Abstract What's city? It does simply mean the integration of an urban locality and market. However, the conjunction of 'recreation and city' has presented particular phenomena and principles of itself in the process of the development and evolvement of the whole city. The urban recreation business district is the core of leisure and recreation in the city, which carried the historical information of every stage. There are intimate affiliations between the development of the urban recreation business district and the development of the society, politics, economy and the city itself. Guangzhou which is the heart of economy, politics and literature in Lingnan with a history more than two thousand years, the development of it's urban recreation business district during the history has presented comparative clear historical venation, it has successively experienced Qin-Han, Sui-Tang, liang Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, latter-day and present-day periods. So we can argue that the ancient urban recreation business district in Guangzhou was formed in Qin and Han dynasty, and the spatial location, the spatial conformation, function and organization and so on has changed during the history, and presented different characteristics in every stage. The factors that stimulated these changes were presented as:the traditional urban planning thoughts, natural geography conditions, the direction of the strategies, economic and trading changes, urban development, significant events and so on. Based on the study of the formation of the recreation business district, the evolvement of the spatial structure pattern and the relative factors that impacts the changes of spatial structure in Guangzhou's history, this paper analyses the historical locus of the development of the urban recreation business district and the general disciplinarians, and tries to use these disciplinarians to hold the direction of the development of the urban recreation business district in the future and provide some practical experiences and reference for the development of the urban recreation business district.
2006, Vol. 21 
