Why it looks like this

Dalian is a young city with a European plan. Russia leased this ice-free port in 1898 and laid out a city of grand circular plazas — Zhongshan Square still has ten avenues radiating from it — inspired by Paris. After 1905 Japan took over and kept building on the same radial geometry for forty years.

The hills and the coastline break the plan into pieces, so the map is a collection of small radial webs and grids fitted between ridges and bays — unusual for a Chinese city, and a direct fossil of its colonial century.