Buying soy sauce the old-fashioned way

Buying soy sauce is no simple matter. Enter a supermarket and you are overwhelmed by options, from traditional varieties to new seafood flavored ones. It wasn't always like this though. In the past, before the proliferation of supermarkets, people used to purchase one type of soy sauce in their local grocery store.

At that time, soy sauce was contained in large containers filled with almost 150 kilograms of the liquid. To extract it, tools were used like a funnel and tishao, a dipper which was made of bamboo. When people wanted to buy some soy sauce, they just picked up an empty baijiu bottle and let the seller fill soy sauce into it using the various tools available.

This scene is rare to see today, with most people buying food from chains and preferring to buy bottled ones for their convenience. But in one grocery store in Beijing named Julaiyong in Fengtai district, this tradition lives on. Here you can still see some people holding empty bottles and buying soy sauce from the jar. We decided to check out the venue.

Stepping into the grocery store, we were immediately hit by a strong smell of soy sauce. In this 60-square-meter space, two large jars contain soy sauce and vinegar respectively. Coupled with the green ceiling fan, the square-shaped counter and terrazzo ground tiles, Julaiyong is firmly stuck in the past as if time has stood still.

Among the people who visit here to buy the soy sauce, 76-year-old Wang Jingui says that she enjoys coming to bring back childhood memories and buying soy sauce in this way is a habit that she can't get rid of. When she was a baby, her family moved nearby to Changxindian Dajie and from then on, all the soy sauce and vinegar at her home was bought in Julaiyong.

That was over 60 years ago now, but the habit has stuck.

Her youngest son Shi Lixin also feels a strong emotional attachment to the store. "When I was a child, my mother always got me to buy soy sauce here and the tools like the funnel and tishao all looked strange to me," Shi said. "To this day I still go here. The flavor of this specific soy sauce runs through my veins."

Grandma Cao, who lives nearby, is also a frequent visitor. For her the most attractive element of the soy sauce here is the price. "Both the soy sauce and vinegar here are sold at 1.4 yuan ($0.22) per 0.5 kilograms, which is cheaper than the bottled ones in supermarkets, normally weighted as 0.65 kilograms and sold at 3.5 yuan."

According to the sales assistant surnamed Liu, the soy sauce and vinegar both come from well-known companies. The soy sauce is from Jinshi and the vinegar is Longmen. These two jars of liquid sell out within a couple of days each time.

"This grocery store has a history going back for more than a century and the two jars have both been used for at least 50 years," Liu said, adding that the store was opened by a businessman from Shanxi Province in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). "Buyers are less since almost all visitors are residents from nearby, who have been coming for a while, and they are getting older and older," he added.

Located in the southwest of Fengtai district, the Changxindian area is less developed compared to its neighbors. This township, which is 19 kilometers away from central Beijing, provides a perfect break from the ugly skyscrapers and traffic congestion of elsewhere in Beijing.

However, this peace will be broken soon after the Beijing government announced this February that the Changxindian area will be demolished within a few months.

In the near future, Julaiyong might no longer exist and the scene of people buying soy sauce in this way will only appear in people's memories and documentaries.