How forced move decimated book market

A bookstore owner dozes at the wholesale book and journal market on Daning Road in north Shanghai's Zhabei District. The number of customers is declining sharply after the market moved last year from the downtown Old Town area in Huangpu District. — Dong Jun

On a weekday afternoon, almost one-third of the stores are closed at the wholesale book and journal market on Daning Road in north Shanghai's Zhabei District. Some are taped with a note on the locked door, stating they are open only on certain days of the week.

Those that are open have very few customers, apart from a handful of bookstore owners who come here to get stock.

Many of these vendors were welcoming dozens of students during summer vacation only a year ago, before they moved from a central wholesale book market in the Old Town area in Huangpu District to this remote place.

"Almost all my customers, wholesale or retail, were those who followed from the old market, but nearly half of them stopped coming because of this location," says Ma, a shop owner.

In his 40s, Ma's childhood dream was to become a writer, and he prides himself on his taste for literature. He used to sell only "pure literature and humanitarian books," and he didn't include Haruki Murakami in the category.

"But it didn't matter," he tells Shanghai Daily. "Though declining, I always had just enough customers to break even and make a living, since I'm not trying to make big money with this business.

"Not anymore," he sighs.

Ma started selling textbooks, a major part of income now for a majority of the vendors in the market. He is ashamed to be selling teen fiction, such as books written by Guo Jingming, an author who was accused of plagiarism and whose books and movies have been widely criticized for boosting the materialistic aspects of the younger generation.

"Last August, I was still selling Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges to kids who appreciated my taste," he says. "The location is lethal. The old market was not only in downtown, but just next to the Confucius Temple, a symbol of knowledge and learning, and also a tourist site."

He adds, "Look at us now. There is nothing and nobody here. We are more than ever in need to be close to and convenient for people, especially when they are not reading as much as before. And quite to the contrary, we moved all this way to the middle of nowhere."

The old book market, established in 1993, was next to the Confucius Temple in the Old Town area, not far from the City God's Temple and Yuyuan Garden, among the most-visited sites in the city. At its peak, nearly 90 percent of all newspaper sellers in Shanghai bought their papers at the market.

Last summer, the market's lease expired, and district officials decided the market was a fire hazard. It also drew frequent neighbor complaints because of crowding, noise, traffic jams and potential security problems. Dozens of vendors in the market were relocated to the current location, about an hour's drive away from the original site, and a 20-minute walk from the closest Metro Line 1 station.

The original site has been closed and empty since then, although there are rumors that the Dongtai Road Antique Market might be relocated there, which would create the same problems neighbors complained about at the book market.

Sweet memory forever gone

District officials have denied the rumor and offered no information about any future plan of the site.

"I was really disappointed when I heard about the relocation of the book market," says Jackie Liu, a 25-year-old Shanghai native who is attending graduate school in Boston.

"It was a big part of my childhood memory. On weekends, I always went with friends to read books and sometimes get a whole bunch of them. We would always go to the dozens of shops on the streets close to the market too, to get toys and animation goods. When I was studying in California, I always told myself that I would revisit the market again," she recalls.

But it was long gone when Liu came back. Many of the toy and animation shops, which boomed when the book market was there, had also closed due to increasing rent and declining customers.

"I thought of going to the new location for the entire summer, but nobody wanted to go with me. It is so far away," Liu says. "And I doubt whether we can rediscover the same kind of fun and crowds in that new location. It's gone forever."

Her guess is not far from reality.

The new two-floor venue was originally a wholesale market mainly for textbooks, and most of the new vendors who were relocated from the old market soon joined the business of textbooks and reference books.

"That's the only way to make money with books now," says a shop assistant who doesn't want her name revealed. "In the last two years at the old market, sales were already declining and we were already selling some reference books to break even, but the relocation sped it up."

The shop once had many wholesale customers who ran bookstores downtown, and it was convenient for them to get stock from the shop in the Old Town area.

"Even before we were relocated here, nearly a quarter of those customers were lost because they couldn't afford the rent in downtown anymore, or they switched to other business," the assistant explains. "After all, everything has become more expensive, except for the prices of books. It is almost impossible now to operate a bookstore in the downtown area, which is such a pity for Shanghai, which is often branded a metropolitan city.

"What's an international metropolitan city without some bookstores in downtown?" she asks.