The arcade culture in the old town of Shantou.

Hundreds of years ago, there was a small fishing village in eastern Guangdong, where a few fishermen made a living. They work hard and live a simple and hard life like fishermen. The fishing village is located at the mouth of Hanjiang River, Rongjiang River and Lianjiang River, with piles of sediment and sand ridges extending to the sea, so it was named "Shashantou" and later renamed "Shantou". This is the origin of Shantou today.

Shantou is known as the "hometown of architecture", and the construction industry has been very developed since ancient times. As early as the Ming and Qing Dynasties, both the sequence pattern of buildings and the decoration technology can rival the imperial palace, so it has the reputation of "the imperial palace in Beijing, the home of Chaoshan people". By the opening of Shantou at 1860, foreign architectural culture branded residential buildings, forming an arcade architectural landscape with a combination of Chinese and western styles and strong local customs.

Arcade buildings are widely distributed in the southeast coastal areas, and most of them are invested by returned overseas Chinese, which has a strong architectural style of hometown of overseas Chinese. In the 1920s and 1930s, skilled craftsmen in Shantou combined traditional architecture with western-style architecture to create a modern arcade building with commercial and residential floors, and its typical representative is the arcade in a small park.

In the design of arcade, according to the climate characteristics of high temperature and rainy summer in Chaoshan area, the veranda building is adopted, and foreign and western materials are used to completely open the porch, forming a corridor along the street, so that a continuous and sheltered traffic space is formed between streets and shops.