STORES AND NEIGHBORHOODS IN MODERN SHANGHAI I Most households used coal to fuel their stoves. A coal stove was a square or round tube made of tinplate, about two feet high, and ten inches on each side(if it was square)or one foot in diameter(if it was round), with a cone-shaped furnace in the middle, insulation materials(such as coal cinders )stuffed between the furnace and the tinplate edges, and handles. For decades in this century, a coal stove like is was the only energy source for cooking and heating in ordinary Shanghai households, and about 98 percent of Shanghais inhabitants could not live without it. Up to 1983, about 51 percent of the households of Shanghai were still using coal stoves as their only cooking and heating facility(Shangbaishi tongji 1983: 320) It reported that in 1990, 1.04 million coal stoves were being used by the residents of Shanghai (Wang and Qiu 1990), a fact that contradicts the popular image of the modernity of Chinas leading"treaty port Because of the ubiquity of coal stoves, shops selling coal could be found on every block in lilong neighborhoods. These stores were known as"egg-shaped briquette stores"(meiqiudian) because egg-shaped briquettes were the major commodity sold But coal stores also sold charcoal, firewood chips, and other fuels such as kerosene Firewood chips were a daily necessity, for most households extinguished the coal stove every night before going to bed, and in the morning, one of the first tasks was to light the stove with waste paper and wood chips. Emily Honig (1986: 136) has mentioned that lighting the stove was the first thing women workers of Shanghai's cotton mills did in the morning. This was, in fact, a routine morning chore for every household in Shanghai that did not have a gas stove(I-3, I-4 All the shopkeepers lived on the second floor of the house in which the store was located and took care of their business all day long. Usually the male head of the family was the owner and manager of the store. He might hire one or two shop assistants who were. more often than not relatives or fellow townsmen. his wife and adult children often worked as helpers when needed. One coal store owner on Hart Road, for example, had his nephew work in his store as counter clerk(alse bookkeeper)for seventeen years(1936-53)and his eldest son as shop assistant for nine years(1938-47). In 1947 he opened another coal store a few blocks from the first one, and had his eldest son run the new store. His daughter-in-law became the counter clerk and bookkeeper of the new store (Yao and Ang 1935: 3; I-4 -5) Tobacco-Paper Stores Re, Stores popularly known as yanzhidian (lit., tobacco-paper store)were actua l\y ariety stores. The owner of one such store, Liu Xiangyu, has run a variety store since 1942, when he inherited his father's barbershop on Hart Road. He soon turned the barbershop into a yanzhidian. Like rice and coal stores, tobacco-paper stores were family-run businesses, but smaller in scale. None of them was larger than a single living room. "Usually, like Liu's(see table 1, the tobacco-paper store next to lane entrance 43), the tobacco-paper store was merely the front half of a"living room facing onto the street, and the back half of the room was used by the family for household needs. In some cases, the whole store was no more than a shop window with no space for customers to walk in; in such stores, all of the business was conducted over a counter set on the shop windowsill. Owners of these stores could not afford to have helpers other than family members, hence these stores wereSTORES AND NEIGHBORHOODS IN MODERN SHANGHAI 101 Most households used coal to fuel their stoves. A coal stove was a square or round tube made of tinplate, about two feet high, and ten inches on each side (if it was square) or one foot in diameter (if it was round), with a cone-shaped furnace in the middle, insulation materials (such as coal cinders) stuffed between the furnace and the tinplate edges, and handles. For decades in this century, a coal stove like this was the only energy source for cooking and heating in ordinary Shanghai households, and about 98 percent of Shanghai's inhabitants could not live without it. Up to 1983, about 5 1 percent of the households of Shanghai were still using coal stoves as their only cooking and heating facility (Shanghaishi tonui 1983:320). It was reported that in 1990, 1.04 million coal stoves were being used by the residents of Shanghai (Wang and Qiu 1990), a fact that contradicts the popular image of the modernity of China's leading "treaty port." Because of the ubiquity of coal stoves, shops selling coal could be found on every block in lilong neighborhoods. These stores were known as "egg-shaped briquette stores" (m~iqiudian) because egg-shaped briquettes were the major commodity sold. But coal stores also sold charcoal, firewood chips, and other fuels such as kerosene. Firewood chips were a daily necessity, for most households extinguished the coal stove every night before going to bed, and in the morning, one of the first tasks was to light the stove with waste paper and wood chips. Emily Honig (1986:136) has mentioned that lighting the stove was the first thing women workers of Shanghai's cotton mills did in the morning. This was, in fact, a routine morning chore for every household in Shanghai that did not have a gas stove (1-3, 1-4). All the shopkeepers lived on the second floor of the house in which the store was located and took care of their business all day long. Usually the male head of the family was the owner and manager of the store. He might hire one or two shop assistants who were, more often than not, relatives or fellow townsmen. His wife and adult children often worked as helpers when needed. One coal store owner on Hart Road, for example, had his nephew work in his store as counter clerk (also, bookkeeper) for seventeen years (1936-53) and his eldest son as shop assistant for nine years (1938-47). In 1947 he opened another coal store a few blocks from the first one, and had his eldest son run the new store. His daughter-in-law became the counter clerk and bookkeeper of the new store (Yao and Ang 1935:3; 1-4, 1-51. Tobacco-Paper Stores Stores popularly known as yanzhidian (lit., tobacco-paper store) were actually variety stores. The owner of one such store, Liu Xiangyu, has run a variety store since 1942, when he inherited his father's barbershop on Hart Road. He soon turned the barbershop into a yanzhidian. Like rice and coal stores, tobacco-paper stores were family-run businesses, but smaller in scale. None of them was larger than a single "living room." Usually, like Liu's (see table 1, the tobacco-paper store next to lane entrance 43), the tobacco-paper store was merely the front half of a "living room" facing onto the street, and the back half of the room was used by the family for household needs. In some cases, the whole store was no more than a shop window, with no space for customers to walk in; in such stores, all of the business was conducted over a counter set on the shop windowsill. Owners of these stores could not afford to have helpers other than family members, hence these stores were