"For more than four years, I've often - almost every day - been going between the pawnshop and the drugstore. I have forgotten how old I was at the time, but I remember that I was as tall as the counter of the drugstore. The pawnshop counter was twice my height. I handed some clothes or jewelry over the pawnshop counter, and was contemptuously handed back some money. Then I headed to the drugstore where the counter was the same height as me, to buy medicine for my father who suffered from a long illness," wrote the famous Chinese writer Lu Xu in the preface to his novel Call to Arms .

As a kind of symbol of the dark "old society," many Chinese nowadays get their first impression of pawnshops from this article from middle school textbooks. What Lu Xun described in his novel is the pawnshop in the town of Shaoxing in East China's Zhejiang Province around the turn of the 20th century. During that period, the prosperity of the pawn industry reflected the dire state of the economy. The poorest people regularly used pawnshops to get money to supplement their incomes.

But modern day Chinese pawnshops, like those in Shanghai, though not large in number, have a different function. They have become a kind of "second bank" for some people.

  Pawnshop Culture

Pawnshops are a kind of credit organization, charging high interest rates, but they are also an inevitable byproduct of the market economy. They have helped circulate resources and helped some people, surviving and developing for thousands of years according to traditional Chinese values.

Historical records show that the pawn industry can be traced back to the Southern and Northern dynasties (420-581), when temples operated pawnshops to help people with problems making ends meet.

Under the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the pawn industry moved away from the temples and became more widespread. Records about the limitation of the industry interest rates show that pawning was already legal at the time.

In the Song Dynasty (960-1127), the pawn industry became an established trade, and in the town of Lin'an there were already a dozen pawnshops.

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