Smoking, Swilling, and Working: New Tour Sees the Women of Dashilar Differently

Anna Pellegrin Hartley | Mar 7, 2019 10:00 am | Add a comment | 686 reads

Beijing's favorite archive-diving tour company, Beijing Postcards, have just released a brand new walk-and-talk. Titled Republican Ladies and the Women of Dashilar, it is the result of months of research on the part of Lars Thom and his team, who turn their focus to the changing roles of the fairer sex during China's Republican Era (1912-1949).

While the Dashilar neighborhood is known these days for its well-preserved hutongs, crammed with trendy cafés, traditional workshops, antique stores, calligraphy ateliers, and old bookshops, its history was not always so chic. As Thom explains, with the abdication of Puyi in 1912, the changes that were unleashed upon Beijing were multiple. Freed from the structure of dynastic rule, women were able to enjoy freedoms and opportunities to live, work and play as never before. Yet curiosity was not the only thing pushing these women out the door. The outgoing power structure took its generous financial incomes endowments with it, and many newly-minted inner-city Republican ladies were forced into the workforce by poverty, taking on jobs that had previously only been the dominion of men such as dragging rickshaws or selling wares on the street.

Regardless of how they got there, women were growing increasingly visible in the public sphere, demanding the right to education, work, economic freedom, and equality, and Beijing finally appeared to be catching up with the rest of the world. Dashilar itself became home to some of the city's most notorious brothels, as well as public houses, theaters, and schools. It was an exciting, tumultuous time, and all of it was reported in breathless detail by the dozens of female-focussed magazines that sprung up to meet demand.

It is the fascinating articles, illustrations, and photographs that appear in these publications – many which depict a world of women and gender relations that contradict accepted wisdom of the time – which form the primary source material of this tour.

Beginning with a discussion in the Beijing Postcards shop, and winding through the narrow hutongs of Dashilar, the walking tour takes an illuminating look at the drastic changes women of Dashilar, and Beijing as a whole, faced following the turn of the century, and the legacy they left behind.