Based on the translation of the historical maps of cities, this paper sorts out the distribution information of various commercial buildings in Guangzhou during 19th century, and establishes a database of commercial buildings in Guangzhou in the 19th century with spatial information technology to show the distribution of various commercial buildings in this city. Moreover, this paper uses GIS to process pairing and density comparison analysis from various sources, which reveal the evolution characteristics, and impetus factors, of commercial buildings in Guangzhou from the formation and factors of urban commercial buildings spatial pattern. Finally, this paper provides countermeasures for the protection of contemporary Guangzhou city, commercial and trade buildings, in the context of rapid urbanization.

The old district of Guangzhou was taken as an example to explore new approaches – the perspective of space syntax – to study the urban structure based on the Geographic Information Centre (GIS) space statistics. Results show that the old district of Guangzhou has significant spatial heterogeneity; the historic regions, as the urban core, have a deep effect on the city and own a ‘double interface’ for both the visitors and indigenous inhabitants. Unique space logic has been formed in the long history of the city, but the grid structure of the old district is unbalanced and incomplete, and some regions have problems in accessibility. Given this, the paper, based on the distribution of the historical buildings, proposed to create contextual urban axes, optimise the public service and improve the space structure, to provide a reference to the preservation and utilisation of historic buildings.