Before We Begin: Where We Went Shopping

First, what this part gathers

A person's most private memory of a city is often bound up with "buying things" — where the first toy was bought, in which shop the cloth was cut for the New Year, the shopping centre where, grown up, you first stood someone a meal …

What this part gathers is two coordinates of where Zhabei people "bought things": Xinxin Department Store of 1988, and Daning International of 2006. Eighteen years and a few streets apart — but read the two pieces together and what you read is a chapter in Zhabei's commercial turnaround.

One line of division

This part is the easiest to confuse with Part Seven, "places no one can avoid": buying things is of course also unavoidable. But commerce deserves to be gathered separately into one bundle — because it has a perspective no other category has: it changes fastest. Shop signs change several rounds over, counters change several generations, and even the phrase "department store" is itself growing old.

This part does not read "sales per square metre" and "footfall" — those figures are everywhere. It reads how a shopping centre opened its doors, how it changed, how it changed a stretch of land, and how the land has kept it in mind.

This category: two commercial landmarks

A few reminders

1. One has changed its name, one is still trading: Xinxin Department Store has been called "Prince Department Store" since 2008, and the building still stands at the corner; Daning International's open-air blocks are still lively today — seeing the former is seeing memory, strolling the latter is strolling the present;
2. a suggestion to "read it backwards": read Daning of 2006 (the new) first, then Xinxin of 1988 (the old) — you will find how fast "buying things" changed in eighteen years, from a district with a single commercial building to a whole quarter set going by one stretch of street;
3. how to read them alongside others: Xinxin Department Store goes with Zhabei Central Hospital (the memory of life on the same Zhonghua Xin Road); Daning International goes with Daning Lingshi Park and Shanghai Circus World — the "Daning trio", which one piece cannot hold;
4. This category will grow. The emporiums of Bunye Cheng, Joy City, the Jiuguang Centre … Zhabei's commercial map is still changing, and this part will keep growing too.

So let us begin with a building that nearly came to be called "Store No. 13".

Connections

• See also：Part Two · A Guide to Zhabei's Sub-districts, Part Five · Zhabei's Old Institutions, Part Seven · Zhabei's Landmarks, Part Nine · Zhabei's Parks