From the excellent people over at EastSouthWestNorth comes this little tidbit of two stores located in Beijing’s Forbidden City with the rather cheeky signs: “只接待外宾、禁止国人入内” (“Only Foreign Guests received, Nationals strictly forbidden to enter.”) While there is no historical proof that the gates to the Shanghai parks in the 19th century really did prohibit dogs and Chinese, these new signs are alive and well and hanging in the Palace Museum.
The presence of the provocative placards prompted one pundit to ponder the presumption behind the posting. In a column in the Nanfang Daily, writer Cao Lin reports that the signs were not exclusionary. Prices in the stores were so exorbitant that the signs were needed as warnings for Chinese lest they accidentally spend 1500 RMB for a 150 RMB souvenir or, worse yet, spread the word to the unwitting foreign dupes. Defenders of the prices claim to be exacting retribution for the rampages of 19th century troops, in particular the 八国联军 Allied Force that invaded in the wake of the Boxer Uprising (义和团) in 1900. Cao compares the report of the souvenir sellers to a recent story out of Shenyang where a fruit merchant priced a jin of cherries for