Qilou — the returnees' old town

A port opens up

After the Second Opium War, China had to open more ports to foreign trade in the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858, among them Qiongzhou on Hainan, today's Haikou. Trade really got going from 1876, when a customs house and a British consulate were set up here. The Europeans called the city Hoihow.

With the port came the ships, and with the ships the chance to leave. Whoever could went to Singapore, Malaya, Siam or Java — the region the Chinese call Nanyang, the Southern Sea. Very many Hainanese worked there as traders, cooks, sailors and plantation workers. And those who made something of themselves sent money home or came back themselves.

Houses that ride over the pavement

Qilou literally means “riding building”. It refers to a house whose upper floor juts out over the pavement and rests on columns — it rides over the street, so to speak. The shop is below, the family lives above, and in front a continuous covered walkway is created.

In the tropics that's not decoration but building physics. The walkway protects against the blazing sun and the heavy downpours that fall almost daily here in summer. You can walk the length of a street without getting wet. The returnees had got to know this style in the colonial cities of Southeast Asia, in Singapore, Penang and Malacca, and brought it home.

When the city wall fell

The first arcade houses appeared towards the end of the 19th century in a small quarter by the harbour. The heyday came in 1924. The ruler of Hainan at the time had the old city wall torn down to make room for wider streets. The wall's stones were used to build an embankment by the water, which today carries the Changdi waterfront road, the “Long Embankment”.

Between 1924 and 1936 there was building as never before. In town they said a new arcade house went up every two days. Today the old town has around 600 of these houses along about four kilometres of streets — one of the largest surviving ensembles of its kind in China.

European façades on Chinese floor plans

The returnees built what they had seen abroad. The floor plans stayed Chinese, narrow and deep, with courtyards for light and air. But the façades show European-style columns, arches, balustrades and stucco ornaments, mixed with details from Malaysia and India, plus Chinese characters and lucky symbols.

High up on many façades you can still read the names of the old businesses, moulded in stucco: pharmacies, cloth merchants, hotels, banks. Raise your eyes and you read the city's economic history.

Four streets, four faces

Deshengsha Road was once a sandy beach outside the city. It got its name, “Sand of Victory”, in 1849, when pirates were driven off here. Later it housed consulates, foreign trading houses and a French hospital, and the street was considered the city's showcase — some compared it to the Bund in Shanghai. The “Five-Storey Building” stands there too, then the tallest building in town.

Zhongshan Road used to lead to a temple and was later named after Sun Yat-sen; today it's the best-known pedestrian street. Bo'ai Road is the old north–south axis of the walled city and still a wholesale street. It links two markets: the East Market has dried seafood, fish maw, squid and shellfish in sacks, the West Market antiques, old coins and bric-a-brac — both worth a detour even without buying anything. Xinhua Road was built in 1924 where the wall used to stand.

Letters and money from the south

Many houses tell of the link to Southeast Asia. On Zhongshan Road a returnee from Singapore opened a hotel in 1923 that also forwarded emigrants' remittances and letters to their families. For many returnees it was the first address after arrival.

An old tea shop on the same street recalls that time with a children's rhyme that tells of farewell: going south, leaving wife and child, saying goodbye to the parents. The rhyme is still sung in Haikou today.

Mazu and farewell

The quarter has a temple to Mazu, the goddess of seafarers. Here the emigrants prayed for a safe crossing before setting off. The Hainanese in Singapore later built their own Mazu temple, where they gave thanks for a good journey after arriving.

People still light incense here today. The temple is small and easy to miss — which is exactly why it's worth looking for.

Restored, but lived in

For a long time the houses decayed, some collapsed. Then over more than ten years the old town was restored on the principle of preserving everything as far as possible as it was. A team of architectural historians classified the roughly 600 houses by condition: some were only secured, others restored from old photos, others rebuilt inside. More than eighty old company names were restored on the façades, and many houses are once again what they used to be: shops, guesthouses, restaurants.

That's the appeal. Qilou isn't an open-air museum but a neighbourhood where people trade, cook and live. Besides souvenir shops there are wholesalers for lamps and tools, hairdressers and food stalls.

How to approach the visit

The old town is most beautiful early in the morning, before the heat, and in the evening, when the façades are lit. In between, a break in one of the old teahouses with Hainanese morning tea is worthwhile. For lunch Shuixiangkou lane has a dockworkers' speciality: rice in spicy soup, a cheap and filling meal for more than a hundred years.

Admission is free, including the small exhibitions in some restored houses. Just walk the streets and look up often.