Nada Yoga › Forum › Principale › NadaYoga › Juqi Antique Market

pysong · Registrato: Feb 06, 2023 Messaggi: 114

Juqi Antique Market

Shanghai is full of hidden markets; if you know where to look, you can find anything from heavily discounted knock-off designer brands, to Communist-era art and literature, to antiques from before the People's Republic of China. To get more news about juqi, you can visit shine news official website.

We recently headed north in Putuo (it's not as far as you think - just a 20-minute scooter ride from the heart of Jing'an) to the Juqi Antique Market (聚奇古玩市场), leaving the comfort of our bubble for a little cultural immersion in China.

From the front, the market looks like nothing - in fact, the antiques section is in a building about a block back from the main road.

When you first enter, you walk through a surprisingly active plant and flower market. Pick up everything from RMB3 succulents to RMB2,000 bonsai trees. There are also plenty of crickets (for cricket fighting - a popular Chinese pastime, similar to cockfighting but somehow more tolerable), reptiles and fish.

Grab a mint plant for RMB10 and then head to the back building for the real reason you came - the antiques. The Juqi Antique Market, which means 'a gathering of treasures' in Chinese, is so much more than your average antique market or art fair - it's a hoarder's dream, a minimalist's nightmare; equal parts trash and treasure.

Walking through the dimly lit lanes, stacked high with mountains of cultural relics, collectibles and period pieces (as well as legitimate junk that should have been scrapped decades ago), is like experiencing a bygone Chinese era in a time-warp vortex of a building.

Between the wee hours of 5am and lunchtime on Friday mornings, the 'Ghost Market' is at its most active, with sellers - and buyers - looking for the most promising sales. Serious collectors, casual retirees and curious onlookers alike grace the halls, the spectacle as fascinating as the purchases.

Go in the afternoon and many of the stalls will be deserted, so it's worth getting up early to get in on the action.

An insider's tip: prices are quoted in hundreds, so don't think you're getting a bargain when a stallholder spits out "yi kuai" as the price - it actually means RMB100, just as san mao is RMB30, not the conventional denomination of RMB0.30.

On non-Friday mornings, the rows are half deserted, with stallholders abandoning their stalls for an afternoon nap, a casual smoke or a game of cards.

Like a giant indoor garage sale, visitors are trapped between piles of worn books, decorative spoons, family heirlooms and fading photographs with curling edges.
Creaking record players are piled next to stacks of cassettes, worn stamps, rolled posters and a myriad of clocks of all shapes and sizes, most of which stopped ticking years ago.

Jade ornaments, rusting coins, broken clocks and uniquely shaped jars are interspersed with wooden carvings, battered aluminium cigarette cases, tarnished hairpins and ceramic pots chipped by age and wear.
Tall vases painted in the traditional blue and white pottery style sit dust-covered next to empty frames, woven sacks and obsolete electronics that may never have worked properly in the first place.

The easiest game to play is 'spot the Mao', with smiling busts, Little Red Books and both colour and black and white pictures of the Great Helmsman scattered throughout.