The core of old Taicheng (台城), an area of no more than four square kilometers, is made up of 20 some street blocks. Many of the buildings were constructed around  1920-30. Qilou (骑楼) is the dominant building style. Street level storefronts were uniformly set back 2.5 meters to create stretches of continuous covered corridors to shield the pedestrians from the sun and rain. Decorated with facades of a mix of Gothic, Baroque, Romanesque, and Cantonese styles, these buildings make up the heart of the old town of Taishan. Another feature of the old town is that all street intersections are 3-way T-junctions. Just as in English, where T is used to describe the junction layout graphically, the character 丁 is used in Chinese to serve the same purpose. 丁literally means people, thus a town with T-junctions (or 丁junctions) would become popular.

The densely populated old town core is well preserved. Various factors have contributed to its preservation. After the building boom of the 1920-30s, the town slumbered through a succession of upheavals including the Sino-Japanese War and the ensuing civil war, the creation of PRC, and the Cultural Revolution, to name just a few. Then in the late 1970s, right before the launch of its market reform that sent China on its way to the fastest economic expansion in its history, the ownership of the buildings were returned to their  original owners, many of them immigrants resided outside of China. Due to the ownership complexity, which made large scale redevelopment difficult, subsequent expansion of the city were mostly outside of the old town core.

Of course, not everything has been preserved. For example, the historic grandiose clock tower of the old Taishan Rail Road Station (台山火车站), an icon of the city, had been demolished to make room for a modern shopping mall, a cookie cutter piece that you may be able to find in the suburbia of Any Town, USA.

Walking along the quiet street where I roamed as a kid, I  felt like  I had just woke up from a long night of sleep, or time had somehow stopped. But nothing could be more to the contrary! Soon I found out that not a single family of my old neighbors remained. There's a Chinese phrase 物是人非 (things-remain-people-not) which captures the sentiment of the moment so exactly that it is difficult to reproduce in another language.

Click to enjoy a photo  tour of the old town core of Taishan.