Walking into Chikan, the quaint smell came to my face. Dark yellow arcades and fresh plants on Roman columns make people feel like they are in a foreign country. The bright and mottled stone road at the foot, the rusty baroque mountain flowers, and the sweet singing of Teresa Teng floating in the alley make people wonder what dusk it is. ...
In Chikan, which combines Chinese and Western culture, the most striking thing is the nearly 600 arcades stretching for 3 kilometers. The arcade is built by the water, which is the product of overseas Chinese combining western architecture with Lingnan architecture. It can not only make full use of the road space, but also adapt to the humid, rainy, hot and high temperature climate in the south.
Xidi and Didong Road are the most magnificent arcades, and their structures are extremely exquisite. Most of them have a roof on the first floor. Behind the walls of various western roofs is the traditional "golden" tile roof in China. Arcades are very high, some as high as two floors. Such a large-scale arcade group is very rare in small towns in Guangdong, and its momentum is no less than that of the arcade in Xiguan, Guangzhou. The owners of game halls are mostly overseas now, and their parents live a fashionable and luxurious life. Walking in front of the building, it seems that you can still catch a glimpse of drunken feasts, and the smell of French perfume and powder remains in the air.
Riding downstairs, there are shops next to you: grain stores, grocery stores, pharmacies, furniture stores, hardware stores, watch stores, and all kinds of colorful stores. There are shops on both sides of the old street. Inside and outside the store, people bargain, read books and play mahjong. As dusk came, the old streets began to get crowded, and the alley was filled with the smell of the bean curd corner of the messenger and the steaming clay pot rice in the casserole. People enjoying the cool air on the bridge, shaking their cattail leaf fans, chatting and drinking tea, or drinking beer with bare arms and eating midnight snack, look relaxed and quiet.
Chikan, like a paradise in real life, happily integrates business and life. In this quiet and leisurely state, time will slow down involuntarily. Chikan is not only a paradise for street life, but also a fertile ground for cultural life. The famous Si Tuleideng Library and Guanjia Library are in full bloom here all year round. Stuart's library was built in 1923. It is a garden-style three-story building that combines Chinese and western styles. There are newspapers and magazines, all kinds of books, calligraphy and painting works, famous stories of Stuart family, etc. Guanjia Library is located on the west bank of Shangbu dike in Chikan, opposite to Situ Library in the east of dike. At the beginning of its opening, there were nearly 10,000 books in the museum, and some foreign newspapers and periodicals were frequently changed. The Stuart family and the Guan family are not so much carrying forward the cultural spirit of the family, but rather conveying the information of a more wonderful world to readers through the cultural position of the library.
Along the Tanjiang River, from the Situjia Library to the Xidi Road Guanshi Library, all the way is covered by ancient banyan trees, and the river breeze floating from the rich green leaves makes people feel relaxed and happy. At this time, the sultry and irritability inherent in southern summer is gone forever. When the big clocks on the top floors of the two libraries rang clearly in the breeze, the prosperity created by the two families, Guan and Situ, through years of competition, shone brightly in this ancient land.
Warm flowing water, rainbow-like elegant bridges, neat and chic arcades and charming European streets not only attract tourists' attention, but also attract filmmakers with unique vision. Not long ago, Chikan Town built a movie and television city with a total area of more than 60,000 square meters, which reproduced the Xiguan style of Guangzhou in the 1920s and 1930s and became the best artificial landscape for foreign tourists to experience the culture of that period.