A hugely-popular, Nanjing-shopping icon is now more-than likely a thing of the past. Citizens were left aghast over the weekend at images of the enormous fire and resulting smoke engulfing one of Nanjing’s mega malls which flooded social media.
At about 10:00 this past Saturday, 29 October, an initially-not-so-serious fire broke out in the branch of the Jinsheng Department Store at 2 Jianning Lu (Zhongyang Men) in Nanjing’s Gulou District. First responders were immediately mobilised to the scene.
But the fire quickly spread and became out of control, to the extent that additional firefighters and equipment were called in from the nearby cities of Wuxi, Changzhou and Yangzhou, reports The Paper.
As a sign of the fire’s severity, it took almost a full day for it to be completely extinguished, as Nanjing’s fire authorities confirmed at 06:44 on Sunday.
In something of a miracle, by all reports there were no casualties in the enormous blaze, everyone in the building having been evacuated quickly after the initial fire.
While official media is playing down the extent of the blaze, photographs have been circulating online that show there is little left of the Jinsheng mall. Indeed, some tenants thereof, many of whom were in the midst of preparations for the “Double 11” shopping-discount carnival, said they have lost about ¥700,000 worth of inventory.
Around noon on Saturday, reporters called a Ms Wang, owner of Fuwandai Jewelry on the first floor of Jinsheng. She said that her shop was not burned by the fire, but flooded by the attempts to extinguish it.
In her shop, Wang held ornamental pieces of gold, silver, jadeite, amber and more, valued at over ¥3 million. “We came out empty handed, nothing, and now we are not allowed to go in”, said Wang at the time, adding that she won’t be opening a shop there again in the future.
Away from shopowners who have lost their livelihoods, media has instead focused its attention on the mall’s principal shareholder, AXA Minmetals. On 30 October, an article on the AXA Minmetals Group website stated the fire would inevitably cause incalculable losses to the company, stores and merchants.
This incident is the latest on a long list of recent financial woes for the real-estate developer. The company’s founder, Wang Hua, was in 2006 ranked 7 on the Hurun Retail Rich List. More recently, however, with AXA Minmetals Group in a litigation quagmire, Wang Hua now instead finds himself listed as a dishonest executor.
Jinsheng in Nanjing was for decades a popular place for anything cheap. Indeed, other than Taboo, there were few places things could be had for less. But unlike the online version, at Jinsheng, you could come in person, see, feel and smell the products, and most importantly, bargain.
Over five floors with 18 escalators and nearly 1,000 independent stores, Jinsheng carried over 50,000 kinds of goods in 30 categories. Home furnishing, tourism, festive crafts, baby products, soft home furnishings, daily necessities, down clothing; you name it, Jinsheng had it.
While the building itself, old as it was, will likely not be missed, the experience of shopping therein, something unique to China and especially Nanjing, will certainly be.
