Snowfall by East Lake

Happy New Year. The Year of the Rabbit: a peaceful year after the year of the Tiger.

Christmas visit to Guizhou province

Guiyang strawberries


During Paula’s Christmas visit to China we took the overnight train from chilly Wuhan to Guizhou Province in southern China, where strawberries were being sold on the streets. Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces, although one couldn’t tell it from Guiyang's expensive hotels, Modern Woman Hospital, and high end stores: at the newly opened French-owned Carrefour store primo bottles of Guizhou Moutai, a potent liquor, are on offer for 28,800 RMB, about $4500.


Guiyang's delivery men

 At night, however, as the streets clear of shoppers, “delivery men” who spend their days walking the streets looking for small jobs sleep in ranks on the sidewalks, using their baskets as pillows.

In a park adjoining the National Culture Palace, snake oil salesman, fortune tellers, singing bird aficionados, sidewalk calligraphers and “Tuo luo” players passed the time. The last involves striking a spinning top with a whip to make it hum eerily. Taking singing birds for an outing, most often “Hwamei,” the Laughing Thrush, in distinctive bamboo cages suspended by large silver hooks, is another favorite hobby in southern China.


Fortune teller (with parakeet)

The National Culture Palace and Hotel is an imposing, oddly-shaped building dedicated to the minority cultures of mountainous Guizhou: Dong, Bouyei, Miao, Yao, Shui and others. The museum isn’t well publicized -- Paula and I wandered through empty display rooms, the only visitors—but interesting for its displays of jewelry and minority costumes.The touristic potential of minority cultures is being exploited as Guizhou develops its tourist industry. A tour we took to Huanguoshu Falls included a stop at a manufactured “Miao village.”

Qianling Park performance

 At Qianling Park, we watched an impromptu classical dance performance while someone played a saxophone on the hillside. An older man told us about Americans who’d been in Guiyang during the anti-Japanese war, and gave us a rule sheet for “Digital Army Military Chess,” designed “just for the foreigners who don’t know Chinese.” The rules are not entirely clear and even a bit alarming (e.g. “Without the engineer troop to dig the mine, can’t win the other side unless use the bomb”) but he gathered a crowd around as he talked to us about his time in Wuhan during the war, and the decline of the “English corner” in the park. The slogan was taken down, he said, referring to red banners routinely hung to make announcements: “Without a slogan they won’t come,” he said regretfully, and then, to the admiring crowd: “Practice makes perfect!”


Feeding macaques, Qianling park

 For Paula the high point of Qianling Park was watching the resident population of macaques, who ran free in the more wooded portions cadging food from visitors. Signs asking visitors not to feed the animals were ignored by monkeys and people. One woman appeared with an armful of Ding Dong-like pastries wrapped in plastic, which the monkeys clearly liked.

Bronze statue,Jiaxiu pavilion

From the National Culture Palace we walked along a river walk beside the Nanming River to Jiaxiu pavilion, a symbol of the city, built during the Ming Dynasty to provide a place for aspiring scholars to prepare for the imperial examinations. A statue beside the river walk depicted a man fishing with a slender bronze pole; we wondered how long a work like this would survive in the U.S. without being vandalized.

Ceremonial opening, countryside

On our second full day in Guiyang we took a public bus to Tienhetuan, past Guizhou’s distinctive mountains, looking like sculpted burial mounds. There was much evidence of the government’s efforts to develop the economy of rural areas and thereby reduce the massive migration to China’s cities. On one hillside a long line of construction equipment had been arranged to complement the festive opening of what would probably be an industrial plant.

Tourism is also being developed, though we were the only foreigners on the bus to Tienhetuan, and found ourselves alone as we made our way through a long, elaborately lighted cave complex. We were mildly alarmed at the thought that no one knew we were in the cave, nor did we have any idea how long the cave trail was.

Huanguoshu Falls

On our last full day in Guiyang we joined a tour to Huanguoshu Falls, one of China’s largest waterfalls and Guizhou’s most famous sight. An all-day affair, the tour included a visit to a fake Miao village and two sales stops, one plugging a knife set, the other local food specialties. These sales stops are a normal part of tours for Chinese visitors, who like to load up on the local food items.

Huanguoshu Falls, modestly identified on a sign as the “No 1 marvellous and wonderful one for the world” is spectacular, not in an overwhelming Niagara Falls sense, but for the way the falling water interweaves with rocks and vegetation. One can climb up to a spray-drenched trail, called Water Curtain Cave, which passes behind the falling water.

Dragon Palace cave

Entrance to Dragon Palace

Also on the tour was Dragon Palace, a karst cave with ragged curtains of stone at its entrance. Visitors enter the cave in little electrically-powered boats, cruising passages with names in Chinese and English (one identified as “Hole-hole”) into large, cathedral-like rooms , lit in technicolor and accompanied by classical Chinese music on the boat’s sound system. Silence might have been preferable, but silence isn’t popular in China.

Tianxing Scenic area



Fellow travelers












A final stop was at the Tianxing scenic area, a quiet, beautiful promenade through striking rock formations along a walkway of large stones, water flowing between them and submerging all but the very top of each stone. By that time we had become part of the Chinese tour group, especially an extended family of three generations, who were always checking to be sure the two Americans weren’t lost. 

Paula and I were back in Wuhan to celebrate New Year's Eve. With the power out in my apartment building, we lit candles and toasted the New Year with Austrian champagne.


Learning calligraphy, Guiyang market


 

Hangzhou in a weekend



Musical fountain show

 Earlier in December I made a flying visit to Hangzhou, which I’d last visited in 1980. Then I’d stayed at the Xiling Hotel, across the street from West Lake. My room was 9 RMB a night -- less than $15. The Xiling has since been absorbed into the five star “Shangri-la,” rooms a minimum of $150. This is a good index of what’s happened to Hangzhou in thirty years. The plain streets of downtown Hangzhou ca. 1980 are neon lit and lined with high end fashion stores. Sites that have attracted tourists for centuries have been fixed up and admission charges levied.

Leifeng Pavilion, latest version

There are new sights, like the free musical fountain show on West Lake, where jets of water from a hundred nozzles accompany classical European and Chinese musical pieces.

There are old sights that have been reborn, like Leifeng Pavilion, situated at the lake’s southeast end on a hill that makes it visible all around the lake. It’s been violently destroyed and patiently rebuilt for centuries. The most recent rebuilding, in 2000, features an escalator to take visitors from the mysteriously named “Pond for Freeting the living thinge” to the hilltop, where there’s a great, if sometimes hazy, view of West Lake and the city beyond from the top deck of the pagoda.

West Lake amusements

The pond probably has some connection to one of the innumerable stories connected to the pavilion and Hangzhou, in this case the legend of Bai Suzhen, 白蛇传, Lady White Snake, an immortal who fell in love with a monk and was punished with confinement under the pagoda for eternity. All around the lake are inscriptions and monuments celebrating similar events, real or mythical, in the city’s long history.

At one end of Xilin Bridge, on Su causeway which bisects the lake, is the rebuilt tomb of Su Xiao Xiao, a 5th Century poet and courtesan whose life was the subject of many Tang dynasty poems. Xiao Xiao’s tomb was rebuilt recently after its destruction during the Cultural Revolution, an event which left a heavy mark on this city of monuments and religious icons.




Writing with water beside West Lake

 


Xiling Seal Engravers' Society

 West Lake remains a beauty spot beyond compare, not only for the lake itself but for the living culture continually going on around it. Near the Leifeng pavilion two elderly musicians were playing erhus when I walked by, another keeping time on a wooden clacker, while women took turns singing and joking with each other. Several people were writing poems on the walkway using pointed brushes dipped in water. Further on people were doing wushu and qigong exercises under the trees, walking with their families, or sitting on benches looking out at the Lake.

The Xiling Seal Engravers’ Society (西泠印社) still looks much as it did when I last stopped there: an attractive group of old buildings climbing up a steep hillside. Though seal-cutting is an ancient art, the Society itself is of recent vintage, founded in 1904 by seal artists from different schools, dedicated, says a sign, to research in “epigraphy and sphragistics.” Now, though, it’s mainly a place where seals are engraved and sold to tourists. I went there to get a birthday seal for Margaret.


View from Felai Feng

 On Saturday I took a bus out to the Wuling Mountains to see the Lingyin Temple and climb Felai Feng mountain, (飞来峰; literally "the peak that flew hither"), referring to the belief the mountain came from India bringing with it the sutras of Chan Buddhism. During the Cultural Revolution the Temple and figures in adjacent cave grottoes had been damaged. The Temple has been repaired but the headless stone figures remain, beside a sign saying in English, “It is a pity that the head parts had been damaged.”

Among the temples forming part of the Lingyin complex is the Lingshun temple, dedicated to Marshal Zhao Gong, god of wealth. This temple is said to be especially popular with local businessmen, and there was evidence; among the many offerings to the Marshal (so called because he has under him four lower gods in charge of property, treasure, rare collections, and the market – divine hedge fund managers) was a large stack of black briefcases.

Sunset over West Lake

Hangzhou from Baoshan

On Sunday I walked with a local friend up Bao Shan, a hill overlooking West Lake’s northwest end. It’s a favorite spot for people to hang out on a nice day, flirt, picnic, play the flute, bring singing birds in bamboo cages to hang from trees, or read inscriptions that have been cut into rocks over the centuries, some with remarks by Tang or Han Dynasty emperors on the beauty of the view or the coming of spring (though one emperor concluded his remarks on the natural setting by adding “there’s too much bamboo”).

Huang Binhong statue

On the way back to my hotel I stopped at the western-style home of Huang Binhong, a painter who died in 1955. Hangzhou is a town where painters and calligraphers are celebrated. Huang was famous for his dense, thick, modernistic style; he was among a new breed of literati fostered by China’s first republican revolution.

I was reminded of the importance of that first revolutionary period again at the statue near West Lake of Qiu Jin, a schoolteacher executed for leading an abortive uprising against the Manchu dynasty in 1907. Finally, I visited the Zhejiang provincial museum, not a large museum but with some of the most interesting pottery I’d seen, from the Three Kingdoms and Eastern Han dynasty periods.

I thought I’d end this blog with a picture of one of the most beguiling items in the museum: a Happy Family pot from the Eastern Han. From my happy family to yours, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Paula arrives in Wuhan today, and after visiting with friends she hasn’t seen in thirty years and looking around today’s go-go Wuhan, where she won’t recognize a thing, we’ll be taking the train to Guizhou, a province to the south known for beautiful scenery and a relative lack of economic development. My next blog will be from there.

A weekend in Xi'an

Xi'an's drum tower by night

 

View from Bell Tower


  Earlier this month I paid a whirlwind visit to Xi’an, the one-time capital of some of China’s greatest dynasties and a favorite tourist destination. I’d visited Xi’an twice before, in 1980 and 1984. As with everywhere else I’ve visited, the downtown is unrecognizable except for its landmark sites: the Drum Tower and Bell Tower, though even they are hemmed in by modern buildings, shopping centers, McDonalds, spiffy clothing stores and high-end restaurants.

It was a quick visit: I arrived Thursday evening and left Sunday night, but almost every minute had been planned by a former student, Yang Yasha, who’d done her undergraduate study there, and by two friends of hers, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang. I was whisked into the city in their Buick van. Mr. Zhang is in real estate development; he’d occasionally point out some multi-story building his company was constructing.

Xi'an's wall: old city to right,
new city to left

Those tall apartment buildings lie outside the walls that still surround the old city of Xi’an. Unlike Beijing, which has removed most of its old walls and gates to make room for superhighways, Xi’an puts up with some congestion at each of the four main city gates. It’s part of the city’s tourist appeal, and the tourist business has really taken off in Xi’an.

Jia San Tang Bao

On Thursday evening we visited shopping streets behind one of the gates, a busy place of fast food and touristy tchotchkes, ending with dinner at a well known restaurant. Mr. Zhang was determined I would sample all of Xi’an’s cuisine on this short visit; this restaurant specialized in Jia San tang bao.


Bing Ma Yong warriors Pit I

 Friday morning we were off early to Lintong, where the burial site of Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di, is located. This was not to be one of my usual experiences of bumbling around trying to locate a bus going to a famous spot. We went in Mr. Zhang’s Buick, and were greeted by Pang A Ping, the Chief Executive of the People’s Government of Lintong District. Mr. Zhang is clearly a man with influence, or guanxi: wherever we went he would get out his cellphone to call ahead, and we’d be greeted by an official who assured red carpet treatment.

Ongoing excavation, Pit I

While foreign and Chinese visitors waited in long lines to buy tickets to the Bing Ma Yong museum where Qin Shi Huang Di’s vast clay army is located, we were driven in a convoy of official vehicles to the front door of the building housing Pit 1, the oldest excavation site, and escorted to a viewing area reserved for special visitors, closer to the grey and brown warriors. Angela Merkel, I was told, had recently received the same treatment. Being so close to the grey and brown warrior army allows one to see better the individual poses, features, and even expressions of the figures.

Lintong luncheon table

One can’t tell that each had once been brightly colored, the color having faded almost immediately after they were exposed to light, or that they had been nothing but fragments when excavated. The wooden beams supporting the tomb had collapsed on them, thanks to an army of rebels against the emperor’s megalomaniac exactions, who’d fired the beams millennia ago. The scorch marks are still visible.

In one section, a man was very slowly removing bits of yet another warrior from packed earth. It’s a process that will go on for decades. These are just the outliers of the emperor’s tomb, in a vast tumulus some distance away. No one knows when or if the tomb itself will ever be excavated; there are intriguing tales of rivers of mercury and crossbow booby traps, but the main deterrent is the lack of technology needed to preserve whatever is found.

After visiting the smaller excavations called Pits II and III, featuring additional elements of the emperor’s fantasy army of next-world protectors, housed in special buildings, Mr. Ping took us to lunch at a restaurant with yet more local specialties, including duck feet web, small toasty birds said to be pigeon (complete with head), salmon sashimi, and small crabs requiring great attention to find miniscule bits of meat. All of these, and many other dishes, were accompanied by frequent toasts in the local potent bai jiu liquor, Xi Feng, and concluded with another local specialty, sweet persimmons and pomegranates for which Shaanxi is famous.


Corn drying



Shaanxi apples


It was harvest time in Shaanxi province. There were apples for sale everywhere and neatly threaded rows of corn cobs placed to dry along rooftops or strung around tree trunks.

I was sated and ready for xiuxi, a nice nap, but our host wasn’t through with showing us the sights. We headed for Huaqing hotsprings, site of the famous Xi’an incident, where Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Nationalists during the anti-Japanese war, was coerced into agreeing to a United Front with the Communists against the Japanese in 1936. The tone of criticism of Chiang had much abated since my last visit, perhaps because China’s relations with Taiwan have improved.

Yang Kuei Fei and admirers

Now you can dress up like a Nationalist soldier and have your picture taken. In any case, the real draw for most Chinese visitors isn’t the Xi'an incident but the legend of Yang Kuei Fei, consort of an 8th Century Tang Dynasty emperor. A nude statue of a Rubenesque Yang Kuei Fei is now the first thing you see on entering the Hotsprings.
Mr. Ping saw us off with dinner in Litong: no duck web, but there were chicken feet, pumpkin tendrils, shrimp on a skewer, and noodles with mushrooms.


Ghost Day observances
 in the Shaanxi countryside

 On the way back to Xi’an on Friday evening, smoke hung in the air from people burning pieces of paper dedicated to the departed: it was the eve of Ghost Day, when paper inscribed with greetings is burned to keep ancestors warm as winter approaches.

Folk religious practices are more evident now than they were thirty years ago, as are Buddhism and Taoism. On Saturday, after visiting the tomb of Wu Zetian we visited the Famen temple, a vast, modernistic Buddhist structure with a representation of giant hands over an enclosure in which a famous relic of the Buddha, a finger bone, is displayed on occasion.

Famen temple

Relic of the Buddha



Doves at Famen temple

 The long approach to the temple is lined on both sides by giant gilded Bodhisattvas, each with its own altar. The Famen temple is one of many sites developed for the rapidly developing industry of religious tourism aimed mainly at Chinese tourists. One survey reports that 85 percent of Chinese practice some kind of religion, and it seems to be especially so among younger people. China Daily quotes this opinion by a Buddhist: “Thanks to increasing tolerance and freedom, the religious need, a human instinct… will be further awakened” in China. But there’s money in it as well: governments around the country are developing projects to renovate and market their temples.

That evening, back in Xi’an, I was treated to yet another local specialty, Pao Mo, which involved breaking up bread cakes into small pieces and sending them off to the kitchen where they are combined with soup and vegetables, served with wu zhu, a spikey lettuce, cucumber with lotus root, and stewed chicken.

Tang "dancing horses" in
Shaanxi museum



 Hanyanling underground museum

 Sunday was my last day in Xi’an. We went in the morning to the Shaanxi provincial museum, an outstanding museum with treasures from the Tang dynasty, including gold and silver pieces clearly strongly influenced by Tang contacts with Persia.

In the afternoon, Yasha and I rode bikes part way around the Xian city wall, a bumpy but enjoyable ride.  In the afternoon, on the way to the airport, we stopped at the Hanyanling museum, an underground museum where one looks down through plexiglass walkways onto excavated trenches from a Han dynasty burial. Here, the figures are small and doll-like, but in their way as individual in expression as the life-size Bing Ma Yong warriors. Thousands of them had once been posed with wooden arms and full-dress outfits, the arms and cloth having long rotted away.

It was a whirlwind tour, and I’ve regretfully left a lot out: the food (cake with meat: rou jia mo, liang pi, Qishan Sao Zi Mian (noodle), thin sliced ham, the varieties of local bai jiu or white liquor, pai gu); sights I haven’t mentioned; and above all, the generous hospitality of the Zhangs and their friends. I returned to Wuhan with a backpack stuffed full of Shaanxi pomegranates and apples.



Mr. and Mrs. Zhang. Xie Xie!



Riding the Xi'an wall

With Yasha at Wuzetian's tomb



Golden week in Chengdu

I spent most of “Golden Week” -- the national holiday celebrating the birthday of the People’s Republic of China -- in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. The city was something of a revelation of how far China’s modernization has come in these thirty years. It’s further along than Wuhan, where streets and sidewalks are torn up as work proceeds 24/7 to construct the city’s subway system.

Instruction on boarding a car

 The first route in Chengdu’s subway system, running north-south, just opened. It wasn’t just the shiny new subway stations and cars that said “modern” but the amount of planning that had gone into the system’s introduction. At every station, crews of attendants showed people how to buy tickets from touch-screen ticket machines and how to use the ticket at entrance gates.

On the train platform, attendants with bullhorns educated amazed residents on where to stand when the car doors opened. Announcements of upcoming stations are in Chinese and English; a lighted schematic every few feet along the car walls shows the train’s current location. The subway runs to suburban destinations like “Ocean Park,” “Century City,” and “Incubation Park.” More such suburban developments – forests of twenty story apartment buildings, not individual houses -- are promised as the metro system expands. Ads for “Luxetown,” “Europe City” or – get this, Kansas City – “Mission Hills,” are already on billboards, sporting images of golf courses and speedboats.

Thirty years ago there was virtually no advertising in China because there was nothing to advertise: now it’s omnipresent. Every city bus and motorized pedicab is decorated inside and outside with ads; a TV usually runs in the front of the bus with more ads. Ron Popeil-type merchandising is appearing: a Chinese tour group I was traveling with was diverted into a sales center where we were subjected to an hour of sales talk about the virtues of a knife set made out of artillery shell metal. And that isn’t all, we were assured: there’s also this handy melon peeler. And that isn’t all….

When one emerges from the metro station to Remnin Street, there are wide, uncrowded roads, new – and in some cases striking – buildings, and an absence of traffic jams (unlike Wuhan). Alongside are sculptured beds of impatiens, poinsettias, marigolds, petunias, and salvia. Signs in English in Chengdu rarely feature the “Chinglish” errors that so tickle English speakers other places in China (though I would have suggested the owners of a tony downtown hotel consider a name other than “The Caesarian”).

Architecture with Chinese characteristics


If cell phones are everywhere, that’s only to be expected; it’s as if they’ve been surgically attached to the young globally. Even litter bearers were talking on cellphones as they transported the disinclined or indisposed up steep flights of stairs at Mr. Qingcheng while the rest of us toiled on foot. The internet is likewise ubiquitous, in Chengdu as elsewhere: there’s hardly a tiny shop selling bananas without a computer screen and someone staring intently at it.

Buddhist monks at Wenshu monastery

In Chengdu's Wenshu monastery, I heard a guzheng, the traditional Chinese zither, being played by a Buddhist monk. I peered into his cell, where he stood over his instrument; to his left, his laptop screen glowed, beside his bed were a set of weights for daily exercise. In the outside corridor his electric scooter was charging. Back in 1980 I once tried to explain bumper stickers to my Chinese students, and discovered they didn't know what a "bumper" is, or any other parts of the car, having had no experience. That wouldn't be a problem now.



Huanglongxi ancient town crowd

 And there are other, less material indicators of Chengdu’s and China’s modernization. For example, queuing. When I wanted to take bus trips out of Chengdu to the local sights, transportation hubs were invariably jammed. Trying to get to the famous “ancient town” of Huanglongxi I almost gave up at the sight of the milling crowd.

Inside, however, the crowd resolved itself into a dozen patient, orderly lines. Thirty years ago, buying a ticket in a station could be a free for all. Wickets were often a hole into which you thrust your money while trying to yell your destination louder than the next person. At the Chengdu bus station, in contrast, the line moved steadily forward and line jumpers were faced down by the ticket seller.

Somehow, crowded as everywhere was during Golden Week, there were no collisions. Things kept moving, slowly and with a kind of invisible efficiency. When it came time to leave Huanglongxi, around 8 p.m., the student I was with called the bus driver to find out the location of his bus amidst the great snarl of buses bound for Chengdu. After a long delay while the driver sorted through piles of tiny tissue-paper tickets to be sure no one was missing, we were off. The tickets, round trip, cost 10 yuan -- about $1.50.

China’s modernization is stunning, and disorienting. In Chengdu I felt at times like an old gentleman I saw accompanying his little grandson to see the new subway station. The grandson hopped nimbly onto an upward bound escalator but I don’t think the grandfather had seen one before. He paused, doubtful, watching steps appear out of nowhere. The grandson had to come back down to get him. Everything was fine in the end; the grandfather was smiling by the time he got to the top, a convert to escalators.

But perhaps there’s nostalgia for simpler times. One can see it in the number of people who make offerings and obeisance at Buddhist and Taoist temples, something frowned on three decades ago, or in the “Cultural Revolution” kitsch – the Mao statues, little red books, posters, and 60s newspapers – for sale.

Buddhist observances at Wenshu monastery

If the development of Chengdu’s urban center and satellite suburbs is impressive, one doesn’t see the other side: the condition of those who come to the city from the countryside. Rural migrants provide the cheap labor on which the city’s prosperity is based, yet none could afford the exorbitant price for a flat in “Europe City.”

In Beijing there are 3 ½ million migrant workers living in outlying “walled villages,” within which they’re confined at night. In general, migrants lack “hukou,” the household registration giving the right to reside permanently in the city. Access to education and healthcare is limited as a result. For Americans, it sounds all too familiar.

There are probably similar villages for migrants in Chengdu, a city of 10 million. The national government is implementing rural development policies to move production inland while trying to discourage migrants from permanent settlement in the cities. But for anyone who’s read studies of contemporary rural life in China like Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao’s Will the Boat Sink the Water? or Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China, it’s difficult to believe rural migrants will want to return to the countryside, or, if they do, that their condition will be happy. China’s problems seem sometimes as great as its enormous achievements. Which also seems all too familiar.

And, yes, there are pandas in Chengdu. Here's my favorite picture of the ones I took at the "Panda Research Base":


Contemplative panda