A Designer's Six Memory Clues From the Street He Knows Best — Some Already Gone

This is the fourth installment in the series [Why Changle Road Matters].

The designer Li Zhiqian likes to wander with his camera through Shanghai's capillary network of longtang alleys, a kind of "street observer" who reads how different people live from the lettering they use and where they put it.

At the end of 2017, the "Urban Type Watch" group Li Zhiqian runs released a 2018 "type calendar" built from photographs taken around Shanghai. No Customs House, no Nanjing Road, none of the city's usual landmarks, and no skyline of Bund towers. The photograph for September was a whole wall hung with small handwritten signs: "Hero Fountain Pen Ink," "Button Tape," "Fax Paper," "Energy-Saving Bulbs" — the stock list a general store on Taiyuan Road had put up outside.

These characters, common on every street and in every alley, are written by the people who live there, locals and migrants alike, year after year, and they in turn shape a city's particular character. "But we are watching this landscape die out," Li Zhiqian told QDaily.

He and a friend founded a design studio called 3Type, and with the type-design website Type is Beautiful they developed city walks strung together by lettering. In Shanghai, the place Li Zhiqian knows best is where he was born and still lives: the corner of Changle Road and North Xiangyang Road.

That is how he became one of the narrators in our Changle Road series.

"Jingang Diner"

In Li Zhiqian's memory, the shops along Changle Road — a street a little over three kilometers long — have always been living and dying. Two of them have survived improbably long. One is Xiaoyuting, "Little Rain Pavilion," which happens to touch his own trade: it carves seals and makes brass plaques. The other is called Jingang Diner, and its signature dish is a 16-yuan bowl of spicy pork noodles.

Only a few years ago did he read the story of Jingang Diner, on a WeChat official account called "A Shanghai Citizen's Guide to Life." The owner is named Jin Qigang, once a worker at Shanghai No. 3 Steel Plant. In 1985, caught up in the rush to go abroad, he went to Tokyo to study and work, sponsored by relatives in Japan. For two years he studied and worked, his days run by the clock and shuttling between a few fixed points — grinding for every cent, as Boss Jin put it.

When his two-year visa ran out, he came back to Shanghai with the yen he had earned. He still remembers depositing the money at the bank, and how people wondered where all that cash had come from. Someone who knew him told the crowd he had just come back from abroad: "You're all still arguing about whether to go. This man has already made his money and come home."

In 1990, Boss Jin spent a "fortune" of 200,000 yuan on a ground-floor storefront facing the street and opened a restaurant. In the early 1990s, welfare housing allocation still ruled; Boss Jin said buying the shop came from a tip his boss in Japan had given him, that a man with property is more likely to stay the course.

By the time he was hiring waitstaff through a job agency, plenty of workers were arriving in Shanghai from elsewhere. Boss Jin said he saw in them the man he had been, hustling for cash in a Japanese ramen shop.

"China Blue Calico Museum"

In 1990, Kubo Masa, a Japanese woman then nearly 70, worked with the Shanghai Textiles Import and Export Corporation to open the China Blue Calico Museum, hidden deep in a longtang off Changle Road, in a Spanish-style building with a courtyard.

She had first seen blue calico back in 1955, at a trade exhibition a Chinese foreign-trade company held in Tokyo. After relations between China and Japan were normalized in the 1970s and ordinary exchange resumed, Kubo came to China again and again, riding jeeps, tractors and ox carts deep into the countryside of southern and southwestern provinces to collect blue calico of every kind. She went home with more than a dozen crates: blue calico clothing, bedsheets, cloth wrappers, stencils cut from mulberry-bark paper, even the rare boards used for clamp-resist dyeing.

Besides the finished cloth, Li Zhiqian once saw an exhibition in this handsome building on the history and craft of blue calico. The writer Shen Jialu, a friend of Kubo's, said she had hoped at one point to design new products that would carry the old craft forward, but was never satisfied with the results.

Many of her pieces were lent out for exhibitions or research and vanished that way. Kubo Masa died in Japan in 2011; Shen Jialu regretted that he heard of it only long afterward, and Shanghai's local press did not report her story until two months after her death — a sad contrast with the noisy fight several cities once waged over which of them was the birthplace of blue calico.

The Blue Calico Museum is still there, but it no longer holds exhibitions. It is more like an ordinary shop now, drawing in a few foreign tourists.

Huating Road Clothing Market

In the 1990s, on a street so quiet you could walk it without meeting anyone, one spot was suddenly packed with people: the corner of Huating Road. Running south from Changle Road for more than 700 meters, it was crammed with open-air stalls the whole way to Middle Huaihai Road at the other end.

In 1984, the Xuhui District Bureau of Industry and Commerce put money into the Huating Road market, moving nearly 70 clothing vendors from the green strip at the west end of Zhangjiabang Road in Xujiahui and from Wuyuan Road onto this narrow street. The stated aim was to "encourage and guide the development of the non-public economy, and widen employment channels for sent-down youth returning to Shanghai and other idle members of society." Vendors took overnight trains to Guangzhou to restock, or "referred to" the fashions printed in Japanese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese magazines, choosing their own fabrics and designing their own pieces.

The other thing vendors often "referred to" was Maison Mode on Huaihai Road, one of the most upscale department stores in Shanghai in the 1990s (it closed at the end of 2009). "Look at Maison Mode, buy on Huating Road" was a routine everyone knew. Over more than a decade this "knockoff street" drove several waves of fashion: bell-bottoms, "Ah Mei" pants, printed T-shirts, cargo pants. Li Zhiqian remembers Huating Road in the 1990s being as thick with people as Sai Yeung Choi Street South in Mong Kok, Hong Kong, is today.

Wu Xiaoming of Shanghai Normal University once recalled Huating Road's earlier "back-street history" on the blog Ziji. In the 1950s, for nearly a hundred meters north from its southern end, the road filled with open-front stalls of bamboo, wood and tar felt; secondhand dealers who had peddled door to door or sold from their own homes were gathered here into "joint operations." Like the better-known Huaihai Road Secondhand Store nearby, the place sold used household goods, furniture and utensils taken over from the old regime or seized in house raids. The difference was that Huating Road was cheaper.

In 2000, the Huating Road market, by then a leader of mass-market fashion, was cleaned up, and more than 400 vendors were moved to the Xiangyang Road market not far away. At the end of June 2006, the Xiangyang Road market was shut down too. Seven years later the iapm shopping mall rose on its site.

"Where that batch of Xiangyang Road vendors went, nobody knows. At least when the market moved from Huating Road to Xiangyang Road it was handled well — the Xiangyang Road site was bigger, there were more people, and the vendors were glad to go, so the clearance went smoothly. Not like today, when most market cleanups just mean everyone is broken up on the spot and left to fend for themselves: go wherever you like."

Huating Road today shows no trace of those crowds. It is a small street in a residential district.

W+K

Changle Road is also home to many advertising agencies Li Zhiqian knows well: W+K (Wieden+Kennedy), still there, and Ogilvy and J. Walter Thompson, which moved out of Century Trade Plaza at the end of 2015. He remembers when the ground floor of W+K was a small gallery full of designers' work. It is a restaurant now.

In 2012, W+K put up an interactive wall on Changle Road. People could post a photo they had taken on Weibo along with the number of a square on the big screen, and that square would turn the dominant color of the photo. The graffiti on the wall changed as passersby joined in.

Most of the change has been quieter than that. Middle Wulumuqi Road has cafés, restaurants and bars where creative people gather. Someone who leaves a 4A agency to start a studio can rent a room in a longtang nearby, "and that way you can keep up business with your old employer or your clients." Anfu Road and Yongfu Road, close by, have a richer supply of cultural venues. Li Zhiqian calls it a chicken-and-egg process — no one knows who rode whose coattails first — but theater, nightlife and other niche pleasures have gradually found a mass audience.

We reported on WPP Group's ambitious move at the end of 2015, when 26 of its companies and more than 3,000 employees left a dozen-odd offices scattered across Shanghai for a single building near the railway station, Dabang Collaboration Plaza. In a post titled "It's the End of the Year and We Want to Make Big News," people from the creative business called themselves "pioneers": "Back then the area around Century Trade Plaza was desolate too. It took years of 4A people nursing it along."

Maggie Lane

Century Trade Plaza, where Ogilvy and J. Walter Thompson sat for years, and the upscale apartment tower beside it, Hui Xian Ju, were both developed by Cheung Kong Holdings, Li Ka-shing's company, and finished in 2004. Li Zhiqian remembers that this block was once like everything around it: old longtang laid out like capillaries.

"That changed the 'scale' of the street. You get an office tower packed with people, and luxury apartments behind it, and you can imagine plenty of foreigners living there and plenty of office workers. They buy or rent nearby, and other needs follow." Li Zhiqian is optimistic about this kind of "renewal," and thinks it brings new blood to an old neighborhood.

The plot next door was cleared at about the same time, but more than a decade later it is still shut behind walls over three meters high, which Li Zhiqian finds "eerie."

He did not know this was Maggie Lane, and had never read the coverage of its forced demolition. In 2004, the relocation company set a fire to drive residents out, and two elderly people died. According to a 2011 report in Southern Weekly, apart from the relocation company's general manager and a member of the "relocation emergency squad," both given suspended death sentences, and the squad's leader, sentenced to life in prison, the investors who jointly developed Maggie Lane all "walked away clean" — the government bought back one party's land at a high price, and the other not only recovered its entire investment but collected a huge payment on top of it.

The year Maggie Lane was torn down, Li Zhiqian was still in college, though he had already begun photographing Shanghai's tangle of alleys. "Almost twenty years on, that stretch of the skyline is simply gone, as if someone took correction fluid and painted the whole block out."

The Xiangyang Road "Modern Electronics City"

The Xiangyang Road market was cleared out in 2006, and some of its vendors moved into the Modern Electronics City on Xiangyang Road. Li calls that another "strange" place. You could buy light bulbs, sockets, no-name small appliances, the "pot lids" that pick up satellite TV, radios, smuggled electronics, cutout CDs, secondhand cameras, or stop at a stall selling cookware, slippers, strings of beads — a jumble of everything, good and bad together.

On Dianping and the Shanghai forum KDS, people left warnings that the place sold nothing but fakes, and that even if you found out you had been sold one there was "nowhere to complain." Others praised it: welcome to Shanghai's own Chungking Express. Inside a stodgy old building you could find old-school Shanghai gentlemen dealing rare DVDs, and teachers and students from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music went regularly to dig for discs. You could also turn up "Dior, Cartier and Longines watches in excellent condition, old models so good-looking they make you wonder whether design has moved forward or backward all these years."

In October 2013, a Xuhui state asset management company overhauled the Modern Electronics City. Li Zhiqian thinks that after the makeover it became a "boring" office building. According to the official "Working Plan for the Transformation and Tenant Recruitment of the Electronics Market," the new tenants were to include financial and related institutions, education, healthcare and well-known restaurants.

"The more low-end a place looks, the more possibilities it can offer," Li Zhiqian says. "You can't go to an Apple Store to buy a circuit board. You can only go to an electronics market, this one or somewhere like Qiujiang Road Market" — another huge electronics market in Shanghai. "Gentrified places don't give you raw material. All they have is finished products. In a sense — and maybe I'm overstating it — that takes away your chance to make something. It won't let you create. All you can do is buy."

"I studied product design. Design usually means solving a problem in response to a need, or making something out of nothing, or borrowing from someone else's work and improving it. Wandering a market is a kind of 'passive choosing.' It pushes you to think backward. You picture where the thing would sit in your home and how you would use it. You don't have to be right. What matters is being provoked."

He used to browse materials markets in Japan, and he loves the quarterly magazine Otona no Kagaku ("Science for Grown-Ups"), which tells the story of one scientific model in each issue and comes with a kit to build it — thermodynamic jet boats, simple pinhole cameras, radios that need no electricity, phonographs that record, Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter.

Once, in the jumble of the Xiangyang Road electronics market, he came across a multifunction flashlight and thought it odd that anyone still used one, and beside it survival knives, lighters, headlamps. "We're inside a modern system that keeps feeding itself, and we can't get out. You'd never think about it otherwise. Seeing it is what sets you off — is there another way to live? All of a sudden I felt I could escape the whole thing and go survive on a desert island."

"This city isn't only young people who are used to electronics," Li Zhiqian says. Recording the lettering across the city, he insists, is not aesthetic nostalgia or a hunt for novelty; behind these things dismissed as "out of date" are needs that the so-called mainstream is gradually ignoring, even denying. "Don't you feel we live more and more cut off from each other?"

"In the past few years online, people have gotten used to 'searching for what they want,' or worse, to some algorithm called 'things you might like.' Our field of view keeps narrowing to the knowledge and the frames we're already used to. We used to watch television and might stumble onto the 'agricultural science channel.' Now, where do you get information like that, information that looks useless?"

(Unless otherwise credited, all images were provided by Li Zhiqian.)