Last Chance to See #2 - Guangzhou, China!

All the way from Beijing Road to Li Wan Square are the "famous vernacular 19th century arcade/coupons gallery style buildings of Guangzhou", "designed in Canton, by combining the characters of western and traditional Cantonese, to make modernised the city" and dammit if these buildings aren't completely splendid.

Let me show you a few:


Loving them so far? And do note the windows. Those are all stunning and I sooo want to own windows just like them one day. In fact, let me see if I can find more examples of those amazing stained glass or cut-glass windows:

Double-click to see properly.

And there's also a lovely element of "play" in the fabric of these buildings; stunning little decorative bits that serve no function. I'll just show you one so you'll know what I mean.

Love this ceiling?

Don't know why things like this make me happy, but they just do.

Look, instead of being all so overly-prescriptive like this, why don't I show you stretches of street scape and let you choose the buildings you want to fall madly in love with.


In love? OK, now comes the bad part. It's all going! Guangzhou has selected one Coupon-Gallery-Arcade Building that they think is the best, and all the others are to be razed to make way for steel and glass skyscrapers!

It's bad, I'm telling you, BAD! How can they let all this just go? It's all so beautiful. And it's vernacular too; indigenous to Guangzhou; endemic! Nowhere else on earth has buildings quite like these! And it's all still intact; an entire stretch of road that still has all it's architectural integrity. That's just so rare. AND there's nothing structurally wrong with any that I could see, so there is no real grounds for getting rid of them.

Does anyone know anyone at UNESCOs World Heritage? Can someone let them know that the world will lose something special and significant if this stretch of street is demolished, and ask them to, you know, talk to Guangzhou City Council and maybe ...

There's no harm in trying, is there, when the alternative means we're going to lose something that is truly worth saving.

And if we can't save them ... can I please have my choice of those windows?