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| Longtangs in Shanghai - Part 1 |
"Jobs tears seed, almond and lotus seed congee!" "Rose chip and white sugared rice cake!" "Fragrantly spiced egg boiled in tea leaf!" These were the hawking of snacks in longtangs around Zhabei District that Lu Xun, the great writer, recalled in his essay "Business in Longtangs of the Past and Present", at the time of his first arrival at Shanghai in the 1920s. The writer remarked that this kind of hawking was both attractive and artistic, which made people's mouths water while hearing it.
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Longtang is the local term used by Shanghai people for lilong. As "long" means a lane and "tang" means an important building or the front room of a house, "longtang" either means a lane that connects houses or a group of houses connected by lanes. According to elucidation, "longtang" might not be as explicit as "lilong", for the "li" in "lilong" means neighborhood, and people living in a longtang are actually living in a neighborhood, but it is understood.
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In longtangs, besides hawking of snacks, there were hawking of vegetables, fruits, bean curds, melons and eggs, even live chicken and ducks; once or twice a week, there would be hawking of service rendering, such as repairing shoes, mending coir ropes stretched on wooden bed frames or flicking cotton quilts to make them fluffy. Every type of trade would have its own melodic tune in hawking; people could identify them without having to step out to see. Apart from these peddlers, there were fortune-tellers and those begging for alms. Sometimes, in the night, shrill hawking could be heard of peddlers selling fried ginkgo or tin foils for burning the dead, and occasionally melancholy howling could be heard for calling back the soul of a sick child.
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The houses in longtangs, generally two storied, are proximately attached to each other in rows, sharing the same front and back lanes. People living along the same lane had the habit of nodding or greeting each other when passing by; some would even stop to chat a while. Once a hawking was heard, housewives of the same interest would come out, comment and exchange opinions on the quality of the goods and bargain or help their neighbor bargain with the peddler. Some of them also took this opportunity to gossip and exchange neighborhood news forgetting what they intended to buy. The advantages of the longtang life lie in the good neighborhood relationships, "good neighbors are more helpful than far away relatives" proved to be true in Shanghai. For most of the Shanghai people at that time actually came from other places or cities. However, the shortcoming was, as cited by Lu Xun in ditto essay, "...... for those who make a living from writing, if they fail in training themselves to be as calm as an ancient well, owing to the noise outside, they can write nothing."
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Moreover, in large longtangs different sorts of people and different interests mixed together, as well as frequent contacts, would occasionally result in trouble and disputes. Shanghai people are often considered to be the ones who are keen on conducting business, smooth in social contact and good in dealing with money. This is probably due to the fact that many people from this city lived in longtangs since their childhood and learned how to effectively handle relationships with different people.
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Longtang and the longtang houses were native products of Shanghai soon after the city was forced to open to the West as a treaty port. In the beginning, Chinese were not allowed to live in the foreign concessions. But later the British realized that relying only on the small number of Western residents at the time, they would not be able to tap the big potential of Shanghai that was becoming a metropolis. At the same time, incessant civil wars in China caused a large number of wealthy Chinese refugees request to move into the foreign concessions. That is when the authorities agreed to have them opened to the Chinese people. However, for the sake of management, large
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numbers of collective dwellings were built in designated lots enclosed by walls. The house, similar in design to the English terrace house, but suited the Chinese way of living, is surrounded by walls and includes a courtyard in front. Houses were arranged in lines like barracks, row after row and could easily be accessed by sub-lanes connected to the main-lane, while only the main-lane could lead to the city road outside through an iron grille gate. Nobody knew at the time that this type of housing, built initially for the convenience of management, would later become the main and typical type of housing in Shanghai, and would eventually be the most active and important part of the real-estate business, which would be the leading business of Shanghai's economy for the following decades. Large numbers of longtangs were built not only in the foreign concessions but also in the Chinese quarter around the concessions, and their appearance made up the general physiognomy of the city of Shanghai.
During the 1940s, out of a population of 4.1894 million people in Shanghai, except for the very rich (accounting for 5%) and the very poor (about 1 million), the majority of the population, nearly three million, including white-collar Western and Chinese residents, lived in various types of longtangs. Even now, although many of them are demolished, when one stands high up looking down at the city, one can see waves of longtang roofs, one after the other.
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Weekly Chinese Words |
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零食
Transcription: líng shí
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: snack
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闲话
Transcription: xián huà
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: gossip
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租界
Transcription: zū jiè
Part of speech: Noun
Meaning: foreign concession
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Weekly Chinese Phrases |
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远亲不如近邻
Transcription: yuǎn qīn bù rú jìn lín
Meaning: good neighbors are more helpful than far away relatives
Topic: proverb
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