Chinatown, The Dubai Mall
The UAE's first Chinatown — a designed immersive district of moon gates, lantern streets and neon, by Kokaistudios.
Chinatown in The Dubai Mall is billed as the UAE's first, and it is less a shop than a fully designed immersive environment — a 15,000-square-metre district conceived by Kokaistudios, the architecture practice founded in Venice in 2000 and headquartered in Shanghai. Rather than copy the historic Chinatowns of London, New York or San Francisco, the designers amplified instantly recognisable visual codes of Chinese culture — fans, lanterns, lattice, and above all the colour red — into a pop-infused, contemporary vision built for Dubai's global crowd.
It unfolds as a sequence of named thematic zones. You enter through a circular moon gate, the classical Chinese threshold. Lantern Street, the main thoroughfare, is canopied by thousands of hexagonal red lanterns above open shopfronts, with metal-mesh awnings, mortise-and-tenon woodwork and varied floor tiles evoking a street market. Neon City is a three-storey skylit atrium walled in glowing signage. The Bird Market food court hangs custom lighting shaped like the metal birdcages of old Chinese flower-and-bird markets, while the Tea Room Garden offers a calmer, wellness-themed retreat, with oversized red fans floating overhead as a dramatic canopy. A large panda at one end and a golden dragon at the other bookend the space. Every corner is engineered to be photographed.
Exhibo editorial
Treat it as a walk-through installation, not a food court with decoration. The design rewards attention: notice the moon-gate entry, the shift in ceiling treatment from Lantern Street to the birdcage lighting of the Bird Market, the traditional joinery. Liveliest in the evening, when the neon and lanterns carry the space. It's on the first floor, opposite the Dubai Ice Rink.
How to find it
On the first floor of The Dubai Mall, opposite the Dubai Ice Rink; also reachable via the fifth-floor cinema parking. Enter through the moon gate and follow Lantern Street through to Neon City and the Bird Market; the panda and golden dragon mark the two ends.
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