Theme party raises awareness for protection of old buildings

By Annie Wei

Celebrity parties held in 20th century residences in the foreign concession are a regular occurrence in Shanghai. Tianjin followed suit for the first time last Wednesday.

Elegancy, a style magazine in Tianjin, teamed up with the city’ culture protection organization to host a 1920s theme party in Jingyuan. Invitees included Chinese celebrities and foreign executives based in Beijing and Shanghai.

Jingyuan, located in central Tianjin, was built in 1921 and is most famous for once being home to Puyi, China’s last emperor. The three-story panish style building  has three courtyards, beautiful balconies, fountains and a garden.

Wang Tingting, the event’s planner from Tianjin Historical Architecture Restoration and Development company, said Puyi enjoyed such partie and was often seen on the dance floor.

Wang Yajun, Elegancy’s chief editor, said the event aimed to raise greater awareness about Jingyuan among locals and foreigners. The residence is open to visitors in the daytime but it draws few locals or business travelers despite its inexpensive entrance fee of 20 yuan.

Tianjin, a treaty port in the late 19th century, has numerous old, foreign-designed buildings, some of them under government protection. Wang said the organizers hope the gathering will help promote the repair, maintenance and preservation of these cultural heritage sites.

“As one of Elegancy’s second-year-anniversary events … we tried tfind an opportunity to promote local chic culture,” she said, adding that the party’s design was inspired by the popular 1920s nightclubs in Tianjin and Shanghai. Laojueshi Jazz, a local band popular since the 1980s,rovided the entertainment that evening.

Among its 100 participants were a group of elderly intellectuals who remember socializing at ballroom dances in the 1980s, including the dean of Tianjin No. 1 Hospital and professors from Nankai University.

Mapping out the noise

By Jin Zhu

Since last July, Shenzhen and Beijing have been publishing city noise maps. Although they only include a limited slice of each city, they represent a bold new step to combat  what could become an ear-splitting problem.

Offending decibels

The city’s first map of a 12.7-square-kilometer block of Haidian District revealed how various urban districts are plagued by noise pollution. It was unveiledby the Beijing Municipal Institute of Labor Protection last month.

“The current noise pollution comes mainly from traffic. Engineers created this sample map to reflect the noise of road traffic as as starting point,”u Wencheng, a lead engineer at the institute, said.

The map depicts an area bounded by Xizhimen and Deshengmen in the south and Jianxiangqiao and Xueyuanqiao in the north. The area includes almost every kind of road: speedway, arterial road and express lanes.

The sample illustrates levels of noise pollution with different colors. In areas along the sides of the speedway, coded in blue, noise reaches 75 or more decibels. The sides of the main roads marked in red and purple hover around 70 decibels. In residential communities, coded in green and yellow, the noise ranges from 40 to 45 decibels.

Hu said the institute has been mapping urban noise since 2006. The city was divided into several parts and monitored by standing in the center of each for 10 minutes. “It was only a rough average, but the city registered 69 or more decibels everywhere. That was not precise enough,” he said.

The current model implements some techniques used by European countries, which are at the forefront of noise mapping. But some adjustments are required.

“Using buses as an example, ours have engines designed ver different from what you see in European buses, so the base noise level is not the same,”Hu said. The engineers cataloged the noise output of 7,000 buses over the last half year.

The new model map has been submitted to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau, which will complete a citywide noise map next year.