Five Great Avenues

The Five Great Avenues (五大道) are the nickname for the extension of the British concession beyond the Wall River, in today's 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, and over the following decades it became an up-scale residential quarter. It 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; among the three hundred most typical buildings there are 89 British, 41 Italian, 6 French, 4 German and 3 Spanish. In 2013 the State Council approved 39 representative buildings as national key protected cultural relics.