There are flower-cum-pet markets all over Shanghai, but the most fascinating is perhaps the one in South Xizang Road which runs north to south just to the west of the Old City of Shanghai. The nearest metro station is Laoximen, which means old west gate (of the city), but it still has a flavour of the old city about it, even though the buildings are more modern. This is not a place to go for the faint-hearted or for someone who believes that single-handedly you can change Chinese attitudes to animal welfare. I took Charlie and his then girl friend Ella somewhere similar in the summer of 2015 and they wanted me to buy all the birds for sale in one shop and to set them free. I refused saying that it would just encourage pet sellers to stock even more birds.
Unlike many of the other markets around the city, there are few flowers for sale here, only the odd plant stall for indoor plants or plants for aquaria.
But what you can buy here are pets. Any sort of pet you can think of that can live in a small apartment in this vast city of 30-odd million people. (That’s almost 4 times bigger than population of Greater London, for those of you who haven’t quite grasped quite how mind-bogglingly big this city is).
Not surprisingly in the country that first domesticated the goldfish over a thousand years ago, there are many breeds on sale, from Koi Carp to Bubble Eye, some of which are decidedly ugly.
There are other pets to buy for keeping in tanks, from turtles and terrapins, salamanders to dyed frogs.
You can buy stones or figures for your aquarium, or pots for your plants or for tea drinking:
For some reason, which I have yet to fathom you can also buy gourds or carved walnuts or indeed a carved figure of the sign of your zodiac (Chinese that is):
And then there are the banks of caged birds:
or birds in their own cages
some far too young:
or the “pet” ones that are chained to their perch
and the mealworms to feed them with:
There are also guinea pigs, rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks:
and the puppies and cats:
as well as the locusts, cicadas and crickets with all sorts of cages sold for transporting and housing them:
so that their new owners can listen to them sing:
The only consolation in all this is that the lives of the stall holders don’t seem to be much different:
Pearls From The Orient 