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November 30, 2014

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Home » Sunday » Now and Then

Veranda-style buildings populate the south

Source: Shanghai Daily | November 30, 2014, Sunday | Print Edition

QILOU, arcade building or arcade house, is a fusion of traditional Asian architecture and the 18th century Western veranda style, with some Indian and Arabic influences thrown in.

These houses can be found chiefly in south and southwest China, including Guangdong, Fujian and Hainan provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. But they may also appear in some other cities south of the Yangtze River. Even in Shanghai, there are streets featuring qilou, or arcade buildings.

Such buildings were first introduced into China after the 1840 Opium War, an aggressive war waged by Britain against China. After China’s defeat in that and following wars with the Western counties, great influences from the Western Hemisphere began to affect Chinese people’s daily lives, including their buildings and houses.

Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province, was one of the first cities in the country to introduce arcade buildings in the late years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The most prominent feature of such buildings is that they are linked together by a veranda, which had become widespread since the 1850s in many Western countries and their colonies, including those along the Mediterranean Sea, Australia, New Zealand, India and even the western part of the United States.

At first, people in Guangzhou built commercial buildings, usually three- or four-story high structures, with an arcade running along the street and striding over the sidewalk. Such arcades can stretch for several hundred meters or even surround a whole block. They can provide shelter for shops along the sidewalks as well as the pedestrians from the capricious local weather, which sees scorching sun one minute and biblical rain the next.

In Guangzhou, most arcade buildings are located along its commercial streets, such as Dishifu Road, Shangxiajiu Road, Zhongshan Road, Jiefang Road, Remin Road S. and Yide Road. The arcade buildings in the Xihaokou area are supposed to be the finest of their kind. They include the New Asia Hotel, Nanfang Building and Oi Kwan Hotel.

Those arcade buildings also feature a variety of architectural styles by copying Gothic windows, ancient Roman columns, Southeast Asian holed walls, baroque decorations or modern functionalism.

But after the 1960s, few new arcade structures were built in the city.

Another concentration of arcade buildings in the country can be spotted in Haikou, capital city of Hainan Province, the big island close to the southernmost tip of the Chinese mainland.

Haikou features many so-called qilou streets or arcade building streets. Most of them, of course, are commercial buildings housing all kinds of shops.

The Qilou Arcade Streets area in Haikou covers an area of 1.5 square kilometers, stretching for more than 3,800 meters and comprising several roads. Some of the buildings there are more than 100 years old, with the oldest dating to 1849.

The local government has already presented this area, now a popular tourist attraction in the city, as a candidate for the World Cultural Heritage List.

Meanwhile, Quanzhou in Fujian Province, Wuzhou and Beihai in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and a number of other cities around southern China boast many well-preserved arcade buildings. Some are known for their unique architectural features, such as water gates and iron rings on the outer walls.

It is said that such designs were aimed at providing people in the buildings access to the outside and places to moor boats when the streets were heavily flooded.

山花 (shānhuā) Pediment

Shanhua, or pediment, is the triangular part on the top of a gable wall under a gable and hip roof.

In the West, the pediment is usually placed above the horizontal structure of the entablature and found in classical Greek temples, Renaissance and neoclassical architecture. But in China, they can be spotted on the top of the end walls of a house with a double sloping roof.

The pediment in the country is often adorned with glazed tiles or brick sculptures. In the north, the pediment decorations are mostly of themes such as divine animals, figurines and folk stories. In the south, people prefer brick sculptures of flowers and other plants.

Fine examples of such pediments can be found in ancient gardens such as the Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou and the Small Golden Hill in Yangzhou, both in east China’s Jiangsu Province.

Now and Then


 

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