Thursday, October 07, 2010

THE FIVE MAIN VENUES


Our hotel serves breakfast in an Italian restaurant. So it’s not unusual to have fried Chinese noodles and greens with European bacon and sausages. I wonder about the cheese and was on this contemplation mode when I decided to take a quick side trip to what is indicated in the map as a sightseeing street.

Some 2,000 buildings of European architecture built between the 1920s until the 1930s are showcased in Tianjin's Wu Da Dao District (aka The Five main Venues) and serves as reminders of the city's colonial past. In 1858, British and French gunboats induced the signing of the Treaties of Tianjin that opened the city to foreign trade. In 1900 as an aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, an eight-nation alliance composed of Russia, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, the United States, Austro-Hungary, and Italy occupied and governed Tianjin. The city was effectively under foreign occupation until the end of World War II with Japan's surrender in 1945.



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