Word: curios
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Since the automobile license fee was upped to $50 U.S. monthly, more than 9,000 automobiles have vanished from the streets; gasoline is $3 U.S. a gallon. In Shanghai's curio bazaar, where foreign visitors used to throng, merchants slump disconsolately beside their stalls or aimlessly play Chinese checkers. In once-thriving jewelry stores on Nanking Road, where intricately wrought gold ornaments and glistening jade once brought handsome prices, merchants have turned to selling soap, DDT, medicines, towels and underwear. Of 136 factories that formerly made headily scented cosmetics, only 30 are in operation, and they are engaged exclusively...
...tunghsi, or curio salesmen, find business rough. Their bronzes, brasswork and jade figurines bring only a quarter of the price they commanded last winter. One tunghsi man reminisces mournfully: "The mandarin coats-ah! We used to sell them for $20 apiece. When we ran out of real ones we went to the undertakers and bought up their supply of secondhand burial clothes. The burial clothes were even more ornate, and the Americans were twice as happy...
Beadles & Magnificence. Despite everything, it was a rather wonderful show. Visitors could forgive a dozen stilted scenes of the chase for a curio such as Tregonwell Frampton Arrested by a Bea dle, or The Ancient Ceremony of Cheese-rolling; and could pass pleasant minutes in contemplation of George Stubbs's beautifully painted study of Gimcrack (see cut), a magnificent grey horse of the 1760s, or of Marshall's John ("Gentle man") Jackson, a straight, first-rate study of the prime pugilist of the Regency...
...Rotarians let them down. Staid, stout and respectable, they ignored the hotspots, loosed not a wolf whistle. Festooned with cameras and shopping bags, they took the funicular to Sugar Loaf mountain, gazed at the Christ of Corcovado, swarmed into the curio shops to buy butterfly trays and carved knickknacks...
...lost delights of your reviled regime. One pressed a switch and lo! The Light was found (Today you would be fined ?100). Water and Gas obeyed the humblest hand, Though greedy Tories still controlled the land. Coal, too, almost like water, used to flow, A commonplace and not a curio. Coal, Chaos, was as plentiful as hay: We had so much we sent the stuff away! The Railways, not less rapid than they are, But much more regular, went just as far. The Ships, with small assistance from the State, Sailed round the Planet and returned with Freight . . . Either...