The Shop Window of the Restaurants

The food street's construction began with a removal. It opened on 1 January 1985 with about 42,000 square metres of building area laid out as a walled Chinese town, and construction started on 11 August 1984, after 445 households had been moved out in only thirteen days. The project raised about fifty million yuan, and it was proposed by the mayor Li Ruihuan in 1983 as one of ten things the city government would do to improve people's lives. That framing is important: this is a municipal welfare project expressed as architecture, and the speed of the resettlement is recorded as an achievement rather than a cost.

The wall is not decorative. The street lies in the Nanshi quarter of Heping District, between Heping Road and the Nanshi Hotel Street, facing the Drum Tower, and it is laid out as a walled town with four gates. At its opening it held 19 large restaurants, 61 snack shops, 11 food stores and 4 teahouses, which is a concentrated inventory of the city's cooking in one enclosure. The Associated Press called it the shop window of Tianjin's restaurants, a description that captures both its function and its promotional purpose: a place where a visitor could see the whole range of local food without crossing the city.

The gates carry the most deliberate detail in the design. The four are named Zhenyu, Xingge, Zhongsheng and Huayu, and their first characters read together as revitalize China, a phrase of the 1980s reform period set into the architecture. The four gate plaques are written in the Yan, Liu, Ou and Zhao styles of calligraphy, so that a visitor passing from one entrance to another passes four different traditions of the brush. That pairing of a political slogan with a display of calligraphic schools is a very specific period gesture: the building is at once a municipal promise, a commercial showcase and an exhibition of traditional literacy.