Shanghai street alley entrance

Author: Zhong Fulan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: With the Western capitalist powers forcing open China's doors with cannons, Shanghai began an unprecedented process of modernization. In terms of the socialization of food production and consumption, there was a confrontation and conflict between tradition and modernization, providing an objective foundation for the general transformation of food culture and traditional dietary customs. The process of marketization of catering and food was, in fact, a historical leap forward in Shanghai's food culture. The development of food marketization and socialization in a sticky state led to competition becoming an inevitable phenomenon, which in turn manifested as a series of new developments: first, the emergence of "wet markets"; second, the emergence of "large vegetable and rice stalls" catering to the needs of the lower classes; and third, the emergence of "catering workshops" similar to later large canteens. These three new phenomena fully demonstrated the characteristics of food marketization and socialization. Today, in the highly socialized catering and food industry, the prosperity of supermarkets and the convenience of shopping make it difficult for people to imagine the hardships endured by the people of old Shanghai in their daily food consumption. Before the opening of Shanghai in the modern era, Shanghai County was just a medium-sized county in Jiangnan, and the old city of Shanghai was a small county with a diameter of less than three Chinese miles. Like other counties in Jiangnan, the demand and supply of vegetables and subsidiary food products were mainly met through two channels: , vegetable farmers in the countryside would carry their produce to the old city to sell by carrying baskets on their shoulders: over time, there were also specialized vegetable and subsidiary food vendors who would buy produce from farmers and then sell it along the streets, distributing vegetables and subsidiary food products to residential areas through a door-to-door approach. Second, scattered around the old city were some market streets where vegetable farmers or small vendors would set up stalls. In traditional society, the practice of traveling merchants and settled traders had already taken shape in the sale of vegetables and subsidiary food products. Some stalls even developed certain divisions of labor, such as one street being dedicated to selling vegetables, another to selling bean products, and others to selling subsidiary food products, northern and southern goods, river fish, and seafood. Over time, people had relatively fixed habits about which street market to visit for what goods, and everyone knew it. To this day, some street names remain in the old city of Huangpu District, such as "Salt Melon Lane," "Bean Market Street," "Ham Lane," and "Gluten Lane," which are remnants of the past when vegetable farmers and subsidiary food vendors set up stalls and formed a certain structure. In the 1930s, Shanghai had become a bustling metropolis in East Asia, and the practice of selling goods door-to-door was still common. The famous singer and actress Zhou Xuan, known as the "Golden Voice," once performed a song titled "Annoying Morning," whose lyrics read: "The dung cart is our alarm clock, every morning it wakes us up, vegetable sellers call at the front door, rice sellers call at the back door, the cries of the younger brother of the second landlord shake the sky, the little thing on the third floor jumps about with both feet." The lyrics vividly described the life of the residents in Shanghai's alleys in the 1930s, but "vegetable sellers calling at the front door, rice sellers calling at the back door" only captured half of the truth. At that time, many Shanghai residents still bought from the fixed stalls of vegetable farmers and vendors. This relatively fixed gathering place for "stalls" was the prototype of the wet market. After the mid-19th century, with the gradual formation of modern Chinese society, concessions appeared north of Shanghai County. Initially, the concessions were designated as residential and trading areas for foreigners, and Chinese were not allowed to live in them, so the actual population of the concessions was very small. Statistics show that before the Xinhai Uprising in 1853 (the third year of the Xianfeng reign), there were only over 300 foreigners in the Shanghai concessions, plus several thousand employees working for foreign companies, so the concessions did not have a vegetable market. The vegetables and subsidiary food products needed by foreigners in the concessions were mainly obtained by purchasing them from the old city. During the Xinhai Uprising in 1853, a large number of people fled the war and sought refuge in the concessions; during the Taiping Army's advance from 1860 to 1862 (the first year of the Tongzhi reign), tens of thousands of refugees from southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang were also forced to seek refuge in the Shanghai concessions, leading to a sharp increase in the population of the concessions. Although order was partially restored after the war, many refugees returned to their original places of residence, but a significant number of residents chose to stay in the concessions (some sources say that at least 150,000 people settled in the Shanghai concessions at the time). The concessions were originally established to avoid "Chinese and foreign mixed residency," but later, they became places where people from all over the world lived together, with Chinese and foreigners intermingling. P025-026