RIP Dongtai Lu – A New Stage in the Blanding of Shanghai

I blogged back in September 2014 about the announcement that Shanghai’s Dongtai Road, its much-loved tat (and the odd antique) street, was coming down, as all old roads must eventually in Shanghai. There was nothing amazingly historic about the Dongtai Road market – it had only been around since the 1980s. However, the street itself had a longer history – Dongtai Lu was once Rue Tai Chan in the French Concession and constructed around 1902. The street was originally named after Taishan in Guangdong Province and well-known by many at the time as it is estimated that over 75% of all overseas Chinese in North America until the mid- to late-twentieth century could claim origin from Taishan. It was    renamed in 1906 after A. Hennequin, a member of the Conseil Municipal de Changhai and an agent of the Messageries Maritimes shipping line. Though French he was elected Chairman of the British dominated Shanghai Club in 1878. The road was a popular location for street entertainers long before it became a market.

The point about Dongtai Road’s destruction is that it leaves another swath of land with nothing planned but tower blocks, car parks and malls extending across from Xintiandi effectively. With Jingling Road (formerly Rue du Consulat) being destroyed at the moment that could leave the entire stretch from the river at Zhongshan No.2 Road (often called the Bund by people, but formerly the Quai de France as it was Frenchtown) as far west as the North-South Elevated Road completely flattened and rebuilt. That is a substantial section of the former French Concession and remember that the destruction of the old town, to the south of this area, is already substantial too.

There’s another point too, though one I know the master builders of Shanghai have no interest in. The former French Concession is now (with the exception of a couple of small indoor food markets) completely free of street markets. If, like me, you think street markets an essential part of a city then you should mourn the passing of Dongtai Road. Across Asia street markets have succumbed to the thirst of developers for land – Hong Kong being a prime example. In Shanghai, I think, it’s both a hunger for development/profit opportunities by the philistine combination of the Party-state and property developers, but also a slight distrust of markets, places where people gather, mingle, talk, argue and act as a community in a way far less controllable than in a heavily mediated public square, a shopping mall or an anodyne faux-space such as the Xintiandi development. Street markets have an inherent chaotic vitality and pleasant anarchy to them that is naturally abhorrent to the city authorities.

Imagine a London without Portobello Road, Petticoat Lane or Leather Lane; a Paris without Clignancourt, Port des Vanves or the numerous flea markets; Taipei without its night food markets (a phenomenon almost totally gone now in mainland China and Shanghai – see previous posts on the end of Wujiang Road/Love Lane back in 2010/2011) – most cities of any interest have their street markets. Shanghai now does not and has not really for some time had traditional street markets – Xiangyang Road remains as a street food market I think, but the old push and shove of the Huating Road market (moved up the road, cleaned up, made orderly and then bulldozed to make way for yet another office block) is over 15 years ago now.

The loss of the old Rue Hennequin is sad – now another ghost street that once existed but no longer. The loss of the Dongtai Road market is also a shame, though not in the way of lost architecture or buildings, but more in a loss of a vital ingredient to urban life – a little piece of the chaotic vitality of the people’s market against the blanding, smoothing, antiseptic, air conditioned, controlled city that Shanghai has become.

Thanks to Gary Bowerman of Scribes of the Orient for this picture of Dongtai Lu last week – gone!