Roads of modernisation : street tree planting in the Republic of China (1911–1949)

In traditional China, there was little roadside planting, either within or outside cities, though willow trees and Chinese scholar trees were traditionally used alongside canals and official expressways for almost 2,000 years. In the early Republic of China, roadside trees in cities were advocated after western examples, it was first practiced in the 1910s and popularised in the press in the late 1920s when they were heavily promoted as part of the nationalist effort to compete with The West in terms of beautiful street scenes and efficient urban governance. Street tree planting came to represent the modernisation the country longed for. It was promoted as being one of the standards of modernity set up by the foreigners. As planting and management of street trees required a centralised government to sophisticatedly coordinate efforts across various bureaus, grandiose streets built by the municipality with well-maintained street trees became a sign of modernisation and more importantly, a departure from a previously weak and decentralised government. The national building programme responded to this in the transformation of cities, which everywhere included trees on approaches into cities newly built and largely reconstructed in the Golden Decade (1927–1937).