Brisbane’s missing Chinatown shade canopy gone for good
Barely a decade after Brisbane City Council installed a shade canopy in Fortitude Valley’s Chinatown Mall, it was considered in too poor a condition to remain.
The shade structure was installed amid great fanfare in 2010 as part of the Campbell Newman-led administration’s $8 million refurbishment of Chinatown Mall.
But it was removed in mid-2021 when large sections of the mall were temporarily closed to allow a new office tower to be built.
The canopy pictured in March 2011, when the Chinatown Mall renovation was completed.Credit: Tony Moore
That tower, now the Queensland Urban Utilities headquarters, was completed in 2023, but the canopy never returned. A spokeswoman for Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner confirmed it would not be reinstalled and had instead been destroyed.
Labor opposition leader Jared Cassidy said the council’s failure to replace the canopy was “just another example” of City Hall’s cost-cutting.
“It’s baffling that Adrian Schrinner would rip down this shade structure with no plans to replace it. There is no way that in the skin cancer capital of the world, we need less shade,” he said.
“This LNP council spent $8 million on a redevelopment that lasted only 14 years. What a waste of ratepayers’ money.”
Schrinner’s spokeswoman said the canopy was put in storage and “wasn’t in good enough condition to be reused” in Chinatown, but insisted any concerns about the canopy’s quality, given its lack of longevity, were “false”.
A shadeless Chinatown Mall in Fortitude Valley, without the canopy.Credit: Cameron Atfield
“The structure was removed as part of the Chinatown Mall redevelopment as it was aged and no longer suitable. The glass and steel was recycled,” she said.
“New garden beds, seating and lighting was recently installed in the Chinatown Mall.”
Former Brisbane Chinatown Committee chairman Chiu-Hing Chan, the last person to hold the role before the organisation’s dissolution, said the canopy was contentious among the Chinese community.
The Wickham Street entrance of the Chinatown Mall in 2000, with pagodas visible in the background.Credit: Getty Images
The poor condition of traditional pagodas in the mall, described by Newman at the time as “dodgy”, prompted the 2010 Feng Shui redesign by architects from Brisbane’s sister city of Shenzen.
“It was a very contemporary design,” Chan said.
“In China, yes I get it, contemporary design is the way to go. But I think it’s a different audience here in Australia.
“Chinese here in Australia tend to want to be reminded of home and the traditional vision of how the Chinese culture should be portrayed – the Chinese here are a little bit more conservative than back in China.”
Now, Chan said, the mall was Chinatown in name only.
“It’s more or less just an aesthetic there, just to remind about the history of the place – that’s it, which is a bit of a shame,” he said.
“The thing is that once you remove those dragon gates, it just becomes another ordinary, typical mall like an extension of Brunswick Street, which is really, really sad, to be quite frank and honest.
“It’s a shame that council hasn’t been able to learn something from Sydney’s or Melbourne’s Chinatown, in terms of how the councils from those two cities have done it and make it so vibrant and lasting.”
With Sunnybank now challenging for the title of Brisbane’s Chinatown, Chan said what remained in Fortitude Valley was a “fitting reminder of what Brisbane Chinatown once was”.
“Sydney still has a vibrant Chinatown in a CBD, yet if you look at the population movements, the majority of the Chinese community has moved to places like Chatswood over in north Sydney, or over towards Strathfield, over in the inner-west of Sydney.
“You have multiple Chinatowns, if you want to call it that way. So it begs the question as to why Brisbane’s CBD Chinatown is pretty much almost dead and dying, yet Sydney has managed to keep it.”
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