The First Entrepreneurs of Beijing

Just outside the front gate of the capital, merchants from all over the middle kingdom have sold their wares for generations. Pushing heavy wheelbarrows, riding camels or donkey carts, hopeful street-style entrepreneurs arrived hoping to make their fortunes. They traded in silk, tea, porcelain, spices, knives - if you could name it, you could find it here! 

Some achieved success and became recognized as “Lao Zi Hao” or “time-honored brands”. These household names of the capital came to possess massive storefronts, their owners eager to show the world that their families now no longer belonged to the dusty streets that had brought them to Beijing in the first place. 

But during the dynasties no matter how rich these merchants became they could never really belong to the finest families of the empire. Commercial transactions were deemed dirty, and it was privilege determined by the blood in your veins that was most important, not money in hand. However that changed with the end of the dynasties in 1912. A wave of unforgiving capitalism swept through the city like a tsunami, only to end just as abruptly as it had started, as the tide turned once again with the communist liberation of 1949. 

The republican capitalists were now labeled as the scum of the earth, as they were accused of exploiting the working class. Factories and communal production became keywords. The old Laozihao shop fronts were seen as an unnecessary artefact of the past and only a few made it through to survive till today. But then in the wake of Mao's death, the tides turned once again. The Dashilar area experienced a revival, and over the course of the 1980s electrical fans, television sets and refrigerators suddenly became items everybody could dream of owning.

The First Entrepreneurs of Beijing is the story of commerce in the capital told through the products that shaped its people and their lives.