Tushanwan (T'ou-Sè-wei) Orphanage at Xujiahui (Zikawei)
Xujiahui: an old Catholic settlement
The desire of Xujiahuipar the Jesuits to restore their presence in Shanghai after the opening of the city to foreign trade in the mid-nineteenth century first responds to their desire to settle where, two centuries ago, Xu Guangqi (1562-1633) , a Chinese literate and Chinese mandarin convert to Catholicism, played a leading role in the early implantation of Christianity in China at the turn of the sixteenth-seventeenth century. They deliberately choose to establish their presence far from the city, in the Xu Family Village (Xujiahui – Zikawei) where Xu Guangqi originated. Under the treaties forcibly removed from the Chinese government, missionaries are the only foreigners able to establish themselves outside the areas where all other foreign residents are assigned, the “foreign concessions”, Chinese territory “rented in perpetuity “According to a complex system combining sovereign retention of the soil and autonomy of foreign communities by a regime of extraterritoriality. If the inexorable march of increasing urbanization in the early twentieth century gradually filled the distance between the city and Xujiahui,
the small Jesuit complex of the mid-nineteenth century is definitely an outpost in the Chinese countryside, which is also repeatedly the result of attacks and destruction in favor of rebellions that stir the region with the movement Taiping Until 1914, a large space still separates contiguous, although it will take a good decade to see the disappearance of fields and canals and the grid of the landscape by roads and houses.