HAN Ping, aged 58, is about to move into the new apartment he just bought. He wants to live together with his parents, and new furniture is on his decorating list. Meanwhile, he worries about how to dispose of the old stuff. Seeing that the old furniture has held up for several decades, his aging mother is not convinced it's a good move and keeps asking herself, "Do we give them up or not?" To her, this is a serious question.

Shanghai's The City's Memory, a recent exhibition of oldies-but-goodies, drew numerous visitors to discover their nostagia.

Unmatched pieces of furniture in disparate styles from different decades look out of place in an apartment like Han Ping's, not to mention several old wooden trunks his parents have brought along. Han Ping fully understands their nostalgic value, but his children don't.

The 1950s: Furniture That Gets the Job Done

Han Ping's parents are native to Shanxi Province. "We came to Beijing with the People's Liberation Army, and married in 1950. Our apartment and furniture were assigned by our PLA unit. We ate in the canteen, so we didn't need much in the way of cooking utensils. We bought only two wooden trunks and a washstand made of iron bars," recalled Han Ke, Ping's father. Han Ping also remembers that as a small child all the pieces, such as a wooden bed, and a small cabinet and table, had an iron label bearing the serial number and name of his father's work unit. "These things belong to the unit, and we in fact rented it. The rental bill listed the fee for use of the furniture."

"My childhood 'bed' was made of two wooden trunks," said Han Ping. Though not all families were like his, it was common that the household accouterments were few and simple. Many families used beds, tables, chairs, trunks and cabinets that had been discarded by workplaces or inherited from an older generation. (Some of the inherited items later became quite valuable, a subject we'll return to later.)

As family size grew and living standards improved, Han Ke splurged a few of his hard-earned RMB on a bed and an iron bookshelf being disposed of by his work unit, then asked a relative to make a desk with drawers at one end, and a chest of drawers inlaid with a mirror. Aesthetic ambition played no part in this. The emphasis was placed solely on durability; it was fine if it did the job.

In 1958, to answer the call of "steel as the key to the Great Leap Forward," Han Ke donated his iron bookshelf and washstand. That year, the whole country busied itself with the "Great Leap Forward" Movement and the "Iron and Steel Smelting" Campaign, in order to realize industrialization and an increase in agricultural output.