Xintiandi

Xintiandi was the first project in China to apply a model of preserving historic building fabric while completely changing its use — retaining the shikumen (stone-gate) facades and lane layouts of a 19th-century Shanghainese residential quarter while converting the interiors entirely to commercial use. The development, completed in phases from 2001 by Shui On Land with architecture by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and the American architect Ben Wood, became a reference model for similar projects across China.

The shikumen style is specific to Shanghai and a few other Jiangnan cities: two-to-three storey terraced houses entered through a stone archway gate, arranged in parallel lanes (longtang) with shared courtyards. The style developed in the treaty port period as a hybrid of Western terrace house plans and Chinese courtyard house arrangements. Most surviving shikumen clusters in Shanghai were demolished in the 1990s and 2000s urban renewal campaigns; Xintiandi is the surviving example in a central location.

The Shikumen Open House Museum, set within a restored unit in the north block, shows the interior arrangement of a middle-class shikumen house from the 1920s — a useful domestic-scale counterpoint to the larger institutional heritage buildings of the Bund area.

The Site of the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, on the south edge of the north block, marks where the party was founded in July 1921. The building is a reconstruction; the original was destroyed. The site functions as a political heritage attraction and is visited by large organised tour groups.