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11 June 2010
by Admin
Seven Treasures Town (2)
Qibao - An Old Town in Shanghai
七宝老街
Looking
the Seven Treasures Twon centre from the
main bridge
In the past on the market days, peasants and
vendors would display their farming
products and daily items for sale on both
road sides (sometimes blocking the access
to the shops and homes), attracting
buyers and browsers from nearby towns and
surrounding villages. By then the street
would be as crowded as this one.
During the hot summer season (that was long
before air-condition era), in South Yangtze
towns like this, after dinner
the residents would bring out bamboo
chairs, wooden stools, or place door
planks on stands on the street in front
of their home for daily evening
breeze-catching, gossip-exchanging
parties. Imagine a news
conference room as big as an entire
street and a discussion group in front of
each household! In such an environment
even a donkey would have learned a few
things about the world by simply mucking
around the town.
Nowadays all the buildings
in the Seven Treasures
Town would be fully utilised
for commercial purpose. But in the old
days, for a typical Chinese town, there
were always residents living in the rear
quarters and the upstairs, which made it
possible for Golden Lotus (潘金莲) to meet her
fate by accidently dropping a small
bamboo pole from an upper floor window,
when she tried to use it to draw the
curtain, to hit the head of a get-rich quick
businessman who just happened to pass
by. The incident caused by such town
planning arrangement later cost her
beautiful head but helped create two
classic Chinese novels - The Water
Margin (水浒传) and The Plum in the Golden
Vase (金瓶梅).
It typifies the main
difference between an authentic Chinese
town of yesterday and the showcase
traditional Chinese town of today. The
essence of the old Chinese towns is that
there were residents living there and
being the integral part of the townscape,
which is what made the streets vibrate
through out the season and in all times.
Co-existence, correlation and integration
are the core of Chinese
civilisation (and city planning), in
contrary to the contemporary Western
mentality that intends to categorise, classify and
divide everything in the universe (and to
separate the urban space by coarsely
defined functions).
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An Old
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