CN-1751185 Xujiahui Cathedral (徐家汇天主教堂) in Shanghai, China

St. Ignatius Cathedral, Shanghai (聖依納爵主教座堂), also referred to as Xujiahui Cathedral (徐家汇天主教堂), is a Neo-Gothic Roman Catholic cathedral, located in Xujiahui, in Shanghai, China. Since 1960, St Ignatius has been the seat of the Bishop of Shanghai and the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Shanghai.

The first church at Xujiahui (徐家汇) was built in 1847. A medium-sized, Greek style church was built in 1851 (This was demolished in the 1980s to make way for the new headquarters of the Shanghai Diocese).

With the growth of Xujiahui as a centre of Catholicism, a new, larger church was commissioned. Built by French Jesuits between 1905 and 1910, it is said to have once been known as "the grandest church in the Far East." It can accommodate 2,500 worshippers at the same time.

In 1960 the Communist arrested and imprisoned the leaders of the Shanghai Diocese. Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei, Bishop of Shanghai was arrested in 1955 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1960. In 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards from Beijing vandalized the cathedral, tearing down its spires and ceiling and smashing its roughly 300 square metres of stained glass. Red Guards also beat up priests and nuns at the church. Powerless to resist, Bishop Aloysius Zhang Jiashu knelt at the altar and prayed until he was dragged away - for the duration of the Cultural Revolution, he was "sent down" for labour, repairing umbrellas and washing bottles. For the next ten years the Cathedral served as a state-owned grain warehouse.

In 1978 the cathedral was re-opened, and the spires were restored in the early 1980s. The building's restoration is continuing. In 2002, Wo Ye, a Beijing-born artist, and Father Thomas Lucas, a Jesuit from the University of San Francisco, began a five-year project to replace the cathedral's stained glass windows. The new windows incorporate Chinese characters and iconography.

This postcard came from Yiyi Yan (6 October 2015) Postcrossing.

This cathedral is on my bucket list of places to visit.