May day in Fenghuang ancient town



Fenghuang at night

 Over the May 1 holiday I went to Fenghuang in western Hunan province, another popular “ancient town” that people flock to as old China disappears. Getting there involved taking the high speed train to Changsha out of the Wuhan train station, which is actually in northern Wuchang and serves only the high speed train network. It’s a huge, ultramodern place, more like airport than train station, with sixteen gates. The high speed rail network is still a-building all over China; when it’s done it’s going to be the best of its kind in the world.

The trip to Changsha was very twenty-first century; after that, things began to retreat rapidly toward the mid-twentieth, and earlier. The bus trip to Fenghuang was out of the Changsha west bus station, a jumble of a place, not helped by pouring rain. There were no gates through which to access the buses: you just go out and stumble about trying find your bus in the muddy yard, while people with little signs try to find you. The four hour bus trip went through rugged, beautifully mountainous countryside, but the road was atrocious, with constant stops for construction and mudslides.

Fenghuang and the Tuo river

Fenghuang – Phoenix town -- has an interesting history. It was set up along the Tuo River during the Ming and Qing dynasties during a campaign to suppress rebellions by the local Miao population. The Xiangxi Border Wall built to protect the town still stands. It was, a local brochure notes, a rather small wall, a sixth the length of the Great Wall, “because that Miao Ethnic Minority group was not that formidable as North minorities.”

The town is in a picturesque setting along the river. Despite the hard journey there, the place was jammed over the brief May Day holiday: the sign over one bar cum service center identified the place as “China’s famous tourist area bays,” and “A beautiful met A roman tic story – All in keep watcher.”

People were doing all the things people do in ancient towns: dressing up in Miao costumes and having their picture taken, dressing up in Kuomintang uniforms and having their picture taken, going for a boat ride on the river in a Wupeng boat and having their picture taken.

KMT kitsch

Eating, of course. My favorite dish was little deep fried small whole crabs, although the tiny whole deep fried crispy shrimps were pretty good too. And the little deep fried fish. And the deep fried dofu.

Deep fried yummies



Miao for a day


Fenghuang was home to the famous writer Shen Congwen, Miao author of Xiao Xiao and other novels dealing mainly with Miao life. The New York Times noted on his death in 1988 that he had been compared to Chekhov, but was denounced “by the Communists and Nationalists alike,” and his books were banned in Taiwan and destroyed in China: “So successful was the effort to erase Mr. Shen's name from the modern literary record that few younger Chinese today recognize his name, much less the breadth of his work.” This was in 1988, but Shen’s former home in Fenghuang is now a tourist site, and his books widely sold, at least in Fenghuang.


Rafting to Miao village



Getting to Miao ren gu

Miao plowman

On the second day I took a bus trip to a Miao village, the name of which I was never able to get clear (it was just called “Miao ren gu,” ancient village, by everyone I asked). Getting there involved long delays, a bus ride, followed by a raft ride, then clambering through a cave to get to the remote location the villagers had chosen to protect themselves from the Han forces. It was another muddy, rainy day, but a picturesque setting, where people wear reed capes in the rain and use water buffalo to plow, something you don’t see much elsewhere in China now.

The return bus trip to Changsha on day 3 was less arduous – better bus, fewer stops – but I arrived at Changsha west bus station in saturating rain, deep mud, long lines of sodden, grimy people in the rain struggling to clamber on to the few buses. Eventually, wet and grumpy, I got to my hotel, conveniently located near the Whacko market.


Hunan Normal school


The next day, a Monday, I visited Hunan First Normal College, Chairman Mao’s former school in Changsha. I had greater ambitions, wanting to see the Changsha museum and the Mawangdui tombs, which I’d visited in 1980, but both are closed on Mondays. Mao was a student at the school from 1913 to 1918, and taught there for a time in the early 1920s. Despite its several exalted designations (“One –thousand-year Academy and One-hundred-year Normal School,” as well as “National Major Cultural Relic Preservation Unit,” and “Patriotic Education Base for Changsha and Hunan Province”), the school is still busy, with noisy music students on the day I was there.