SHANGHAI — On a humid May afternoon in China’s southwestern megacity of Chongqing, photographer Liu Yujia stood among hundreds gathered at the foot of the famous Huatie Hotel, a 1980s concrete tower beside the old Caiyuanba Railway Station.

As the countdown over the loudspeaker echoing through the surrounding structures approached zero, the 25-story building — once a proud symbol of the city’s gateway to the southwest — folded in on itself, disappearing into a thick cloud of dust.

“I couldn’t help it,” Liu says quietly. Rarely one to show emotion, in that moment, he cried. It felt like saying goodbye to a friend he had only known through photographs over decades.

At 24, Liu — better known online as “Tiehe West Street” — has become a cult figure among China’s urban explorers. His feeds are filled with photographs of what he calls “millennium” or “Chinese dreamcore” buildings: glass, often oddly shaped towers erected between the 1990s and 2000s — China’s economic boom. Traveling alone with a backpack and camera, he has spent the past two years documenting tiled apartment blocks, aging industrial zones, and wholesale markets.
 
Born in Jilin City, the industrial heart of northeastern Jilin province, Liu’s online alias comes from a street near his childhood home — Tiehe West Street, a modest lane beside a now-defunct carbon factory. “That area still carries the atmosphere of the 1990s,” he says. While others dismiss such architecture as “ugly,” Liu insists, “It’s where my sense of beauty began.”
 
As a child, weekend trips into the city were a treat. His father would take him to see the tallest buildings — the Unicom Tower, the local post office, the City Plaza — and Liu would marvel at their tinted glass panels reflecting the clouds. That fascination never faded.

He studied architecture at the China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing, but it was his camera, not his drawing board, that guided him through the city. His parents gave him his first DSLR camera upon entering university. Within three years, he had worn out its shutter.

Liu began cataloguing the buildings of the nation’s capital, its neighborhoods dotted with khrushchevka — Soviet-era concrete apartment blocks. He then ventured to neighboring cities, drawn to structures others ignored: cylindrical office blocks, green-glass hotels, towers with decorative spires shaped like lightning rods. 

“They represent a time when we thought modernity meant mirrors and metal,” Liu says. “You could feel society’s confidence in the bright colors, sleek tiles, and oversized balconies.”
 
In 2023, Liu embarked on a two-year cross-country expedition, traversing more than 20 provinces and 180 cities, photographing nearly 10,000 buildings from the 1980s through 2000s, many already scheduled for demolition. “It’s a race against time,” he says. 

In the eastern Shandong province, almost every tiled building had been painted over; in Shanghai, entire blocks had been replaced with empty lots. “It feels like cities are erasing their own memories,” he says. “Each layer of paint hides what the city used to be. It’s like building an archive of the ‘archive era.’”

What Liu photographs are seldom landmarks. Each day begins at a marked district on an old map, shooting for four or five hours before retreating to a local RT-Mart — a Taiwanese-founded supermarket chain. The tiled floors and colorful aisles of the supermarket are a sort of mnemonic for Liu, reminding him of the store’s early symbolism of urban prosperity and consumer culture.

His daily routine is rigorous. On long trips, he may cycle 20 to 30 kilometers or walk several kilometers for a better perspective. In Shanghai, he spent five days walking from the high-rise enclaves in the modern Gubei residential district to the aging clothing markets of Qipu Road, photographing everything from mosaic façades to the deep balconies of early 2000s apartment towers.
 
“Shanghai feels different from any other city,” he says. “Gubei’s buildings have a distinct texture — big, glossy tiles, oversized balconies. Every tower has its own design language. You can see how international influence is mixed in.”

What struck him most was the city’s contradictions: gleaming office towers beside residential blocks barely changed in decades. Cycling through a new development zone, he noted how old “industrial parks” from the 1990s — areas that were once symbols of China’s earliest “high-tech” ambitions — coexisted with glass-and-steel headquarters of global firms.
 
“I realized Shanghai isn’t just one city,” he says. “It’s many cities living side by side — industrial, commercial, residential, each with its own rhythm.” To Liu, the city’s geography reads like a microcosm of modern China: the northeast bears heavy industry; the southwest reflects early technological ambitions; the west near Hongqiao feels international and corporate.

If Shanghai revealed the coexistence of eras, southern coastal cities — China’s first Special Economic Zones — reminded him how those eras began, preserving the traces of the optimism that fueled China’s “opening-up” decades ago. “Walking through old high-tech zones or industrial parks from the 1980s and 1990s feels like stepping into the moment when everything was just beginning,” he says. “The air feels clean. The buildings are clean. Even my mind feels clean.”

By contrast, newer developments feel “empty, emotionless — all glass and slogans but no soul.” The older zones, with their simple concrete façades and blue-tiled roofs, evoke a tangible optimism — a belief that space itself could embody progress.
 
Liu follows a methodical system for mapping China’s urban fabric, which helps him swiftly get the hang of a new city upon arrival. “I start at the old train station, then go to the wholesale market, the city center, the riverside park, the new district, and finally the high-speed rail station on the outskirts,” he says.  

“Even in a city I’ve never visited, I can predict where things are. They all follow the same logic of expansion.” Industrial zones sit beside railway lines; commercial districts stretch along rivers.

Life on the road is minimalist, especially as Liu is running on meager savings and earns little from his online work. With a daily budget of 60 yuan ($8.40), he sleeps in youth hostels, eats simply, and launders clothes every few days, sometimes spending his nights swaddled in a sleeping bag due to the filth of hostel bedding.

On his walks through Shanghai, he rides and wanders, pausing every 100 meters to capture a shot whenever he finds a building “beautiful” — sometimes crossing the street to find the cleanest, most direct view. Within the same day, he completes the process of straightening and color grading the images, and publishes them online.

Since last year, Liu’s journey has attracted hundreds of thousands of online followers. His crisp, symmetrical shots of tiled façades and roadside apartments tap into nostalgia for the millennium’s urban aesthetics.

“Under a set of architectural photos he posted, one comment read: “I love this feeling — the weekend sunshine and the sound of cicadas from my childhood. The blue glass casts a filter over everything inside. That’s my lost youth.”
 
Asked about his favorite moments, he recalls late autumn in the northern provinces, when the sun felt distant, the air was cool, and light hit buildings softly, making windows glow one by one, as if the city itself were breathing. “Every place had its own dream,” he says. “In the north, stoic symmetry; in the south, flamboyant curves. In my hometown of Jilin, half-forgotten factories still bear the logos of vanished enterprises.”

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: Courtesy of Liu Yujia)