MCLC: Unearthing China's past

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Unearthing China’s past
Source: NYT (7/21/16)
Unearthing China’s Past at a Market Whose Raffish Air Is a Selling Point
By Jane Perlez
BEIJING — The vast antiques market is awash in jewelry, snuff bottles, old clocks, brass paperweights, ceramics, and slabs of jade of many hues and dubious quality. It has the same feel as flea markets all around the world that advertise antiquities but do not always deliver the real thing.
Yet when strolling through the Panjiayuan market, a huge open-air space in southeast Beijing, the question of whether the wares are authentic is beside the point. At its heart, the market is a raucous hub for unearthing the past 100 years or more of China’s turbulent past.
There are 20-foot-tall stone statues of Buddha, busts of Confucius, Ming-era lions and huge urns suitable for the gardens of a palace. There are old books, posters and vintage photographs.
Collectors of rare books and posters of China find gems in the ramshackle alleyways devoted to old paper items. Or they make discoveries in the more exclusive little shops in the grandly named Panjiayuan Exhibition Hall, a dowdy gray building that was added to the market in the last decade.
A favorite haunt of treasure hunters as well as Chinese and foreign tourists, the market was threatened with a shutdown this spring when the state company that manages it clashed with merchants over renting rights for tiny spaces — often amounting to a patch of ground measuring just 4 feet by 6 feet.
Scuffles broke out between the police and some vendors. Many stalls closed in protest over rumors about plans to move the market to a spot in Hebei Province, 160 miles to the west.
Then the vice mayor of the city, Li Shixiang, backed off, and said about 1,000 of the estimated 4,000 stalls would be closed as part of a plan to upgrade the market, an idea that goes against the popular grain.
Most fans agree that a raffish spirit is one of Panjiayuan’s most appealing features. It remains a standout from the city’s gaudy malls that sell silk, pearls and fake designer goods.
The vendors are standing firm against the city’s edicts, insisting they will not budge. And the buyers keep coming.
“I have been here since 1995,” said Ren Guibin, 55, as he sat in his book-lined nook with glass-fronted cabinets in the more upscale section of the exhibition hall. “I am not moving. My customers know where to find me.”
Behind his desk, a framed poster of a young Chinese woman — her cheeks flushed with enthusiasm, her hair tied back and her arm thrust skyward in a revolutionary salute — leaned against the wall. It was one of his prize pieces from the Cultural Revolution, the period from 1966 to 1976 when Mao Zedong’s Red Guards were in the vanguard.
“I was offered $25,000 for it, but I turned it down,” Mr. Ren said. Even though he had owned the poster for eight years, he was in no rush to sell it.
That is because a wealthy Chinese collector of Cultural Revolution memorabilia prepared to pay more would be sure to buy it, he said. The recent surge of patriotism combined with astonishing new wealth has created a new kind of buyer: the serious and affluent Chinese collector.
“Twenty years ago, Americans bought all this Cultural Revolution stuff. It was like buying cabbage for them, it was so cheap. Now rich Chinese are going to buy it all back.”
Down the corridor, another vendor was doing business with Marien van der Heijden, of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which owns a large collection of Chinese propaganda posters that is displayed on chineseposters.net.
By midmorning, Mr. van der Heijden, a visitor here for the past 15 years, had amassed about 50 posters, neatly rolled inside a fat tube to hand carry back to Europe.
His best find of the morning was something quite rare: a poster of young Chinese women getting ready for work in the 1950s, a period of poster art when the style was more casual than the high social realism of the Cultural Revolution.
“In the ’50s posters you see human beings, not robots,” he said. “In the early ’50s you even see ugly people. I am always looking for posters with individuality and humanity.”
In the more unprepossessing stalls in the outdoor section of the market, books are scattered on the ground in disorderly piles, and vendors sit at the back keeping an eye on their displays from small stools just six inches off the ground.
Ruben Lundgren, a Dutch photographer who has lived in Beijing for a dozen years, scoured the stalls looking for photography books of the last days of the Qing dynasty, the Kuomintang years, and the various phases of Communist rule.
Many of the books he found illustrate a coffee-table production called “The Chinese Photobook,” published in New York last year by Aperture. It describes and depicts the changing styles of Chinese photo books with many examples from the post-1949 Communist era.
“In the 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution, there was a massive flow of books onto the market,” he said. “Libraries that had been closed in the ’60s and ’70s just pushed books onto the market for very little.”
In the past few years, rare books in mint condition have been harder to find at Panjiayuan. The best often get sent to auction, where they fetch higher prices.
Still, on a recent visit Mr. Lundgren uncovered the photo book of the funeral of Premier Zhou Enlai, who died in 1976, a good find because of the more candid style of photography.
At another stall, in the back row of books haphazardly piled on the ground, he unearthed a highly stylized propaganda volume of color photos of Chinese soldiers who served in the Korean War.
Kang Xuesong, a former news photographer, runs a popular shop for old photographs of China called Da Kang Photography Studio. He embarked on a new profession 20 years ago as a purveyor of sepia and black-and-white images of Shanghai and Beijing before World War II.
He specializes in photos of bourgeois families from the 1930s who, dressed in traditional Chinese finery, posed in studios with European backdrops that featured Bugati cars and Art Deco furniture.
His briskest trade is in the Mao era. Collectors like the nostalgic feel of the photos, he said. From his connections as a news photographer, Mr. Kang said he knew where to find old file photographs from Xinhua, the state-run agency whose photographers were granted wide access to the leaders of the Communists from the moment they entered Beijing in 1949.
The most valued photographs, Mr. Kang said, were the more informal ones. A popular image showed a barefoot Mao in a swimsuit in 1954, sitting on the sand with his daughter Li Na and nephew, Mao Yuanxin.
A beach umbrella behind them, they were relaxing at the beach at Beidaihe, the summer resort not far from Beijing. A bargain at $50, Mr. Kang said.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 22, 2016
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