The Fascinating Story of Shanghai's Bloodiest Building
The killing building grabbed me. I've been intrigued with the old Shanghai Municipal Abattoir since I went to its "re-opening" as a creative industry hub in 2008, when it was renamed 1933 or Lao Chang Fang (老场坊). Sitting on the former killing floor as its new management company spun fantasies about the building's glorious future as retail and office space, I wondered:
Why did Shanghai did need such a big cattle slaughterhouse? How much beef could the expat population possibly eat? Enough to justify this four-story, hyper-modern (for its time) architectural killing machine? And why did they put an Art Deco facade on the front? Has Shanghai always been so obsessed with its looks that even a century ago, it decorated the municipal slaughterhouse?
I never went deeper. Almost fifteen years later, now in lockdown, I fell into an online rabbit hole and came out on the other side at... the 1933 abattoir. My questions came back.
So I tested those questions against the internet. And behold! I found a very detailed study by a professor from a university in Suzhou that satisfied much of my curiosity, but didn't answer who was eating all that beef. For that, I turned to an American historian in Beijing who, also intrigued by 1933 during his time in Shanghai, began studying the historical cattle trade in China. Power of the internet...
So, there is no "news" hook to this article. It is just a nerdy, long and deeeeeep dive into the history of a gory but crucial topic: slaughterhouse architecture.
THE LOCATION
It started with the slaughter grounds. In old Shanghai, the gray areas between the various "municipalities" — the French Concession, the International Settlement (run by British and Americans), and the Chinese city — were often where animals destined for the meat market were killed. It was not pleasant, hygienic or systematic. So in the 1890s, the International Settlement built a city-run slaughterhouse in Hongkou. In the 1920s, it was damaged by fire. At the same time, city planners predicted that Shanghai's population was growing too fast for meat processing to keep up. And they were right. By 1932, Shanghai's foreign population had boomed to nearly 70,000 people. They needed a new abattoir.
After surveying six sites, the Shanghai Municipal Council settled on Shajing Lu (then Sawgin Road) in Hongkou. It was close to the railway station, where the cows came in, and the cattle yards, built in the 1890s, where the cows were parked between arrival and, uh, disposal. It was next to a creek, for getting rid of "waste", and wharves, for shipping. So, in 1926, the Council bought the land and its British architects began drafting plans for what some would eventually call the largest slaughterhouse in East Asia.
THE PROCESS
The Council did their research before launching into the design we see today. It had been 40 years since the last Shanghai slaughterhouse was built, and slaughterhouse architecture had, like many things in the 1920s and 30s, been modernized in line with the "scientific principles" of the day. The architects of the Council wrote to other cities around the world to get advice and tips from their experience in designing modern abattoirs. One important lesson: let gravity do the hard work.
From a 1930 letter by the Toronto Municipal Abattoir Manager:
"the Toronto Municipal Abattoir and Cold Storage has been operating as a Public Abattoir for the past sixteen years ... my recommendation to you is that your killing take place on the top floor so that your offal will gravitate to the floor below... in the operation of killing the livestock on the top floor, it would be much better to have your beef conveyed over to a separate building which could be utilized as a public wholesale market and would also separate your by-product department from your fresh meat entirely."
From Johannesburg that same year:
"The abattoirs as originally built had slaughtering on the ground floor and the Hanging Hall opposite. Some nine years ago additions were made on the first floor of which the slaughtering of cattle is easily done. The arrangement is not an uncommon one and the writer has personally visited the abattoirs over in Sydney and Adelaide and in Melbourne where slaughtering was done on the first floor and even on second floors. The advantage of this is very considerable in as much as the animals can all walk up an inclined way, and gravitation can therefore be employed for delivering the various products of the dressing of the beast to lower levels for treatment."
It works like this.
The animals walk up the anti-slip concrete ramps and into their "lairages" on the third and fourth floor. (The ramp on the southeast corner was for cattle; the northeastern corner ramp was for calves and sheep — the abattoir was built for cattle but handled more than just that.)
These lairages were the holding pens where animals were housed for 24-48 hours before they were killed, to allow them to relax a bit from the stress of being moved from the stockyards. (It is true that stress hormones can adversely affect the quality of meat — there is a deep body of literature on the subject.) This is also when inspectors would check the animals for any outward signs of disease or illness.
From there, they went across the bridge — the M.C. Escher-looking constructions that people now pose for selfies on — to the killing floor, moving from the "square building" into the central "circle".(See the second article for floor plans.)
The bridges themselves were designed to be just wide enough for one animal to pass through without being able to turn around. Once they were on the bridge, the only way was forward. It was a literal bridge between life and death.
At the other end of the bridge, they would enter a kind of chamber, where they would be shot with a .22 pistol. Smaller animals were stunned with an electric shock. The box would be lowered by gravity, the carcass pulled on to the floor, bled and stripped of its hide, and moved to the butchering table.
Each table had two chutes nearby for the workers: one to send the hides down for processing on the ground floor of the circular building; the other for shooting the organs down to the organ room on the mezzanine level.
Their carcasses were strung up by the hind legs and moved around on a track running along the ceiling, winding up in the chilling rooms on the west wing of the building. From there they might have gone into the cold storage or meat market that stood where the Kowloon Hotel (九龙宾馆) now stands, south of the abattoir, and/or onto the central Hongkou market a few blocks away.
The killing chamber automatically returned to its position, a new animal would step into the box, and the process would start again.
A 1936 newspaper account from the Evening Post described it this way (lightly edited):
"He is a full-grown beast with big horns and big eyes and a small hump behind his head. He is brought in from the country and is put into a cement stall in the lairage section... well-ventilated and clean; the animals are not crowded. They have food and water. The inspectors look the ox over and after a day or so he is ready. The ox is then led to slaughter.
He is led into a narrow cement runway and quartered temporarily in a waiting pen. He is surrounded by white cement, galvanized steel and mechanical efficiency. He cannot see what is happening to those that went ahead of him because the building is constructed to prevent that.
When they are ready for him, he is led on over a bridge into the slaughtering block. He walks into a “box” somewhat like a piano box without a top. He still can’t see anything ahead. His nose is tied down to steady him if he is restless.
We stood and looked at this ox. He breathed a little hard but didn’t tug or kick or roll his eyes. He stood quietly. A man stepped up to him with a pistol in his hand and put the muzzle to the middle of this beast’s forehead and fired. The ox instantly fell down in a heap in the box, quite dead.
The box tipped mechanically and the body rolled out onto a cement floor, slanted for drainage. The butchers were here. The work was done, by local custom, on the third floor. A knife goes into the throat and out comes the blood into a bucket. The efficient butchers took off the hide, cut off the feet, head, tail and tongue. Out comes the organs, stomach and intestines, down a chute to a disposal plant.
A hook came down, caught a leg tendon and up went the carcass in the air, hind legs speared on the hook attached to an overhead trolley. The meat was stamped and the carcass rolled off to the cooling halls to join rows of similar carcasses."
THE MARKET
How much meat came out of the abattoir, and who was eating it? Surely, it couldn't all have just been the beef-crazy British, could it?
By the time the slaughterhouse opened in November 1933, Chinese citizens had been allowed to live in the French Concession and International Settlement for decades. Though they also ate beef — historian and professor Thomas DuBois shared a 1925 Chinese cookbook with me named The Secrets of Western Cuisine (西餐烹饪秘诀) that included about a dozen beef recipes — Chinese residents ate more pork, and so the slaughterhouse included a lairage and butchery for pigs on the ground floor.
According to documents from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the abattoir had a planned capacity for slaughtering 500-600 cattle per day, 500-700 sheep, and 150 pigs. In reality, it seemed to have processed less than that, at least in its early days. This is where the statistics compiled by Professor DuBois come in. Be prepared, this gets a little data-ish.
(The conclusion: Shanghai produced a humongous amount of meat — way more than even the British could eat.)
Professor DuBois compiled data on the 1933 cattle trade in 15 Chinese cities, showing that Shanghai processed the most cows of any city that year, at more than 51,000 — roughly 10 million kg of beef, just ahead of Guangzhou (49,000) and Qingdao (38,000), which both exported their meat. (It's unlikely Shanghai exported much beef.)
To get an idea just how much meat the average foreign resident of Shanghai might eat, I turned to a paper named The British Market for Meat 1850-1914, which shows that in 1914, the average Brit (in Britain) consumed about 58kg of beef per year.
So, let's play a little math game. This is totally for fun, not rigorous or academic or probably even correct, but let's try.
The Shanghai Municipal Council's 1915 census shows that the British were 26% of the International Settlement population. Assuming that percentage stayed about the same for the next 20 years, and using archived Bureau of Public Safety documents that show 44,240 foreign residents in the International Settlement in 1932, we can estimate a population of about 11,520 Brits.
If each person consumed beef at the rate of 1914 Britain (58kg per year on average), the Brits of Shanghai alone would eat 670,000 kilograms of beef annually — 3,700 cows per year, or about 10 cows (plus a small steak) per day.
That's to say nothing of the demand from the Japanese, Portuguese, French, American or the many other nationalities — much less the Chinese population of the International Settlement and the million-plus residents of the French Concession. The demand from the Jewish population alone was enough to convince the city to install a special slaughter pen — the Weinberg pen — for ritual slaughter in order to produce kosher beef for that community.
Total it all up and the city was processing an average of 140 cows per day.
Clearly, Shanghai needed a lot of meat.
THE DESIGN
Debate over the categorization of its facade as Art Deco notwithstanding (there is, I understand, some contention), it seems rational to wonder why the Council architects dressed the building up. To me, a slaughterhouse design epitomizes the rule of function over form; indeed, the Shanghai Municipal Abattoir's internal design was as meticulous and process-driven as any modern, assembly-line factory at the time. As Professor Wang Yi-Wen writes in The Modern Abattoir as a Machine for Killing: The Municipal Abattoir of the International Shanghai Settlement, it just specialized in disassembly. Why did it need a cherry on top?
Many sources note that the latticed facade faces west and would have covered the chilling rooms; ventilation was a key concern. Surely, this could have been achieved without the Deco design. But it wasn't. We will never know why.
Even the identity of the chief architect of the Shanghai Municipal Abattoir is obscured by history. In the 2016 paper she co-authored, Professor Wang speculates that the primary architect was not, as many sources state, a British architect named "Balfours" but instead a British civil servant named A.C. Wheeler. Wheeler was an assistant architect in the city's Architecture Office, which handled the abattoir project, and he oversaw new builds during the 13 years he worked there.
Alas, Wheeler moved to Canada in 1939 and if he left any papers explaining why his slaughterhouse has an Art Deco facade, they have been lost to history. Anti-climax!
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THE LATER YEARS
All of that leads us only to the very start of the abattoir's life. What happened after 1933? The general timeline goes something like this.
After the civil war, the new government took over the slaughterhouse, re-named it the Shanghai Number One Slaughterhouse and continued to run it. Slowly, its use morphed from killing machine to pharmaceutical factory, as its R&D department began exploring insulin extraction from the organs of pigs, cattle, sheep and even rabbits. (It started slaughtering rabbits in 1957.)
By the mid 1970s, the shift into biomedicine was complete and the pork slaughtering moved to a different Shanghai abattoir.
By 2002, the pharma company had moved out and the building was left for dead.
The city government picked it up again in 2005, named it Heritage Architecture and made it the flagship project of its plan for urban regeneration and heritage protection through the creative park industry.
In 2007, the management contract was awarded to a company who had previously worked on Three on the Bund. They stripped away the architectural additions that had piled up over the decades as the building's use evolved, took it back down to its almost-sculptural shape and left the concrete bare — originally, the building would have been whitewashed and its rooms done in white tile.
1933 debuted in 2008 and has been a combination of office, shopping and event space since then — oddly, at one point, it hosted a lot of weddings.
Unfortunately, there's little there about the building's history or place in Shanghai; if anything, it seems the current managers are not keen to embrace the building's gory reason for being, preferring to emphasize its aesthetics.
Instead, the building was marketed as "the original option for company annual conferences", according to its old website. The former killing floor is now the "dazzling" 1,500 square meter "Sky Theatre", and the old chilling room has become the "Basilica Suite", where the lattice windows "create superior light and shade effect".
To me, it seems like a missed opportunity for education but it's not hard to understand the motivations of the management company, who spent a reported 80 million rmb on restorations: talking about death doesn't help sell events or office space. In a country where death is taboo, saving the old abattoir is an especially awkward task.
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THE PRESENT
Today, the scale of Shanghai's meat consumption is staggering, and it seems almost quaint that the city once envisioned a single building as a solution. I found at least 75 slaughterhouses in Shanghai's city limits with a quick Baidu search, and that says nothing of the slaughterhouses in other provinces that supply Shanghai.
And how much we eat!
Let's play the data guessing game again.
Statistics from 2020 show that Shanghai alone ate more than four kilograms of beef per person that year. If we do the simple math, that's 4.18kg times 24.9 million, the official population of Shanghai in 2020, or 104 million kg. Divide by about 200kg, the average amount of meat from one cow in modern times, and we see that, as a city, we consumed more than half a million cows that year — at least 1,500 cattle per day.
Pigs? 9.5 million animals — 26,000 per day.
We're going to need another slaughterhouse...
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THE END
This account owes a deep debt to the academics: Wang Yi-Wen, a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (which is actually in Suzhou); and Thomas DuBois, a professor and historian at Beijing Normal University. Thank you both for your papers, your research in the Archives and for our conversations in which you helpfully walked me through the history and answered my questions.
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Illustrations: Cheesecake
