The Gulou district, centred on the Drum Tower, is the oldest inhabited part of Ningbo and contains the highest concentration of pre-modern street patterns and traditional architecture surviving in the city centre. The lanes running south from the Drum Tower through the old residential quarter are not tourist attractions — there are no ticket gates, no souvenir shops — but are instead genuinely old streets where residents hang laundry from windows and run neighbourhood businesses from front rooms.
The district contains pockets of unusually preserved Jiangnan domestic architecture: double-courtyard houses with carved screen doors, stone gateways with faded family inscriptions, communal wells that still function. Most visitors pass through quickly on the way between TianYi Ge and Tianyi Square, but an hour of walking the backstreets reveals a different and more authentic Ningbo than the restored heritage zones.