WANG DI. THE TEAHOUSE. SMALL BUSINESS, EVERYDAY CULTURE, AND PUBLIC POLITICS IN CHENDU, 1900 - 1950. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2008. XIII, 355 p., ill*.

The second monograph of Wang Di 1 is dedicated specifically to the tea houses of his hometown. It is believed that the custom of drinking tea originated in the time of Western Zhou in Sichuan, the birthplace of tea. The culture of tea drinking as a part of public life has long-standing traditions, the preservation of which was promoted by the relative isolation and inaccessibility of the region that existed until the beginning of the XX century. When numerous travelers, both Chinese and foreign, began to arrive in Chengdu after the construction of new transport routes, they left many rave reviews about the city's tea houses, from which it becomes clear that the culture of Chengdu tea houses is something special, different from the tea houses of other Chinese cities.

This special feature is what Van Di is trying to reveal. Readers of his first book remember that for him, as a scientist, it is important not so much to describe the phenomenon as to show how it was transformed in modern times and how much these changes were favorable for the people. The first fifty years of the twentieth century are a time of constant changes in urban life through Westernization, hence the economic, social, political and cultural shifts in the social, "street", to use Wang Di's terminology, culture of Chengdu. The increasing role of the state leads to the loss of uniqueness of local cultures, and Van Di sets out to consider how this happens and how irreversible the changes are. Tea shops in Chengdu for him are the quintessence of local culture, the most vivid manifestation of its identity.

The book is organized thematically rather than chronologically, i.e. the chronology is contained within the topic. Such a structure is fraught with repetitions, which the author himself feels, but nevertheless recognizes that it is most convenient for solving the tasks set by him.

As the title of the first part - "Teahouses" - suggests, it tells about the teahouses themselves: teahouses as a small business; the guild of teahouse owners; labor and workplace culture in teahouses. Tearooms - small businesses in all respects: they do not require a large initial investment and space, they are served by only a few employees, which allows the owners of tea houses to receive a small but stable profit. Teahouses gathered around them representatives of even smaller businesses-peddlers, hairdressers, healers, small artisans... The term "small business" (xiao shangye) is used in relation to tea houses in all official documents (p.27).

* Van Di. Tea shops. Small business, daily life and public policy in Chengdu, 1900-1950). Stanford, Ed. Stanford University, 2008, XIII, 355 p., ill.

1 For T. I. Vinogradova's review of Van Di's first book, Street culture in Chendu: Public space, urban commoners, and local politics in Chendu, 1870-1930 (Stanford, 2003), see: Oriens. 2007. N 4.

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Using numerous and diverse sources, Wang Di gets impressive figures for the number of tea houses in Chengdu at the turn of the century: from 500 to 800, 2 establishments per 1000 inhabitants in 1920, i.e. much more than in the vast Shanghai. The period of maximum flourishing of tea houses was the 1930s. The innovations that local authorities tried to introduce in the first years of the new century were favorable for small businesses. In 1909, electric lighting appeared in Chengdu, and since the mid-1920s, attempts have been made to introduce some basic sanitary standards by law. In 1926, special sanitary regulations were adopted: the staff began to check for skin and venereal diseases, it is forbidden to do pedicures in tea shops, hairdressers were required to have a license. In 1931, an order was issued to filter river water three times with sand filters, heat it up to 100 degrees, do not place tea rooms near public toilets, and throw the sleeping brew not on the floor, but in special baskets. Big successful teahouses in the center tried to follow these rules without fail.

In the 1930s, teahouses provided a livelihood for more than 60 thousand residents and became one of the most attractive businesses, the center of the urban economy. Each teahouse had its own history and development strategy. Tea shop owners tried to create their own social networks and their own system of relationships with local influential businessmen and officials. The bombing of Chengdu by the Japanese from 1938 to 1941 led many residents to move to the suburbs and visit the then-cheap tea shops there (p. 54).

The Chengdu Tea Shop Owners Guild included all the owners of establishments in the city. Most of the guilds in China appeared at the end of the Ming. There were three types of traditional associations, which can be translated in the same way - "guild". Wang Di analyzes the views of various scholars on the term "guild" in relation to various Chinese terms, which indicates the author's great erudition in European historiography.

In Chengdu, at the end of Qing, there was a "guild" of tea leaf merchants, under its auspices there were 54 shops, but no tea houses, in 1905 a Chamber of Commerce was organized, tea houses entered there as restaurants-which they never were - in 1909.

In 1918, the central government issued the Rules for Professional Organizations in Industry and Commerce , China's first guild law. Under the Kuomintang government, a clear guild structure was developed. The Chengdu Tea Shop Owners Guild, established in 1931, was reorganized in 1936. The guild was governed by a board of directors (4 permanent members, 30 members of different status) with a president from among the permanent members, the council had 4 sections: general affairs, organization, accounting, public relations, during the war it was also formed propaganda section. The guild had branches in various parts of the city, regulated pricing, and registered businesses. The guild's role was particularly enhanced during and after the war.

The Chengdu Tea Workers ' Union was established in 1926, before their employers joined the guild. Tea shop workers are mostly waiters and waitresses, of course; Wang Di writes a lot about the latter, about the difficult fate of women in the male world. Tea shop waitresses, as a rule, were not prostitutes, but their very presence inevitably gave rise to gender conflict and sexual violence. The authorities were not inclined to pay attention to the complaints of waitresses, which emphasized the traditionally low status of tea workers - both women and men.

In the second part of the book, the author's focus shifts from teahouses to their customers. Wang Di tends to see teahouses as "a stage where all the people played different roles" (p. 114), and divides people who visit teahouses into idle people (local scientists, writers, landowners and other property owners, retired officials) and busy people for whom the teahouse is a stage (storytellers and actors of various theatrical performances). genres), business office (merchants, traditional medicine doctors), workplace and market (peddlers and artisans). In describing each of these groups of people in detail, Wang Di often repeats the information that he already gave about them in his first book; in the same monograph, he especially talks about theatrical performances given in teahouses.

The storytellers ' performances brought prosperity to the teahouses. Magicians, jugglers, ventriloquists, and singers performed in small teahouses with poor patrons. Thanks to the tea shops, Chengdu gained a reputation as a city where life was spent in idleness and pleasure.

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The first theaters here were founded at tea houses, while in Beijing, on the contrary, tea houses were founded at the Beijing Opera theaters (p. 136).

Teahouse owners, hoping to attract a steady audience, offered long-term engagements to traveling troupes who preferred stability. The first stage in Chengdu appeared in 1906 at the tea house " Garden of Elegant Tea "(almost all the tea houses that showed local operas were called gardens-yuan). Gradually, the establishments acquired permanent stages and focused their efforts more on local opera performances than on tea, although the former required a large investment. As soon as the theater companies "settled" under the big tea houses, local authorities began to try to regulate the programs and repertoire of theaters, since now the theater was seen as a means of educating the people, and not just showing stories filled with prejudice, as before.

According to documents, 360 different operas were performed in Chengdu between 1909 and 1910. Under the Republic, social reformers began to create new operas, and an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin was made for the Sichuan Musical Theater. Since the 1920s, modern "conversational" drama (huaju) and a new opera have appeared in the repertoire of tea houses.

Van Di gives a lot of facts about the life of those teahouses that have become more theaters than teahouses, about their staff, the system of printing posters and programs, and ordering tickets. The first film screenings of the electric Opera were also held in teahouses at the turn of the century, everything necessary for the film screening was brought from Shanghai, and the films were initially exclusively made in the West. The audience of teahouses-theaters, of course, was in many ways different from the audience of ordinary teahouses. The issue of women's right to attend performances was acute, and the police tried to maintain public morals there.

Part three - "Politics from Teahouses" - is devoted to the impact of social conflicts, national and local politics on the life of teahouses and their culture. As a public space, teahouses were controlled by the government and reformers of all stripes. Van Di develops ideas about the generally unfavorable impact of modernization and Westernization, increasing state interference in the spontaneously formed public everyday life, clearly expressed in his first book. In general, this part of the book repeats most of all the relevant passages of the previous book, albeit with a large number of details.

The book's conclusion is pointedly titled " The Triumph of Small Business and Everyday Culture." The author is inclined to view tea houses as a microcosm that develops according to its own laws and is able to resist to a certain extent the increasing role of the state in public life.

There are interesting pages where Wang Di tries to find analogues of tea Chengdu in the Western culture. Teahouses, he suggests, are much like Western taverns, cafes, and especially saloons, but without alcohol, which, by the way, distinguishes them from British teahouses (p. 254). It is strange that there is no comparison with Middle Eastern coffee shops and dukhans. It seems that there is more in common between a teahouse and a Chinese teahouse than between a teahouse and a saloon, and this is not about the amount of alcohol consumed. Ignoring the Middle East is not indicative of a scientist from the Far East who has moved to the Far West?

As the last sentence of the book under review makes clear, Wang Di intends to continue studying Chengdu's tea houses by devoting the next monograph to their fate under socialism.

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