Yongkang Road, the Bar Street With 13 "Owners," Is Breaking Up

We have been following Shanghai's recent campaign to restore the historic character of its old streets. The story is still going, and so are we.

Nearly everyone on Yongkang Road feels, to some degree, that the street belongs to them. And each of them has a plan for its future.

10:30 p.m.

At 10:30 p.m., David closes up Pain Chaud, the bakery at 39 Yongkang Road. When he steps outside, the famous bar street is "completely packed." Shanghai's Yongkang Road is a narrow 550-meter stretch lined with more than 90 businesses, most of them restaurants and bars. The travel review site TripAdvisor calls it "the heart of good bars and restaurants."

These days this is the only hour of the day David, the owner of Pain Chaud, is on Yongkang Road at all. But he started working here in October 2010, at a bar called Cafe des Stagiaires — the Interns' Cafe. Since 83% of the households on this street are renters, David has probably spent more time here than most of the people who live on it.

In his two years at Stagiaires, David often waited until 2 a.m. for the street's drowsy crowds to thin out before hauling the tables, chairs and umbrellas from both sides of the road back indoors.

It was four years ago that David and two colleagues from Stagiaires went in together on La Boulangerie, the bakery at 39 Yongkang Road. They kept the baker and changed the name. Pain Chaud has since opened a second shop near Jing'an Temple, 2.5 kilometers away and bigger than this one.

David knows exactly why the business "has never spent a cent on marketing — it runs on this street." Last Halloween, he says, "the whole street was one great surge of people." That is how Pain Chaud became what may be the latest-closing bakery in Shanghai: nowhere else in the city draws enough people late at night to make it worth staying open.

"But I doubt we'll see that again," David said, standing inside Pain Chaud at 10:30 p.m. on August 8.

Yongkang Road has now been added to the Hengfu historic district cleanup, which began in May. The same campaign had just swept through ten nearby streets — Yanqing Road, Fuxing Middle Road and others — under the banner of "tearing down the five illegals": illegal land use, illegal construction, illegal business operations, illegal discharges and illegal occupancy.

When word first reached Yongkang Road, most shopkeepers half believed it and had no idea what to do. Only at the end of July, when uniformed staff from the market regulation bureau went door to door asking about business licenses, the legal status of the premises and how each shop was operating, did it become certain that Yongkang Road's turn had come.

From August 1, the tables and chairs outside the shops — the thing most people thought of as the street's signature — were banned outright.

Wang Xiaoyang thinks "the tables don't matter; they don't need tables." A few days earlier she had finished a six-minute short film, Yongkang Road: Goodbye, Not Goodbye (《永康路：再见不再见》), and when she came to shoot her last footage on July 31, she was still fairly hopeful.

But David soon found that without the outdoor seating, "the crowd was cut in half overnight." Worse, the street's strange new mood convinced plenty of people that every shop on it must already be closing.

David says "nothing is certain," and at the same time seems ready to shut the doors. Pain Chaud's business license is framed and hung high on the wall facing the entrance — though he does not mention that the address on it is not where Pain Chaud actually stands. Most shops on Yongkang Road have some version of this license problem.

For a while the street's unwritten rules and one unusual "arbiter" kept such problems from mattering. Shopkeepers came, spent serious money fitting out their storefronts, hired dozens of staff and became owners of the street in their own eyes — they wanted the street to do better, and their businesses with it.

Now Pain Chaud may be ordered to close. David says he will move his staff to the new shop near Jing'an Temple; it is big, big enough to just about hold them all.

2016

An employee of Paifeng Company seemed put out at not being invited to the press briefing on the Yongkang Road cleanup held on August 5, 2016. "For our boss, it's obviously unfair," said the employee, who asked not to be named. She had been on the job only a short time, but said she had "heard about" how the street was leased out in the first place, and had "taken part" in the daily work of keeping it in order —

Under a "10 p.m. rule" the subdistrict set for itself, Paifeng staff joined several subdistrict workers every night at 10 to press businesses to switch off their neon signs and herd the still-drinking customers indoors. Her shifts fell on Friday and Saturday nights. It never worked well and soon became pure ritual. A few months ago a family on the fourth floor of a Yongkang Road building, with a newborn who kept waking in the small hours, moved out. They had lived there more than ten years.

Most of the time, though, Paifeng Company kept the street running by simple, effective means, and with real authority. From its founding in 2009 it acted as a kind of clan elder standing between the shopkeepers and the government, between the local gentry and the court.

Its full name is Paifeng Yongkang Commercial Management Company. Corporate registration records show it was set up as a joint venture between the American-invested Paifeng Group and three government-backed firms: New Xuhui Group, the Xuhui District Non-Staple Food Company and the Xuhui District Grain and Oil Company (Xinluda Group). Paifeng Group holds 70%; the other three hold 30% between them.

The venture existed largely to deliver a project then called "Phase One of the Yongkangli Specialty Block," and Xuhui District granted Paifeng 13 years of operating rights over Yongkang Road. The project called for the street to be "renovated to a single design and packaged as a stylish, modern specialty block."

The early years went badly. Only after Paifeng brought in the street's first food-and-drink tenant, Stagiaires, in 2010 did it escape a year of dismal trading. In director Wang Cheng's documentary short Yongkang (《永康》), Paifeng claimed it had signed up its tenants in a single week. But those first small shops selling clothes and handicrafts turned out to be unable to survive on Yongkang Road at all. Only restaurants and bars could.

As businesses poured in, landlords on the street quickly worked out that if they cut out Paifeng — in effect a middleman landlord — they could charge more. So from 2013 on, few of them were still willing to lease to Paifeng. The company changed how it involved itself accordingly: it took a management fee and administered the shops as a group, calling regular meetings, sorting out matters on the street and passing on news from outside.

Today, "about 80% of the shops on Yongkang Road have some connection to our company," the anonymous employee says. She credits Paifeng's standing to "the government." "At the very start we built this street together with the government. We were involved in the design, we filed the paperwork with the housing authority. Without the government, how could we possibly have had the clout to remake it?"

What QDaily learned from several sources is that "built together" meant this: among the 50-odd shops on the eastern stretch of Yongkang Road, some occupy residential space that cannot legally be used for business. To clear out the roadside vegetable market then plaguing Yongkang Road as fast as possible — and to "keep the residents upstairs off our backs" — the Tianping Road subdistrict office, which administers the street, gave Paifeng fictitious addresses so it could obtain business licenses.

If only they had gone further while the "anything goes" window was open. "We should have done the whole thing at once back then, first floor to third floor, on a bigger scale," the Paifeng employee says. Then the Yongkang Road she imagines would never have been torn up by these later quarrels over who owns it, quarrels with no clear right and wrong — and it might never have drawn so much attention that it now stands accused of "overrunning itself" and has to be cleaned up from top to bottom, threatening the "owner" status of Paifeng, the street's self-described planner.

When the market regulation bureau surveyed the shops in July, it did not bring Paifeng along. And when shopkeepers came to Paifeng for answers, the company no longer stood for any authority: it said it knew roughly what they knew.

The new employee says she watched "uniforms of every kind" appear out of nowhere, and watched a good number of the street's foreign tenants "lose their nerve" because they could not "make sense of" what was happening. That is the peculiarity of Yongkang Road: even as Chinese customers have grown year by year, a shop like Pain Chaud still gets 80% of its trade from foreigners.

8 a.m.

Both sides of Yongkang Road carry matching aluminum railings and rain canopies. Built to a single design by the subdistrict around 2009, they later became the scaffolding on which shops extended their floor space — and from that point the street was all but fated to become famous for its outdoor tables and its wild drinkers on the pavement.

At 8 a.m., small clues tell you what kind of night the flats in these four-story buildings have just been through.

In the little fourth-floor room built on the roof terrace, the tenant may not be as badly bothered as his neighbors. The things on his square balcony suggest he is probably a foreigner who moved here on purpose, to live inside the lane culture. Because the Western restaurants he likes are right downstairs, his sublandlord redid the roughly 50-square-meter room and installed an oven and other touches to make him feel at home. Apart from rent of about 15,000 yuan, he has nothing to complain about.

Other residents probably fall asleep to the smell of cooking oil. Because people live on every floor from the second up, none of the street's shops can, in theory, pass the environmental assessment required for food service. The household above The Sailors Fish & Chips is one of the few no longer troubled by it. As landlords of the ground-floor shop, they complained, and in its second year the restaurant rented the unit next door to use as a kitchen and ran a duct to vent the fumes straight onto the roof of the three-story building.

8 a.m. As the restaurants and bars shut, the cafés and bakeries on Yongkang Road open. Ben, the barista at Pain Chaud, pulls coffee one cup at a time from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The business is superb, and the surroundings have once again become "unbearable."

At the end of his shift, Ben has to "squeeze his way out of the street." At 4 p.m. the happy hours start, and "there are already foreigners drunk outside." "The street is too small and there are too many people. Past a certain point you can't even tell who's making the noise," Ben says. "A crowd is nice up to a point — a place where you can just go and drink is pretty good. Beyond that, it isn't."

The Yongkang Road he would like is one "kept within limits, and not so loud" — closer to what he saw the first time he walked into Pain Chaud in 2012, when "the street was still fairly clean."

But Ben thinks "Yongkang Road probably can't be kept within limits."

Jiji Dry Cleaners also opens at 8 a.m. In recent years, with the bars in full swing, the owner, Master Yu, has pushed his bedtime past midnight. He does not feel the newcomers have disturbed his life. "Noise isn't a problem for me. I go to bed late," he says.

Master Yu's dry cleaners and the Liming corner shop are the only two businesses on the street that have not changed in more than a decade. He opened here in 1997, and few people know better how the street went from having its roadside vegetable market cleared out, to getting it back, to the slump of the clothes-and-trinkets trade and the rise of the restaurants.

Master Yu says he did not like Yongkang Road at its loudest, and that the street without outdoor seating suits him well enough. "As long as nobody spills out past their own door, the crowds thin out a lot. Though foreigners have no interest in sitting inside — they'll sit out in blazing sun rather than come in."

But another business owner on the street says the dry cleaners is one of the beneficiaries of all that foot traffic. "There are hardly any dry cleaners nearby and plenty of foreigners around, so he does very well. If this street goes, his business drops at least 30%."

If the crowds really do take his trade with them, Master Yu may have to reconsider whether he likes a loud Yongkang Road after all.

2013

Xiao Ming, who owns the pizza place Casa, believes the crowds on Yongkang Road truly took off on March 6, 2013. He remembers the date because that was the day the street's "water-throwing" incident made Tencent News. Soon after, three people in his shop were selling close to 100 pizzas a day. Rents then nearly tripled; a space of a little over 20 square meters went for more than 12,000 yuan a month.

The "water-throwing" incident refers to the night two second-floor residents emptied several basins of water onto the dozens of foreigners drinking below. They were two elderly Shanghainese women who had lived there for years, and the gesture was a blunt way of declaring that the street belonged neither to Paifeng nor to the shops it had brought in, but to the people who lived on it.

International media, including Britain's Daily Telegraph, reported the incident. Outdoor tables and chairs were banned afterward, and Paifeng imposed a 10 p.m. "curfew" on the shops it managed: kill the neon signs, move customers off the pavement, stop serving drink.

Three months later the alarm passed and everything went back to how it had been. Those measures, "as we can see now, don't solve the problem of disturbing residents," a government official told 13 news organizations at the Yongkang Road cleanup briefing.

The shopkeepers understood what those bans amounted to well before the government did, and they knew the government had no intention of really stepping in at the time. They had to sort it out themselves. Some began sending the two residents 1,000 yuan a month through Paifeng, with a request that the water not fall again.

But most residents lack the two old women's appetite for confrontation, and cannot exercise their rights the way a real owner would. The family of Master Chen, on the second floor, became a neighborhood joke because every member of the household owns a pair of noise-canceling earplugs.

Master Shi, who lives in Lane 65, says he has called the police several times. He has lived on this street for more than 70 years, and his home is now the only ground-floor residence on it that has not been rented out. Nobody doubts his attachment to the place, and he has a fierce sense of ownership; he can reel off reasons for not moving, including ceilings over 3.5 meters high, a thing you cannot find in newer public housing. On this question he wants an outside force — the police, say — to confirm that he owns his piece of Yongkang Road, and to take his side.

Master Shi tried a few times, going to the bars to talk it over. At first the owners seemed "quite embarrassed"; later they started to find him "a nuisance." "The proprietress said, 'Oh, so running a shop is this much trouble?'" he recalls. "I said: we live here. This is a residential street."

Until this cleanup began, though, almost no one — the government included — remembered that Yongkang Road was a residential street.

7 p.m.

Two or three years ago, when BluBlu arrived at 7 p.m., Yongkang Road was already "starting to go mad." She found it too crowded — "people spill right out into the road" — and decided to stop coming to the bars at night. The place she visits most is Cafe del Volcan, a coffee shop near the end of the street.

BluBlu writes for Penguin Food & Drink Guide, a consumer review platform. She has walked streets like this one in Shanghai and in Ho Chi Minh City and knows food well, which is why she is considered able to judge Yongkang Road fairly.

In late June, BluBlu ate her way through every restaurant on the street, not knowing a cleanup was coming. "The conclusion is that there really isn't much here worth eating." That, plus the dirt and disorder of the place, is why she does not like it. "It's very much like some bar street in Ho Chi Minh City. Lots of variety, but the quality is lower than I expected — so how did they ever get popular?"

Judge Yongkang Road on its food and its surroundings alone and the nearly ten hours a day it spends buzzing are hard to explain.

Christopher St. Cavish, an American, is a food columnist with 20 years as a sous chef in high-end kitchens in Miami, New York and Shanghai. He has lived in Shanghai for ten years, and last April wrote The Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index for SmartShanghai, a piece that spread widely on social media.

St. Cavish was wandering Yongkang Road back when it had no bars at all. Now he goes every two or three months to El Luchador, the Mexican restaurant. He thinks the street matters.

"It's like a natural incubator," he says. If the government wants the service industry to improve, it needs a relatively cheap place like this, a street that works the way a startup district does. "Here, some shops fail, and the ones that succeed expand somewhere else."

That is roughly St. Cavish's ideal Yongkang Road: a "naturally grown" downtown (downtown here meaning older districts like Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York, as opposed to the newer areas to the north).

Unlike the ambitious, carefully planned new districts every city builds, a downtown has no single designer, which leaves "room for more possibilities." If anything could be improved, St. Cavish says: "Lower rents, to encourage new brands. Outdoor tables that are well managed and don't disturb the neighbors. A place where Chinese and foreigners mix."

On the evening of August 13, Nicholas, who lives in Hangzhou, came to Shanghai for the weekend and was told by friends to meet them here. He knew almost nothing about Yongkang Road beforehand, but said: "One evening is about enough to get the idea. This street is one thing at nine and something else at ten. I had a drink at The Hop Project — the beer here feels like the real thing."

A Frenchman who goes by the Chinese name Heilong was here for the third time. He does not often go to bars, but a friend was leaving China, so they decided to throw the farewell party on this street.

After BluBlu's article on Yongkang Road ran on Penguin Food & Drink Guide, more than 200 comments came in, many of them saying they wanted to go back one more time. Still, that 7 p.m. experience left her convinced that "this place was always going to be torn down."

"If I were a resident and went out at night, I'd hate it. To me this place is something warped," she says.

2011

Only a few shop owners really understand — rather than merely watched — how something this "warped" came about.

Stagiaires was the first bar Paifeng brought to Yongkang Road, and at the time it was wedged among the clothing and handicraft shops left from the street's earlier plan. Its first loyal customers came through another venture of its French owner, Alexandre Daune: an internship program for French students.

Sean, who is from Xinjiang, walked past Yongkang Road often. On very cold winter nights he saw students standing outside Stagiaires smoking and drinking, with no tables set out, apparently generating a crowd all by themselves.

In 2011 a few more small food shops opened: Hesheng Sushi and the craft beer bar Cheersin. A Taiwanese sausage shop was struggling and wanted to hand off its tiny premises, which had three or four seats. Sean decided to take a gamble and open a British fish-and-chips shop on this street "where foreigners keep walking by." He took over the space, thinking, "this street might amount to something."

The people on the street and the ownership of its shops quickly grew tangled, and that tangle marked the arrival of a new set of owners. Another Frenchman opened a bar called Revolution Road, which at first held a stake in Stagiaires and vice versa. An Australian owner started with the Irish pub Blarney Stone and then opened El Luchador, the wrestling-themed Mexican restaurant. And there was Xiao Ming, who moved from Sheshan Golf to Yongkang Road and opened Casa, a Western restaurant built around thin-crust pizza.

Sean has since opened three brands and five restaurants in Shanghai, two of them on Yongkang Road. As each expanded, his The Sailors and the bakery Pain Chaud ended up with two units apiece, next door to each other.

Today almost every shop on Yongkang Road with a few years behind it credits Stagiaires with bringing in the crowds. At the peak, Daune had a hand in running seven shops on the street, and looked like the man who decided whether it lived or died. He has since sold all of them on.

And according to 2014 figures, 83% of people on Yongkang Road live apart from the household registered at their address — which means that finding an owner in the sense of holding the deed is not easy either. Disputes between shops and landlords are sometimes settled with a fourth-tier sublandlord.

All that churn and absence changes nothing: everyone on Yongkang Road still feels, to some degree, that the street belongs to them, and each of them has a plan for its future.

That is why Ben, the barista, is unhappy. Like Jing'an Villas, where he "used to go on dates as a kid," the places people went to on Yongkang Road may soon be gone for good. "It's hard to know why. You only know the outcome — it's demolished."

Now

From a meter or so away, No. 82 Yongkang Road looks like an old family home: a jujube-red wooden door and wooden windows with glass panes.

At 11 p.m. on Saturday, August 13, a long-haired woman pulled up in a red Ferrari, parked in front of Blarney Stone and walked straight into Big Movie, a DVD shop not yet demolished. Until 2 a.m. the foreigners kept coming in — some who had ridden over on scooters with French bulldogs in tow, others still holding beer bottles from a weekend in the nearby bars. For 12 yuan they could take home the newest pirated Hollywood film.

At a quarter past eleven, a few pedicabs were waiting at the corner of Yongkang Road and Xiangyang South Road, strung with colored lights and blasting English pop, their drivers working on a handful of half-drunk foreigners to climb in and be taken somewhere else to keep going.

But an hour or so before all this, more than ten uniformed officials had been walking up and down the street. Few people were surprised to see them. Some had fresh memories of the Hengfu historic district campaign that covered Yanqing Road and Fuxing Road and ended on June 30, and they knew Yongkang Road's turn would start on August 26.

Four days later, early on Wednesday, August 17, five or six men in hard hats arrived at Big Movie, followed by the sound of hammers. A "restricted zone" was roped off outside with ribbon, with four staff in special-duty uniforms standing guard. They did not chase off the onlookers or shout at anyone taking photographs; most of the time they stood silent or looked at the ground. Across the street sat five "Shanghai Peace Volunteers," and two chengguan officers with briefcases paced back and forth.

For the uniformed crew, the day went smoothly. They shut down a shop with no business license, and swung the first hammer of the Yongkang Road cleanup their superiors had ordered.

Photographs by Ningyi Ma