In 1899, the Polish-Russian architect Kazimierz Skolimowski, educated in Munich and St Petersburg, was invited to join the planning team for Russian Dalny: a future port of global significance on the Chinese coast. Although the plan was signed by the chief engineer Vladimir Sakharov, it was Skolimowski who brought to the project the most advanced ideas of late nineteenth-century urban planning. These ideas drew on the experience of metropolises such as Paris and London.

The city plan combined the axial Baroque layouts familiar from Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, which began in 1853, with the American gridiron plan. Because of the terrain, however, the grid was disrupted and gave way to a radial-concentric layout. At the heart of Dalian stood the circular Nikolaevsky Square, now Zhongshan Square, from which ten thoroughfares radiated outwards. This kind of planning, at once functional and monumental, recalls the idea of the city as theatre: an urban space intended to convey order and prestige.

At the same time, the influence of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement is discernible. Although Howard’s concept was published only in 1898, ideas of green belts and recreational zones were already present in European and American debates on urban planning. In the Dalian plan, therefore, we find distinct green zones, including an extensive urban park and strips of greenery separating residential areas. The city was also designed around a functional division of space, with clearly separate Chinese and European quarters. This, unfortunately, introduced the racial urban segregation typical of imperial planning in that era.

The plan reveals a strongly hierarchical conception of space: from representative boulevards, such as Moscow Prospect and Kyiv Prospect, to monumental squares and varied forms of development, from commercial to public and residential. The geometric layout of the numbered plots suggests that the city was intended, to a considerable extent, to be subject to land speculation. This accorded with the logic of port cities built for global trade.