The Chaste Widow of the Shanghai Racetrack
The Chaste Widow’s Monument, an 18th century memorial arch on the old racecourse, was a legacy of Shanghai before the foreigners came, a bow to an ancient Confucian virtue that stood stubbornly on the racecourse infield until the 1950s. Restored in the 1940s by shipping tycoon and Shanghailander Eric Moller, it was one of the last pailous in the city to be taken down.
So who was this chaste widow? We know very little. She’s identified only by her surname, Zhao 赵—women often didn’t get names–the faithful widow of Lu Zhaojia 陆肇嘉. Chastity in women was a prized virtue (patriarchal society, don’t you know) and chaste widowhood was practically a cult. For centuries, women who honored their dead husbands by remaining chaste received imperial recognition; witnesses to her unblemished life would make applications to Peking. And that’s how it came to be that Lu Zhaojia’s nameless, blameless window was honored with this arch in a remote Shanghai County village in the 8th year of Emperor Qianlong’s rule – 1744.
By 1862, that remote village had yielded to a racecourse for foreigners, with the infield the sports field of the Shanghai Recreation Club. The Widow’s monument stayed–even giving its name to part of the sports ground—much to the chagrin of at least some of the foreign community. “An eyesore and an inconvenience,” grumbled a China Press writer in 1933, “a monument to a virtuous wife of a defunct unknown who no one remembers.”
Not all foreigners felt that way. In 1941, Eric Moller funded a year-long restoration of the monument, ““in token of many pleasant memories of happy hours spent since boyhood on the Recreation Ground and Shanghai Racecourse.” (The plaque also mentions the Battle of Muddy Flat, but that’s another story, for another time!).
Moller, born in Shanghai to shipping tycoon Nils Moller, grew up playing on the sports field, in the shadow of the monument. As one of the Race Club’s gentleman jockeys, he would have seen the structure as he urged his horse along the racetrack. His stable, Cire, grew to be the largest in Shanghai, but today, he’s best known for the whimsical house he left Shanghai, Moller Villa on Shaanxi Road. The Widow’s Monument was part of the backdrop of his life.
The grumbling newspaper writer who found the Widow’s Monument such an eyesore was nonetheless resigned that it wasn’t going anywhere: “To the Chinese, the monument is sacred, and it is still on Chinese soil in China, and therefore … untouchable.”
Irony of ironies, then, that when the monument was demolished, it wasn’t by a grumpy foreigner, but by a Chinese authority – the new Communist government, in 1952.
References:
“Widow’s Monument on Race Course Remains Untouchable”, The China Press, May 13 1933 accessed
“Widows’ Monument Restored”, The North-China Herald and Supreme Court & Consular Gazette, April 9 1941