Shangxiajiu Commercial Pedestrian Street

This guide to the Shangxiajiu Commercial Pedestrian Street in Guangzhou traces the qilou, the covered arcade sheltering you from sun and rain, back to a legal argument: viceroy Zhang Zhidong's tour of British-run Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1880s, and the 1912 law that followed, ordering shops on major streets to raise their upper floors on columns. It follows the tearing down of Guangzhou's old defensive wall and the decade of building, from 1918 to 1928, that stitched Shangxiajiu together from three older roads into one of the busiest.