The Russian City

Xiaobailou's character came from a group of people who had lost their own quarter. In the 1920s several thousand Russian refugees arrived in Tianjin, and because the Russian concession had already been cancelled they settled instead in the southern end of the British concession and in the neighbouring streets of the old German concession, around Kaifeng Road and the western half of Xuzhou Road. The area became a White Russian district that foreign residents called the Russian city. Russian emigrants opened western restaurants, Russian food shops, bars, dress shops and beauty parlours there, along with a Jewish club, and the sources note that the streets carried Russian signs on every side.

The quarter's prosperity during the occupation is one of the stranger facts about it. Because Xiaobailou lay inside the concessions, it was not affected by the war of resistance and continued to trade through the Japanese occupation of Tianjin from 1937 to 1945. The British concession's own account adds a detail about who the customers were: Xiaobailou was a White Russian quarter of bars, dance halls and restaurants serving the foreign garrisons. A district that lived on soldiers' pay and refugees' enterprise is not a stable economy, but for two decades it was a lively one, and its architecture and street names still reflect the mixture.

The modern quarter has been rebuilt twice over. After the 1950s nearly a hundred shops survived around the crossing of Dagu North Road and Kaifeng Road, and from 1993 the old district was redeveloped with department stores and hotels. The Xiaobailou shopping street opened on 22 October 2000, seven years after that redevelopment began, and in 2009 the area was designated the city's main centre, on the argument that it combines historic depth with finance, business offices and high-end retail. Metro line 1 serves it, with stations at Xiaobailou, Xiawafang, Nanlou, Tucheng, Chentangzhuang, Fuxingmen, Huashanli and Caijingdaxue along the same corridor.