Marks and Sparks on the Nanking Road

Marks and Spencer's open their first Mainland store today on Nanjing Road - nearly 5,000 square metres of clothing, food and homewares. M&S have been around for 124 years but never had a Shanghai store before the revolution. Still, the opening of a major new department store on the street seems a good excuse to put up a picture of the old Sun Sun Department Store, one of the Big Four stores that helped put Shanghai on the map as Asia's shopping mecca between the wars being dubbed the 'Oxford Street of the East'.