Shanghai Paramount Ballroom
Modern Shanghai seems to be an immortal magic city, with countless love and hate every day, and its century-long development history also provides unlimited reverie space for today's Chinese. In a large number of film and television dramas about Shanghai in the Republic of China, it is inseparable from the depiction of shanghai beach dance halls and dancers, such as the post-80s impressive "Huo Yuanjia", "Jingwumen", "Half Life" and other film and television dramas with the old Shanghai as the stage, there are Paramount singers. In fact, the dance hall and dance have become important symbols in people's memories and fantasies about old Shanghai, and they are also symbols of the prosperity of Shanghai Beach. However, unlike the beautiful and modern image in the film and television drama, the real history of the Shanghai Beach dancers, their living conditions are much more complicated. Even in 1948, tens of thousands of dancers marched and destroyed government offices. Today, let's take a look at the dancers of old Shanghai.
Chinese dance has a long history, but most of them attach importance to individual solo dance and rarely interact with each other. In contrast, Western dances have flourished in modern times, and in addition to being watched, these dances are also very important for communication, so dances such as waltz are also called "ballroom dances". In 1812, the British government approved the waltz dance, which then spread to the United States and was equally popular. At that time, Western society had gradually moved away from the conservatism and prejudice of the Middle Ages, and it was acceptable that men and women had a certain degree of physical contact in public, and ballroom dancing became an important way for people to communicate with each other.
waltz
In 1842, China was forced to open a treaty port, And Western ballroom dance was also introduced to China along with ship cannons, which was first popular mainly among the Western population in the concession, and later with the deepening of Sino-Western exchanges, more and more Chinese began to contact and try ballroom dance, especially the emergence of foreign students who went to Western countries as diplomatic envoys and studied in various countries, which made ballroom dance begin to expand into the circle of Chinese. Although Chinese at this time were worried about this new dance that was completely different from traditional Chinese dance, believing that it would bring men and women too close to each other, their tolerance gradually expanded. In 1897, the newly appointed Shanghai Daotai Cai Jun, in order to show kindness at home and abroad and to wish Empress Dowager Cixi a happy birthday, decided to hold a grand ball at the Jing'an Temple Road Foreign Affairs Bureau. According to Cai Jun, this is to use Western etiquette to express respect for Westerners. This is the first ballroom held by Chinese, which is of breakthrough significance in the history of Chinese dance and the history of Sino-foreign exchanges.
After nearly a hundred years of development and evolution, by the time the National Government of Nanjing was established in 1927, Shanghai had become a huge modern city, with tens of thousands of Western expatriates and millions of Chinese living here. It is also since 1927 that the Shanghai Ballroom has entered an unprecedented stage of development, ballroom dance and dance hall has become an important "landscape" in Shanghai, and dance is no longer popular only in the upper class like the late Qing Dynasty, but has become an entertainment method for the general public.
The construction of a large number of dance halls is a landmark event for the rapid development of Shanghai's dance industry. At that time, how many dance halls in Shanghai Beach is still unknown, but according to the observation of the time, Shanghai dance halls were divided into several levels, such as the Licha Hotel, the Dahua Hotel, the Calden Dance Hall, the Anle Palace Dance Hall, the Dahu Dance Hall and other high-end hotels or dance halls, which were the most luxurious and comfortable dance venues in Shanghai, most of these hotels or dance halls have appeared in the late Qing Dynasty, and have received countless high-ranking officials and dignitaries in the past few decades, and are excellent places for Shanghainese with heads and faces to dance and watch dance. In addition, there are some middle and lower dance halls, these dance halls compared to the upper class dance hall gap is naturally very large, but the actual conditions are not too bad, can go in to dance most of the middle-class families in Shanghai, after all, for thousands of ordinary Chinese, dancing Western ballroom dance is still a very high threshold thing, they will not dance and do not have extra money to dance in the dance hall.
Retic Hotel
In addition to dance halls, as the publishing center of modern China, a large number of newspapers and magazines distributed through Shanghai also have a large number of reports related to dances or dance halls. Many newspapers and periodicals have shown unprecedented attention to the dance hall and dance industry, such as the "Declaration" published a large number of dance hall advertisements, these advertisements are not simply to promote the dance hall, such as the dance hall of various programs and dancers are also placed in it, to attract customers. At the same time, Chinese dancers also appeared in large numbers in dance halls, which was a fundamental change compared with the situation in the late Qing Dynasty when dance halls were full of Western dancers. These Chinese dancers are not only handsome and good at dancing, some high-end dance halls also require them to be able to "know English well", of course, their salaries are also very high, far more than the average female worker. In order to improve the popularity of dance halls, many large hotels and high-end dance halls will also hold a variety of dance competitions, such as the Anle Palace Hotel, which hosted the first post-dance election in Shanghai and invited celebrities from all walks of life to supervise the votes.
On the one hand, the prosperity of the dance hall has enriched the entertainment life of Shanghai citizens, and on the other hand, it has also become a major problem for the Shanghai Municipal Government to carry out urban governance. Some people may ask, how can opening a dance hall and dancing make the city government feel a headache? This also depends on the social reality of the time. Although shanghai ballroom dance has become common, as a new dance, the rise of ballroom dance with close physical contact and the emergence of a large number of dance halls are still a great psychological and cultural impact for most Chinese. Many conservative celebrities have repeatedly requested the National Government and local governments to seal down dance halls and prohibit people from dancing ballrooms on the grounds of corrupting the social atmosphere.
The old Shanghai singer in the film and television drama
The Shanghai municipal government felt very embarrassed, Shanghai is not like Nanjing and Beiping, it is a city without concessions, Shanghai has many concessions, this uniqueness makes it impossible for Shanghai to seal or ban dance halls. The 1931 September 18 Incident and the outbreak of the Songhu War of Resistance in 1932 further deepened the antipathy of Local Shanghai society towards dance halls. They believe that when the country is in trouble, the major dance halls in Shanghai are still singing and laughing, singing and dancing, without the slightest shame, and the government must ban the dance halls in order to show their determination to resist the war. Although the Shanghai Municipal Government agreed to seal down the major dance halls in the Chinese border, due to the existence of the concession, the people who had originally danced in the Chinese border went to the concession to dance, and the Shanghai Municipal Government's ban was like a fictitious one.
Shanghai Municipal Government Building
In 1945, after the victory of the all-out War of Resistance, the major dance halls in Shanghai ended the difficult years of Japanese and puppet rule, and originally thought that they would enter a new stage of development, but they did not expect to be rectified again. After the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Nationalist government took over the concessions in an all-round way, and Shanghai was no longer what it was in the 1930s, and the major dance halls could not seek refuge in the concessions. At the urgent moment when war was about to break out between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, both the Nationalist Government and the Shanghai Municipal Government decided to rectify the Shanghai Ballroom as the entry point to ensure that the social order in Shanghai remained stable.
In 1947, in the name of "economy", the Nationalist government issued a decree banning for-profit dance halls throughout the country, of which Shanghai suffered the most. In January 1948, more than 3,000 dancers in Shanghai held a plenary meeting in the Vienna Ballroom in Shanghai to discuss their personal way out. On the 31st, thousands of dancers and workers decided to go to the Shanghai Municipal Social Bureau to protest, they broke into the Social Bureau and destroyed it, and a large number of dancers cried in front of the Social Bureau to protest that the government had cut off their way of life. The Shanghai Municipal Police Arrested a large number of dancers and employees, and 69 of them were brought to court for trial, but no matter how the dancers protested against it, the Shanghai Dance Hall was also struggling to maintain. On May 27, 1949, the People's Liberation Army successfully liberated Shanghai and carried out a comprehensive transformation of the dance hall.
Dancers' Parade in 1948
After the ballroom dance was introduced to China from the West, it quickly became popular in China for more than a hundred years. A large number of dance halls have been established in China, especially in Shanghai, and countless dancers and customers have poured into them, staging the joys and sorrows of the world. Ballroom dancing was a huge impact on Chinese original ideas, but it also brought them closer to the world. In the poor and weak modern China, the fate of dance is also destined to be closely related to the fate of the country, and ballroom dance has encountered many restrictions in the process of development, often subject to government rectification.
Ma Jun: Ballroom and Municipal Administration: A Page of Shanghai's Century-Old Entertainment Life, Shanghai Dictionary Publishing House, 2010.
Zhao Fengling, "Ballroom Dancing and the "Modern" Life of Modern Urban Women", Jianghan Forum, No. 5, 2008.
(Author: Haoran Wenshi Little Sun)
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