The Banking Street

This street is where road-building in Tianjin began. In 1870 the British concession built the first road inside any concession in the city, running from the old customs house to the Astor Hotel, and named it Victoria Road; it is now Jiefang North Road. In 1887 the concession authorities went further and laid a gravel road in front of the chairman's house, the first macadam-style road in Tianjin. The sequence is telling: the first road connected the customs to a hotel, because that was the traffic that mattered, and the second served a private house, because that was the ratepayer who mattered. Infrastructure follows the interests that pay for it.

The street became a banking centre in the 1920s. In 1923 the HSBC bought a plot on the British concession's middle street, today's Jiefang North Road, and built a new branch there, and in 1926 the Yokohama Specie Bank built a classical headquarters on Victoria Road. The Astor Hotel itself has an older and stranger origin: in 1863 the missionary John Innocent bought six mu of land in the concession with 600 taels of alms silver, and the hotel's name is a pun on a phrase from Mencius. A street of banks that begins with mission money and a Confucian pun is a fair summary of treaty-port Tianjin.

The sources treat this street as the city's best evidence of architectural variety. The bank buildings on Jiefang North Road are called the most typical example of the diversity of Tianjin's Western architecture, and the examples given are specific: the HSBC building with its Ionic colonnade in a strict classical manner, the Astor Hotel in British classical style, and the old Chinese Central Bank branch. The street also appears as one of the historic districts of the former French concession, listed with the Quanyechang, Central Garden, Chifeng Road and Chengde Road quarters, and it lies across Jinwan Square from Tianjin station, so the banks face the railway that brought their customers.