Baixiang Street was the most prosperous place in the lower half of Chongqing, which served as the birthplace of Chongqing's "mother town" culture. Located at the intersection of Jiefang Road and Kaixuan Road, the "Oriental Wall Street" saw its best days in the golden age of the city's lower half.
From nine 100-year-old cultural relics and two sites of city wall ruins, the scene of "one street, two parks, three lanes, and nine guild halls" reappears with the grandeur of the mountainous city in the past.
Photos provided to iChongqing
Walking on Baixiang Street, you'll find that the original features remain.
With hollowed-out lattice doors and windows, the buildings combine the exotic Western style with traditional Chinese elegance.
As the heart of the industry in the auxiliary capital during wartime, the Medicinal Materials Guild Hall has witnessed the glorious century of Chongqing's medicinal materials industry through the ups and downs. Its robust three-storeyed main building features left-right symmetry. Doors, windows, and columns are decorated with ingenious, exquisite, and vivid reliefs, which have high value in architectural art and aesthetics.
The building presents the Baroque style during the Renaissance in Europe, and the form of regular wavy or reverse curves endows the architectural elements with a dynamic effect.
However, the Private Xinghua Primary School's home, inaugurated by the Guild Hall in 1935, is a modern eclectic building. With three floors on the front and four floors on the back, the well-proportioned building sits in the south and faces the north's Yangtze River. The ship-shaped building, with Chinese wood, black bricks, grey tiles, and Western arc wall corners, shows the perfect combination of the two architectural styles.