Former Amoy Club

The Amoy Club, also known as the “Foochow Club”, was a social and recreational venue for expatriates, rich Chinese, and senior employees of foreign companies. It was originally located at Lu'erjiao in the southeast part of the island. However, at the beginning of the 1920s, that property was bought by Huang Xiulang, an overseas Chinese, who built the HaiTian Tang Gou Mansion on the site. The club moved to a new building on East Tianwei Road on a hill overlooking the sea, which included a ballroom, a bar, a billiard room, a bowling alley, a reading room for foreign books, and a meeting room.at that time, it was also known as Lequn Building.
The former Amoy Club building is a two-storey brick structure with a floor area of 1,541 square metres. It is architecturally simple in colonial veranda style with some modern features. In plan, the building was split up according to function, with an L-shaped veranda connecting the different functional spaces. As the functional requirements grew, the building was expanded and renovated several times. A two-storey semicircular porch was added at the main entrance, and, at various times, two rectangular rooms with hipped roofs supported by unique cable-stayed roof trusses were added on the north side of the main building, and a long, thin bowling alley was added at the rear of the north side.
The former Amoy Club, as a cultural and recreational facility of the period on Kulangsu, reflects the public cultural and recreational life of Kulangsu International Settlement from the mid-19th to the mid-20th Century. It also was involved in the spread of modern recreational and social activities such as ballroom dancing, billiards and bowling on Kulangsu.