In the 19th-century, Shanghai was a city on the make with a tenuous grasp of law and order. As such, it was an especially harsh place for immigrants newly arrived from other parts of China. This sense of alienation prompted many migrant workers to seek lodging, kinship and entertainment – not to mention protection in this often dangerous new world – from their native place associations, commonly known as tongwianghui or huiguan. Today, vestiges of these groups can still be seen in Shanghai along Guangdong, Fujian and Ningbo Roads, which were named after these sojourner associations.

Serving the needs of communities from the same province or area, these groups were organized on the basis of labor which had traditionally been divided along regional lines: tea traders from Anhui, carpenters from Canton, blacksmiths from Wuxi, silk merchants from Zhejiang and Jiangsu and machinists from Ningbo and Shaoxing.
Whole industries came to be dominated by certain groups, so that Shanghai homebuyers, for example, would commonly remark that without the involvement of a Huizhu person (from Anhui ), they stood little chance of getting a mortgage. Read the rest of this entry »