Burned Three Times

The site was a place of hospitality before it was a place of worship. In 1773 Tianjin salt merchants raised a three-storey tower of 152 rooms at Sanchahekou as an imperial resting palace, and the Qianlong emperor named it Haihe Lou, the tower that looks at the river. Salt money paid for it, which is a reminder of what the salt trade funded in this city. Only in 1869 did the French missionary Xie Fuxin pull down the Chongxi Guan beside it and build Tianjin's first Catholic church on the site. A building that began as a lodge for an emperor became, within a century, the most contested piece of ground in the city.

The church was burned in the Tianjin massacre of 21 June 1870. The city's account of the affair is that the orphanage held by the church was accused of kidnapping and brainwashing children, that the county magistrate opened a conflict at the building, and that the confrontation became a fight between the church's converts and other residents, in which the church and the nearby French consulate were burned and eighteen foreigners killed, including ten French nuns and the French consul. France and six other powers complained, and the Qing court paid 400,000 taels of silver. The church was rebuilt in 1897 from that indemnity money.

The rebuilt church did not last either. It was burned again by the Boxers in 1900, during the fighting that also destroyed the old Laolongtou station across the river, and it was built a third time in 1904, in the thirtieth year of Guangxu, using the Boxer indemnity. The building that stands at 292 Shizilin Street is therefore the third church on the site, and it was badly damaged once more in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake before being rebuilt by the municipal government in 1983. It was listed as a national key protected cultural relic in 1988 and as a special-protection historic style building in 2005, which is a considerable record for a building that has been destroyed four times.