Nanjing Road: The Department Store as a City

East Nanjing Road did not mark the beginning of Shanghai. It became a commercial artery during the city's modern treaty-port era. The street began as Garden Lane in 1851, linking the Bund waterfront with a racecourse near today's People's Square. As foreign trade and the city expanded, shops clustered along this route and commercial ambition took architectural form in increasingly elaborate street fronts.

That history is easiest to read through stores rather than a single monument. By the 1920s and 1930s, the Four Great Companies—Wing On, Sincere, Sun Sun and Dah Sun—made this corridor a center of Chinese department-store retail. The names are historical markers, not interchangeable labels for today's businesses: premises changed hands, were renamed and acquired new functions over time.

The early department store changed what a shop could ask a customer to do. Window displays made goods visible from the street; escalators and elevators turned upper floors into part of the same visit. A shopper could move between departments, compare objects and look without beginning with a specific order. These were practical technologies, but they also made shopping a public leisure activity in a rapidly changing city.

The street's grand fronts helped stage that shift. Facades gave large stores a civic presence, while broad display windows linked the interior to passing pedestrians. Architecture and retail met at the threshold: the city presented itself through objects arranged for view, and the store invited people inside to continue looking. This is why a department-store building carries more than a catalogue of products; it records a new choreography of movement and attention.

Wing On's address on East Nanjing Road has carried different identities. The Shanghai government account notes that the building was Hua Lian Department Store from 1988 to 2006 before the Wing On name returned; the earlier Four Great Companies belong to another historical layer. Shanghai No 1 Department Store, meanwhile, began after 1949 as the first state-owned department store. It is not simply the same business as the prewar Dah Sun store, even though the sites and stories of the street overlap.

In recent years, Shanghai No 1 Department Store has added art programming, selected books, cultural products and immersive performance spaces to conventional retail. A limited 2026 Shanghai Style pop-up presented craft and design objects there as a temporary exhibition-like shop. These examples show how the department store can keep changing its role: from assembling goods under one roof to curating experiences around them. The useful question is not which store is oldest, but how each era organizes looking, movement and exchange.