Tianjin's Five Great Avenues on foot: the concession streets Beijing forgets to visit

The brick on Munan Dao (睦南道) is the colour of weak tea, and the villas behind it sit close to the pavement — close enough to read the doorbells and the brass numbers on the gates. A pedicab bell sounds twice at the corner and goes quiet; the driver is in no hurry, and on this street neither are you. Tianjin (天津) keeps its treaty-era houses on a handful of parallel avenues, and they only make sense on foot, at the speed a bicycle would coast.

Reading the five avenues

Wudadao (五大道), the Five Great Avenues, is not five streets so much as a low grid of them south of the Haihe (海河) river. The names to hold are Machang Dao (马场道), Munan Dao (睦南道), Dali Dao (大理道), Changde Dao (常德道) and Chongqing Dao (重庆道); walk any one end to end and the cross-streets will hand you the others. There are no towers here, nothing tall enough to throw a shadow across the road, and the effect after a day in Beijing is of the volume being turned down.

The middle of the district is Minyuan Guangchang (民园广场), a former sports ground now ringed by a running track and low arcades, and it works as the pin you keep returning to. Pedicabs idle at its edges offering loops of the avenues; the commentary is in Mandarin and the route is theirs, not yours. On a first pass it is better to walk, because the detail that rewards you — a stone balcony, a date carved into a lintel, a garden gone slightly wild — is easy to miss at wheel speed.

The houses and the people in them

The villas of Wudadao were built for people who wanted to be near the foreign concessions without being watched too closely: retired officials, bankers, warlords between postings. The former residence of Zhang Xueliang (张学良), the general known as the Young Marshal, stands on the district's edge and now trades under that name; a stretch of Chifeng Dao (赤峰道) holds the Porcelain House (瓷房子), an older mansion its owner sheathed entirely in broken china and ceramic shards. Both charge to go inside, and both keep their own hours — check at the door or on Tianjin's tourism pages before you plan a day around them.

Most of the street, though, is not ticketed, because people live in it. The architecture is a catalogue with no index: a British half-timbered gable next to a Spanish courtyard wall next to something Italianate with a shallow dome, each with a grey municipal plaque naming its architect and year. Read them from the pavement. A gate left open is not an invitation, and the pleasure here is cumulative — twenty façades in a row, not one you paid to enter.

Across the Haihe to the Italian quarter

Walk north from Wudadao toward Xiaobailou (小白楼) and the city changes register. Jiefang Bei Lu (解放北路) runs beside the Haihe as a corridor of old banks — granite columns, bronze doors, the street once called China's Wall Street — and it is best in the early light, before the traffic. Follow the water and you reach the steel bulk of the Liberation Bridge (解放桥, Jiefang Qiao), a bascule span near Tianjin Station that still lifts on occasion.

Cross it and you are in the Italian Style Town (意式风情区, Yìshì Fēngqíng Qū), a few blocks of shuttered villas, cafés and wedding photographers on the north bank. Upriver, the Tianjin Eye (天津之眼, Tiānjīn zhī Yǎn) turns slowly on the Yongle Bridge; you do not need to ride it to use it as a landmark. The two banks together make a loop you can walk in a morning, the concessions of rival empires facing each other across the same brown river.

洋楼要慢慢看，一条街走到底，再拐进下一条。

What to eat without joining a queue

Tianjin's real breakfast is jianbing guozi (煎饼果子), a mung-bean crêpe cooked to order on a round griddle, an egg cracked onto it, a length of fried cruller folded inside for crunch. Buy it from a cart or a hole-in-the-wall near the avenues rather than anywhere with a photographed menu, and eat it walking. The city's sweet side is mahua (麻花), the dense fried dough twist sold in gift boxes under the Shibajie (十八街) name, and erduoyan zhagao (耳朵眼炸糕), a fried glutinous cake you eat hot from the paper.

Goubuli (狗不理), the steamed-bun house every guidebook prints, is now more a brand than a breakfast, and the neighbourhood stalls do better buns with less ceremony. If the weather turns, duck into a teahouse — Tianjin is a crosstalk (相声, xiàngsheng) town, and some of the older houses still stage it in the evenings over pots of green tea. Expect to pay by the pot and the seat; confirm the night's programme at the door, since it changes.

Getting there, and getting it right

From Beijing the trip is a short intercity hop: C-series trains leave Beijing South (北京南, Běijīng Nán) for Tianjin Station through the day, booked on 12306 with the passport you will show at the gate. From the station, Metro Line 1 to Xiaobailou or Line 3 puts you a short walk from Wudadao; a taxi hailed through Didi does the same. Spring and autumn are kindest — the summer here is humid and the villas photograph flat under a white sky — and the brick warms best in the first hour of light.

Confirm two things before you commit to them: the opening details of any house you mean to enter, at the venue or on Tianjin's official tourism site, and, if you take a pedicab, the route and fare agreed out loud before the wheels turn. The one mistake to avoid is treating Wudadao as a checklist of famous doors. It is a district to be walked past, slowly, most of it lived in — the reward is the accumulation, not the entry.