The Store That Named a Place

The building was a commercial venture with two identifiable authors. It was built with money raised by the comprador Gao Xingqiao, who managed the Tianjin sales office of the Jingxing mining bureau, and designed by the French architect Paul Muller of the Yonghe construction firm, who also taught at the Tianjin business college. It opened on 12 December 1928 at the crossing of the French concession's Consul General Road and Fuxu General Road, and became the largest and most complete department store in North China. A Chinese comprador's capital and a French architect's drawings produced the building that would define the city's shopping centre for decades.

The naming is a small story about who had influence. The French concession authorities suggested calling the store the French Emporium, but it was finally named Quanyechang on the advice of the shareholder Prince Zaizhen. Quanyechang means roughly the hall that promotes industry, a name that belongs to a programme of national commercial development rather than to a colonial administration, and the choice is a reminder that the concession's Chinese investors were not simply tenants of a foreign regime. In 2001 the building was placed on the national key cultural relic protection list, which is unusual for a twentieth-century department store.

The most interesting thing about Quanyechang is what happened to its name. By the 1930s it had replaced Guyi Street, the old silk and clothing street outside the wall, as the city's commercial hub, and the sources record that the word Quanyechang extended from the name of the building to the name of the place around the Binjiang and Heping road crossing. That is a rare event: a shop so dominant that its name becomes a district. The shift also marks the southward movement of the commercial centre toward the concessions, which had begun in the 1920s and which pulled businesses, including Goubuli, along with it.