Markets and hawkers: how the Council tried to get Shanghai's food off the street, 1880–1932

The short answer. In 1880 the International Settlement’s food market was the roadway of Nanking Road, hosed down every morning after the stalls had gone. By 1932 the Council ran sixteen municipal markets, the largest of them a three-storey concrete building in Hongkou that took a hundred thousand dollars a year in stall fees, and its police charged 26,190 hawkers in a single year for selling food in the street. The fifty years between are the story of a town council trying to move a Chinese city’s food trade indoors, for the sake of its drains, its flies and its revenue, against the resistance of the ratepayers who would not pay for a building, the private market owners who lost their stallholders, and the hawkers, who were the poorest people in the Settlement and never went away. The Council’s reports count the markets, the fees and the prosecutions; the hawkers’ side survives in one petition of 1915.

1880–1893: the Market Lot and the Hongkew sheds

The Council’s first market was a street. “The side channels in the Nankin Road where the market is held, were washed down daily,” the nuisance inspector reported in 1880, and that was the extent of the Settlement’s provision. In 1882 the Council bought a site behind the road and had eight sets of plans drawn, J. M. Cory winning the 250-tael prize for the best; in February 1883 the ratepayers carried an amendment “That the Municipal Council do not proceed to build a Public Market” and told it to sell the lot. It did not sell. By 1887 “the new market off the Nanking road has been cleaned daily, and well washed down with water from the hydrants”, a yard of open sheds where “about 140 stalls” still stood unroofed, and in 1888–89 “the entire Market Lot bounded by the Nankin, Kiukiang, Kwangse and Kweichow Roads has been paved with Ningpo stone”. The Council had an inspector of nuisances, markets and livery stables at 2,250 taels a year and an assistant for the markets at 1,260, but no market building; the ratepayers built it one only in 1896, when the Town Hall went up on the lot with “a foreign market” beneath the drill hall and “the Chinese market on the south side at the back”, which the reports thereafter call the Maloo Market, after the Chinese name of Nanking Road.

The second market was built to kill a street. At the ratepayers’ meeting of 29 February 1892 the Council was authorised to raise 25,000 taels at five and a half per cent “for the purpose of acquiring a site and erecting the sheds for a Market in Hongkew”, and “the sheds for the Market which were commenced in September 1892 were completed in May last”, adjoining Boone and Hanbury Roads on the triangle of ground that gave the market its later Chinese name. The Council decided to charge no fees at first; what it needed was dealers. On 26 May 1893 the Mixed Court magistrate proclaimed “that the Market in Tiendong road would be closed on the 31st” and that the dealers “would not be allowed to sell them in the streets”. “The Market was opened on the 1st June, and the whole available space was immediately occupied.” The Hongkew Market was a success from its first morning because the street market it replaced had been shut by order. By 1901, Darwent recorded, its fees “yielded a sum of Tls. 15,971”, and he sent his readers there “between 6 and 9 a.m.” for “lively scenes of Chinese marketing”.

1902–1905: licensing the private markets

The Settlement’s Chinese population had its own markets, private yards where a landlord let stalls, and in 1902 the Council adopted “the scheme initiated in 1902 for the provision of adequate public markets under Municipal supervision in substitution for existing private establishments”. The legal lever was bye-law XXXIV of the Land Regulations, under which only licensed markets could sell food. In 1904, with “the Hongkew Market overcrowded and the Maloo Market well filled”, the Council opened three more, at Sinza, Elgin Road and Wayside, “free of charge during November and December” to draw the dealers in, and from 1 April 1905 “License fees were imposed on all dealers in private markets under conditions identical with those levied in the Municipal Markets”, a measure carried “after considerable opposition”. The health officer wrote the sentence that would be the Council’s market policy for thirty years: hawkers “who used to obstruct the public thoroughfares and set up their stalls in stuffy alleys, were brought within the sanitary fold of the Municipal Markets”. The Council bought one private market outright, Morriss’s yard on Taku Road, “for the sum of Tls. 7,000”, as the Mohawk Market, paid 24,192 taels for a site for an East Hongkew market, extended Hongkew by fifteen feet for a “large demand for stalls”, and seized 15,000 pounds of rotten fruit. Its fee scale was $2.50 a month for a stall, fifty cents for a basket space and $7 or $8 for a shop. Market fees went from 17,873 taels in 1903 to 25,451 in 1905 and 36,147 in 1908.

1913–1915: the hawker’s licence and the hawkers’ strike

The markets did not empty the streets. In 1913 the health department admitted that “efforts have been made to get all street hawkers of foodstuffs into the market with varying success in the absence of police compulsion day and night”, and proposed instead “to permit street hawking under licence, provided the hawkers are provided with fly-proof baskets”, because “cold food exposed to flies is notoriously unsafe” in a cholera summer. The budget put it in revenue terms: a fee of “$1 per mensem on all street hawkers of food stuffs” would follow “the practice already in operation in the French Settlement” and “tend to reduce the number of fruit vendors and other untaxed competitors of the smaller dealers” who paid for stalls. The market scale, “fixed about twenty years ago”, went up at the same time to $1 a basket space and $3 a stall. “A Hawkers’ licence was introduced in July” 1914 “with satisfactory results”: market revenue rose “approximately 30%”, partly because the fee was counted under markets and partly because it drove “numbers of these pedlars into the Markets”. The Hongkew Market was meanwhile rebuilt in stages, an extension “entirely in reinforced concrete” begun in January 1913 and finished in September 1914 that increased the accommodation by 40 per cent, the old sheds having been “so overcrowded that dealers had to overflow into adjacent roads”.

In May 1915 the ratepayers doubled the hawker fee to $2, and the Settlement had its only hawkers’ strike. “The increased licence fee, $2 per mensem, as approved by the Ratepayers, led to an agitation among the hawkers in May,” the health department reported, “a species of strike was declared”, which it attributed “chiefly not from bona fide hawkers but from the mendicant class”. The other side is in the Council’s own report, in the Mixed Court magistrate’s letter of 8 May 1915: “several hundred street hawkers assembled outside the gate of the Court”, saying they were “very poor small tradesmen” and “unable to meet this additional fee”; on 28 May he wrote again with a petition from “the hawker Chen Tse-hsiang and others”. The Council’s answer of 4 June, signed by its secretary Leveson, is the plainest statement in the reports of what the markets were for. The health department’s aim was “encouraging bona-fide merchants to vend sound food in the numerous markets” and “gradually to abolish all others”, because “promiscuous selling of food-stuffs, often of worthless infected material, is the cause of much sickness, suffering and death among the Chinese poorer classes”. The agitation failed: “the old established hawkers took out licences at the increased rate without much protest, and in the absence of their support the agitation soon subsided”. The number of licences then rose, “an indication that the fee should be further increased”. By 1917 the fee “has had an inhibitory effect, but a considerable number have escaped payment”; the police were set on them and raised $7,600, and the Council asked for sixteen Chinese constables for the summer and a $3 fee for hawkers of “fruit and other foods considered dangerous to health”. Market fees had gone from 42,083 taels in 1913 to 98,074 in 1917.

The rules

The 1921 handbook of licence conditions prints the regime. A food hawker’s licence cost “Two Dollars” a month, had to be “exposed at all times when hawking”, allowed no stall or fixed pitch, and came with the line “Hawking by women and children is not permitted”. A private market paid “$25 per quarter” and its licence conditions read like a code of manners for a crowd: “That no person spit in the Market.” “That no dogs be allowed in the Market.” “That no live pigs, sheep, goats or cattle be brought into the Market.” “That no gratuities of any kind be paid any employee of the Council.” No pheasant was to be sold between 16 February and 30 September, no deer, hare, partridge or small birds between 1 March and 30 September. Inside a municipal market a Chinese space renter paid “One Dollar” a month and a stall renter “Three Dollars”, a shop $7 to $8 “according to position”, and the stall licence “does not permit hawking outside Municipal Markets”. Whoever sold food had, in the Council’s scheme, a place, a fee and a paper.

1922–1925: a market of three floors

In 1922 the Council pulled down what was left of the 1893 sheds. “The accommodation has been considerably increased by demolishing the remaining area of the one storey timber market and replacing it by a reinforced concrete structure with three floors for stalls,” the engineer reported, the stallholders being kept meanwhile “under a temporary wooden shelter in Miller Road and on the roof of the one storey market”; 105,870 taels were spent that year and 35,000 the next, and Hongkew got “a special tariff of fees” while shops elsewhere went to $9. Market fees reached 134,703 taels in 1922, Hongkew’s $58,927 against the Maloo Market’s $39,835. The same year the Council moved the hawkers’ licensing from the health department to the revenue department, and the 1923 budget moved the money, 53,000 taels, from “Markets” to “Licence Fees”, where it has to be read thereafter: 56,312 taels in 1923, 63,644 in 1924, 64,229 in 1925.

The report for 1925 is the Council’s survey of what it had built. “There are twelve Municipal Markets in the Settlement. The Hongkew Market is by far the largest”; “there is almost as much business done at that Market as at all the others put together”. Its newer part “is of three stories”, the ground floor full, “the second floor is crowded with vegetable dealers”, the third half taken by cooked-food sellers; “eighty-four Japanese have stalls” and “some Russians and other Foreigners have seventeen box-shops”, which is the Hongkou of 1925 in a building. It took $89,953 that year from 1,195 stalls and 426 basket spaces, at twenty cents a square foot against five at the Maloo Market, whose shop rents the Council raised “from $9 to $15 per month” in May. The strike of June 1925 taught the Council a lesson in scale: the Hongkew Market “did not carry on properly for fifteen days”, and “a number of small markets at well selected positions are more suitable than one or two large markets”. It also listed its gaps: “there is no Municipal market between Nanking Road and Soochow Creek”, only a street market in the Woo Foo Loong lanes; East Hongkew “is too low a structure and is very much overcrowded”; Yangtszepoo “too small”. Market fees were 126,739 taels, under estimate “because of the disorganization resulting from the riots in May and June”. The Mixed Court that year charged 2,085 hawkers and fifteen market offenders; the health department prosecuted 778 people for selling food without a licence and 48 for breaches of market regulations, with fines of $3 to $25.

1928: “a constant source of anxiety”

By 1928 there were “fourteen Municipal Markets”, Pingliang Road having opened in November, fees were $192,414 or 136,609 taels, and “slightly over half the total receipts were derived from” Hongkew, whose single-storey part “will soon become necessary to enlarge”. The health department’s section on hawkers is the Council at the end of its patience. “The enormous number of food hawkers in the Settlement is a constant source of anxiety, and even with the assistance of sanitary police it is found impossible adequately to control this class of trade.” It listed what it had found: “storage of foodstuffs in the bedrooms”, “dirty water for ‘freshening up’ certain articles of food”, “dirty and contaminated natural ice as a refrigerant”. Its policy was a sentence: “Hawking should only be permissible where market facilities are not yet available.” It banned one trade outright, “the hawking of ice-cream anywhere within the Settlement”, and complained that the new Tsitsihar market “has proved difficult to popularise on account of the large number of hawkers in the neighbourhood”: the Council built a market and the hawkers sold outside its door. The three remaining private markets were “local anomalies which interfere with the development of a comprehensive system of Municipal Markets”. Hawker licences brought 73,072 taels.

1932: sixteen markets and 26,190 prosecutions

“There are 16 municipal markets in the Settlement, an increase of two over last year,” the report for 1932 begins: Peking Road in January, Liaoyang Road in June, a new Sinza on Shanhaikwan Road on 21 July, and a small one building for “the Ferry-Robinson roads hawker-infested area”. Peking Road filled the Central District gap of 1925: “following the opening of this market it was possible, with the co-operation of the police, to clear away hawkers in the Woo Foo Loong district”. Hongkew had its best month ever in January 1932 and then the war: after the fighting began on 28 January “both the revenue and the volume of business done fell away to amazingly small figures”, 49 stalls working at the start of February and 253 by its end, and by June the takings matched June 1931. The building itself was “gradually becoming antiquated”, with “very much congestion” on its lower floors. Every stallholder in the Settlement was now registered, “issued with a registration paper bearing the stallholder’s name, number of stall, address, date of occupying stall, and article sold”, and the private markets’ stallholders held municipal licences too. The health department destroyed 80,221 pounds of unsound food and brought 2,082 prosecutions, 1,630 of them for selling without a licence; the police charged 26,190 hawkers and 488 market offenders. Market fees were 227,866 taels, Hongkew’s $98,724 and Foochow Road’s $32,005 the largest; hawker licences averaged 5,055 a month and brought 87,335 taels against an estimate of 100,000, down from 94,032 the year before, because, the Council said, the fighting had emptied Hongkou of hawkers too.

The markets in numbers

Year	Municipal markets	Market fees (taels)	Hawker licences (taels)	Hawkers charged
1893	2
1905	5, plus private markets licensed	25,451
1913	about 8	42,083	fee of $1 proposed
1917	9	98,074 (with hawkers)
1925	12	126,739	64,229	2,085
1928	14	136,609	73,072
1932	16, and 5 private	227,866	87,335	26,190

Two lines move together and one does not. The number of markets and the fees they took rose steadily for forty years. The hawker licences rose too, from a few thousand a month to five thousand, which means the trade the markets were built to abolish grew with them; and the prosecutions went from two thousand in 1925 to twenty-six thousand in 1932, which means the Council had given up abolishing it and settled for fining it. The markets were a sanitary success and a social failure: the Settlement’s poor bought from the hawkers because the hawkers came to the lane.

What the sources disagree on

The Council’s reports and a Chinese popular history give different dates for the Hongkew Market. The reports have sheds built 1892–93, an extension of 1905, a concrete extension of 1913–14 and the three-storey block of 1922–23; the Chinese article has hawkers on the site before 1891, a one-storey concrete market before 1915 and a three-storey rebuilding in 1923, and Pott dates a rebuilding to 1916. The reports never call it the Triangle market; the name is Chinese and later. The market-fee series has a break in 1923, when hawker licences were moved out of it, so the 1914–22 figures are not comparable with the later ones. The amount the 1883 ratepayers were asked for the Nanking Road site is illegible in the scan. No report before 1905 says why the Council wanted markets; the only trigger recorded for 1893 is the magistrate’s closure of the Tiendong Road street market.

What to look for

The Market Lot behind Nanjing Road East, between Jiujiang, Guangxi and Guizhou Roads, is the block of the old Town Hall; the market has been shops for a century. The Hongkew Market on the triangle of Hanyang, Tanggu and Emei Roads, the Triangle market, was the largest food market in Shanghai for a hundred years and was demolished in the 1990s; a shopping block stands on the site. The Peking Road market of 1932 and the Tiendong Road street market of 1893 have left no trace. What remains is the thing the Council could not abolish: on any morning in Hongkou the vegetable sellers are on the pavement outside the licensed market, and the registered stallholders are inside.