ABSTRACT
‘The Only IDEAL STORE in the town offering High Quality, Good Service, Reasonable Price’, promised the Sun Sun Co., Ltd. (Xinxin gongsi) in an advertisement published in a Shanghai guidebook in the 1930s ( All about Shanghai and Environs 1934–5:31) ( Figure 1 ). Established there in 1926, Sun Sun Co. was one of the ‘big four’ department stores in Shanghai along with Dah Sun (Daxin gongsi, established in 1936), and the venerable Sincere (Xianshi gongsi, 1917) and Wing On (Yong’an gongsi, 1918) companies (Shanghai baihuo gongsi et al. 1988). These department stores vied for the expanding market of a growing Chinese middle-class clientele in China’s largest and most cosmopolitan city. Located on Shanghai’s version of New York’s Fifth Avenue, Nanjing Road, arguably one of the world’s busiest streets, the architecture, ambiance and sheer number of goods for sale from the ‘cheapest to the highest grade’ was a powerful mix of western and Asian tastes purveyed with a bewildering variety of services, from roof-top tea gardens and afternoon dancing parties to attached hotels. Sincere’s Oriental Hotel, we are told in another local guidebook, was offering 114 rooms – Chinese-style from $1 to $2.50 a day or foreign-style from $2 to $6 a day (Darwent 1920:14; Xianshi gongsi 1924[?]). At Sincere’s opening in 1917, it was heralded as ‘the largest and most up-to-date Chinese-owned store in Shanghai, at which everything from a needle to an elephant (toy) can be obtained’, but not for long. Opposite Sincere, its rival Wing On (like Macy’s and Gimbel’s in New York, or Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya on opposite ends of the Nihonbashi bridge in Tōkyō) offered competitive prices and services. Wing On’s attached Great Eastern Hotel, although smaller than Sincere’s, boasted a complex that included four theatres and music halls that stayed opened until 2am, attracting 30,000 people there in a twenty-four hour period ( North-China Herald 1917; Macmillan 1923:491). Advertisement of the Sun Sun Company Ltd. (Xinxin gongsi), one of the ‘big four' department stores in Shanghai, from the guidebook <italic>All About Shanghai and Environs</italic> (1934–5:31). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315026329/c49540c3-43fc-4f8d-9e45-4f7d9dc59fcd/content/figI_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
