A Fairground Turned Park

The park exists because a governor decided to build a new town. In 1902 Yuan Shikai, then governor of Zhili, laid out the Hebei New District on the low, marshy ground north of the Hai River, with Dajing Road as its central axis, a regular street grid, and a new opening bridge, the Jingang Bridge, to replace the old pontoon crossing and connect the new district with the walled town. In 1903 he built the Xin Kai He railway station, today's Tianjin North station. The plan was a deliberate piece of modern urbanism, and the sources describe the new district as becoming the political and cultural centre of the Chinese part of the city.

At the middle of that grid Yuan Shikai planned a park called the Quanye Huichang, an exhibition ground that also served as public ground. Putting an open space at the centre of a new district is a planning choice with a long European pedigree, and here it did political work as well as recreational work: the ground was used for meetings and petitions. Sun Yat-sen, Li Dazhao and Zhou Enlai all spoke there, several times each, according to the district's own account. A park that hosts petitions is a different kind of public space from a garden, and this one was designed as a place where a crowd could gather and be addressed.

After Sun Yat-sen died the ground was renamed Zhongshan Park in his memory, which fixed its political identity in its name. It is now listed among the parks of Hebei District together with Beining Park and Yigong Garden, and the district's roll of parks also includes the Haihe central square park. Beining Park has a comparable origin: in 1906 Zhou Xuexi founded the state planting garden there, and it later became a park, so the district holds two green spaces that began as projects of the late Qing modernisers rather than as landscape design. Both are now simply parks, which is how most political ground ends up.