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China > Life & Culture > Longtangs in Shanghai
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
零食
Transcription: líng shí
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: snack
闲话
Transcription: xián huà
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: gossip
租界
Transcription: zū jiè
Part of speech: Noun
Meaning: foreign concession
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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