The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Nanchang is the seat of the Archdiocese of Nanchang, one of the oldest Catholic dioceses in China — Jesuit missionaries established a presence in Jiangxi in the sixteenth century, and the church has maintained an unbroken institutional presence through an extraordinary range of political upheavals. The current cathedral building is a twentieth-century structure with a gothic-influenced facade that stands somewhat incongruously among the apartment blocks of the Donghu district.
The cathedral holds regular masses and is open to visitors during daylight hours outside of services. It represents a dimension of Nanchang's history that the city's own tourist materials rarely highlight — Christianity reached Jiangxi through Matteo Ricci's mission network, and some of the earliest Western observations of Chinese provincial life were made by Jesuit missionaries based here.