Site of the Taiping Rebellion Armory

Site of the Taiping Rebellion Armory

The Site of the Taiping Rebellion Armory is a Suzhou Municipal Cultural Relics Protection Unit.

The Site of the Taiping Rebellion Armory is located at No. 12 Madalu Alley, Zhongjie Road, Suzhou City, and was designated as a Suzhou Municipal Cultural Relics Protection Unit in 1982.

Originally the "Shenxiu Hall" residence of the Qiu family, built during the Ming Dynasty, the site served as the Taiping Rebellion armory. Before the Taiping Army entered Suzhou in the tenth year of the Xianfeng reign (1860) during the Qing Dynasty, the owner and his family left the city to avoid the chaos. Upon returning after the war, they found coal, iron, cannons, cannonballs, and similar items in the halls and courtyards, clearly indicating that the site had been used as an armory workshop. Local lore also associates it with the Taiping Rebellion armory. During the Tongzhi era, the Qiu family renovated the residence. In the early 1960s, stone cannonballs, round iron objects, sawn-off iron cannons, and Taiping Rebellion–related weaponry were unearthed from beneath the courtyard, believed to have been buried on-site during the house’s renovation.

The entire residence covers nearly 4,000 square meters, with a construction area of 3,000 square meters. It faces south and has three sections divided into four courtyards. The central section consists of, in sequence, the entrance hall, sedan-chair hall, main hall, and upper-floor hall. The main hall is 17.55 meters wide and 13.7 meters deep, with broad wooden screens along its east, west, and north sides. The beam frames feature simple and smooth carvings such as “mountain mist clouds,” and faint dragon motifs can be seen in the painted decorations on the ridge purlin. The rear eaves retain dragon-and-phoenix drip tiles characteristic of the Taiping Rebellion. The brick-carved gate tower in front of the main hall bears an inscription from the Tongzhi reign of the Qing Dynasty. Aside from the sedan-chair hall and the main hall, which still retain Ming-style architectural features, the other buildings in the residence were mostly rebuilt during the Qing Dynasty. In front of the study in the western section stands a large white-bark pine tree, about three zhang tall (approximately 10 meters) and as thick as a person’s embrace, also dating back to the Ming Dynasty. In 1994, cultural relics authorities conducted a comprehensive renovation of the main hall, while the other structures remain scattered as residential houses.