Chaonei No. 81

Chaonei No. 81 is a two-and-a-half-storey brick house with a mansard roof and stone trim on Chaoyangmen Inner Street, in Beijing's Dongcheng District, listed since 2009 as a district-protected historic building and owned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Beijing. Its origin is disputed: the account now promoted by Beijing's authorities and press dates it to 1921 as the home of Georges Bouillard, the French engineer who ran the Beijing-Hankou railway, while an older tradition places it around 1910 as the North China Union Language School for Western missionaries. The legend that made the address famous claims a Kuomintang officer fled in 1949 leaving a wife or concubine behind, and that she hanged herself inside. Beijing newspapers and the Dongcheng police have rejected it: no death is on record at the property, and station files reviewed in 2009 contained neither the workmen supposed to have vanished in 2000 nor the explorer supposed to have died in the building in 2007. The derelict house attracted urban explorers from about 2005, and the 2014 horror film The House That Never Dies, although filmed in Wuxi rather than here, brought crowds to the gate. Restored in 2016-17, it reopened to the public in October 2024 as Wenyuan 81, a cultural venue with no ghost-tour programming.

Chaonei No. 81 is a two-and-a-half-storey brick house with a mansard roof and stone trim, standing on Chaoyangmen Inner Street in Beijing's Dongcheng District. The municipality of Beijing has protected it as a historic building since 2009, and it is now owned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Beijing. The house is best known outside China as the setting for the 2014 horror film The House That Never Dies and as the address most commonly identified as Beijing's haunted house. Its origins are disputed because pre-1949 records are fragmentary. The account promoted by the archdiocese and repeated in Beijing's official press dates the main house to 1921 as the residence of Georges Bouillard, the French engineer who managed the Beijing-Hankou Railway. An older tradition places it around 1910 as the North China Union Language School, an institution that taught Mandarin to Western missionaries and later evolved into the California College in China, part of the Claremont Colleges system. Still other historians argue the building may have been erected as early as 1900 by the Imperial Chinese government as a gift to the British or Catholic Church. By the late 1930s it had passed to a Catholic organisation, possibly an American Benedictine group, and an Irish-born priest is recorded as attempting to use it in 1937. During World War II Belgian Augustinian nuns ran a clinic there until at least 1946, and by 1949 the Irish Presbyterian Mission was in charge. After the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War the new government took control and used the buildings intermittently through the 1950s and early 1960s for various government departments. By the time of the Cultural Revolution the property had stood empty for some time, but local memory holds that a group of Red Guards occupied it briefly in the late 1960s before leaving because they were frightened. No documentary record of that episode has surfaced, but the story has been repeated in interviews with long-term residents. From 1949 onward ownership records are more consistent, though the path to the present owner was complicated. A 1980 government order required properties used for religious purposes before 1949 to be returned to their former religious owners, but incomplete archives made this difficult. The complex was finally transferred to the Beijing Catholic Patriotic Association in 1994, by which time Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms had created a booming real-estate market and the buildings were close to demolition. The archdiocese argued that the site would make an ideal Vatican embassy if relations with Rome improved, but it lacked the funds to renovate. Between 2003 and 2005 the project was listed as a top priority, but the death of Fu Tieshan, the association secretary who had championed the building, pushed it back. During those years the neglected, overgrown house acquired its supernatural reputation. Legends about a suicidal woman and mysterious disappearances began to circulate among local teenagers, who started using the property for urban exploration despite the diocese's ban on entry and graffiti warning of ghosts. In 2011 Hong Kong filmmakers Raymond Yip and Manfred Wong began three years of preproduction for The House That Never Dies. They visited the house, and Yip reviewed three thousand pages of material about it, but ultimately filmed at another location in Beijing and in Wuxi. The film's Chinese title was changed from the house's name to Jing Cheng 81 Hao, or Capital City No. 81, at the diocese's request. Released in July 2014, it grossed 154 million RMB in its opening weekend, a record for a Chinese horror film, and crowds of young viewers began turning up at the real address. The diocese closed the gates and allowed only small groups inside because of structural dangers. Restoration took place in 2016-17, after which the complex was opened for rent. In August 2024 it was rebranded as Wenyuan 81 and opened to the public on 19 October as a cultural venue combining art and hospitality. A chalked notice beside the main entrance states there are no ghosts inside.

Chaonei No. 81 is located at 81 Chaoyangmen Inner Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing, roughly 250 metres west of the Second Ring Road at the former site of Chaoyangmen gate. The nearest subway access is Chaoyangmen station on Lines 2 and 6, with pedestrian overpasses crossing the street nearby. The property sits behind a concrete wall with opaque metal gates, and mature deciduous trees screen the buildings from the street. The house is privately owned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Beijing and is not a public museum in the conventional sense. It was restored in 2016-17 and rebranded as Wenyuan 81 in August 2024. It opened to the public on 19 October 2024 as a cultural venue combining art exhibitions and hospitality; visits are therefore possible but depend on the venue's opening hours and event schedule rather than on fixed daily admission. Unlike many Western haunted-house attractions, there is no ticket office, ghost tour or paranormal programming associated with the address. Visitors should check the official Wenyuan 81 channels for current access details rather than arriving expecting a heritage-site visit. The surrounding neighbourhood is fully urban and easily reachable, with bus routes and taxis serving Chaoyangmen Inner Street. There is no on-site parking for visitors; street parking in the area is limited and the narrow hutongs nearby are not suited to private cars. The building offers no specific accessibility information, and the restored complex should be approached as a commercial cultural space rather than a preserved ruin. A chalked notice beside the main entrance states there are no ghosts inside, which may disappoint visitors specifically seeking the haunted-house experience that made the address famous.