Entity
Xiaohu Island People's Commune Auditorium
Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
The Xiaohu Island People's Commune Auditorium stands at No. 10 Xiaohu West Road as a striking physical record of 1970s rural China. Its cream-yellow walls, lake-blue hopper windows, and cinnabar red brick columns immediately draw the eye, offering a distinct color palette that defines the era's civic architecture. The ground beneath this two-story structure holds generations of village memory.
A Li family ancestral hall originally occupied the site, later giving way to the Xiaohu Primary School. In 1970, the current auditorium rose in its place to serve as the undisputed center of village life. During the commune era, these walls echoed with the sounds of military send-off rallies, traditional opera performances, and the whir of film projectors. Look upward to appreciate the building's defining engineering achievement. The roof is supported by a plain concrete block tie-rod arch truss spanning nearly fifteen meters. This specific design is the largest surviving example of its kind in Guangdong province. Builders in the 1970s used this technique to push the technical limits of the time and manage the region's heavy rains, sheltering the massive 1,034-square-meter interior beneath a traditional hard-mountain style roof covered in gray tiles. Today, the auditorium remains the largest and most intact structure of its kind in Nansha District.