A Street Rebuilt in 1986

Before it was a street, this was a pair of lanes on either side of a temple. The Ancient Culture Street grew out of Gongnan Street and Gongbei Street, the two roads centred on the Tianhou Palace, and the sources call that ground the earliest place in Tianjin where culture, religion and trade gathered in one spot. The logic is easy to see on the map: a temple attracts worshippers, worshippers attract sellers, and sellers build the kind of street that outlasts both. What stands there now runs 687 metres from Tongbei Road to Shuige Street at a width of five metres, lined with small shops built in the Qing manner.

The street a visitor walks today is a reconstruction, and it has a date. On New Year's Day 1986 the Tianjin municipal government rebuilt Gongnan and Gongbei streets, putting up more than a hundred small buildings in the Qing folk manner, and the result was promoted as one of the ten sights of Tianjin. In late 2002 the Tianjin Real Estate Corporation invested two billion yuan to add a commercial district on the old street, with 220,000 square metres of floor area. On 8 May 2007 the tourist area was formally approved by the national tourism administration as a 5A-rated scenic area. The street has been successively rebuilt, extended and re-graded, and each of those steps is part of its history.

The shops are the argument for the street, and they are specific. More than a hundred line it, dealing in old books, folk goods, ethnic instruments and traditional handicrafts; among the best known names are Yangliuqing prints, Clay Figurine Zhang and Kite Wei, three of the city's own crafts. That concentration is the point: a visitor can see the print, the clay figure and the kite within a few hundred metres of one another, and each is a working tradition rather than a souvenir design. Nankai District counts the street as its 5A scenic area and describes it as China's only open commercial tourist area, a phrase that emphasises the absence of a gate rather than the presence of a ticket.