Panjiayuan Antique Market, Beijing

1 · POSITION

Panjiayuan is Beijing’s antiques market: an open-air ground in the southeast of the city covering 48,500 square metres and some 4,000 stalls. It sells books, paintings, snuff bottles, ceramics, jade, New Year prints, embroidery and carving, much of it offered as antique and some of it not. Its admirers come for the raffish air that sets it apart from the city’s malls, and for what it turns up of China’s recent past. [1, 2, 3]

2 · THE GHOST MARKET

Its nickname, the ghost market, is traced by the city tourism office to the end of the Qing, when palace objects reached the public and aristocrats sold their own treasures before dawn. The market of today began in the 1980s as an informal weekend trade by families selling from their own homes, carried on quietly because such trade was still illegal. Books flooded it in those years after libraries closed in the 1960s and 1970s were emptied. [2, 3, 4]

3 · WHO BUYS

Collectors from abroad and researchers have long worked its aisles; one Dutch researcher gathered about fifty propaganda posters in a morning. By 2016 affluent Chinese collectors had become a principal buyer, above all of Cultural Revolution material — one dealer said he had declined US$25,000 for a single poster, and that twenty years earlier Americans had bought all of it. Bargaining is the form of the place, and about sixty per cent of stallholders come from other provinces. [3, 4]

4 · A MARKET UNDER PRESSURE

In spring 2016 the state company that manages the ground clashed with traders over stall rights; police and vendors scuffled, stalls closed in protest and a move to Hebei was rumoured. A vice-mayor said about 1,000 of the 4,000 stalls would close under an upgrade plan. A grey exhibition hall added in the preceding decade holds the more exclusive dealers, while the semi-covered Middle Area trades only at weekends. [1, 3]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The year the market became legal is given three ways: officially established in 1992 in one account, legalised in 1994 with its present site from 1995 in another, and simply the early 1990s in a third; all three are printed. Whether the 1,000 stalls named in 2016 were in fact closed is not established. Authenticity is not assessed: the sources describe much of the jade as of dubious quality, and that is a fact about the market, not about any piece in it. [1–4]