Historian Wang Di's Collected Columns on Everyday Life in Chengdu at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

"Chengdu, like every other city in China, is losing its flavor — its culture growing ever more homogeneous."

About the Author

Wang Di was born in Chengdu, Sichuan. A historian, he is currently a distinguished professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Macau, co-editor of the English-language academic quarterly Frontiers of History in China (FHC), and a former professor of history at Texas A&M University. His research centers on Chinese social history, urban history, the new cultural history, the history of everyday life, and microhistory. His many books include Stepping Out of the Enclosed World, Street Culture, The Teahouse, and The Pao Brothers.

Book Excerpt

In Place of a Preface: Does Chengdu Still Have Its Flavor? (Excerpt)

I have been away from Chengdu so long that I can no longer say with any certainty what the city smells and feels like today. What I can still sense is the Chengdu of my childhood — a taste I revisit in memory. The rest I know from the historical record, an indirect impression of what the city once was.

What is Chengdu's true flavor? It cannot be summed up in a few sentences, and it resists any single definition. A city's flavor does not form in a day. It must be the product of a long process, a tradition handed down from the past, a convergence of many forces.

Flavor is notoriously hard to put into words — more often felt than described. I cannot quite say what Chengdu tastes like today, but I can still savor what it once was: something that lingers in the mind and surfaces now and then as a faint nostalgia, a quiet melancholy. So much of that old flavor has vanished.

To speak of Chengdu's flavor is inevitably to compare it with other cities. It is regional, defined by difference. To care passionately about food in Chengdu, for instance, is to be a person who knows how to live; to a Beijinger it might look downright vulgar. (I believe the Chengdu writer Ximen Mei made this point in her "Food and Time" series.)

Chengdu's flavor might lie in the particular relationship between city and countryside: the farmers who came in every morning from outside the walls to sell vegetables, the itinerant craftsmen who came to make a living. It might lie in the physical face of the city — the two-story shopfronts, the walled private compounds, the Fu-Nan rivers, the city walls, the Manchu Quarter and the Imperial City. It might lie in the shop signs and hanging banners that filled the streets. If every city chased a gleaming "skyline" and tore down its signage the way some cities do today, what richness would be left?

Chengdu's flavor might also lie in its dialect, its food (especially its street snacks), its civic culture (a certain ease of living, a particular rhythm of life), its smells (the aroma of hotpot, of street food, of tea, of chili), and its sounds (the cries of craftsmen and hawkers).

Those smells still linger, but the old sounds of Chengdu have gone. In their place: car horns on the streets, promotional music blasting from shops, the tinny tunes of square dancing. In my book Street Culture, I described the city's soundscape this way:

Residents could instantly recognize the calls of different vendors and craftsmen. A folk song in the zhuzhi ci style went: "Outside the gate there suddenly comes the peddler, his drum-bell rattling and jingling. Maid-servants are sent to fetch him, mistress holds them back — it is the lady of the house who makes the final choice." One old teahouse regular recalled with vivid clarity the melodic cries of the secondhand dealers: "Teeth, teeth, gold teeth; watches, watches, broken watches. Do you want pearls? Do you want agates? Do you want coral? Do you want teapots?…" From dawn until dusk, hawkers moved up and down the streets, drawing customers with their distinctive calls. At first light, the city woke to a medley of sounds drifting from teahouses, roadside stalls, and pushcarts — the cries of "Snow peas!" and "Bean sprouts!" filling the lanes, those being the most common vegetables of an ordinary household. After sunrise, the full cast of street vendors took to their stage — the street — and began the day's performance in the symphony of urban life.

Flavor is, in fact, also a way of life, an attitude toward living. Much has already been said about how the people of Chengdu live and what they value: the city is leisurely and unhurried, a clear contrast to the pace of fast-moving modernity.

If you ask what Chengdu's flavor is, the teahouse is Chengdu's flavor. The unhurried way of life is Chengdu's flavor. An easy, unflappable attitude toward living is Chengdu's flavor. The places people live are Chengdu's flavor. The courtyard of my childhood, fronted by streets called Buhou Jie and Jiaoban Jie — even the names had flavor. The Kuanzhai Alley (Broad and Narrow Alleys) before its renovation had flavor too.

Flavor is something worth savoring — there is always more to take in, more to feel. Different people experience a city's flavor differently. It also varies by social group: by class, education, economic standing, geography, ethnicity, age.

I am fond of the flavor of Monk Street behind the Daci Temple in the old days, but that area is now Taikoo Li. Taikoo Li has none of Chengdu's old flavor, yet the young love it. These are precisely the new things eating away at tradition — and yet they may well be what Chengdu tastes like to younger eyes.

Today's young people grew up in an era of globalization, commercialization, and the internet. Local culture has had only a limited hold on them, and so their sense of Chengdu's flavor will inevitably differ from that of my generation. In time, they may not even feel any particular attachment to something called "Chengdu culture."

To many old Chengdu residents, the new things may dazzle, but they have no Chengdu flavor. Here I should clear something up: during a panel discussion organized by Tencent's Dajia platform, I said that Monk Street — which once had authentic Chengdu character — had been torn down and replaced by today's Taikoo Li. The press coverage of that conversation somehow had me saying that Taikoo Li was Chengdu's flavor. That was the exact opposite of what I meant.

For the food lovers among us, the street snacks are Chengdu's flavor. For those who love a game of chance, mahjong is Chengdu's flavor. For those who cherish historical sites, the Du Fu Thatched Cottage and the Wuhou Shrine are Chengdu's flavor. For those who love narrow lanes and back alleys, the old Kuanzhai Alley was Chengdu's flavor. For those who love unhurried conversation, the teahouse is Chengdu's flavor. But authentic teahouses with real flavor are getting harder and harder to find in Chengdu; when the rite is lost in the city, people seek it in the countryside. The Guanyin Pavilion Teahouse in Pengzhen, on the outskirts of Chengdu, has become a place where many of us go to recapture the feeling of the old teahouses.

Human relationships, too, can reflect a city's flavor. Part of what gave old Chengdu its character was the warmth between neighbors: people living in shophouses and courtyard compounds shared a closeness, borrowing everyday items back and forth, keeping an eye on one another's elderly parents and young children, chatting for no particular reason, the smells of each family's cooking mingling naturally in the air. But today people have moved into sealed towers of concrete and steel, and that intimacy between neighbors is gone.

Old Chengdu could also absorb outsiders. A city with flavor must have openness — the capacity to take in other people's tastes and make them its own. Cultures have always influenced and borrowed from one another; that was true throughout history and remains true today.

A city with real flavor is, without question, one that can make room for people from the lower rungs of society — migrants from other provinces in particular. The Chengdu teahouse is the best proof: almost everyone who worked there came from outside the city. The upper and lower classes could share the same space, sit at the same tea table.

What gives a city its flavor is precisely its variety and richness — including the diversity of its people. If everything is identical, what flavor is left? A city that tries to drive out what it calls its "low-end population" is not merely flavorless; it is morally bankrupt.

The great American urban historian Lewis Mumford said that a city is a living organism, and a city's character is inseparable from its ecology. But our cities today are turning into great monsters of concrete and steel. They are losing their vitality, even their life — and some have become "dead cities" and "ghost cities."

There is now a prevailing aesthetic in urban design: everything uniform, everything orderly, everything monumental (even some neighborhood government offices have been built to intimidate). Call it a "socialist aesthetic," imported from the Soviet Union — vast squares, colossal buildings, perfectly symmetrical, awe-inspiring in scale. If every city looks the same, it is bound to be dull.

What worries me most is how fast our cities are changing. Within roughly twenty years, one ancient city after another has been torn down and rebuilt; the old city is simply gone. Recently I saw a set of photographs alongside a set of oil paintings, all of buildings in various European cities. The buildings in those century-old paintings still stand today, and seeing the two side by side is genuinely stunning. Why do we hold our own traditions in such low regard?

Chengdu, like every other city in China, is losing its flavor — its culture growing ever more homogeneous. This is bound up with the rebuilding of cities. Housing conditions must change; the question is how. Europe's stone buildings are, of course, far easier to preserve. Chinese houses have mostly been wooden, and hard to make last. But look at Japan, our neighbor to the east: its old buildings were also mostly wood, and yet today, walking through Kyoto and Nara, one still feels something unmistakably distinct. The only place left to see China's Tang-dynasty wooden architecture is Japan. Is that not a tragedy for Chinese urban heritage?

In China today, from north to south, from east to west, culture is converging. Ancient towns across the country all look alike: Dali in Yunnan, Huanglongxi in Sichuan, Zhouzhuang in Jiangsu — hardly telling one from another. Once, a single photograph told you instantly it was Chengdu. Now that is impossible; the whole country has been stamped from the same mold.

I just got back from a trip to Yunnan, deeply disappointed: the villages there have lost their character too. The countryside of Yunnan and the countryside of western Sichuan are nearly indistinguishable — brick walls topped with corrugated metal or asbestos tiles have replaced the bamboo houses of the Dai people; the original beauty is gone. I cannot understand why even the houses of remote, impoverished villages once had a sense of design and beauty, while today even the mansions of the newly rich look so tasteless.

Here is what tends to happen now: one city renovates its old district successfully, and the rest rush to copy the template. The landscape degrades; visual beauty disappears. Everywhere you go: "ancient towns," music plazas, grand boulevards, "old streets," pedestrian zones, faux-antique buildings, oversized swooping rooflines. Our imagination is running dry. Urban development faces a real contradiction: the infrastructure improves, but the tradition disappears.

How do we resolve these contradictions? I am pessimistic. I believe the disappearance of local culture is an irreversible trend that no one can stop. China's current system of urban governance has not slowed the process — it has sped it up. If our city administrators could take a longer view, and put the preservation of history and local culture ahead of economic returns and commercial development, perhaps we could still leave something to future generations — something that carries the flavor of Chengdu.

Cover image: pixabay