China To Restore Colonial-Era Anglican Church

BEIJING — The state-run Protestant Church in China has unveiled plans to restore Shanghai's colonial-era Anglican cathedral, in a sign of the revival both of Christianity and of interest in the city's historic Western architecture.

Holy Trinity, a classic piece of empire neo-Gothic designed in the 1860s by the leading architect of his day, Sir Gilbert Scott, was for almost a century the focal point of Anglicanism in the Far East.

The cathedral school next door educated the sons of the Western businessmen who flocked to Shanghai's International Settlement and French Concession in the decades before World War II. One pupil was the future author J. G. Ballard, whose celebrated novel of the era, "Empire of the Sun," opens with the 11-year-old hero wearing a cassock and watching war films with fellow choristers in the cathedral crypt.

Now, after more than 50 years in the hands of the local Communist Party, it is crumbling, with tree branches poking through its distinctive red brickwork and cracked windows shedding a gloomy light on its nave and chancel.