This week was the first time I had been to Panjiayuan antique bike meet in months. Being it was the end of spring festival, and still winter, there wasn't the usual crowd. And the crowd that was there came late. But still there was some interesting stuff to be seen. One first timer unloaded a table of bits and pieces. A fine melange for a browsing.
Frequent readers will remember past posts of vintage Fuji Brake-Rod roadsters. These are fantastic, is very heavily constructed bikes from one of the world's oldest and most successful bike companies. Dearly sought after machines indeed.
Now a funny thing happened at Panjiayuan a few months back. A gentleman brought an excellent example, maybe the best example seen yet, of a Fuji roadster....or was it? In the below pictures you can see quite clearly on the head badge and the fender logo, that although the Fuji trademark silhouette of Mt. Fujiyama is co-opted, It instead bears the letter "HAO" and not Fuji.
Hao, incidentally, means "Good" in Chinese, although the bike is clearly Japanese. So is it a copy?
There are many, many, many brands of bicycles in China besides the "Famous Four". A lot of these manufacture to a standard that closely matches the major manufactures like Forever and Flying Pigeon. This allows a fair amount of interchangeability of spares. The street side bike doctors can only keep so many parts on their tricycle, and if they had to stock unique parts for all the different brands, street side service would never work. One of these "other" brands is Jin Shi.
Here is an interesting antique Japanese import. It's a New Kent bicycle which, as we are told very often by the badging, was the "World's Best Bicycle". While best is certainly debatable, I'd have to agree that it is certainly
