Joy City: The 98-Metre Wheel, and a Horse on a Watercourse

Basic information

This section is about a mall, and also about a river. The mall you can walk into at any time; the river you have to go eight kilometres north to see.

1. That Ring on the Roof

On 19 December 2015 the north block of Joy City opened. On the same day the wheel on its roof began to turn.

There are a few numbers worth noting:

Why "cantilevered"? Because a roof can carry only so much. With two legs, the weight has to press on two structures; the cantilevered way gathers the support into one side and leaves the other in mid-air — space bought with structure, and weight bought with structure too. The stretch of roof left free underneath became the "Mofang 166" light-art quarter.

Looking down from 98 metres, what can you see? — Suzhou Creek turning a corner at your feet, and Henan North Road, Xizang North Road and Gonghexin Road running north side by side, and beyond them the roofs of Zhabei, one joined to the next.

But you cannot see the other two things this piece is about. They are both to the north, eight kilometres off.

2. First, the geography: three things in three places

This piece is about three things: the wheel, the Zoumatang, and the place where horses were kept.

Let it be said first — they are not in one place, and not even in one district:

Three things, three places. Then why write them in one piece?

Because they are strung together by one watercourse — that is what section six is about. First, the other two.

3. The Zoumatang: a river renamed three times

The Zoumatang lies in the north of Shanghai. It starts at Fengbang in the west, flows north-east past Nanxiang and Dachang, and at Jiangwan Town joins the Xiaoji Creek; its total length is about 20.8 kilometres.

This river has changed its name three times.

The first name: Qian Creek.

It is said to have been dug by Qian Liu, King of Wuyue in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. Qian Liu was famous for managing water — he organised labour to dig ponds and cut channels around the mouth of the Wusong River, in order "to gather the profit of fish and salt", and along the way to settle the frequent floods of this stretch. When the river was cut, the people called it Qian Creek, and also Qianjiabang.

The second name: Zoumatang.

In the Southern Song the troops of the general Han Shizhong, who fought the Jin, were stationed for a time around Jiangwan and Dachang. The Qing Continued Gazetteer of Dachang records the matter in one sentence:

"The Zoumatang is also called Qian Creek; it was opened by Qian Liu, King of Wuyue, to gather the profit of fish and salt. In the Song the famous general Han Shizhong stationed troops around Jiangwan and Dachang, and rode to and fro on horseback along the bank, and so people called it the Zoumatang."

Han Shizhong often took his soldiers riding and drilling on the bank, and the people, used to the sight, came to call the river the "Zoumatang".

The third name: still Zoumatang.

The three characters "Zoumatang" appear earliest in the Jiading County Gazetteer of the Wanli reign of the Ming. In the four hundred years and more since, the name has not changed again.

A local man, Zhou Zhaoyu, wrote a poem, and it is about this river:

Walking by the Zoumatang, cold clouds thin and the sky clears. A thousand plots steam with water, ten thousand leaves clash in the sound of autumn. Who understands the woodland birds' speech, the bank's flowers open unnamed. The bamboo bridge is half sunk by the tide, the path over the bank hard to find.

Two dynasties are hidden in the name of one river: Qian Liu of the Five Dynasties dug it, Han Shizhong of the Southern Song rode on its bank.

4. "Zouma" is not horse racing

Here a very easy misunderstanding has to be put right.

The three characters "Zoumatang" contain "zouma", riding a horse, and it is easy to suppose that this area was once a racecourse. It was not.

"Zouma" was military training — Han Shizhong's soldiers exercising on horseback on the bank; not betting on horses, and not racing them.

But along this river, things connected with an army really have been dug up.

"Han bottles" — a tall, lean pottery bottle about 19 centimetres high, pointed at both ends, fired from the Southern Song into the Yuan, a vessel soldiers used to draw water, the equivalent of today's army canteen. Since the founding of the People's Republic, at Putuo, Jiading, Zhabei and other places along the Zoumatang, "Han bottles" have been dug up in heaps, and where there were many the heaps grew into small hills, which people called "Bottle Hills".

One account has it that Han Shizhong's soldiers were mostly northerners and could hold their drink, that before a campaign and after a triumph they drank deep, and threw the empty bottles down, and that the pile became a hill over the years. — That sounds like a story, but the bottles are real, and so are the heaps.

The place where horses really were kept was not on the Zoumatang. It was at Jiangwan.

5. Where horses really were kept: the stables by the Xiaoji Creek

Shanghai once had four or five racecourses. The most famous was the "Shanghai Racecourse" on People's Square (1862, the third racecourse), but that one belonged to the foreigners, and Chinese were not allowed in.

In 1908 Ye Yiquan, fourth son of the Jiangnan magnate Ye Chengzhong, went to the racecourse to watch the racing, and was several times mocked and turned away by foreigners. He would not swallow it, and resolved to build one of his own in the Chinese-administered area.

In 1909 he bought 1,200 mu of farmland at Jiangwan, centred on the crossing of today's Wuchuan Road and Wudong Road, and began work on a racecourse. When the land was taken over he paid ten silver dollars a mu above the current price, and asked the Shanghai county magistrate to come in a blue-felt sedan chair and oversee the staking out, paying the farmers on the spot.

Inside the racecourse there were a track, a grandstand and a great clock tower, and a golf course laid out as well. And the place where the horses were kept was built on the bank of the Xiaoji Creek, west of the track:

It opened on 6 May 1911. Ye Yiquan invited political figures, rich merchants and notables, and the envoys of the various countries posted in Shanghai. Town and country people from Hongkou, Zhabei and Jiangwan came too, and the cars, carriages and rickshaws on the three roads stood nose to tail.

At the opening there was one more entertainment: the Frenchman Vallon flew a Sannes monoplane in circles over the racecourse — the first time the Chinese had seen an aeroplane fly.

The racecourse later invited foreigners to take shares and changed its name to the "International Recreation Club", but people still called it the "Jiangwan Racecourse". After it opened, betting on the races flourished as never before, and it became the first racecourse of Shanghai, paying up to a million dollars a year into the government treasury. In 1935 it closed as war drew near, and after the outbreak of the War of Resistance on 13 August it was shelled, part of its buildings destroyed, and the ground left waste.

Today that place is a residential area. Of the stables and the horses, not a trace is left.

6. Water joins the three places

Now it can be said plainly: why the wheel, the Zoumatang and the place where horses were kept belong in one piece.

Because they are on the same water network.

Stand the table upright and it is a water road from north to south:

Zoumatang — (Xiaoji Creek) — the stables of the Jiangwan Racecourse Zoumatang — (Pengyue Creek) — Tanziwan — Suzhou Creek — Joy City

In one river Han Shizhong's horses ran; beside one branch the racecourse's horses were kept; and in the end all this water flows into Suzhou Creek, and past the foot of Joy City.

When the wheel turns to its highest point, what lies at your feet is the very end of this watercourse.

7. Before 2010: whose land was this

Last, back to the plot itself.

The plot Joy City stands on was formerly called Xinmei Taigucheng.

In 2002 the Xingsheng Group, the major shareholder of Shanghai Xinmei, won the tender for this plot; it was an old-neighbourhood redevelopment project of Zhabei District. Work on phase one began in 2005. The plan had been to run it and attract tenants itself, but the letting went poorly.

In February 2010 COFCO Property bought phase one of Xinmei Taigucheng outright for 1.35 billion yuan, and then renamed the project "Shanghai Joy City" — the first time the COFCO "Joy City" brand came to Shanghai. The name is taken from the Analects: "those near are pleased, those far come".

On 18 December of the same year the south block of phase one opened. On 19 December 2015 the north block opened, and the wheel began to turn.

From old-neighbourhood redevelopment project to commercial landmark on the north bank of Suzhou Creek, the plot took thirteen years.

And the water beneath it has been flowing for more than a thousand years.

Connections

• Sub-district：Beizhan Subdistrict
• See also：Beizhan Subdistrict, Xinxin Department Store, Daning International Commercial Plaza, Pengpu Xincun Subdistrict, Appendix 1 · Historical Codes in Street Names

Sources: that Joy City stands at No. 166 Xizang North Road (at the Qufu Road junction), that the south block of phase one opened on 18 December 2010 and the north block on 19 December 2015, the rooftop cantilevered wheel SKY RING (56 metres across, hub 98 metres above the ground, 30 capsules, the first cantilevered one on a roof in the country), the rooftop Mofang 166 light-art quarter, the roughly 163,000 square metres of floor area of the two blocks together, that the plot was formerly phase one of Xinmei Taigucheng (the Xingsheng Group's winning tender in 2002, an old-neighbourhood redevelopment project of Zhabei District), and that in February 2010 COFCO Property bought it outright for 1.35 billion yuan and renamed it, the name "Joy City" coming from "those near are pleased, those far come" in the Analects, are based on the Baidu Baike entry "Shanghai Joy City", the Wikipedia entry "Shanghai Jing'an Joy City", Lianshang Net's The Second Phase of Shanghai Suzhou Creek Bay Joy City Opens at the End of the Year (March 2015), and Time Weekly's COFCO Joy City's Frustrated Shanghai Trial (Grade B/C, reprinted from the same source); that the Zoumatang starts at Fengbang in the west, runs through Nanxiang and Dachang to Jiangwan Town where it joins the Xiaoji Creek, and is about 20.8 kilometres long, that it is said to have been dug by Qian Liu, King of Wuyue, and was therefore once called Qian Creek and Qianjiabang, that in the Southern Song Han Shizhong stationed troops at Jiangwan and Dachang and "rode to and fro on horseback along the bank, and so people called it the Zoumatang", that the name first appears in the Jiading County Gazetteer of the Wanli reign of the Ming, the poem by the local man Zhou Zhaoyu, and the "Han bottles" of the Southern Song and Yuan and the "Bottle Hills" dug up along the banks, are based on Shanghai Fabu's How the Rivers of Our Shanghai Got Their Names, Shangguan News' Traces of Wuyue Culture in Shanghai, and Jiefang Daily's Tracing Shanghai's History with a Pot of Qibao Old Wine, with the quotation from the Qing Continued Gazetteer of Dachang (Grade B); that the Jiangwan Racecourse was built by Ye Yiquan in 1909 on 1,200 mu of farmland bought at today's Wuchuan Road and Wudong Road, that the stables were built on the bank of the Xiaoji Creek west of the track, that they held close to a hundred horses, that the racehorses were mostly fine Mongolian stock and mostly boarded by skilled horsemen, that it opened on 6 May 1911, that the Frenchman Vallon flew a monoplane in circuits as an entertainment, that it was later renamed the International Recreation Club, that it closed in 1935, and that after 13 August it was damaged by shellfire, are based on Yangpu Times' The First Racecourse of Shanghai in Its Heyday, Sohu's The Jiangwan Racecourse: The First Racecourse of Shanghai in Its Heyday, and Phoenix Culture's Racecourses of the Foreign Concessions (Grade B); that the Pengyue Creek "starts in the north from the Zoumatang, runs south through Pengpu Town and enters Suzhou Creek at Tanziwan, about 7 kilometres long" is based on China National Radio's The Zoumatang, the Qiujiang, the Taopu… How the Rivers of Our Shanghai Got Their Names! as quoted in Appendix 1 · Historical Codes in Street Names (Grade B). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.