The German Quarter

The German concession was created by a contract, and the contract has a date and three signatures. On 30 October 1895 Sheng Xuanhuai, Li Minchen and the German consul signed the agreement that allowed Germany a permanent concession in Tianjin, covering 1,034 mu. The concession ran from the Hai River on the east to the Haidadao on the west and from the American concession on the north to a line near Xiaoliuzhuang on the south. Germany enlarged it after the invasion of 1900, forcing the Qing government to sign a further contract on the fifth day of the sixth lunar month of 1901, and by 1902 the concession covered 2,304 mu, more than doubling in seven years.

The concession ended in Chinese hands earlier than most. On 14 August 1917 the Chinese government announced that it was taking over the German concession, and it was redesignated the first special district of Tianjin. The timing was not a Chinese initiative: Germany had lost the First World War in Europe, and the concession became one of the assets that a defeated power could no longer hold. The German government later accepted the relevant clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, and the concession was formally recovered. That sequence, a concession acquired by treaty, enlarged by force and lost through a European war, is the shortest possible summary of how the whole concession system worked.

What survives is a street rather than a quarter. The Jiefang South Road historic quarter is described as a multi-purpose district whose chief feature is German-style architecture, and it names the Dongguang Building, the German Club and the former home of the warlord Wu Yulin among its buildings. The reason the list is short is geological: in 1976 Hexi was badly hit by the Tangshan earthquake, and the sources record that most of the German concession buildings in the district disappeared. The quarter is therefore a fragment with a known cause, and the metro now stops at Jiefang South Road on line 6, between Meijiang Convention Centre and Dongting Road, which puts the modern street on top of the old one.