At that time, all kinds of tickets flooded the mountain city, such as food tickets, meat tickets, cloth tickets, salt tickets, oil tickets, coal tickets, tobacco tickets, vegetable tickets ... even tickets were needed to buy sweets and cakes, matches and soap, and tickets gradually became the guarantee for urban and rural residents to eat and wear warm clothes.
It was not until the mid-1990s that this kind of ticket ended its special status and circulation.
Perhaps no country has more tickets than China. Looking back at the ticket complex in those years, we should not forget them, because these seemingly insignificant pieces of paper contain rich political, economic and cultural connotations, condense the bumpy history of * *, and record the difficult trajectory of the city from "planning" to "market".
Recall-
Poor days when materials are scarce.
In the past National Day, people will never forget the dazzling array of supermarkets.
Back in the 1980s, on the same festival, people thought about how to add oil and water to the dining table with some special tickets issued during the festival.
In the mid-1950s, with the appearance and wide application of food stamps, various bills related to people's daily life, such as oil, meat, cloth and coal, also appeared one after another.
"In those days, tickets were more useful than money, and it was difficult to move without tickets." Chen Qianrong, 52, is an employee of the former vegetable company in Jiulongpo District. This is his first strong impression of the ticket.
At that time, he was a young man with five parents, brothers and sisters at home. The whole family receives food 100 Jin a month by ticket, and meat oil is half a catty per person per month.
"At that time, it was the time when children grew up, where there was enough to eat! You see that I am thin now, which is the result of losing my body at that time. " He joked.
When Chen Qianrong was a child, what he longed for most was the Chinese New Year, because the government would provide more food and meat oil, which would not only make his teeth ache, but also make him a new suit with the cloth tickets he had saved for a whole year. "It was a luxury at that time, because most of his friends were wearing patched clothes."
Although life is a bit bitter, there are still things that excite him.
He was always the top student in his class when he was studying, so the school gave him an industrial ticket for this.
He excitedly dragged his mother to buy leather shoes, but when he got to the store, he found that there were no men's leather shoes at all, so he compromised and asked his mother to buy a pair of women's leather shoes, so it looked foreign to wear to school.
Recalling the past, he couldn't help laughing.
When the food stamps came into use, 65-year-old Wang was in high school. She had 32 kilograms of food in January, while her parents were ordinary residents, each with only 25 kilograms.
Because my mother works in a butcher shop, she can eat some greasy meat at home every month.
However, the good times did not last long. The natural disaster began at 1959. At that time, he was already a carpenter in a paint factory in the sand area, earning some money every month. "But you can't buy anything without a ticket. Money is not everything."
I remember one day on 1960, I went to a restaurant for dinner after work, and he ordered a bowl of vegetarian noodles with two food stamps. But as soon as the delicious noodles were served, a child rushed into the restaurant and ran away with a bowl.
At that time, he heard that someone was robbing rice in the street. I didn't expect this to happen, so he chased it into an alley to block the children. The child looked at him piteously, took out a crumpled cotton ticket and said to him, "Uncle, let's change it. This is for you. " He was crying and laughing at that time. Although he was so hungry that his chest pressed against his back, he finally gave the noodles to the children.
It is said that only when you are in power do you know Mikey. Li Kaizhen, a 75-year-old mother-in-law, has also experienced ups and downs in the era of material shortage.
At that time, she and her husband with four children were crammed into a small room of 10 square meter. Although her husband is the party secretary of the unit and a model worker in the city, his income is relatively high, but the "nine grades and ten grades" grain distribution system at that time stipulated that the grain quota for cadres was even less, so the problem of eating at home was particularly serious.
"There are many children and the elderly have to take care of them before they lose themselves." Li recalled her tears.
Once my mother was ill, she bought pig's trotters with a pound of meat coupons, prepared stew for her mother, and added kelp to the soup in consideration of the children.
When eating, she found that her little son kept vomiting, thinking that he was ill. After repeated inquiries, she realized that he saw the hoof flower soup stewed at home, but he was afraid to steal meat, so he had to eat a bowl of kelp, but he didn't know that his stomach was affected by oil and water for a long time, and the result was always nausea.
After Li Kaizhen was relieved, he quickly took half a catty of meat tickets to buy meat for his son the next day.
Aftertaste-
A symbol of a special era
At present, young people in their twenties in Chongqing often know nothing about food stamps and other tickets, but for their parents and grandparents, these tickets can remind them of the deepest aftertaste of that material shortage era.
1949, New China was in full swing. Even in a big city like Chongqing, materials are scarce: from June 1953 1 1 to the following September, Chongqing began to implement the planned supply of grain and cotton cloth.
On August 25th, 1955, the State Council issued the Interim Measures for Grain Rationing in Cities and Towns. All urban residents living in China must obtain grain purchase certificates and food stamps with their urban hukou.
1956165438+16 October, Chongqing announced that the edible vegetable oil would be supplied in limited quantities, with tickets available. Farmers are rationed 5 Liang a month, while urban residents are rationed 7 Liang. The retail price of vegetable oil is 0.48 yuan per catty.
On June 2 nd, 10, Han, president of the City Fans Association, lamented to reporters that food is the first thing for the people. In the ticket era, food stamps were regarded as life tickets. "The original measurement of food stamps was 16, 1959 was changed to 10, and 1985 was changed to thousand restraint.
During the festival, the government will also issue special tickets. For example, glutinous rice is only provided once before the Spring Festival as a new year certificate.
There are national food stamps all over the country, which are limited to local food stamps in provinces, cities and counties, as well as military food stamps and food stamps issued by individual units for use by units.
If you need to travel in different places, you have to change the local food stamps into national food stamps through formalities, so the national food stamps and local food stamps have nicknames called' flying around' respectively. As the organizer of last month's ticket collection cultural exhibition, Han said: "Today, we collect tickets not only to preserve the traces of that hard time, but more importantly, to remember the past and learn new things by reviewing the old." According to his research, from 1955 to 1988, there were more than 100 ordinary food stamps issued by Chongqing Grain Bureau. "Chongqing food stamps are exquisite in atmosphere and meticulous in printing technology. As the main pictures, the red lanterns of wheat ears, Lushan and auditorium, Hongyan Village and Chaotianmen are full of praise and hope. "
Yu Chaolun, a collector who also likes to study tickets, told reporters: "Tickets are brilliant flowers in the long river of history, and every ticket is a window to see history." Among the tens of thousands of tickets in his collection, a considerable part are quotations from 1967 to 1974. "Quotation tickets are decorated with revolutionary holy places, images of workers, peasants and soldiers and quotations from Chairman Mao, and intact political slogans can be seen everywhere.
Some food stamps say' Down with Su Xiu', just to remind people not to forget to criticize revisionism when eating. "
Since the 1970s, Yu Chaolun has collected dozens of Chongqing tickets, which are generally divided into four categories: fine grain tickets, coarse grain tickets, cake tickets, tofu tickets, milk powder tickets, salt tickets and meat tickets. There are cloth tickets, cotton tickets and so on about wearing; About daily necessities, there are soap tickets, match tickets, cigarette tickets, honeycomb coal tickets, gas tickets and so on. There are special tickets for Gao Qian, babies, pregnant women and patients, and extra holiday tickets for the Spring Festival.
Tickets are the symbol of that special era, leaving people with unbearable bitterness.
He said, "In order to make full use of tickets, people try their best to concentrate on commercial purchase tickets, meat tickets and cloth tickets. In the difficult period of three years, some people were even sentenced to food stamps because of hunger. "
Feeling-
The tragedy began to end in comedy.
This kind of picture often happens in the second-hand market of Zhongxing Road: On September 30, an ugly middle-aged man appeared outside the market building, wandering on the path with a bulging leather bag in his hand, and finally stopped at a booth with various tickets and asked the boss if he wanted to collect food stamps. The boss nodded again and again: "Take it!" Middle-aged people opened their purses, with colorful tickets neatly stacked on the inside, and then said unhurriedly, "There are tofu tickets, match tickets, soap tickets ..."
Once upon a time, those tickets that flooded around us have quietly disappeared. When they reappear, these pieces of paper that once dominated our lives have become collectors' favorite products. How can the vicissitudes of history not make people feel deeply touched? "We have to admit that Hegel once said that in many cases, history often begins with tragedy and ends with comedy." Yan He, a historian of the Municipal Museum, said, "We can find a comedy aesthetic effect in the authenticity of this ticket story in the history of New China."
Since the reform and opening up from 65438 to 0979, the state has gradually narrowed the distribution scope of consumer goods.
By 1983, the state only supplied two kinds of food and edible oil, and the system of unified purchase and distribution of agricultural products, which had been implemented in 1985 for more than 30 years, was cancelled.
During the period of 1992- 1997, the ticket system finally withdrew from the historical stage nationwide. The end of this era marked that China had moved from the era of shortage of planned economy to the era of surplus of market economy.
During 1996, Chongqing issued the last set of beautifully printed local food stamps in some areas, but when almost no one used them, they were sent directly to the collection market.
Time has passed, and now it is a series of consumer bills that quietly enter the new life of Chongqing people.
Now, citizens are used to receiving a stack of bills regularly: water, electricity, gas, telephone and broadband ... With the acceleration of modernization, various "cards" have become new friends of citizens.
Whether shopping, inviting guests to dinner, going out to take a taxi, seeing a doctor or staying in hospital, bank cards and various derivative cards have become citizens' belongings, and credit card consumption has spread to all aspects of life.
The transition from "ticket era" to "bill life" reflects the profound changes in the social structure of Chongqing and even China in recent decades.