65 years, 250,000 outpatient visits, 64,000 operations — the department where Chinese plastic surgery began
To walk into the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery of Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital is to walk into the place where the discipline began in China. The department was founded in June 1961 by Academician Zhang Disheng, the physician who built Chinese plastic and reconstructive surgery from nothing — and who went on to pioneer Chinese microsurgery and to found Chinese craniofacial surgery. Six and a half decades later, the department handles more than 250,000 outpatient visits and performs more than 64,000 operations and treatments a year, with 240 inpatient beds, 116 clinicians (50 of them senior professors and chief physicians), and branches across the hospital's south and north campuses, its Pudong division, and three outpatient centres. In the Fudan Hospital Specialty Reputation Rankings, it has held the No.1 position in plastic surgery for more than a decade — in fact, since the specialty table was first published.
The department's role in the country is not just clinical. It was China's earliest national key discipline in plastic surgery (1984), its earliest doctoral training programme in the specialty (1984), and one of the first postdoctoral stations (1991). It houses the Shanghai Institute of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, with dedicated laboratories for microsurgery, three-dimensional craniofacial imaging, scar research, lymphedema, tissue regeneration, and vascular anomalies. That set of designations gives the department a role in Chinese plastic surgery similar to the one Fuwai plays in cardiology: it treats the most difficult cases, trains the national workforce, and defines the specialty's academic standard.
What the place actually looks like
Where most plastic surgery departments in the world are organised around cosmetic surgery — the economically dominant part of the specialty in most countries — the Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital department is organised around reconstruction. Its seven clinical groups are microsurgical reconstruction, craniofacial surgery, vascular anomalies and malformations, lymphedema, hand surgery, burn reconstruction, and aesthetic surgery, spread over some twenty defined clinical directions that include facial nerve paralysis, genitourinary reconstruction, laser therapy, hair transplantation, and functional rehabilitation. Aesthetic surgery is one group among seven — which is the structural reason the department is internationally known for the cases other hospitals cannot do: complex craniofacial malformations, severe burn and trauma reconstruction, congenital hand deformities, and lymphedema that has failed standard treatment.
Two of the department's centres are unique in China: the craniofacial surgery centre, the country's first and still its reference centre for the correction of skull and face deformities, and the comprehensive lymphedema treatment centre, the only one of its kind in the country. That structural choice — a single department covering every form of reconstructive surgery in every age group, from newborn cleft lips to adult post-cancer and post-trauma reconstruction — is the operational reason it has kept the Fudan No.1 ranking since the specialty table began.
Why it became No.1
Three factors explain the department's grip on the Fudan ranking. First, the historical first-mover position: the department is one of the birthplaces of Chinese plastic and reconstructive surgery, and its founder, Academician Zhang Disheng, was simultaneously the pioneer of Chinese microsurgery, the founder of Chinese craniofacial surgery, and the physician who first applied microsurgical technique to lymphedema and to complex limb salvage. Every subsequent Chinese generation of reconstructive surgeons has trained in the lineage that runs through this department. Second, an institutional depth that no competitor has matched: the national key discipline and doctoral programme established in 1984 produced the country's densest concentration of plastic surgery professors, now led by Professor Li Qingfeng, a Chang Jiang Distinguished Professor and recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. Third, a research output that in the three most recent reporting years alone included 36 grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and 143 SCI-indexed papers, anchored to the laboratory platform of the Shanghai Institute of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
That history matters for international patients because reconstructive surgery is a specialty where volume and case mix decide outcomes: the department's 64,000 annual operations mean its surgeons see more craniofacial, lymphedema, and complex reconstruction cases in a year than many national referral centres see in a decade.
What this means for international patients
For a foreign patient considering reconstructive surgery in China, the Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital department is the place that handles the cases the rest of the country refers out. The department's internationally recognised strengths are craniofacial reconstruction (cleft lip and palate, craniosynostosis, facial skeletal deformities), lymphedema treatment, hand and microsurgical reconstruction, burn and post-trauma reconstruction, and vascular anomalies — conditions that in most countries are scattered across half a dozen hospitals, and that here are treated by dedicated groups under one roof. The hospital runs international patient services through its multi-campus network in central Shanghai and Pudong, and the department's aesthetic surgery group offers the full range of facial and body contouring procedures for patients seeking them alongside reconstruction.
The department is based at 639 Zhizaoju Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, with the Pudong division and three outpatient centres across the city. This profile is editorial information based on the sources linked below, not medical advice; individual outcomes depend on the deformity, the prior treatment history, the team, and the patient.