Two Months After a Wet Market Was Cleared Out: Its Former Vendors and Customers

This is the last piece in our 2017 Stories series.

Two months on, the old Chengshousi wet market feels startlingly small.

The ground has been graded into a slab of concrete, split in two by a sliding gate a little over a meter high. The inner half looks set to become a parking lot — a few 4S dealerships have already parked new cars there. The outer half holds a scattering of cars, plus two makeshift stalls set up in the open air near the entrance.

The Chengshousi farmers' market sat between Beijing's South Third and South Fourth Ring Roads, ringed by residential blocks — among them the multi-phase Zhonghai City development and several large complexes such as Huafang Yuan, Jingcheng Xiufu, and Sifang Jingyuan.

Up until November 29 of last year, the market held more than a hundred stalls; even a quick lap took half an hour, and a once-a-week grocery run could fill the better part of a morning.

You could smell the roasted nuts and cooked food before you stepped inside. People called it a vegetable market, but it carried far more than fresh produce — there were grain-and-oil shops, dried goods, clothing and shoes, and stalls selling home textiles and fabrics.

"I don't manage anything anymore — just myself," said Mr. Zhang, who was picking up dinner ingredients at a nearby beef-mutton-and-vegetable shop. He used to be one of the market's supervisors; now, he told us with a laugh, he still "manages this empty lot."

Mr. Zhang knew everyone in the shop. As he chatted with us, he hollered upstairs for a clerk to come down and slice him a jin of lamb.

The shop had once been a beef-and-mutton stall inside the market. After it closed, the owner, Ms. Zeng, rented a two-floor ground-level unit in the neighboring compound — the shop downstairs, the family's home upstairs.

By Mr. Zhang's account, that "empty lot" used to pull in real foot traffic. "From noon to evening, count it yourself — this market of mine could see twenty thousand people come through. A single shop like this would do well to get two thousand," he said.

Mr. Zhang had worked at the market — eight in the morning to six at night, an eight-hour day — keeping order on the floor. After closing each evening, a dedicated crew swept the place; daytime janitors kept it tidy during hours. Now those cleaners, like Mr. Zhang, are out of work.

Of course, no amount of cleaning could match the bare concrete the site has become.

Si Dachuan, a screenwriter who had lived in the neighborhood for just over six months, came to Beijing for work last summer and moved into a residential compound near the Chengshousi metro station. She chose the area partly to be close to her office, and partly for the market at the station entrance — small but fully stocked, from fresh produce to household goods, a real convenience.

After the market was torn down, she noticed that the supermarket on her building's ground floor had carved out a section to sell fruit. The owner told her it had been sublet to one of the former market vendors.

These days she handles almost everything on her phone, ordering groceries through Tmall and JD.com — though she has to hit a minimum to skip the shipping fee, then wait a day or two for delivery. For cooked food and fruit, she and her roommate switched to ordering takeout on Ele.me.

"There was one vendor at the market who made these wonderful sesame flatbreads — so fragrant, a yuan or a yuan-fifty each. I'd grab one whenever I walked past," she said.

70 Days Earlier

"The Daxing fire was on the 19th, and on the 20th they told us to move out — tomorrow's the last day."

Around five or six o'clock on the afternoon of November 28, almost nothing was left on the shelves inside Chengshousi market. Over the previous nine days, the hundred-plus vendors had been clearing stock in a mass selloff. On November 20, Beijing had launched a 40-day "sweeping inspection and cleanup campaign" centered on fire safety; this market had ten days to vacate.

No official notice went up inside the market. Vendors said management came door to door on November 20 to tell everyone the market would close on November 30 for fire-safety reasons, with demolition starting December 1. "The 29th was our last day open. On the 30th it was locked up. They locked the front gates — you couldn't get in."

On the afternoon of the 28th, the place still looked like a bright, well-stocked ordinary wet market — except that every stall was plastered with "clearance sale" signs. A day later, it was empty.

A dry-goods vendor weighed out nuts while pitching other items to passersby: "Want some hazelnuts? Forty-five yuan for two jin of hazelnuts and almonds — it's all going cheap." Between sales, she fielded the same question over and over. "Where are you moving to?" In seven or eight minutes, four or five regulars asked her in turn. She pointed to the phone number printed on a packing bag and repeated the same answer: "Call this number and you can find me. We'll definitely find somewhere close by — it won't be far."

Regulars asked to add the vendors on WeChat; vendors planning to reopen nearby handed cards to passing customers, hoping to keep their loyal clientele.

Yang Wei, who ran the flowers-and-plants stall, handed out plenty of cards printed with her phone number, WeChat ID, and address — though the address on all of them was already void. She pointed to the phone number: "Call this, or add me on WeChat."

In three years running a nail salon inside the market, Li Lin had made a habit of asking every new customer to add her on WeChat; customers would message ahead to book a time.

As the market was being cleared, Li Lin flooded her Moments feed with her new shop address for days — twelve identical posts over three days. The new spot was only a few hundred meters from the market in a straight line, but reaching it meant cutting through a supermarket to get into the compound, and she worried customers wouldn't find it.

The night before the market's last day, some stalls had already been stripped bare, and the shelving units that couldn't be moved were piled in what had once been wide aisles.

On November 30, the market closed. On the empty lot we ran into Guo, a former market supervisor, who told us the buildings were demolished and cleared in the days that followed, leaving the place as it stands today.

Four years earlier, this patch of ground had been a fairly disordered wasteland, wedged between Metro Line 10, a furniture mall, and several large residential complexes.

In early 2014, the site was graded and prepared for a market. By August it opened for business, and coverage at the time called it "a big country-fair-style market built right next to the metro station."

The market's organizer was Longzhuashu Village, in Chaoyang District's Xiaohongmen township. A Beijing Evening News report from the time noted that the market was built to serve the surrounding communities — and to bring income into the village. The person in charge was quoted as saying: "We know this kind of market doesn't fit Beijing's broader direction of development. It's only a temporary economic stopgap — we're using every resource we can to bring in income, taking whatever we can get."

Even then, the Chaoyang District Commerce Commission had already announced plans to "cut low-end industries," aiming to reduce the number of physical markets by 40 percent within five years. By September of that year, Chaoyang District alone had closed six markets.

Many vendors who came to Chengshousi that year had relocated from other markets in Fangzhuang, Haidian, and Xicheng. "The one in Fangzhuang got torn down, and this one was just starting to take tenants — so we came."

In the Beijing Evening News coverage from that time, nearby residents had voiced plenty of reservations about the market that was still signing up tenants — comparing it to "a village fair," worried it was too downmarket and would drag the neighborhood down. But when we visited during the closing-down sale, every local resident we met said the market was well-stocked and convenient. "This market has everything. The imported fruit is good and cheap. I'm not about to go to the supermarket and stand in line for over an hour just to buy one spring onion or a block of tofu."

At Higher Cost, Some Vendors Stayed Near the Market

Mr. Cheng had come to this market — next to four or five residential compounds — to open the largest fruit shop in it, and he wasn't ready to leave.

"The biggest fruit shop in the old market was ours, and the one at the far end was ours too." Between shelving and the renovation, Mr. Cheng had put more than 100,000 yuan into his original premises. After the market closed, he found a space of over a hundred square meters a few hundred meters to the north; because the rent was higher, he added vegetables, which he hadn't sold before.

He said he couldn't leave the area, because he had built something here. "We've done business here for over three years — the landlords and everyone trust us," he said.

At first, before he found a place, he set up a fruit stall outside the old market entrance with three employees, one of them his own daughter, Xiao Cheng. Out in the open, they were forever being moved on by city-management officers. Once the demolition was done and only the iron arch gate remained, the supervisors quietly let them shift inside — they didn't take up much room, setting up at seven in the morning and packing away at nine or ten at night. On the coldest days, Xiao Cheng and the others would wait until after lunch to come out.

"Before the New Year, the way I see it, this is all we can do — just rough it for now." A supervisor had mentioned turning the site into a morning market before the holiday, but the New Year was almost here and nothing had come of it.

Since the market closed, foot traffic in the area had thinned out; once night fell, the fruit stall became the brightest spot in the whole neighborhood.

The dozen or so workers at the shop had all come together from the family's hometown in Hebei — room and board included, a hundred yuan each per day. "None of them went past middle school — they dropped out after junior high, but they all work hard." Some of the younger ones were Xiao Cheng's classmates. His daughter had been in Beijing just over a year and was not yet eighteen.

During the slow stretch, some had left. "Not many — when we need them, they come back."

About a dozen vendors like Mr. Cheng had found storefronts near the market. Si Dachuan told us that every few days she turned up another "old face" from the market. The pet-supplies stall had rented a unit by the parking lot beside the old market and kept on selling cat and dog food; of the two grain-and-oil shops from inside, one had moved into a supermarket near Zhonghai City Phase II, the other into a unit in a commercial complex as a stopgap.

Ms. Zeng's shop opened in the opposite direction from Mr. Cheng's fruit store, slightly closer to the original market site.

More than three years ago, soon after the market was built, Ms. Zeng had moved from Niujie to Chengshousi and opened a shop dealing in beef and mutton. "Everyone knew us — we were the very first meat stall, right at the market entrance," she said. She and her family had originally rented three adjacent units and sold beef and mutton brought in from Niujie. "I had six big freezers, restocking every day."

Their Niujie shop was still running; opening at Chengshousi had been an expansion.

Before the market stopped trading, Ms. Zeng had already found a ground-floor unit in a residential compound about a hundred meters away — the family living upstairs, the shop selling downstairs. She printed the new address and phone number on little cards to hand out to her meat-counter regulars, promising to reopen once the storefront was ready, and to carry not just meat but vegetables too.

After the market closed, it took the Zeng family more than twenty days to get the new shop running. Monthly rent jumped from about 6,000 yuan to more than 10,000. The landlord wanted six months upfront; with renovation included, Ms. Zeng put in more than 100,000 yuan in one go.

Even with rent up, Ms. Zeng kept the prices on her beef and mutton unchanged. To bring in more revenue, she added vegetables and fruit; the wider range meant a more complicated till, and two weeks after opening, the staff still hadn't quite got the hang of it.

Li Lin had found a unit in the same compound as Ms. Zeng's shop, though hers was inside the compound itself. She brought the color swatches and price board over from the old shop, kept the decor simple, put up a new sign, and Lin Lin's nail salon was open again.

Because almost all her clients booked through WeChat, business was barely affected. "My regulars basically all live in this compound — one day a girl came down in her slippers," she said.

With the compound's central heating, the new shop was much warmer than the market stall had been, and a bit larger too. But at 4,000 yuan a month, the rent was nearly double.

Now she posts to Moments every few days, as she always did — mostly photos of new nail designs, or shots of clients' fresh lash extensions. With the New Year approaching, Li Lin was also sending WeChat group messages to remind customers of her Spring Festival closing dates.

Supermarkets and E-commerce Took Up the Demand, but No Single Market Concentrated So Many Categories in One Place

"At first the neighbors were pretty worked up, of course." Si Dachuan and her roommate quickly got used to buying groceries through JD.com and Tmall Fresh. Older residents switched to the nearby Hualian supermarket — though by the regulars' reckoning, the checkout lines were long and the prices a bit steeper.

Residents who went to the supermarket also complained that the produce wasn't as fresh and that shopping there was less convenient all around.

Several supermarkets in the buildings nearby gradually added cooked-food and fruit counters — stopgaps cobbled together by former market vendors.

But there was no replacing a single market that gathered so many categories under one roof.

In the old layout, the north section near the entrance had been fresh produce — vegetables, fruit, meat. The middle held grain-and-oil and dried goods. The south section was general household merchandise: clothing and shoes, home textiles, flowers and plants, plus tailoring-and-alterations shops, beauty salons, and nail bars. There were also tea shops and a pet store. You could find Baoding hand-pulled noodles, old-brand pickled vegetables, and Shandong braised pork — all in the one market.

Before the market closed, the Li Grain-and-Oil Shop had already lined up a temporary spot not far away — selling on the first floor, living on the second. They wrote the address and directions on their stall sign, and many customers photographed it.

"But plenty of people still can't find us," said Ren Ming, a shop hand, who now often had to step outside, cross the road, and walk lost customers to the door.

The new premises still had an old "Appliance Repair" sign out front. Inside, goods were crammed into tight rows — plainly not a long-term arrangement. For items they didn't sell often, Ren Ming sometimes had to dig around to remember which shelf they were on. "Our old place took up four rooms — it was pretty roomy. We haven't got this one sorted out yet."

Qiu and her husband Liao packed up their tea stall and moved it back to their old shop near Panjiayuan. "We called a truck that same day and moved everything back." That shop sat inside Dingsheng Market, a four-story complex. Built on the footprint of the old Panjiayuan morning market, Dingsheng opened in 2008 and arranged fruit, vegetables, tea, and general goods across separate floors. Markets of that scale were a rarity in Beijing by now; the best-known survivor was probably Sanyuanli Market near Liangmaqiao. The decades-old Chongwenmen Food Market and Xinmin Market had both closed temporarily in 2017 for renovation and upgrading.

A few days earlier, a small market a couple of hundred meters from the original site had opened for business. According to the gatekeeper, Mr. Fu, the land also belonged to Longzhuashu Village, just contracted to a different operator. A dozen or so vendors from the old market had taken units there, at rents a few hundred yuan cheaper than the old market's roughly 2,000 yuan per unit.

On the phone, the new market's operator, Mr. Wu, told us only three units were still unlet, and that most vendors would start trading after the New Year.

The Vendors Who Stayed Each Found Their Own Way to Cope With Higher Costs

With fewer viable premises and higher rents, the shops that stayed had all changed in some way.

Both Mr. Cheng and Ms. Zeng expanded beyond their original lines. Mr. Cheng's shop added vegetables and was renamed from "Everyday Fresh Fruit" to "Xinfadi Vegetable Basket."

"I needed the place in a hurry, and it's expensive — otherwise why would I be in the vegetable business? Selling only meat was never going to work. Everyone knows the margin on a jin of meat is a yuan or so. How much can you make?" said Ms. Zeng.

Li Tingting was a Beijing native who lived in one of the nearby compounds. She had run a small tailoring-and-alterations stall in the Chengshousi market — taking up trouser hems, pressing, adding zippers, refurbishing leather — and out front she had set aside space to sell ornamental fish and plants.

Before the market closed, the fish and plants went in a last-minute selloff. She brought her sewing machine and ironing board home and left behind the display cabinets and fish tanks she couldn't move. Li Tingting wasn't looking for new premises; she would work from home. "My regulars all have my WeChat — they can find me."

Over the past two months, a friend had pulled her in to help with something else; in her spare hours she took alterations work, arranging meeting points with customers over WeChat, talking through the changes by message, and meeting again when the piece was done. Sometimes a customer came by metro, and Li Tingting would walk to the Chengshousi station to collect the garment through the fare gates. "Saves you a metro fare," she said.

But not every kind of business could be run that way.

Mr. Wang had rented a unit in the market for a duvet-cover processing operation. He had spent the year alone in Beijing while his wife stayed home with the children. As the market was closing, he cleared out his remaining stock in a cheap selloff and sold nearly everything. "I didn't even look for new premises — I didn't really want to keep doing this anyway. I've been at it for years."

For the past month, Mr. Wang had been taking delivery orders on Baidu Waimai, running them on his electric bike. "I just started, so I don't know the routes well yet — I'm still working around Chengshousi." Over a full day, the bike could run out of charge. He said the night before, the battery had died at seven or eight o'clock and he'd had to beg a ride from someone.

He had already bought his train ticket home, planning to work until the 27th day of the lunar month before heading back — a few days later than in past years.

Whether to Go Home for the Holiday, Whether to Come Back After — Everyone Has a Different Calculation

With the New Year drawing near, Mr. Cheng too was arranging the journey home for himself and his staff.

As in past years, they planned to head back to their hometown together around the 28th or 29th of the lunar month. Storefronts around here were hard to find, but they would come back after the holiday.

Mr. Gu had grabbed train tickets and taken his whole family back to his hometown in Anhui in late January, during Beijing's coldest days. His family's stall had been the cooked-food shop at the market entrance — roast chicken, roast duck, American-style fried chicken, all kinds of braised dishes, under a banner reading "Nanjing Salted Duck, Wuwei Plate Duck, New Orleans Roast Chicken." Buying or not, the smell drifting from that shop was probably the first thing most people met when they walked into the market.

Mr. Gu's daughter, Gu Xi, was twenty-seven and had been in the trade for more than a decade. When she finished junior high in 2006, staying on for high school in Beijing as a non-local would have meant a hefty out-of-district fee; the family decided against it, and she started helping out in the shop instead.

Listening to Gu Xi talk, you could barely catch any Anhui accent. The family went back to their hometown only for those ten-odd days at Spring Festival each year.

Over the month-plus break, Gu Xi was thinking about finding work in the meantime — an Alipay merchant-services team that knew her from events she'd been pulled into had even invited her to join. She thought it over and turned it down. "I can't sit in an office. I want something where I deal with people."

After the market was torn down, the family went looking for premises everywhere. "We looked all over — whenever someone said a space was free, we'd go see it." But finding a place meant someone had to stay and mind it, which all but guaranteed no earnings this year and likely no trip home for Spring Festival either. The family decided to keep looking after the holiday.

The day they set off for home, Anhui was hit with heavy snow. Gu Xi sent us a voice message saying she'd finally seen the snow that Beijing had gone without all winter — and that it had stranded her at Hefei's high-speed rail station.

Ms. Chen, owner of the Chenchen Flower Shop, still meant to stay in the flower business, but didn't plan to return to Beijing. With no new premises in sight and her elderly parents in poor health, she had gone home with her younger son.

She was still thinking about coming back to Beijing eventually, but wanted to build something on the city's edge rather than run a business inside the urban core. "Storefronts are hard to find now, and Beijing is pushing people out so hard — we don't have much confidence in it anymore."

Ms. Chen's husband ran a freight business. Their younger son, born in 2008, had no Beijing social-insurance registration and couldn't go to school in the city, so they had enrolled him at a primary school in Sanhe instead. They couldn't leave Beijing entirely, but they felt that outsiders simply had no place left inside the Fourth Ring Road.

Yang, who ran a Baoding hand-pulled-noodle stall inside the market — fresh noodles, dumpling wrappers, and the like — headed home with his wife soon after the market closed. In past years they had always waited until the holiday was nearly upon them; this year they had already been home over a month.

He said he planned to come back after the holiday and find a new place to open. He'd worked the Chengshousi stall for two years, the couple living in Beijing while their child stayed home with relatives. He could clear about 10,000 yuan a month. "Either way, it beats working for someone else," he said.

There's Supposedly Going to Be a Morning Market — but No One Knows for Sure

"In under half a month we're planning to open a morning market — we could still get half a month of selling in before New Year." So said Guo, the supervisor we ran into at the entrance to the old market site about a month after it closed. At the time, a handful of open-air stalls were still trading along the roadside, all former vendors.

Half a month later, when we went back, only Mr. Cheng's fruit stall remained of what had been two open-air stalls. The morning market had no confirmed opening date.

There was still some hope. According to Manager Ni in the market management office, it all came down to what "the higher-ups say" after the New Year. If policy allowed, a morning market could open — but rebuilding the market as it had been was out of the question.

"Something happened, and there's nothing to be done about it," Manager Ni said. "Whatever gets built is the village's call. Nothing's been decided yet — it depends on what the policy looks like. If they let us operate, we'll open a morning market. If they don't, there's nothing we can do."

(Si Dachuan, Li Tingting, Yang Wei, Li Lin, and Gu Xi are all pseudonyms.)

Cover image and in-text photos taken on site; the panoramic cover image is from Visualhunt.com