Zeedijk

Street · Nieuwmarkt / Chinatown (Centrum)Amsterdam,Netherlands

An Amsterdam street standing on a thirteenth-century sea dyke, still bending as the dyke bent, now Chinatown, with a timber house of about 1550.

Zeedijk is a street standing on a dyke, and it still bends the way the dyke bent. The dyke went up in the thirteenth century to hold back the IJ, then an open arm of the Zuiderzee. It worked, and the town grew on the dried ground behind it. At number 1 stands In 't Aepjen, built around 1550, one of only two houses in Amsterdam that still show a timber front to the street. By the seventeenth century the merchants had moved to the new canals, leaving the street to sailors and drink. Chinese seamen settled at the eastern end from 1911, and their descendants made this Amsterdam's Chinatown: shop signs run in two alphabets and the He Hua temple sits behind a Chinese palace roof. In the late 1970s heroin dealing took the street over so completely that police stayed out, and twenty years of local buying and reletting got it back. Before noon it is a quiet lane of grocers and small kitchens; at eleven at night the crowds from the red light lanes spill into it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look above the bar door at number 1 — The timber planking and brackets are eighteenth-century, and the sixteenth-century frame they hang on is inside, so go in for a drink.
Treat the temple as uncertain — He Hua is free to enter but keeps short afternoon hours, closes on Mondays, and shuts without warning for ceremonies, so look through the doors before you count on going in.
Look for the hanging roast meat — several kitchens along the eastern half run Cantonese barbecue counters, with duck and pork belly hung in the window and cut to order by weight.

Things to do

1
Walk the dyke line from the Nieuwmarkt end
Start at the Nieuwmarkt and follow the street north without cutting a corner. It never straightens, because every bend follows the line of an earth bank raised against the IJ eight centuries ago. The houses that lean out over the road are the ones built on the top of that bank.
2
Stand at the foot of the temple steps
Cross to the far pavement opposite He Hua and look up at the roof. The palace form is Chinese, the architect was Dutch, and the yellow glazed tiles were made in the Netherlands after tiles from Taiwan failed in the Dutch damp and frost. The building copies a Chinese design but was put together here.