The Old Pavement Fair of Shanghai – A New Year Tradition Once

I read a guide to Peking’s temple fairs at New Year the other day in The Beijinger by Jeremiah Jenne. During my lengthy China sojourn the temple fairs were slowly resurrected and are now pretty major again – not quite the 1930s when the Peace Preservation Corps of volunteer police would be mobilized to control crowds and catch thieves, but still…

However, sadly the old Chinese New Year tradition of the Shanghai Pavement Fair appears to have died out and not been resurrected. However, Osbert Sitwell in his 1939 book Escape With Me! has a quite lengthy and detailed description of Shanghai and the Pavement Fair at Chinese New Year in 1934 (ushering in the year of the dog, by the way). Here then is your Chinese New Year read from China Rhyming this year….it was Sitwell’s first encounter with China, a stopover in Shanghai before travelling on to Nanking, Tientsin and finally Peking…

‘The next morning was grey, and a bitter, knife-edged wind swept through this strange city, falling like a flail down the great modrn boulevard which leads from the Liverpool-like wharfs and river-front, past the crooked, tortuous streets of the Chinese town, with its zigzag bridges and alleys choked with people, to the racecourse. The whole of this thoroughfare has, on one side, a pavement pitched above the road and nearly as broad as the road itself. Ordinarily no block of people would have been permitted to assemble on road or pavement here, but today citizens were allowed to stroll and watch, to such a degree that progress was scarcely possible. Knot after knot, group after group, of Chinese, in European clothes and caps, in nondescript rags, or in their own quilted, padded winter robes, topped with fur caps, waited, laughing and talking, round the numerous attractions until the wide pavement had become a mile-long stage, for actors, acrobats, mountebanks and charlatans of various descriptions. The scene must somewhat have resembled a less elaborate Venetian carnival, save that here was no architectural frame, and that this grey blanket of cloud above us was substituted for the blue, autumnal, transparent sky of Italy. Down upon audience and performers, as in the ballet Petrouchka, drifted a few sad flakes of snow, occasionally increasing to a fine veil, melting on hats and shoulders. The noise was immense, actors and female impersonators, singers, clowns and ventriloquists, all ranted and vociferated; conjurors shouted as loud as they could, to divert public attention momentarily from the movement of their hands contriving the crucial sleight, and jugglers yelled in order to indicate their prowess. The yellow, naked trunks of wrestlers gleamed sweating through the thin snow, as they clutched each other round the waist, the muscles of arm and neck and shoulder standing out , and issued fake cries of rage or pain. Two men in long blue robes with fur collars, one of them blowing a trumpet, were leading along on a chain a heavily furred bear, which growled and groaned and grumbled as it trod heavily from side to side on two cruelly clawed feet that were yet too delicate for its weight. Some of the turns were elaborate, a scene from a well-known play acted in the proper dress; two actor-warriors, representing armies, clanging their swords, one against the other; a gang of eight or nine acrobats turning co-operative somersaults, or forming themselves into pyramids and towers. In the middle of another inquisitive cluster, a man in a black robe and a conical hat was giving an exhibition of the painless extraction of teeth (a very old Chinese art, which I do not pretend to understand, but to which, nevertheless, I constantly refer my dentist in London). There were, too, stalls devoted to the wonders of Chinese medicine, to witches’ brews of beetles, sea-slugs and noisome verdure, sealed up in huge jars (concoctions which, though unappetizing, have, it is said, some of science in them, effect their cures, though the healing art in China has been very little studied by the West), Professional storytellers banged their drums vigorously in several corners. Then there were singers, wailing to an accompaniment of lutes, and, for the children, Punch and Judy shows and marionettes, the booths decorated in red for the New Year. These last were surrounded entirely by the mothers and fathers, while their small boys of six or seven, in clothes padded like those of their elders, found themselves obliged to dart about beneath parental elbows in a vain struggle to see…This was my first experience of a Chinese fair, and though in the course of the next few months I was fortunate enough to witness many of them, in the courtyards of temples, or outside their gates, or in ruined palaces, none remains more vividly in my memory than this New Year pavement fair at Shanghai.’

Osbert Sitwell (by Cecil Beaton, 1926)