And there were sections of the city where different foreigners lived - Japanese, White Russians, Americans and Germans - but never together, and all with their own separate habits, some dirty, some clean. And they had houses of all shapes and colours, one painted in pink, another with rooms that jutted out at every angle like the backs and fronts of Victorian dresses, others with roofs like pointed hats and wood carvings painted white to look like ivory.
- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
China's third largest city, the commercial centre of TIANJIN , on the coast some 80km east of Beijing, is a dynamic and modern city, but for visitors its most attractive feature is its legacy of colonial buildings reflecting an assortment of foreign styles. Overshadowed by the capital and little visited by tourists, Tianjin has architecture and shopping opportunities, especially for antiques, that make it well worth a day trip from Beijing, just over an hour away by train. A longer trip will prove expensive as there is no budget accommodation in the city.
Though today the city is given over to industry and commerce, it was as a port that Tianjin first gained importance. When the Ming emperor Yongle moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, Tianjin became the dock for vast quantities of imperial tribute rice, transported here from all over the south through the Grand Canal. In the nineteenth century the city caught the attention of the seafaring Western powers, who used a minor infringement - the boarding of an English ship by Chinese troops - as an excuse to declare war. With well-armed gunboats, they were assured of victory, and the Treaty of Tianjin, signed in 1856, gave the Europeans the right to establish concessionary bases on the mainland from where they could conduct trade and sell opium.
These separate concessions , along the banks of the Hai River, were self-contained European fantasy worlds: the French built elegant chateaux and towers, while the Germans constructed red-tiled Bavarian villas. The Chinese were discouraged from intruding, except for servants, who were given pass cards. Tensions between the indigenous population and the foreigners exploded in the Tianjin Incident of 1870, when a Chinese mob attacked a French-run orphanage and killed the nuns and priests, in the belief that the Chinese orphans were being kidnapped for later consumption. Twenty Chinese were beheaded as a result, and the prefect of the city was banished. A centre for secretive anti-foreign movements, the city had its genteel peace interrupted again by the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, after which the foreigners levelled the walls around the old Chinese city to enable them to keep an eye on its residents.
The City
Tianjin has few actual sights, and it's the city's streetscapes, an assemblage of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century foreign architecture, mostly European, juxtaposed with the concrete and glass monoliths of wealthy contemporary China, which are its most engrossing attraction. The old city was strictly demarcated into national zones, and each section of the city centre has retained a hint of its old flavour. The area northwest of the main train station, on the west side of the Hai River, was the old Chinese city. Running from west to east along the north bank of the river were the Austrian, Italian, Russian and Belgian concessions, though most of the old buildings here have been destroyed. Unmistakable are the chateaux of the French concession, which now make up the downtown district just south of the river, and the haughty mansions the British built east of here. Farther east, but still south of the river, the architecture of an otherwise unremarkable district has a sprinkling of stern German constructions.
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