Shopping Customs in Shanghai

Manawatu Times, Volume 60, Issue 249, 22 October 1935, Page 2

Shopping Customs in Shanghai

“SAY IT TO MUSIC.” Shopping customs in China formed the subject of an interesting address to the Auckland Travel Club, the speaker being Mr S. Hutchinson, who had lived 12 years in Shanghai. “The women there,” Mr Hutchinson said, “do it by music.” And he explained that hawkers or pedlars went about the streets carrying their wares, each salesman making some particular “musical” sound, by which ho signified the wares he was selling. The clients Como to know the sounds made, and then they know that the hairdresser, or the sweets or toy seller, or the man who sharpens knives, is near. The women, ho explained, lived within courtyards, over the walls of .which they could not see, and they had to have some way of telling who was without.

“The day begins at dawn,” Mr. Hutchinson added, "with the small seed cake and waffle man, who makes a sound on a steel gong.” The man who sold kerosene beat upon a hollow block of wood, like a woodpecker striking a hollow tree. Another gong was beaten by the man who sold sewing requisites. The barber smote on a tuning fork. Another salesman, or group of salesmen, had a regular band of a drum, a kcttlo drum and a cornet, who played Western tunes liko “Daisy, Daisy.”

Innumerable Pedlars. As well as these, the speaker said there were innumerable pedlars, with every imaginable ware. One sold the children an indigestion cure in the form of little flour and water tigers and animals dipped in some syrup.

The speaker told of a fortune teller who was not a fortune teller. He was usually blind, and he sold not fortunes but drugs. He was candid enough about it all. This is what he said: “Here is the stuff that gives you wonderful dreams, and rots away your body, mind and spirit.” The fortune teller came about midnight. The “muscle flour” man claimed that he sold smoked fish. As a matter of fact he sold neither flour nor fish, but smoked pig’s head.

Other Chinese women of the poorer class went to the market. Each one carried a pair of scales. In them everything was weighed, even if only a bunch of spinach. There were some terrible rows in the markets over articles which might cost only a copper. A copper, ho said, ran about 16 to the penny; still, a copper to the Chinese women was a copper.

Mr. Hutchinson told of the less pleasant-side of the Chinese city, of the work of a cemetery and a hospital. Every day, he said, men from the Public Benevolent Hospital, went through tho streets and they gathered up all the dead they found therein. In one year they found no fewer than 36,371 bodies of which 29,099 are infant. As one moved np and down the busy modern thoroughfares of Shanghai, one did,not realise the appalling mortality of the native quarters, Mr. Hutchinson said.