Beihai Old Street: Arcade Houses and Merchant Plots
Zhuhai Road’s arcades, shopfronts and deep merchant plots preserve the form of a coastal commercial street.
Beihai.
Beihai’s coastal setting connects places with very different timescales. Zhuhai Road preserves a mercantile streetscape; Qiaogang carries the history of families resettled from Vietnam; Hepu County holds evidence of Han-era exchange. Offshore, Weizhou’s volcanic rocks and living reefs tell separate stories of construction and change. These are connected journeys, rather than one uninterrupted port history.
Beihai Old Street
Hepu Han Heritage
Finding Han Hepu Beneath the Ground
Walls, wells, production remains and tombs reveal how archaeologists reconstruct Hepu’s Han-era maritime world from evidence that survives in different forms.
Hepu Han Beads: Materials, Making and Exchange
Scientific study of Hepu’s Han tomb beads traces varied materials and skilled making while leaving individual routes uncertain.
ReadQiaogang
Qiaogang: A Fishing Town Rebuilt After Migration
The story behind Qiaogang’s food streets begins with families arriving from Vietnam and continues through changing forms of maritime work.
Shengtang Catholic Church
Shengtang Church: Island Stone, Travelling Forms
Pointed openings and local coral stone connect Shengtang Catholic Church with Weizhou’s village life and nineteenth-century religious history.
Weizhou Island
Weizhou: Reading Fire and Water in the Coast
Basalt, fragmented volcanic deposits and marine erosion reveal how Weizhou’s coast was built and reshaped over time.
Weizhou’s Living Edge: What the Reef Studies Reveal
Corals, algae, sediment and heat shape Weizhou’s reefs; studies of small encounters and longer histories reveal a changing marine community.
ReadPlaces
Beihai Old Street
Zhuhai Road’s merchant buildings reveal how shaded pedestrian space, narrow shopfronts and deep plots supported a port town.
Qiaogang
Fishing work, family food traditions and the memory of resettlement shape this coastal town within Beihai.
Hepu Han Heritage
Walls, wells, tombs and tiny beads offer different kinds of evidence for Hepu’s place in early maritime exchange.
Weizhou Island
On Weizhou, volcanic deposits, wave-cut shores and living coral communities ask to be read on different timescales.
Shengtang Catholic Church
At Shengtang on Weizhou Island, Gothic forms, local building materials and continuing faith meet in one village church.
Photo credits and rights
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Beihai Old Street in an archival photograph, showing its continuous commercial frontage. Source-reported photograph date: 2012-12-07.Thomas Fischler · CC BY 2.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗ Resized and converted to WebP; full composition retained.
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Han-period gemstone beads from Hepu, shown in Figure 1 of Zheng and Guo (2025). The authors’ material labels follow Xiong (2015); this labeled research image is not a map of the beads’ individual journeys. Photograph date unconfirmed.Yanyan Zheng and Guikun Guo, Arts 14(6),147, Figure 1 / CC BY 4.0 · CC BY 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗ Resized and converted to WebP; full composition retained.
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Tidal shoreline on Weizhou Island. The exact beach and the nature of the exposed rock lines are unconfirmed. Source-reported photograph date: 2013-05-02.Lun Joe · CC BY 2.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗ Resized and converted to WebP; full composition retained.
