“Welcome, come on in! We have special offers today, some items are up to 50% off. Don’t miss it!” – Visiting Beijing in 2024, from small street stalls to high-end supermarkets, you will hear the ubiquitous sound of sales-announcements: monotonous, often pre-recorded messages in endless repetition projected through low-fi megaphones. Why this noise? Why not rely on writing or colourful advertisements alone? Peddlers’ calls have a long tradition in Beijing: Once a versatile repertoire of calls performed by street vendors to attract customers as they passed through Beijing’s small alleyways (the hutong), these sounds are now understood as a unique type of ‘street theatre’ – a tradition that seems to live on in the age of the megaphone. A tradition, some would argue, worth reconstructing and preserving.
Interest in hawkers, market criers or peddlers’ calls is not new, nor is it unique to Beijing: While Seneca and Cicero seem to have expressed disdain for the noisy calls of street vendors in ancient Rome, in imperial China, the calls of street vendors were performed by eunuchs for emperors in their summer residence of Yuanmingyuan. In Europe, from the Middle Ages onward, street cries became a common subject in art and music: Clément Janequin’s (1485-1558) chanson ‘Voulez ouyr le cris de Paris‘ (Listen to the Cries of Paris) and Orlando Gibbon’s (1583-1625) madrigals ‘Cries of London‘ offer humoresque imitations of the calls of street criers. In China alike, market scenes and peddlers were a popular subject of paintings.
These artistic renditions of course entail changes to the ‘original’ sound: they isolate (or silence) the peddler’s call, divorce it from its original space and function, focus in on and potentially ‘clean’ the sound for aesthetic appreciation etc. This process – the aestheticisation of peddlers’ calls – is interesting in itself. Its importance is heightened, however, when these sounds become politicised.
In Europe and China alike, peddlers’ calls became what Murray Schaeffer calls a ‘soundmark’: a (unique) sound, which is tried to a specific place and familiar to its community – thus featuring in its memory culture and contributing to the identity construction of the community. As such, soundmarks became part of the social and political struggle associated with modernisation: In nineteenth-century Paris and London, as the industrial revolution and state-led urban (re)construction reshaped city soundscapes, the perceived disappearance of hawkers and their street theatre was bemoaned as a loss of a crucial part of city life. Musicologist Jacek Blaszkiewicz writes:
‘during the Second French Empire (1852-70) [the Prefect of Seine, Georges-Eugène „Baron” Haussmann] ordered the mass demolition of working-class neighborhoods […] Haussmannization irrevocably altered the Parisian soundscape by displacing, policing, and thus silencing the working-class communities that made their living with their voices. […] A proliferation of books, poetry, and musical works about hawkers reveals a middle-class drive to thwart the eventual disappearance of the city’s iconic sights and sounds. This nostalgic counternarrative aligned the cris de Paris with the broader idea of le vieux Paris (the old Paris) […]. The emergence of an imagined “old city” provided an ideological check on the Second Empire’s utopian, capitalistic urbanism.’
A similar story can now be told of the sound of Beijing’s hawkers – albeit with some unexpected, transcultural twists.
In the early twentieth century, the drastic changes in Beijing’s political and socio-economic fabric and architectural layout inspired a surge of artistic and academic interest in the preservation of local culture, including the ‘sounds of old Beijing’. Qi Rushan, renowned dramatist and long-term collaborator of Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang, for example, published A Pictorial Study of City Music in the Ancient Capital 古都市樂圖考in 1935, focusing on instruments of street vendors and their calls. Interestingly, this book was “translated” almost immediately: In 1937, Samuel Victor Constant produced a beautifully illustrated study called Calls, Sounds and Merchandise of the Peking Street Peddlers for his MA degree at the California College in China – heavily based on Qi’s account. Surprisingly, most of what we know about peddlers’ calls in republican China stems from these sources: Peddlers, often from neighbouring provinces, entered the Inner City of Beijing to sell their goods and specialised crafts and services. Since the courtyard home was sonically secluded from the bustling alleyways, peddlers would announce their arrival and advertise their goods. Each trade, each vendor, had a unique repertoire of calls and many used make-shift instruments to announce their arrival, performing a unique kind of ‘street theatre’. In fact, Qi’s and Constant’s books might be one of the main reasons why hawkers’ sounds are now considered a unique soundmark of the city. Constant’s descriptions have been translated back into Chinese, his illustrations are reprinted and widely used in commemorations of the cultural practice.
At the end of the last millennium, as urban land-use was commercialised and hutongs were demolished on a large scale, Beijing’s sonic environment and socio-economic fabric changed again and a new wave of commemoration started. Part of this period of nostalgia for the sounds of Old Beijing were projects such as Favourite Beijing Sounds: Initiated by the British Council and curated by British phonographer Peter Cusack in 2005/2006, it asked people to describe their favourite sounds of the city in order to reconstruct them. Peddlers’ calls feature prominently in the resulting collection of field recordings and the documented memory of Beijing citizens involved in the project. While the recordings seem to carry a nostalgic affection for peddlers’ calls and romanticise them through their focus, they also capture the process of destruction of the cultural practice.
But the aestheticised sound of itinerant vendors has been slowly reintroduced into its original space: Colin Chinnery (秦思源), former curator of the British Council’s Sound and the City project, opened his Shijia Hutong Museum in 2013. In Chinnery’s museum, we find a sound booth, where illustrations from Qi Rushan’s and Constant’s books are accompanied by hi-fi recordings of the instruments peddlers used. In fact, Colin Chinnery has become a unique force in reconstructing sounds of old Beijing: In 2023, his Sound Art Museum opened in Beijing’s new art district Songzhuang. Here, Peter Cusack’s recordings are featured again and visitors are asked to suggest new “Favourite Sounds”. The Museum also presents a collection of peddling instruments and a beautifully crafted sonic reconstruction and reimagination of the early 20th century Beijing soundscape, which includes peddlers’ calls. Chinnery’s projects may represent earnest, even critical efforts to preserve the historical sounds.
The impetus to preserve the ‘sounds of old Beijing’ seems to mirror the late-nineteenth-century reactions to urban renewal experienced in major cities in Europe. Again, public intellectuals and members of the middle-class questioned state-led modernisation programs, not rejecting modernisation and urban reconstruction per se, but negotiating the impact of these developments on their immediate environment and communities. But contrary to Paris and London, where the projects of state-building, urbanisation and capitalist-modernisation were largely aligned and peddlers’ calls silenced as representations of a feudal past, in Beijing, peddlers were considered remnants of a “semi-capitalist” society: When a comedy sketch called ‘Peddling Suite’ 叫卖组曲 was performed there in 1962, it earned a devastating critique: “In this three year period of struggle [the Great Leap Forward], to maliciously aestheticise the image of hawkers, means to call back the spirit of the restoration of capitalism.” Such traces and idealisations of capitalism and especially a portrayal of the lower classes as individual agents within it were not compatible with state ideology in the era of collectivisation even as Mao’s first major political campaign drew to a close. This changed with Reform and Opening: In the early 1980s, peddlers’ calls offered the perfect combination of folk-culture and the spirit of private market-oriented economic endeavour. In 1983, the “Peddling Suite” was performed again, by the Beijing People’s Art Theatre 人民艺术剧院 at the state-sanctioned CCTV Spring Festival Gala, and received favourably.
Since the early 2000s, this anesthetised version of peddlers’ calls has been practiced by amateur performance groups, such as the Old Beijing Peddlers’ Calls Art Group 老北京叫卖声艺术团, who offer performances of ‘historical’ street cries. These groups have also become the main drivers of its recognition as Intangible Cultural Heritage (as understood by the UNESCO) by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture in 2007. A historically informed reconstruction of peddlers’ calls seems to be secondary to these performance practices, which today mainly garner towards tourists.
Of course, staging peddlers’ calls changes them: It not only separates the sound from its original environment, but its performative effect builds on the dissonance this displacement entails: it counteracts the social and sonic expectations of the crude mannerisms of street vendors versus those of skilled actors. Furthermore, a stage makes the peddlers not only visible, but also the centre of aural attention. It demands a certain density of performative acts, which cuts short pauses and thus time to listen to potential other components of the hutong soundscape.
As is the case with most local art forms, the process of heritagisation has fundamentally changed the art form itself. The staged call has returned to the space as a state-sanctioned form of cultural expression, which now mainly serves the entertainment of tourists, foreign visitors, intellectual upper middle class, and the cultural elite. The aestheticised sound is divorced from the socioeconomic background of its historical performers and, most importantly, their contemporary, megaphone carrying counterparts. Nostalgic imaginations have allowed a disappearing sound to gain a cultural significance unattained by its historical patrons. All the while, the sound of peddlers’ calls has changed: For now, the polyrhythmic, multilayered call to buy mass produced items has become a new, albeit less celebrated, soundmark of the city.