The characteristic buildings of Rui Fu Xiang

The plan layout of Ruifuxiang Cloth Store complex is the traditional Chinese courtyard style, but the buildings facing the street are all buildings. The rooms are more than the number of rooms in a traditional courtyard, a new type of courtyard combining bungalows and buildings. The most important building in the Ruifuxiang complex is a large group of buildings on the west side - Hongji Silk Cloth Shop, which is mainly engaged in silk fabrics. The tallest building on the west side of the street is the business building of the cloth store. The building was built in 1923, with a floor area of 3520 square meters, a height of about 11 meters, and a combination of steel structure and brick structure, its architectural style is based on traditional Chinese architectural forms, and it is an early Chinese commercial building combining Chinese and Western elements.

The building is a three-story building, tall and majestic, very special in the commercial district. The front facade of the building has two symmetrical four-story square towers on the east and west. One or two floors for rectangular windows, three floors for round windows, and the highest floor of the tower is a traditional Chinese with four corners to save the steeple of the quadrilateral pavilion, this tower borrowed from the architectural form of the Western church. In the middle of the two towers is the south wall of the business hall of Ruifuxiang Hongji Cloth Shop. The two square towers protrude a little further south than the business hall. The business hall also has a front porch, when it rains or snows, customers can take refuge here for a while, the design is more humanized. Business hall above the door that is between the two floors to build a short wall, just as the long plaque used as a business.

After entering the main door is the business hall, the hall has four rows of columns supporting the second floor in the north-south direction. The columns are relatively thin, and the column heads are typical of the Ionic column heads commonly used in the West, which are rarely seen in the interior of commercial buildings, and are mostly used in the exterior fa?ade of buildings in Western architecture. There is a patio in the north central part of the business hall, which was a characteristic of commercial buildings in that period, on the one hand, for the purpose of lighting, on the other hand, to make customers feel less depressed when shopping, the patio has now been changed into a staircase. After going up to the second floor, there are also 4 rows of columns as on the first floor, and there is a lot of space on the second floor as well. From the outside, the outer body of the building is three-storey, while from the inside it is actually a two-storey building, only the height of the second floor is equivalent to the height of three-storey building, so it is very spacious.