The Wharf Before the Wall

Dazhigu's history is administrative before it is architectural. In the Yuan period the court set up receiving offices, storage offices and a salt administration at Dazhigu, including a Linqing Myriad Household Office, and built granaries there to hold the grain moving toward the capital. The same period saw a Tianfei Palace and a Tianhou Palace built on the ground. What this describes is a state facility rather than a village: an office that received goods, a warehouse that held them, a monopoly office that taxed salt, and a shrine that protected the sailors doing the work. The whole apparatus of a canal state, in one district.

A Yuan scholar left the best description of what the junction looked like. Zhang Zhu, sent to sacrifice at the Tianhou Palace, wrote of the Sanchahekou that under the morning sun ten thousand ships gathered with their masts together, a line quoted in the sources as evidence of the traffic. Poetry is not statistics, but the image is specific enough to be useful: a river mouth crowded with moored vessels, seen from the bank at dawn. Dazhigu, with Sanchahekou and Beidaguan, formed the wharf and commercial districts along the river outside the Tianjin Wei wall, which is to say the working city lay outside the fortifications rather than within them.

The district also marks a linguistic boundary. The older form of Tianjin speech east of the Hai River, called type B in the sources, covered the old Hedong quarter, Dazhigu and the Hebei area together, and it used more dental sounds than the type A speech west of the river, which covered the old walled city and the western head. A dialect boundary that follows the river and includes Dazhigu is a reminder that this bank developed separately from the walled town, with its own wharves, its own shrines and its own way of pronouncing the city's name. The water divided the city before any bridge did.