Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

 

Looking for something exciting for our Friday evening, I talked my friend into visiting the infamous No. 81 house near Chaoyangmen Subway Station. The early 20th century, three-story French Baroque-style structure, on Chaoyangmennei Dajie, has long been deserted and in disrepair partly due to rumors of the house being haunted.

That day, at dusk, we circled around the building, peeping inside from the broken windows and cracks between locked doors. We then ventured into the adjacent building with a similar style which is free from ghostly rumors. While the exterior of the grand "haunted" house with red brick façade and covered with ivy looks like a normal historic building, the crumbling stairs, shattered cement floorboards and the graffiti saying "Danger" and "There are ghosts" in large Chinese characters on the walls really gave the structure a sense of spookiness.

As we were about to leave, we had a chat with one of the security guards living in the yard where the house is located. Telling us about the building's history, he ultimately dismissed rumors that had gone viral on the Internet - such as the wife of a Kuomintang official had hung herself there, and that a few construction workers disappeared while working on the site a few years ago.

Originally built around 1900 to be used as a church, funerals for dead Christians were held there, which was where the ghost stories originated from. The building was taken over by the Communist Party and used as an office building from the late 1940s. In the 1980s the last occupant, a newspaper, moved out and the property was returned to its current owner, the Beijing Catholic Diocese. However, a recent report in the Beijing News says the building was used as a language training center for foreign missionaries.

Impressed by the building's uniqueness, my friend and I were sorry to learn that such a historic building with a fine architectural heritage is being left in such a derelict status and has failed to secure enough funding, said to be a couple of million yuan, for renovation.

Iconic historic buildings are an important component of a city's identity. They give people a sense of belonging, attachment, and memories of the past. The actual cost to renovate the building is yet to be appraised by experts, but the cost of not doing so is obvious. Given the deterioration the building suffers from now, it will soon topple down, and the historical, cultural and potential economic value will also be gone.

It would be difficult to rely on a single tenant to renovate and transform the building. For heritage regeneration schemes, the key is to find a beneficial economic use, let's say a high-end hotel or residence and apply the "funding cocktails" strategy by using diverse funding sources.

Funding could be from government or lottery funding, restoration grants, corporate or individual donations, to name a few.

Beneficial economic use could not only bring economic value to the city, but also the community, by creating new jobs.

There have been successful transformations of heritage buildings in Beijing, for example the high-end Temple Restaurant Beijing, a former temple. Hopefully there should be sound use for a building if a feasible regeneration plan is made.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.