Three Lanes and Seven Alleys, Fuzhou (三坊七巷)

Why Go

A Few Hundred Metres of Modern History

1. Start with the opium

In 1839 an imperial commissioner arrived at Canton with orders to stop the opium trade, confiscated some twenty thousand chests of the drug from British merchants and destroyed it. Britain sent a fleet. The war that followed ended with the first of the treaties that opened Chinese ports to foreign trade and control, and in Chinese historical writing it is the event that begins the modern period.

That commissioner came from this quarter of Fuzhou. So, over the following decades, did a remarkable number of other people who shaped what came next: the translator who introduced Darwin and Adam Smith to a Chinese readership, the administrator who built China’s first modern naval yard and academy, one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century, and a young revolutionary executed before the 1911 revolution whose farewell letter to his wife is still taught in schools.

A few hundred metres of lanes producing that list is not a coincidence. This was where the scholar-official families of Fuzhou lived, in a port province with long exposure to the outside world, at exactly the period when the question of what China should do about that world became urgent. The quarter is interesting as architecture; it is important because of who grew up in it.

2. What the walls are doing

The visible character of the place is white plaster and dark tile. The lanes run between high blank walls, and the tops of those walls undulate in smooth curves rather than stepping up and down. That curved profile is a Fujian form and it is worth pointing out because visitors who have seen photographs of the stepped, angular gables of the Huizhou merchant villages often assume all Chinese white-walled houses look like that. They do not, and the difference is regional.

Behind the walls are courtyard houses, which is where the interest actually lies, and in front of them at street level are shops. One picture below shows a whitewashed gable with a large circular sign hung on it carrying the character used for a pawnshop, with umbrellas and visitors underneath: old fabric, current use.

3. It is a shopping street now, and that is not a scandal

The pictures here show a commercial district: lanterns strung the length of every lane, hanging banners, shopfronts, tourists with cameras, and a stone gateway at the entrance to the main street. Anyone expecting a quiet preserved neighbourhood will find something busier.

What redeems it is that people still live here. In the picture at the top of this page, among the visitors, a woman is walking down the lane carrying two plastic buckets, which is not something anyone does in a museum. The quarter was restored rather than emptied, and the result is a mixture: a heritage district, a commercial street and a residential neighbourhood occupying the same few hundred metres.

Orientation

One Street, Ten Turnings

The layout is in the name and it is easy to hold. A single commercial street runs through the quarter, entered under the stone gateway in one of the pictures here, and off it run three wider lanes on one side and seven narrower alleys on the other. Everything is within a few minutes’ walk of everything else.

The street is where the shops, the food and the crowds are. The lanes are where the courtyard houses and the former residences are, and they are quieter by a noticeable margin within twenty metres of turning off. A visit that stays on the main street has seen the commerce and missed the reason the quarter is protected.

Context

Why Fujian, and Why Then

Fujian is mountainous, faces the sea, and has never had enough farmland for its population. For centuries the consequence was emigration and trade: Fujianese communities across Southeast Asia, a merchant marine, and ports that dealt with foreigners as a matter of routine rather than as an exception. The province was looking outward long before the imperial government wanted it to.

That background matters for what this quarter produced. When the question of how China should respond to European power became unavoidable in the nineteenth century, the people with the most direct experience of Europeans were disproportionately from the coastal south, and Fuzhou in particular became a centre of the self-strengthening effort: a naval yard, a naval academy, translation work, and a stream of officials and students going abroad.

So a few lanes of scholar-official houses in Fuzhou sat at the intersection of a classically educated elite and a province that already knew what was outside. The results went in several directions at once, from the commissioner who tried to stop the opium trade by force to the translator who concluded that China had to learn from the societies that had beaten it. This site covers the Fujian earthen houses inland at Fujian Tulou and the treaty-port island at Gulangyu.

Where to Base

Fuzhou (福州)

Fuzhou is the provincial capital, a river city near the coast with hot springs under it and a long history as a port and a shipbuilding centre. It gets far fewer foreign visitors than Xiamen down the coast and is the more ordinary of the two, which is part of its appeal.

This quarter is the city’s main sight and fits comfortably into a day that also takes in the old naval yard district and a hot spring. For travellers working down the Fujian coast it is an easy stop between the mountains and Xiamen rather than a destination in itself.