History

Italy joined the international expedition against the Boxer uprising in 1900 and received, with the other powers, a concession in Tianjin — the treaty port where Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Belgium already held quarters. The Italian zone, initially salt flats and marsh, was reclaimed and built up in the 1900s–1930s as a showcase in miniature: a European garden quarter whose streets carried a double Sino-Italian naming. Its garrison — the San Marco marines of the Carlotto barracks — and its small administration made it more an outpost of prestige than of profit; the resident Italian community numbered in the hundreds, beside a much larger Chinese population.

The Second World War ended the experiment: after the armistice of September 1943 the concession was occupied by Japanese forces, ceded on paper by the Italian Social Republic, and formally returned to China by the peace treaty of 1947. The quarter passed through the following decades largely intact, and in the 2000s the municipality chose restoration over redevelopment — a Chinese city conserving an Italian colonial quarter as part of its own heritage, the same paradox of re-appropriation this series has met from Asmara to Tirana.