Older Than the Walled Town

The street is older than the city wall, and the local saying makes the claim directly: Guyi Street came before Tianjin Wei. It is an old clothing street of more than 700 metres in Hongqiao District, east of the north gate of old Tianjin, running south along Beima Road, north to the south bank of the South Canal, west toward Zhugan Lane and diagonally across from the needle market street. It formed in the Yuan dynasty under the name Matou Dongjie, the east street of the wharf, which explains its position: a street of dealers grew where the boats tied up, before any wall was built to enclose them.

At its late-Qing and early-Republic peak the street held eight of Tianjin's twelve great silk dealers, among them Ruifuxiang, and the trade in secondhand and new clothing gave the street its name, since guyi means old clothes. Two shops on it survive as protected buildings: the Tianjin Qianxiangyi silk shop at number 12 and the Ruifuxiang shop at number 44, both municipal cultural relic protection units. The concentration of dealers on one street is a reminder that the silk trade in a canal city was a cluster rather than a scatter: buyers came to one place because every seller was there.

The street's function ended in a single administrative act. In 1956, after private shops were brought into joint state ownership, most premises on Guyi Street became warehouses, workshops and housing, and the retail life of the street stopped. That is a more complete transformation than decline: the buildings stayed, the trade did not, and a shopping street became a service yard for the state economy. In 2011 the Tianjin planning bureau fixed the historic district plan and named the street a historic and cultural quarter, and a district history of the riverside describes it as a rebuilt commercial street on the right bank at Sanchahekou.