Two Thousand Garden Houses

The Five Great Avenues are the nickname for the extension of the British concession beyond the Wall River, in what is today Heping District. Once the area was made the concession's extension zone in 1903, it was filled in with silt dredged from the Hai River, which means the ground under some of the most expensive houses in Tianjin arrived by dredger. That sequence matters for how the quarter looks: an empty, flat, engineered site can be laid out in a single plan, and this one was, in parallel streets running east to west and named after five cities of south-west China, Chongqing, Changde, Dali, Munan and Machang.

The scale is the point. The quarter holds more than 2,000 garden houses of differing national styles built in the 1920s and 1930s, over a million square metres of floor space, and among the three hundred most typical buildings there are 89 British, 41 Italian, 6 French, 4 German and 3 Spanish. English-language descriptions put the total at over 230 buildings of all kinds in the architecture of Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. The mixture is what gives the area its reputation: it is called a museum of world architecture, and it is counted as one of the fourteen historic cultural districts of the city.

Two official acts fixed the quarter's status in the 2010s. In 2013 the State Council approved 39 representative buildings of the modern Wudadao group as national key protected cultural relics, which is the highest level of protection available for built heritage in China. In April 2015 the quarter was named one of the first batch of Chinese historic districts by the housing ministry and the state heritage administration. The protection followed a change in use: from 2012 the Heping district government built tourism around the renovation of the Minyuan stadium, opening a visitor centre and a sightseeing carriage service, so that the villas are now experienced by carriage rather than by residence.