Old buildings, new chic

摘要

In a leafy street close to a busy underground station in the southern city of Guangzhou, two middle-aged women sit in a booth giving out hand-drawn local maps to passers-by. These feature cartoon-style images of churches and other grand architectural relics of the city's pre-Communist past. Nearby, giggling youngsters take pictures of each other outside one such edifice: a European-looking villa, its high garden wall topped with ornate green tiles. There are few foreign visitors. The hand-drawn maps are all in Chinese. It is young locals who are drawn to this neighbourhood of large three- or four-storey houses built in the 1920s and 1930s in Western and Chinese styles (one is pictured). Its tree-lined lanes dotted with cafes and art galleries have become fashionable hangouts.