Eight Passes and One Tree on Each Street

The district takes its literal name from the old fortifications of China. Three streets run north to south, Zijinguan, Ningwuguan and Shaoguan, and seven cross them: Wushengguan, Jiayuguan, Hanguguan, Zhengyangguan, Linhuaiguan, Juyongguan and Shanhaiguan. Each is named for a pass that once guarded a route into the interior, and each is lined with a single species of tree, so that people often call a road by its tree rather than by its name. Shaoguan Road is planted throughout with flowering peach, pink in spring like a band; Zhengyangguan Road with crape myrtle, in flower in summer; Juyongguan Road with maple; Zijinguan Road with rows of cedar; Ningwuguan Road with crabapple. Flowers open from early spring to late autumn, which is why the district is called a flower street.

A German colony existed here from 1897 to 1914, and a few of Badaguan's older European houses are German, but the greater part of what stands was built afterwards. The mass of the district dates from the 1930s. From 1931 to 1937 the mayor Shen Honglie reserved the ground east of Rongcheng Road, north to Zhanshan Road and south to Taiping Bay, as a special zone for regulated building: the built density had to stay below 50 percent, the green space had to be protected, and open walls were required. What came out of it was more than 200 buildings in the styles of Russia, Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Japan, Denmark and some twenty other countries, which is why the quarter is called an exhibition of world architecture. In 2001 the ensemble of near-modern buildings was made a national key cultural relic protection unit.

Beside the district, at the south end of No. 2 Beach, a stone villa of 1932 stands on a rock outcrop: Huashi Lou, the colourful rock building. Its designer, Liu Yaochen, set a Gothic form against Russian lines, built the walls of differently coloured stone and cut stained glass into the windows; a turret rises above it and a passageway runs from the house down to the seashore. It began as the private residence of a Russian merchant, passed to a British owner and served as the residence of the British consul-general, and Chiang Kai-shek stayed in it in the late 1940s. A few streets away, at No. 10 Juyongguan Road, stands the building called the Princess House, said to have been raised in welcome for a Danish princess and in fact the villa of a German merchant.