Wennan Street Qilou

Wennan Street's qilou shophouses are among the best-preserved examples of early 20th-century southern Chinese commercial architecture in Hainan. The colonnaded ground floors that gave the buildings their name — qilou means "raised building" — shelter pedestrians from rain and sun while providing display space for the shops behind, an arrangement that works as well today as it did when the buildings were new.

The facades show the eclecticism typical of the style: Ionic columns, arched windows, decorative parapets, and occasional Art Deco geometric ornament mix without apparent concern for consistency. The overall effect is lively rather than confused. Most of the buildings are still occupied and still commercial, which gives the street a lived quality that preserved historic districts in more tourist-heavy cities have lost.

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A story
Qilou — the arcaded shophouses that line Chinese commercial streets across Southeast Asia and southern China — were built here in the 1920s and 1930s by Wenchang merchants who had made money in the Nanyang (Southeast Asia) and returned to invest in their home town. The style, which blends European neoclassical facades with Chinese interior arrangements, is a direct expression of a particular historical moment when Hainanese merchants were central nodes in trade routes across the South China Sea.