Datong, an old town and its island in the river

A 2024 cultural-tourism field visit entered Lanxi Old Street on four-sided stone paving. The report notices brick walls, dark roof tiles and horse-head gables, features that shape the street’s Hui-style appearance. The details matter at walking scale: a paved lane sets the rhythm of movement, while high gable walls define the edge of a house and the line of the street. Datong’s heritage is not one monument but a sequence of spaces encountered on foot.

The report describes Heyue Old Street through “three streets and thirteen lanes.” That phrase gives the old quarter a structure rather than reducing it to a picturesque facade. Each narrow route connects doorways, walls and small turns; together they form a neighborhood whose scale encourages walking and repeated passage. A visitor group was asked to trace the street’s history, but the old lanes are also a present-day spatial system, linking homes and shared spaces.

The field visit included the former National Sixteenth Middle School, the old Salt Administration and Merchants Bureau, and the former Datong Anglican church. These buildings represent different institutions that occupied the town: education, government-linked trade and religion. The report groups them as heritage sites along the old streets, inviting readers to see how a riverside commercial settlement gathered varied functions in close quarters. Their histories should be read individually; their proximity is what makes the walk coherent.

The 2024 field visit ended at a national reserve for the Yangtze finless porpoise, where the group watched a feeding session. The itinerary places river ecology beside Datong’s old streets and historic institutions. It records one visit, not a measure of the species’ population or conservation results; the river is both the setting of the town’s history and habitat that requires protection.