Sensual City Studio

CIGARETTES

Being a smoker in Shanghai is fun. You’re allowed to smoke almost everywhere, and the best part is being able to smoke in the taxi back home.
This custom is comparable to the traditions surrounding food.
In particular, it is bad manners to eat everything on your   plate, as this signifies that you are still hungry and consequently want and need more food in order to be satisfied. The plates on the table will be endlessly refilled, until you finally give up your Western ways and leave some food to be thrown away.
With cigarettes, it’s kind of the same: sometimes you will still be smoking a cigarette and your Chinese friend will offer you another one. In this case, you should simply put out the one in your mouth and take the new one your friend is offering; later, it will be your turn to do the same.
And, believe it or not, it is actually normal to eat while smoking.
In a taxi, sometimes you can simply ask the taxi driver if he wants a cigarette, and hey presto, there you are in a mobile living room or smoking lounge.
Not accepting cigarettes is like not accepting food: it’s not good manners. However, they will accept a refusal, if you are truly a non-smoker. Just make sure they understand that it’s not an unfriendly gesture, but simply because… well… you’ll need a good excuse for this one! Personally, I don’t know of one…

TREES

Trees are a little bit of nature in the concrete jungle, and dispensers of shade. As a Spanish saying goes, “everything happens in the shade  ” .
In the almost cruelly hot summers of Shanghai, nothing is put to its fullest use like trees. In the parks, it is under the leafy shade of the trees that people dance, practise martial arts and play all sorts of traditional Chinese games. Walking, driving and cycling is simply delightful under these huge canopies of coolness.
Chinese culture has a long tradition of gardens. They are places that are carefully planned as architectural artefacts.
In the emperor’s palaces, gardens were created for recreation, meetings and relaxation, as a meditative space in which to dwell. It is said that football was actually invented under the trees of one of these palaces by the concubines of an emperor. The girls got bored and started playing with a ball, forming teams, since there were so many of them for the emperor to choose from.
Plane trees were brought over by the French in around 1902, to embellish their concession, held between 1849 and 1943.
These providers of shade were first planted along what was then Avenue Joffre, which used to be a tram route, and which is nowadays known as Huaihai Road, one of the city’s most important shopping streets. And yet these plane trees, with their characteristic forms, have become a symbol of Shanghai, and the go-to location for brides and grooms posing for photos before their weddings.

INAUGURATION

Happiness is not silent in Shanghai. When a boy is born, or when a happy couple gets married, or when a couple moves into the new home they have bought together , or when a shop opens its doors for the first time… all these events are good reasons to show one’s happiness to the entire neighbourhood and beyond. Rows of red firecrackers are set off, red ornaments adorn the street, and photographs galore are taken.

CONFUCIUS AND LEARNING

I came to a Confucius temple, and a school. I understood, then, the link between the roots of beliefs passed on from one generation to another, in the spatial sense: the inseparable link between Confucius and knowledge in China.
When a friend of mine arrived, she had many items with her: incense sticks, paper, red silk thread, and a wooden panel.
The transformation of these items then started to take place.
On the paper, she told me to write all my needs and hopes concerning my studies. Then, by adding the red string to them, they would become “gaokao [university entrance exam] wishes”.
The wooden panels became “prayer cards”, a tradition that is believed to have originated in this very temple in Shanghai.
Together we then hung them in a tree, where other students’ prayers already hung, so that they would be received by Confucius  .
Before that, though, we paid our respects by kneeling in front of Confucius and lighting three incense sticks each, which we then placed inside a huge vase made for this purpose.
After finishing our respective rituals, we went to one of the largest book markets in Shanghai, where an amazing array of rare books, manuscripts, comics, propaganda posters and other items from various Chinese eras were waiting to be discovered.

GESTURES

Every culture has its own gestures. Indians constantly move their heads while talking. Similarly, Japanese use their heads to indicate that they have understood the subject.   As for Italians, they have a whole array of hand gestures that form a sort of language of their own. Shanghainese, on the other hand, don’t have all that many gestures, probably because of the embedded notion of yin   and yang   within Chinese culture and, consequently, their conception of healthiness. No one should be too happy or too sad. Equilibrium shall always prevail.
Nonetheless, when there is a crowd of Shanghainese watching a group of people playing mah-jong or carrom or any other table game, they will cross their arms, and some will smoke a cigarette without even touching it, as they do when they ride a bike, take a break at work or have a meal in a restaurant. What’s more, they will often do this while adopting the “crouching-on-heels position”. Since the very beginning of time, it has been shown that this is the best posture for the human body; however, in the West, most of us can’t really do this anymore, or at least not if we have to put our heels on the ground. But the Chinese can, and do, all the time, and hold this position for a very long time – while working, eating, waiting for public transport, going to the toilet, or simply talking to each other in the park or in the street.