A man walks past a bar in the neighborhood which was transformed from a shabby village on Shuguang Road in Hefei, Anhui province.
Businesspeople have high hopes for the previously derelict part of provincial capital
Karolina Caban spent Christmas Day in a "village" in downtown Hefei, its narrow alleys bedecked with lanterns and packed with dozens of bars, inns, cafes and other small shops.
Caban described the distinctive neighborhood, known as zhongyinyushi in Chinese, or "Hidden in the City", as a place that "has its own soul".
Yet not many years ago, the area was filled with garbage depots and had no soul at all. The village had been considered a blight on the provincial capital for almost two decades.
"Garbage and polluted water were everywhere," said Xu Lijun, director of the Wuhu Road community in the city's Baohe district, which governs the neighborhood.
The neighborhood, which expats now call "Bar Street" or "Shipyard Street", takes up about 200 meters along Shuguang Road. It was once part of the vast Hanwa village, which was divided into several sections when a number of roads were built in the 1980s. Most of the buildings were demolished and replaced by high-rise buildings, and the area remaining was reserved as backup land for two schools, leaving dozens of shabby dwellings in limbo.
Before 2012, there were more than 20 private garbage and recycling depots, and local officials and residents had appealed to the government to improve the image of the village.
"The depots saw a lot of garbage brought to the village every day, making it a place nobody wanted to go, except garbage buyers and their customers," Xu said. "The schools were still there, so constructing new buildings was not among the options."
Property owners also strongly objected to a proposal, which would have been very costly to the government, to demolish the old residences and build a park. "They understood quite well that land in such a geographically central place was very valuable," Xu said.
"We could also clear the depots out, renovate the houses to rent them to street vendors by ourselves," he said. But officials "were not sure whether such a mode could be sustainable and would fundamentally improve the image of the village".
Authorities "had been wavering for quite a while", Xu said, when a private company, Anhui Zhongyinyushi Business Management, made an attractive renovation proposal.
Zhu Hong, the company's president, said he had dreamed for years of finding "such a place to run a specialized cultural street in the city".
"Such streets are also seen in cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, while a place suitable for similar operations was hard to find in Hefei," Zhu said.
At the end of 2012, Zhu's company signed a contract to renovate the village. The reclamation depots were soon moved out and renovation of the dwellings' external facades started the following March.
The plan preserved the properties and allowed the owners to earn a considerable amount in rent every year, Xu said.
When the company started to attract tenants, Briton Jeremy Hayes moved his bar, Shipyard, into the village. From afar, the neighborhood seemed no different from those similar areas in almost every city in China. People usually called such places "villages in the city", but "the situation here was quite different", Hayes said.
At the time, it was packed with dozens of two and three-story dwellings, but "there were just brick walls and dusty floors", he said.
"I was pretty sure this was the right place I wanted to move the bar to," he said. "Personally, I don't like modern streets, compared with the old ones."
The preference is one shared by many expats, Caban included. Chatting with the customers and enjoying the music at Shipyard, she said she felt at home, because "more than half of the people here are foreigners and most of us know each other well".
A few months after Hayes moved in, 50 more shop owners followed, occupying all of the buildings. Since the area had such a bad image before, no one had high expectations. "To a certain extent, we were surprised to see the result," Zhu said.
Hayes said: "Since the development pace of cities in European and other Western countries is more gradual, such villages in the city are often better preserved," he said. "I think this is how a real city should be."
Economic data provided by Xu's colleagues tell a positive financial tale about the renovated village.
"The street has attracted more than 900,000 visitors since the end of 2013. The stores see a combined daily operation revenue of around 150,000 yuan ($23,115) and have more than 600 employees in total," Xu said.
Most rental contracts are for 10-year terms, "a considerable time, which is beneficial for the company's stable and continuous development", he said. "Hopefully, the village will be there for a long time."
