Shangxiajiu Shopping Street
[History of Xiguan]— [The Xiguan Shopping Arcades]— [Delicious Food of Guangzhou and Xiguan]—[Features of Xiguan]
[History of Xiguan]
The Shangxiajiu Shopping Street is located in the Liwan District, one of the four downtown districts of Guangzhou. For the last hundreds of years, the district has always been the busiest section of the town. However, until the 7th century during the Tang Dynasty (618 -907 AD), this place had been but a stretch of marshland with crisscrossing ditches and brooks on the north bank of the Pearl River. In 526 AD, when the Indian prince Dharma sailed east across the Indian Ocean and arrived at Guangzhou to propagate Chan Buddhism, here was the very place where he first went ashore. This Indian prince set up a hut on the bank of the river to preach Buddhist doctrine, which was gradually extended into the present-day Hualin Temple. Now the place around the temple is still called Xi Lai Chu Di, meaning” The First Landing Field when coming from the West”.
Prior to the Qing Dynasty, the Liwan District lay outside the west gate of the city walls, and so the area is commonly known as Xiguan, meaning “Western Outskirts “in English. During the Ming Dynasty between the 14th and 16th centuries, Guangzhou became China’s only trading port that was opened to foreign countries and, down to the Qing Dynasty several hundred years ago, many businessmen made great fortune from trades. These millionaires were fed up with the bustle of the heavily inhabited city center and had their houses built in this area one after another, so the district gradually developed into a new residential and business quarter.
[The Xiguan Shopping Arcades]
The 1500-meter-long Shangxiajiu Shopping Street, flanked by some 300 stores and many of them being well-known old shops, is indeed a “paradise “for shopping. In this street, a great variety of articles are on sale, with just about everything one could wish to find. Around this shopping street are 10 other streets for specialized trades, such as the Qingping Farm Produce Market, the Hualin Jade- ware Street, the Yuansheng Pottery Antique Street and the Desheng Garment Accessory Street. Among them, the jade-ware street is well worth mentioning. This jade-ware street, about1000 meters long, has more than 400 shops and over80%of the jade-ware dealers in Guangzhou are gathered here. Apart from selling jade articles, they also take up the making of gold and silver ornaments. The art of jade- carving in Guangzhou has long been famous all over the world for its good quality and fine workmanship. Of the many jade wares made in Guangzhou, the jade-ball is the most exquisite and is the representative work of Guangzhou jade carving. A jade-ball is carved out of one whole piece of jade stone, with as many as 30 smaller balls one inside the other, which are all movable and are all carved with beautiful designs.
[Delicious Food of Guangzhou and Xiguan] No comment on the city of Guangzhou is complete without mentioning its distinctive cuisine. And the mere mention of Cantonese food brings to mind a popular Chinese saying that summarizes the spiritual and creature comforts of life. It goes like this: To enjoy the best that life has to offer, one has to be born in Suzhou, to live in Hangzhou, to eat in Guangzhou and to die in Liuzhou – because Suzhou is renewed for its beautiful women, Hangzhou for its scenery, Guangzhou for its delicious food and Liuzhou for the finest wood for making coffins.
As far back as the 7th century during the Tang Dynasty, culinary art of Guangzhou was already quite perfect. During the long years of its evolution, the outward-looking Cantonese incorporated some foreign cooking skills with the traditional Chinese cookery handed down from Central China and thus created the unique Cantonese cuisine. So, of the varieties of food available in China, Cantonese food is perhaps the most pleasing to Western palate and is altogether different from those of other places. For one thing, the style 0f cooking is different; for another, the variety of dishes and ingredients for preparation of Cantonese food are numerous, in contrast to the monotony of those of other cities.
Cantonese food in many instances uses steam and water for preparation, instead of frying, with the tastes leaning to the light side and moderation with spices. Fresh ingredients are often cooked in high heat for only a short time to maintain their inherent crispness. Another notable difference is the emphasis given to the appearance of the food. This is nowhere more noticeable than in the presentation of cold hors d’oeuvres, where the foodstuff will be arranged to form a bird, a butterfly or a flower. They will be distributed to provide not only an appropriate color but the right textual appearance as well. So stand up and take a good look at this when it is served. You will often feel it is too attractive to break up for serving.
While Cantonese food is exquisite in its making, the materials used for preparation are many and varied. As a saying goes, except airplane and chair or table, everything on earth that has legs and all things that can fly in the sky can be made into delicious food by the Cantonese. This is certainly not fully correct but, in a sense, is true. Just as people of Shanghai are particular about their clothes, so are the Cantonese fastidious about their food. People of Guangzhou spend a much higher percentage of their income on food than people in other parts of the country and, according to statistics by departments concerned, the money the Cantonese spend on dining out in the restaurants accounts for 40% of their expenditure on food. One of the Cantonese social customs that is unique to this country is that people here like to have breakfast in the restaurant. This is known as” drinking morning tea” and is often n occasion for friendly association or business connection. For some old people who’ve retired, this is their daily pleasure, chatting with their old fellows while tasting the dim sums and having cups of tea. Now the” tea meal” has extended to “afternoon tea” and” evening tea”. Since the Cantonese are keen eaters who spare no money on food, some of the restaurants and snack bars in the city, totaling 20,000 or more than that cater for an average of up to two million diners a day with an annual business volume of more than 50 thousand million yuan, are always thronged with people from morning till late at night. Sometimes especially on Sundays or public holidays, people have to get up before dawn in order to reserve a table and even have to make reservation for a New Year’s Eve dinner half a year ahead of time. Guangzhou is indeed a” City of Eating”. While Cantonese food is universally acknowledged as one of the best in China, we may as well say that the best food in Guangzhou is made in Xiguan because many of the famous Cantonese dishes and snacks originate from this district. In 1998, a national cooking contest for choosing” the best Chinese snacks” was held under the auspices of the Chinese Culinary Art Association. Of the 21 prize Cantonese snacks, 11were traditional Xiguan snacks. Now in the Shangxiajiu Shopping Street there are still many well reputed old snack bars and many of the city’s best-known old restaurants are located here, such as the Linxianglou Restaurant which was started in 1889, the Taotaoju Restaurant established in 1885 and the hundred-year-old Guangzhou Restaurant.
[Features of Xiguan]
The Xiguan area not only has been the busiest commercial district of Guangzhou over the last hundreds of years but the style of the buildings here is typical of South China features.
The arcaded buildings along the Shangxiajiu Shopping Street, with a passage-way underneath, are unique to this country and are a kind of architecture created by the returned overseas Chinese. As you know, Guangzhou, the native home of a great many overseas Chinese, is situated at the south of the Tropic of Cancer, with the highest temperature going up to 38 degrees centigrade and an annual rainfall amounting to 1730 millimeters. The sun is very strong in summer and from April through September is the rainy season when monsoons often come and heavy showers suddenly fall right out of the blue. So, when the overseas Chinese came back to build their houses here, they incorporated the ancient arcade structure of the Western countries in the tradition local building called “bamboo-tube house”. These passage-ways under the buildings along the street not only are good for sheltering the pedestrians from the rain and the strong summer sun but also can help the stores to collect shoppers; therefore this style of buildings was once popularized throughout the city.
In the back street around the Shangxiajiu Shopping Street, there are some old residential houses that are unique in appearance and architecture. These high and solid houses, known as “Xiguan Big House”, were built by the former rich merchants and were all decorated with wood-carvings, stone-carvings, pottery sculptures and lime-sculpture. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, the number of such houses amounted to 800 and more, but now not more than 100 survive and have become historical relics protected by the government.
Xiguan is the epitome of Modern Guangzhou and the Shangxiajiu Shopping Street is a witness to the history of the Guangzhou as a flourishing commercial port of China.