Dongxi Xiang: Old Streets and New Fabric

Zhengyang East and West Lanes run beside the southern wall of Jingjiang Princes’ City, taking their names from their position outside its southern gate. That spatial relationship is the most useful starting point for understanding Dongxi Xiang.

A street beside a monumental enclosure presents two scales at once: the long boundary of an institution and the smaller divisions of houses and shops. Their juxtaposition can remain legible even where individual buildings change. The lane and the wall connect neighbourhood life to the history of the palace precinct.

Excavations connected with conservation work revealed a princely ancestral-shrine foundation in the eastern area and altar remains in the west. The Guangxi archaeological institute records cultural deposits extending from the Tang through Qing periods. Its short report describes the shrine as an arrangement of enclosing walls, entrance and halls.

Below later commerce and housing lay spaces associated with princely ceremony. The buried remains extend the district's history beneath its present street level, recording successive uses of the same ground.

A renewal project began in 2013, and the renovated East Lane reopened in April 2016. The Guangxi consultative body describes restoration and reconstruction work at Dongxi Xiang and Xiaoyao Tower.

Inherited elements sit beside renewed surfaces and new work. A retained foundation, replacement window and new commercial interior can belong to different moments in one building's life. The contemporary streetscape gathers these layers within an older urban arrangement.

The present Xiaoyao Tower is a modern reconstruction. It renews a city landmark and a remembered relationship with the river, carrying a historical name into the current skyline.

Reconstruction adds a new chapter to the site's material history. A recovered outline, familiar name and renewed public focus express how a later generation chose to remember the tower. Surviving remains elsewhere in the district preserve other kinds of connection with earlier buildings.

According to descendants interviewed by Guilin Daily, Xiong Tong He Pharmacy began around 1894 with migrants from Jiangxi; it became Lequn Pharmacy in 1956. Its premises were later recreated. The report also identifies Ma Qibang’s former home at East Lane number 7 as a small European-influenced building.

These examples introduce two different forms of historical continuity. A remembered business can survive through a name and a reconstructed presentation. A house can complicate an apparently uniform historical streetscape through an unexpected architectural vocabulary. Neither story fits neatly into the idea of a district frozen in one period. Commerce, migration and changing taste belong in the interpretation alongside the princely wall.