Wuhan's lifen: the 1930s lanes Hankou still lives in, not visits

Shanghai's lane houses have a name travellers arrive already knowing. Wuhan's have one almost nobody uses outside Hubei: lifen (里份, lǐfèn), the grey-brick lane compounds built across Hankou between the 1900s and the 1930s, each entered through a stone gateway with the lane's name cut into the lintel. Enough of them survive that you can walk four or five in an afternoon, and most are still an address rather than an attraction.

The gateway tells you what you are entering

A lifen is not a single building but a spine: one main lane running back from the street, with narrower ribs branching off it, two-storey houses shoulder to shoulder on both sides. The names carved above the entrance almost always end in li (里) or cun (村), and they are the fastest way to spot one from a passing bus.

Inside, the register changes within a few metres. Laundry poles cross overhead, bicycles and scooters are parked against the brick, and someone's ground-floor front room is selling reganmian (热干面), the sesame-paste noodles Wuhan eats standing up before nine.

The restored lane, and the ones beside it

North of Zhongshan Avenue (中山大道, Zhōngshān Dàdào), Tongxing Li (同兴里) has been cleaned, repointed and part-let to coffee roasters and small studios. It photographs well and it is a fair place to start, because it shows you the brickwork as it was meant to look.

Then walk five minutes to Kunhou Li (坤厚里) or Sanderi (三德里), which have had no such treatment. The stairwells are dim, the doorframes are painted over in whatever colour was going, and the difference between the two kinds of lane is the whole point of the walk.

The restored lane is the one you photograph. The lane behind it is the one that explains what the first one was.

Walking them without being a nuisance

Go mid-morning, when the lanes are awake but not crowded, and treat the main spine as public and everything beyond a doorway as not. Cameras pointed into open front rooms are the one thing that reliably sours a visit.

Buy something — noodles, tea, a bottle of water — from whoever is trading in the lane you have just walked through. Afterwards, Lihuangpi Road (黎黄陂路) a few blocks east has benches and shade, and the Yangtze embankment is a short walk north.

里份不是景点，而是地址——走进去之前，先记住这一点。