As the Chinese Lunar New Year approaches, a gathering of old collections expressing Shanghai people’s New Year travel custom was launched at the Shanghai Mass Art Center (SMAC) on December 9.

Scheduled to officially open on January 11st, 2020, the final collections exhibition will showcase to citizens old items related to travels during the Spring Festival, such as train tickets, train models and photos of the “ Spring Festival travel rush”.

In 1980, the phrase “Spring Festival travel rush” appeared in the People’s Daily for the first time to describe the annual large-scale return of Chinese migrant workers to their hometowns. Guan Xiaoming, who worked for the China Railway Bureau’s Shanghai Branch before retirement, is very familiar with these journeys. “In the 1970s, I myself used to take a freight train and spend 15 hours on my journey from Wuxi to Shanghai for family reunion, staying on the carriage, with kerosene lamps on, listening to the clickety-clack,” said Guan, who participated in the collection assembly activity.

During the Spring Festival travel rush in 1973, people flocked to Luohe Railway Station, a station in Central China’s Henan Province. [Photo/ Wechat account: Chinarailway]

Guan introduced several difficulties the Chinese faced during the travel rush in the past decades. For example, to get a ticket, people even had to arrive at the railway station one night in advance and sleep on the floor of the ticket booking office. And the waiting room was usually too cramped to hold so many passengers. Even when the train arrived, to successfully get on board among a swarm of people was another problem. In the worst cases, people even had to lie down under the seats and berths.

Zhang Jianren, another retiree who came to the activity, introduced that during the spring travel rush, providing bus services was as tiresome as working on a train. He was engaged in planning and dispatching buses at the Shanghai Tilanqiao No.2 Trolleybus Factory.

A series of monthly bus tickets from Shanghai in 1987 collected by Zhang Jianren. [Photo/ jfdaily.com]

“During that period, more buses had to be arranged to the stations near the railway station,” said Zhang, who has collected piles of monthly subscription bus tickets over the past decades and intended to contribute them to the coming exhibition. “From 1956 to 1989, a monthly ticket cost 6 yuan, but the price was raised to 12 yuan in 1990 except for the student ticket,” Zhang continued.