annexation of Manchuria, and David Tucker’s Our Manchukuo, which provides the progress of Dairen’s urban evolution in early 1930s. In east Asia, the most prominent historian of Japanese colonial architecture is Yasuhiko Nishizawa [西泽泰彦] from the university of Nagoya. Throughout his career, he established a series of monographs on Japan’s architectural activities in Manchuria, which included Japan’s Oversea Architectural Adventurers (1996), Japan’s colonial architectural theories (2008) and The architectural institutions in the South Manchurian railway zone (1988). These works created a chronology of Dairen’s architectural evolution and linked this chronology to the political changes in northeast Asia. However, as the first expert in Japanese colonial architecture, Nishizawa dedicated his work to understanding the broader picture, and was unable to investigate detailed architectural connotations and specific architectural sites. The intention of this dissertation is therefore, to provide a more detailed account of one of the most significant spatial settings created under Japanese imperialism and, most importantly, to frame this experience within a theoretical context that argues for the wider significance of Dairen’s colonial architectural history and to encourage further investigations into this comparatively overlooked subject and its wider historical and architectural significance. Due to the incompleteness of the existing knowledge on this subject, the main research methodology focuses on known and new archival materials combined with empirical research over several years prior to and including this specific study. Through various online sources, databases and archives, relevant maps were obtained that revealed the Circus’s development. Moreover, the Manchurian Architectural Association Journal is consulted, which is a record of the principal
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