This paper examines the changing narratives of the Ward Road Prison (1903), also known as Tilanqiao Prison today. Built initially to incarcerate Chinese offenders caught in the Shanghai International Settlement—the major enclave of British and American subjects, this colonial prison was much acclaimed by contemporary reformists as a model prison but later gained an unenviable reputation for colonial racism. The prison changed hands several times during WWII (1937-1945). Current narratives are largely unconcerned with its British imperial post (1845-1941) but portray the prison as a contested place where the Japanese detained the Chinese during the military invasion (1932-45), and then the nationalists imprisoned the communists at the last stage of the Civil War (1945-49). Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the prison was used as a political prison to execute Japanese war criminals and incarcerate the pro-Japanese Chinese and the nationalists. Since then, the prison has become an emblem of the victory of the communist revolution and a place for patriotic education. The prison precinct remains in use today. Situated at a previously peripheral but now central location, the prison is scheduled to be relocated to the city outskirt in the next few years as part of a regeneration plan to transform the North Bund area into the third Central Business Area of Shanghai. The regeneration plan proposes to covert the prison compound into a mixed-use development to incubate cultural and creative industries and become an iconic ‘place-maker’ in the future. Intriguingly, lost memories about the colonial past, and the role of this prison in accelerating penal reform, are rekindled and come flooding back.
Yi-Wen Wang is an associate professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research lies in the area of heritage conservation and management, focusing on social and cultural issues of heritage-led regeneration in both urban and rural contexts. Her research work is mainly concerned with the protection of unassuming, quotidian structures as heritage, addressing the conservation issues surrounding 20th-century built heritage and across the scales of architecture, urban design and spatial planning, with a focus on the Yangtze River Delta region.