Food Market

Wangfujing & the street behind it

Wangfujing is one of Beijing's oldest commercial streets, with trade on the site going back to the middle of the Ming dynasty. Its present character, though, dates to the Qing dynasty, when ten aristocratic estates and a princess's residence were built along it. The name itself comes from that history: wangfu means “prince's residence,” and jing means “well,” after a well of sweet water discovered near the estates soon after they went up. By the early 20th century the street was even known to foreigners as Morrison Street, after the Australian journalist George Ernest Morrison, who lived there.

Today Wangfujing is a pedestrianised shopping boulevard of around 280 stores, running from Oriental Plaza and the Beijing Hotel up to St. Joseph's Catholic Church, lined with department stores and malls rather than market stalls. The night market I stumbled into wasn't on Wangfujing itself but in a side alley off it, near the street's northern end, at what's named for the Forbidden City's East Gate (Donghuamen, 东华门) nearby.

The Donghuamen Night Market had been there for years by the time I visited in 2014, a strip of mobile carts under red-and-white awnings that set up each evening and packed away again by morning. It was unmistakably built for visitors rather than locals: it was clean, well lit, and heavily photographed, and Beijing residents mostly ate elsewhere.

It didn't last much longer after my visit. The Donghuamen Night Market closed for good on 24 June 2016, following complaints from residents and local businesses about hygiene and noise.

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What was available to eat

The market worked like a gauntlet: stall after stall with its catch laid out raw and often still moving, so you chose your creature before it was cooked to order. Other visitors who wrote about the market around the same years I was there, describe much of what I remember:

• Scorpions, sold live, skewered several to a stick, then dropped into hot oil to order. One of the market's signature sights, reportedly offered in more than one size.
• Seahorses and starfish, dried or fried whole, alongside squid, shrimp, and octopus on the market's seafood-skewer stalls.
• Snake, grilled or fried meat, threaded onto sticks like any other skewer.
• Tarantulas, centipedes, and silkworms, deep-fried.
• Cicadas and grasshoppers, grilled complete on skewers, a more everyday find in Chinese night markets than the scorpions and spiders, but just as striking laid out in rows.

And then there was everything the market kept alive rather than displayed: the live fish circling in shallow tin bowls, the toads bundled together in large nets, and the chickens in stacked wire cages, all waiting to be chosen and dispatched to order. It's the part of the market that's hardest to find written about now, probably because it photographs less well than a tray of fried scorpions, but it's the part I remember most vividly. Besides all of it sat the spice stalls: mounds of ground chilli, cumin, five-spice, and sesame in deep reds, ochres, and browns, piled into cones and scooped onto the meat and vegetable skewers once they came off the grill.

The effect of the whole street was less a meal than a performance. Onlookers gathered to watch other people actually eat the stranger items, which made every table part of the show.

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My visit to the market

I decided to try some things on offer as we walked through the market.

• First up was a starfish: I asked the lady for one, and she pointed at the star fish in a tank in front of her. Not knowing any better and not wanting to appear scared to try it, I chose one, grabbed it and went to take a bite. The lady looked at me horrified and shouted at me and held her hand out to take the star fish from me. She then put it on a wooden skewer and deep-fried it before handing it back to me. I have to say it was horrible, it was very dry and so dry the leg I bit off was difficult to swallow. I passed it over to Mel who like me, took a bite of a leg before handing it on to Dave, April & Rob, who all ate the rest of it.
• Next up was a snake skewer: Mel returned with a spicy snake skewer. After taking a bite herself, she handed it to me and I attempted to bite off a bit. It was very rubbery and difficult to bite a bit off. After eventually biting some off to eat I handed the skewer to Ron who polished the rest off quickly.
• Finally we had a scorpion skewer: Tracy again refused to try it, but after I had taken and eaten the first scorpion, Mel ate the second one. They were very crunchy. I don't remember what they tasted like, but I won't be rushing to eat them again.

After we had eaten at the stall, we continued to walk through further side streets on our way to a restaurant for our evening meal. We passed numerous colourful sacks of spices. Live chickens in cages waiting to be be decapitated and handed to buyers, in some cases still twitching after having their had been cut off in front of us by the stallholders with bloodied axes.  We also saw plenty of large metal bowls holding live fish, some with cats hanging around, waiting for a chance to grab dinner. The strangest thing I remember were the string sacks full of live toads, they were huge and made a lot of noise as we walked past.

We did get to our restaurant, but apart from the fact it was a nice restaurant with regular food served on a lazy Susan table. I have no memory of it or leaving to go back to the hotel for the night.

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Its gone now

The Donghuamen Night Market closed for good less than two years after my visit, shut down by the district government in June 2016 after complaints about hygiene and noise from residents and nearby businesses. The stalls, the woks, the tubs of live scorpions and toads, all packed up for the last time. Wangfujing itself is still there, still one of Beijing's busiest shopping streets, but the alley I walked down in 2014 doesn't exist any more in the form I saw it.

I'm glad I got there when I did. It's the kind of place you don't fully appreciate until it's gone. A single strange, loud, smoky block that managed to put the whole range of what people in Beijing will put on a stick in front of one tourist with a camera and no idea what he was about to eat.

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