The Royal Asiatic Society Building: The Museum on Museum Road

I first saw the old building in the summer of 2000, coming out of a lane on Huqiu Lu. It stood there, in all its modernist majesty, still glorious despite half a century of neglect. We asked the residents at the lane entrance just opposite the building about it. One middle-aged man, shirt doffed in the stifling Shanghai heat, nodded knowledgeably, saying it had once been a famous foreign geographical society. He pointed to the ghosts of three letters that could still be faintly made out at the very top: “RAS”.

RAS: The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded by a Sanskrit scholar in London in 1823 “for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia.” The early focus of the RAS was the Indian Subcontinent and the Near East – the most important outposts of the British Empire at that time. In 1857, the China Branch of the organization was set up in Hong Kong and a year later, American missionary Reverend Elijah Bridgman established the Shanghai Literary and Scientific Society with the goal of increasing foreigners’ understanding of China through lectures, a journal, and a library. A year later, it became an RAS affiliate, the North China Branch of the RAS.

After more than a decade of operating out of other people’s buildings,* British Consul-General Sir Rutherford Alcock offered the RAS its current site: a plot of land for lease just behind the Bund, on what was then called Lower Yuenmingyuan Road. Completed in 1871, the first RAS building was outfitted with a library, a reading room, and lecture hall; by 1874, the outdoorsy members had established a museum on the second floor as well, filling it with stuffed birds and other creatures done in on the regular hunting forays of the society’s early members.

Incredibly, until 2014, many of the RAS mounted specimens could still be viewed – not at the old RAS building, but at the Shanghai Museum of Natural History on Yan’an Road, the repository for the collections of the RAS and the Musée Heude, which received the Sowerby collection. The old natural history museum, in the former Cotton Exchange building, features prominently in the memories of Shanghainese–and in our memories, too.

We first visited the museum in 1996, with our children—then one and three—and were instantaneously spellbound.  It was slightly creepy, this darkened museum in a beautiful old building, where a ceiling-scraping dinosaur skeleton from Sichuan filled the main hall, throwing shadows on the wall. The fraying stuffed creatures here, with labels painstakingly typed out in English and Latin, harkened back to the days when men roamed uncharted territory in search of wild and exotic specimens. To enter was to enter another world, and we visited often over the decades, even as the kids became grown-ups, such was the draw of the creatures collected by long-ago RAS members.

Clockwise, from top: 1) The first RAS animal collected, a leopard, in 1871; 2) The dinosaurs on display on the ground floor of the old Shanghai Museum of Natural History in the Cotton Exchange Building; 3) A lion – head only! from the old museum; 4) Giant dinosaur paw + tiny child, old Shanghai Museum of Natural History; 5) Arthur de Carle Sowerby working on a diorama, which could later be seen at the old Museum of Natural History.

Over the years, some of the Settlement’s prominent names became associated with the RAS: Henri Cordier, famous for his compilation of the Bibliotheca Sinica; Consul Sir Harry Parkes, whose statue graced the Bund; missionary and educator John Calvin Ferguson, for whom Route Ferguson (Wukang Road) was named; naturalist Arthur de Carle Sowerby, President from 1935-40, and publisher of the Society’s China Journal. The reputation of the Society grew, and as the only museum in the city, the street on which the building stood was renamed Museum Road. 

But by 1928, the  original RAS building was in a bad way, suffering a terrible termite infestation. The  North China Daily News reported that the determined creatures had attacked the books, the wooden columns in the lecture hall, and, most damaging of all, the building’s roof.  Fund-raising for the Tls 100,000 (₤1.5million today) new building commenced, led by members Sowerby, the naturalist, and architect George “Tug” Wilson of Palmer & Turner, who would design the building. The British Consulate, which had previously leased the land to the Society, now donated the land so that it could be used as loan collateral. Benefactors included British American Tobacco, Sassoon and Company, and the Cambridge-trained Malayan public health pioneer, Dr. Wu Lien-teh, then director of the National Quarantine Service in Shanghai.

Clockwise, from top: 1) The RAS building under construction; 2) Ground floor & gallery upon opening in 1933; 3) Staircase, photographed in 2008; 4) The stylized characters for 厕所男(“men’s toilet”) incorporated into the ironwork, photographed in 2008 5)Ground floor & gallery space, photographed in 2008.

Architect Tug Wilson was fresh from creating a breathtaking Art Deco design for the Cathay Hotel, and he selected the same streamlined architectural style for this literary and scientific society, with Chinese design elements to create a visual East-meets-West modernist aesthetic, the organization’s defining philosophy in bricks and mortar. Wilson created a spacious, comfortable light-filled space, form admirably following function, and added clever details: the characters for “men‘s toilet” and “women’s toilet” were incorporated into the ironwork design in the men’s and ladies’ rooms; the staircase on every floor is slightly different.

The building opened in 1933, and enjoyed several fruitful years before the Japanese occupation of the Chinese parts of Shanghai began, in 1937. The International Settlement, where the RAS was located, was not occupied until December 8 1941, after Pearl Harbor, and they saw a bump in visitor numbers as libraries throughout the city closed down. But things were unstable, becoming even more so once the Settlement was occupied: Society books and museum artifacts were taken to Japan; members, including Sowerby, were interned. The Society struggled on after the war, reclaiming the materials taken to Tokyo, but by 1952, the RAS exited China, leaving its collection behind in the newly Communist China. The museum collection was inherited by the Shanghai Cultural Bureau and the Shanghai Municipal Cultural Relics Sorting Commission (which must’ve had quite a job in the early ’50s!), and the library’s collection of volumes, in English and Chinese, went to the Shanghai Library.

Left: The RAS building today (photo: courtesy RockBund Art Museum), top: the bathroom ironwork gets a jazzy color update; bottom: the streamlined staircase

By the time I first saw the building, in 2000, it had long since ceased being a museum or society of any kind. Museum Road was now called Huqiu Road and the building was mostly residential, with the space that once housed stuffed leopards and dinosaur skeletons now partitioned off into living areas and communal kitchens. In 2006, residents were moved out to make way for the RockBund redevelopment project.

But history sometimes returns when you least expect it. In 2007, the North Branch of the RAS was reconstituted in Shanghai. And in 2010, a the RockBund Art Museum opened in the old RAS building, using the open spaces for the original purposes for which they were intended: once again, a museum stands on Museum Road.

*The RAS first operated out of the Shanghai Library in the Masonic Hall (first located on Ningbo Road, and then on the Bund), and then the Commercial Bank building on Nanjing Road).

In July 2022, Historic Shanghai guests enjoyed private tour of the RAS Building, part of our “Inside the RockBund” series.

SOURCES

Shanghai Waitanyuan Historical Buildings (Phase 1). Shanghai Zhang Ming Architectural Design Firm. Shanghai: Shanghai Far East Publishers, 2007.

“The One Bright Spot in Shanghai – A History of the Library of the NCBRAS” by Harold Otness. Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 28 (1988), pp. 185-197

“Royal Asiatic Society Building Packs Lots of History” Shanghai Daily, May 23 2014