets, repaired bridges and even operated a fire brigade. It also provided some services (deemed essential at the time) that have no contemporary equivalent: volunteers scoured the city for discarded scraps of paper with written characters and brought them back to Yaoju Nong, where priests performed paper disposal rituals.

In order to promote moral hygiene for all Shanghai citizens, obscene books were burned in a specially built temple.

In the 1840s, foreigners began to build a new Shanghai beyond the north gate.

Those from the outside who ventured into the ‘Chinese city’ found old Shanghai unsightly and squalid. But even colonials who scoffed at everything Chinese, acknowledged that the Fuyuantang was indispensable inside and outside the city wall.

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The Tongren Fuyuantang took care of abandoned bodies and coffins for those who could not afford proper burial. In 1938, the Tongren Fuyuantang collected 59,866 bodies in Shanghai.

Violent times

Since the Taiping Rebellion, the international city saw consecutive waves of refugees. The abandonment of corpses, especially those of children, became a local epidemic.

There were huge strains on public services and new (and macabre) demands upon the Fuyuantang.

The most conspicuous Fuyuantang employees were body collectors who gathered unidentified corpses, presumably safeguarding neighborhoods from ghosts of the unburied dead.

In one year, collectors picked up almost 60,000 bodies in Shanghai. 

In the early 1940s, U.S. photographer Jack Birns documented Fuyuantang’s carts loaded with corpses.

For poor Shanghainese, the Fuyuantang was the Red Cross, Salvation Army and UNICEF combined.

The Fuyuantang owned cemeteries in Pudong and would ferry coffins across the Huangpu. Distinctively painted death barges were a well-known sight on the river, as recognizable and inevitable as opium hulks.

Times change, building remind behind

In the Republican era private charity missions merged with the new government or dissolved, their patronage disappeared and their functions became anachronistic.

Fuyuantang buildings, once an important presence in the city, were simply absorbed into residential lanes of the old town.

Today, the stylized bats and propitious clouds dancing across the wooden planks above the gateway are all that’s left of the organization’s once proud buildings.

The few older residents left in the area caress the stone lions as they pass by, acknowledging the building’s important past.

Every day, fewer and fewer people remember the good the Fuyuantang, the lost good Samaritans of historic Shanghai.