The Fab Four

These are four models showing acupunture spots. I saw them in the panjiayuan market in Beijing a few weeks ago. A favorite haunt for savvy tourists, local expats & Chinese alike, the market opened a few years ago at its present location. Prior to its move, it was known as the "Ghost Market" or the "Dirt Market" because it regularly disappeared. Operating only on Saturday & Sunday mornings, it was a sprawling empty lot where vendors came in from the countryside and spread their wares out on blankets laid on the dirt. In its early years, most of the stuff you could find was either worthless junk or genuine artifacts of a bygone era, peeping out from whatever hole they had hidden in during the Great Leap Forward, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, & (of course) the Cultural Revolution. My always overactive imagination assumed that the sellers had carefully hidden all these things away from the Red Guard and whomever else might covet them. Along with that fantasy, I looked at all the vendors themselves as survivors of the vivid history of modern China. Surrounded now by the sterile towers of post-Olympics Beijing, some of the old-timers are still there. Whether their goods are genuine or not, you'll have to decide for yourself. People say they still find the occasional gem. Altho its now much less of a ghost market & is housed in a sprawling semi-permanent complex of old-style buildings & open air shelters, it still retains some of the flavor & atmosphere of the old market.