Foreword (apology)
I somewhat embarrassingly promised more of this story after
posting part one without considering that my life would quickly take over,
thereby preventing that continuation. A combination of authorial lethargy (erm,
that’s a posh way of saying laziness, in case you were wondering) and economically
productive exertion (um, work) have caused me to neglect my bloggeration for
several months. Anyway, all this means that I have published this as one huge
post, but it’s divided into sections for those of you with little time or
concentration. Please read and enjoy during your inter-dynamic regenerative
periods (leisure time and break times). Parts four and five are my favourites,
for both their descriptive qualities and cute pictures.
A quick note: I have changed the name of our guide who showed us the villages around Chengdu, if you want to know more about him please leave a comment and I will tell you more if you leave contact details.
Part 1 - Trains, planes and Chinese bacon
If you know a bit
about China, Chengdu should need little introduction. It’s a city in Western
China famous for housing giant pandas, being the home of the Chuanxi opera
style and the well-known “face changing” technique, the frighteningly spicy
Sichuan hotpot (四川火锅) and a whole host of other cultural attractions. Given
the prevalence of food and music in and around this city it would seem a
dereliction of my interests not to report back on some of the experiences I had
when I went there during the National Day Festival (国庆节) period
of 2013.
Travelling during
any festive period in China is fairly daunting, the largest temporary migration
on Earth does tend to make one a little nervous. We had planned to go by train,
but we couldn’t get tickets due to the vagaries of the often arcane train
booking system in China. Essentially, they wait until as many people as
possible want to travel and then start selling all the tickets at once, ending
in a mad scramble that even our the incredibly helpful logistics man at work
could not beat. So rather than taking the sleeper in grand style, as I had
envisioned it, we were to head to the airport and zip across the country in
somewhat faster style. This meant going to Shanghai (上海) as
Suzhou (苏州)
has no airport of its own, which gave us a great opportunity to feast due to it
also being Celia’s birthday. In the morning I made a less than typically
Chinese breakfast of French toast, which, if you don’t know, is a dish of bread
dipped in a mixture of eggs, milk and cinnamon and fried in butter, and is
quite delicious in a heart-stopping kind of way. Not wishing to break up a
happy marriage, I also fried some bacon. Chinese bacon is not quite the
delicious pork flavour bomb that you’ll be used to eating if you’re from
western climes. Rather it seems to come as a somehow bacon flavoured ham, a
little disappointing. If you do find yourself craving bacon in China (perhaps a
slightly specialist piece of advice here) I recommend going for something known
as “Barbecue Bacon”, available in big supermarkets and with a cured flavour
slightly closer to your favourite porcine breakfast item.
Now
fully satisfied with our gluttony we headed out to get to Suzhou train station.
At the time of travel this was a pretty unreliable journey (there is now a
metro that actually goes to the major
transport hub of this city), one is never quite sure whether a cab will stop, a
never ending stream of the red of full cabs will enrage one to turn a similar
pallor, or one will simply stomp off in exasperation to the nearest bus stop
and get stuck in traffic as the train departure time merciless marches by. This
time it seemed St. Christopher or his oriental equivalent was with us and a
forgivingly green-topped cab pulled over almost immediately. At the train
station I remembered my devotion to food and had a stroll around while we
waited for the departure time. The areas around train stations in China are a
hotbed of street food and small time traders. Generally the food consists of
flour based products of various sorts, from bingzi (pancakes) to various kinds
of flatbreads. These floury fried treats are generally advertised as being from
Dongbei (东北),
the north-eastern part of China. This part of China was traditionally well
above the latitude that allowed for the growing of rice and therefore developed
various flour based cooking methods. I particularly enjoy the flatbread stuffed
with meat or vegetables, also generally painted with a sweet and vinegary sauce
for extra tang. Another part of China, the western Xinjiang (新疆)
province is represented by men who look more Middle-Eastern than Chinese baking
flat bread studded with sesame seeds in large metal drums embedded in a
moveable cart. The Xinjiang region is an area that tells of the true vastness
of China. It is, like Tibet, labelled semi-autonomous; it’s largely populated
by the Uighur ethnic minority, who bear far more resemblance to the peoples of the
Stahns to the west of China. They speak a different language and aren’t always
the best of friends with the increasing numbers of Han Chinese in their lands.
However, there was no hint of aggression displayed in the affable face of the
man selling his wares outside Suzhou station.
It was time to
board the train and to experience the excitement of the nascent Chinese
national high-speed rail network. Chinese trains have historically been clunky
slow things with more in the way of perseverance than speed, this however has
recently changed in certain areas. The rail network has modernised and grown
exponentially, a microcosm of the triumph of modern China. The high-speed
network also displays an example of that other great symbol of Chinese
modernity, plagiarism. It is said that the Chinese worked with Japanese
companies and then took the technology for themselves, claiming it had been
adapted enough to belong to them conceptually as well as practically. Whatever
the controversies that surround this expanding web of spears flying over the
quilt of eastern China, it cannot be said that they are slow or inefficient,
the trains themselves long white javelins and the stations ultra-modern
cathedrals to communication, a sign of China going through its unique brand of
economic and industrial revolution underwritten by the ostensibly communist
authoritarian state. The lack of civil society and other such checks and
balances is made quite clear by various stories regarding huge train crashes
and bridges built with rubbish filling their concrete structures, inevitable
growing pains to be experienced in this fantastic nation with more problems
bubbling just below its surface than its government would ever care to admit.
These thoughts came to a close as our javelin found its target at the unfeasibly
large travel hub Shaghai Hongqiao (上海虹桥), from where our plane was to
depart.
Plane travel in
China during festival times remains the preserve of the well off, most migrant
workers and similar having to cram onto those iron monsters of the old rail
network. Plane journeys are pretty unmemorable, sinking into that general
international ooze of echoing halls of aviation, overpriced shopping malls
flanked by winged metal tubes ready to fly us to our destinations in sanitised
discomfort. Largely these serve as necessary bypass conduits to avoid the riots
that occur in trying to purchase train tickets and find a space in which to sit
among the several hundred million people gamely trying to have a good time.
Part
2 – Chengdu: pandas, spice and minority culture.
Chengdu is an
instantly likeable city to anyone from a multicultural background, mainly
because it tends to move away from the ennui of the monocultural Han east,
which although steeped in history and a fascinating place to live sometimes
lacks that texture one finds in a melting-pot city. Chengdu is in many ways a
frontier town, the final large metropolitan outpost before the jagged
wilderness of Tibet to the West, the peaks and lush green valleys of Yunnan to
the south and the frozen wastes of and towering snowy turrets of Qinghai (青海) to
the north. It’s a meeting place for the enormous mixture of minority cultures
to be found in all of these provinces, although the Tibetan minority certainly
seems to be the most present. This became clearest to us when visiting the
Tibetan quarter of the city, not some gaudy tourist destination but a real
functioning home to what must be one of the largest representations of the
Tibetan diaspora outside the semi-autonomous region. The poverty was sadly
visible as we meandered through the streets, limbless beggars on carts rolling
through the streets and unkempt children gambolling up and down the streets, this
all surely exacerbated by the Han led government’s tendency to actively
marginalise the culture of these people.
One of those Tibetan worship equipment suppliers.
As with so many a
marginalised urban diaspora there was a friendly culture hiding just beneath
the apparent poverty. The streets were dotted with an enormous number of shops
selling religious curios and the apparatus of Tibetan Buddhist worship, brown
cloaked monks and nuns wandering up and down the street habitually wrecking any
outdated stereotypes by chattering on I-Phones. The owners of the shops tended
to display the outcome of marginalisation by being less than magnanimous when
bothered by interested Europeans, but we found to our mutual delight that this
was less the case in the Tibetan restaurant we decided to refuel at. Here the
owners were friendly and curious, giving us various suggestions as to what we
might sample and happy enough to speak in Mandarin Chinese.
The outside of the Tibetan restaurant.
The cuisine of
Tibet is very suited to the high altitudes and tough conditions, often warm,
hearty and full of butter. We ordered a pot of the ubiquitous butter tea, which
was certainly unusual and the similarities with tea ended at the temperature of
the beverage. It tasted something like hot salty buttermilk, it was not
difficult to imagine how incredibly satisfying this drink must be when perched
in small settlements high up in the lonely mountains to the west. We ate a dish
of shredded beef (we thought) cooked in butter, delicious but perhaps not for
those with heart conditions; a dense doughy ball of bread, very good when
saturated with the aforementioned beef laden butter; and a dish of sautéed
potatoes that suited our western pallets very well indeed. The flavours were
unusual, but certainly attractive to lovers of rich dairy-heavy foods (read:
almost all northern Europeans).
Butter tea
Buttery beef
Doughy thing
Another notable
culinary experience to be had in Chengdu is the famous Sichuan hotpot (
四川火锅).
This is getting better and better known Europe, my first experience of it was
at a fine establishment on the rather less typically Sichuanese London Road in
Sheffield. I’d loved the intensity of its flavours and the novelty of cooking your
own food in a shared pot, as well as the delicious fresh ingredients, it was
therefore with some excitement that we headed towards the hostel’s (Sim’s Cozy
Hostel: http://www.gogosc.com/en.asp) local recommendation. Sichuan hotpot is
essentially a shared bowl of soup in which the diners communally cook their
choice of fresh ingredients, the soup is traditionally spicy and flavoured with
a quite serious weight of garlic and Sichuan pepper. Sichuan pepper is an
unusual spice, it is both spicy and numbing, the Chinese have a word for this –
mala (
麻辣)
– which approximately means spicy and numbing. A friend who had been to China
before warned me that in China the broth would make the anglicised version
taste like baby formula in comparison (OK, this is a somewhat hyperbolic
version of his actual description). Luckily, it’s possible to order a hotpot
that is half spicy and half chicken broth, although some cross contamination
during the feasting stage is inevitable.
Sichuan hotpot ready to be eaten.
Me ready to eat Sichuan hotpot, complete with apron - how did they know?
As we approached
the restaurant it was clear that the Sichuan populace were going to work hard
to confirm their national reputation as garrulous merry makers, there was a
large crowd of chattering guests waiting outside while chomping on various
kinds of seeds, sipping hot water and spraying shells in various directions.
The staff worked hard on their part to prove the Sichuan reputation for
friendliness, smiling and helping the slightly mystified foreigners (us) to
navigate through the chomping crowds. Inside was a huge hall filled with purpose
built tables that had a big hole in the middle of each one where a gas burner
was situated to heat the eye-watering pungent broth. They helped us pick some
raw foods which we would then cook and brought us a huge cauldron divided into
two concentric circles, one spicy and one not (I can’t currently find the name
for the half-half hotpot, research is continuing). It’s necessary to wear an
apron when eating a real Sichuan hotpot as splash back is likely to occur,
especially when drinking the local Snow Beer (
雪花啤酒).
This beer has an alcohol content roughly equivalent to its namesake, but it
does suit eating Sichuan food rather well since it also has the cooling effect
of said precipitation. The entire experience at this restaurant was festive,
although conversation was not a particularly viable proposition as the sound
levels in the enormous echoing hall of spice approached those of an
international airport runway. For more on hotpots visit this rather wonderful
blog:
http://yireservation.com/recipes/chinese-hot-pot-part-i/.
Chinese people generally
love food, this is undeniable and generally something they will heartily agree
to. Not only will they feast during meal times but there is also a national
love of all things snack-like. Chengdu accords with this cultural tendency to
the fullest extent possible, it was particularly the case during our time there
which, being a holiday period, brought out seemingly the entire population onto
the streets for a well-deserved bit of rest and recreation, some respite from
the work ethic of long hours broken up by few holidays. This work ethic tends
to bring out an intensity in the merry making of Chinese people (at any rate in
all the places I’ve been), they will go a long way and battle through an
unreasonably large throng of people to
have
fun, this can sometimes be a little trying for a polite
Swedo-British-American-Guernsenais (Celia is from Guernsey in the Channel
Islands, I’m from all over the place) couple but with a certain measure of
stoicism and cultural adaption one can generally have a pretty good time. We
found ourselves at Renmin Park (meaning literally people’s park –
人民公园)
where the festive spirit was in full swing, in fact so much so that people
seemed almost drunk on it. There was ballroom dancing, people on hired boats
jauntily crashing into each other, the common communal group dancing, an art
auction, a loud tea house (something of a Chengdu institution) and of course a
plethora of snack stalls. These had everything from fried tofu to sweets made
of nut paste to fried potato and meat to sweets skilfully crafted from caramel
into exquisitely delicate Chinese zodiac animals. The atmosphere that day was
electrifying and any reservations I’d had about Chinese festival times were at
least partially quietened by this extravaganza of food, culture and above all
fun.
Chinese people having fun.
An auction in a park!
During our time
in Renmin Park we stopped for a spot of tea at the ever-present park tea house
(
茶馆).
Chengdu is famous for its tea and chattering, tea houses fulfil that part of
the cultural sphere filled by the public house in Britain, which in Chengdu
meant another echoing chasm of high volume discussions and further mountains of
discarded shells. Tea in China is served as leaves in a cup with hot water
replenished at the drinker’s request, until the concoction mainly tastes of
water flavoured slightly by these leaves. This particular establishment seemed
to be aimed at tourists and locals alike, the main outcome being that it was
something of an old fashioned experience, the hot water being decanted through
slender copper spouts sprouting from a hot copper bulb. These spouts were of a
surprising length, presumably to allow the water to cool down, in the same way
that Berber tea, it’s far flung north-African many-times removed cousin, is
generally decanted from a great height. The tea was delicious, remaining my
favourite green tea but also remaining something of an elusive treat. The tea
was called Qing Cheng Shan (I’m not entirely sure about this, and I’m even less
sure how to write it in characters), which means something like Green Cheng Mountain,
although this memory remains bathed in the amnesiac haze of holiday
recollections, thus it serves further to escape me.
Celia enjoying tea.
An example of the long-spouted tea pot, although in a different location.
Tea houses in
Chengdu facilitate more than simple tea supping, there are multitudinous hordes
of other enterprising individuals plying for trade. Amongst others are the ear
cleaners, peering into the open tunnels with small torches for illumination,
poking and prying with metal sticks, burning with lighters; things seemed
somewhat medieval, clearly cotton buds were not adequate for these tasks. There
are also those willing to buff up shoes to reflective glory and provide seeds
and snacks in place of the scones or biscuits that are enjoyed much further
still to the west on our own shores. It was during these cultural reveries that
we were approached by Xiao Yu, a gentlemen who was to provide us with a valuable
vantage point over the more impenetrable parts of Chinese culture. That
impenetrability is created in part by the monolithic state in China, a state
which sets great store by face-saving techniques that disqualify those
uncosmetic experiences of village life from most foreigners’ experiences of
this vast and fascinating cultural tapestry. He approached clutching a magazine
and enthusiastically telling me about a critical essay therein that he was
surprised to see get past the censors, a strangely hopeful occurrence wrapped
up in the heavily doctored local media. It quickly became clear that he was a
tour guide of sorts and offered to show us around local villages for a price
that is quite high in China, but low to a European, and since a chance to see
rural China had frustratingly not raised its head during my accumulated year
and a half there Celia and I jumped at the chance. We will return to this
experience later on, first there was music to be enjoyed and there were performances
to be seen.
Zodiac sign sweets and Celia.
Bumper boats
Ear cleaning
Part
3 – Changing faces and minority music.
Before the less
cosmetic stage of our experience we were destined first to have the more
standardised and largely obligatory experience of the local culture through
organised shows and museums. These were of particular interest to me because of
my fascination with food and music that rather neatly interlinked with the
cultural riches available in Chengdu. A visit to the Sichuan provincial museum
revealed a complex texture of minority cultures that had many of their own
instruments and musical customs. Aside from the better known wind instruments
of the Tibetans there were various examples of lesser known minorities, such as
the Qiang, Dai and Miao groups. This served as a reminder that China is a much
more diverse country than an outsider might be led to believe and that while
only about eight percent of the population belong to ethnic minorities that
is still in the region of one hundred
million people, that being based on only one of the many differing figures I’ve
heard quoted.
A selection of minority musical instruments, mainly for ceremonial purposes.
One evening we
were taken by organised tour to see some performances in something of a
multipurpose tea house, auditorium and gift shop emporium. The unexpectedly
multicultural history of western China was met that night with a reminder that
the east is developing its own more modernised mixture. Aside from Celia and me,
there were three students from Xian, a confident and chatty slim Chinese
student, a somewhat rounder South Korean and their shy wide-eyed Japanese
counterpart. They were something of a message from the developing future of
China as an oriental melting pot, three representatives of cultures that have
in the past been less than cordial (indeed, it can be said that China and Japan
are still hardly the best of friends) all living and studying in the same
Chinese city, a China with its very own story to tell of cultural mixing
through trade along the Silk Road. All this continually serves to reshape any
stereotypical views one might hold of China as an ossified monocultural and
eternally unchanging mass.
The performances
themselves were clearly geared for tourists, but lacked the usual kitsch, aside
that is from the make-up coated qipao (a kind a Chinese dress –
旗袍) clad
master of ceremonies, whose robotic English was all but incomprehensible (I
made a little more sense of her through a curious combination of her broken
English and my broken understanding of her Mandarin, something of a shattered
plate of comprehension). The performances included, among others, an ensemble
of various classical Chinese instruments, such as the plucked guzheng (
古筝) and
the popping sound of Chinese cymbals; a few performances from operas; some
shadow puppetry; a slightly incongruous but undeniably amusing demonstration of
physical comedy from a clown and his “wife”; a painfully high pitched wind
instrument performance; and finally the crescendo of a face changing performance.
The opera performances flooded onto the stage in a torrent of vivid colours and
happily were rather more melodious than their Beijing counterparts, Jingju (
京剧) originates
from Beijing and Chuanju (
川剧) from Sichuan province. They seemed
to straddle the mythical and historical as Chinese history is often apt to do,
such as with the stories of Yu the Great (
大禹), thought to be tamer the
Yangtze River in something of a mythical piece of civil engineering (
see myShoaxing post), and the somewhat embellished tales of Qin Huangdi
(
秦皇帝)
resting for eternity in his tomb latticed with shimmering channels of mercury.
These tales were relatively more prosaic, one telling of a love lorn princess
and another of a beheading, complete with a terrifyingly realistic enactment of
the deed itself.
Some Chuanju for you.
The shadow
puppetry was at first a cause for scepticism, but quickly rose in pace to a
frenetic display of manual dexterity and served as reminder of the historical
foundation of the much later achievements of the Lumiére brothers, another
marker of the complex web of culture and history that threw out its tendrils
inexorably across Eurasia. Chinese instruments are often deeply calming and
highly palatable to western ear, however there are certain notable exceptions.
Take for example Beijing opera, to my ear a dissonant cacophony. The wind
instrument interlude belonged to this unfortunate stable. According to our
slathered robotic friend it was supposed to give the impression of song birds.
Perhaps if that song bird was to be strangled I might agree with this, but I
could not find any beauty in this particular chirruping. The performance of
physical comedy provided a welcome interlude, it seemed to follow the line of
the familiar comedic trope involving a long suffering couple, the husband
clearly not of much use and the wife a nagging pain. It was executed quite well
and, though lacking subtlety, was expressive enough to coax plenty of laughter
from the crowd. The finale was a performance of face changing. Face changing is
a style of masked performance where the actors by some sleight of hand change
their masks at a high frequency to the metallic popping reverberations of
cymbals. The masks themselves are vivid contorted grimaces, resembling slightly
the faces of samurais, cultural dissonance notwithstanding. The performance
that night was a great introduction to this fast paced visual illusion, and the
performances in general had been an excellent taster of Sichuan performance
art.
A short clip of some shadow puppetry.
...and some more Chuanju.
Part
4 – Out of town and past the biggest building in the world.
In part 2 of
this post I told of a man with whom we met by chance in Renmin Park during our
festive forays. He’d promised to take us on a tour of the surrounding Chinese
villages and so he met us one morning with his driver. It was to be a day
fascinating not only for anyone wanting to appreciate a China that had not been
coated in the make-up through which the authoritarian government would
seemingly like all outsiders to view this country, but also in particular for a
gastronomic obsessive like me. First we had to navigate the modern highways of
Chengdu and scarcely had we left when Xiao started pointing out various things
I would not otherwise have noticed. He pointed to some vehicles being stopped
by police and explained that they were using military license plates illegally,
a quick sign of the corruption simmering beneath the surface of the booming
modern nation.
It was this
mixture of corruption and hard headed governance that Xiao hinted at intermittently
as our day progressed. He talked in quiet tones governed by control, but in a
nevertheless increasingly vitriolic anger, of modern land clearances around
Chengdu and the modern fashion for mindlessly expanding GDP at the expense of the
surrounding agrarian communities. He didn’t mention too much about it, but to
hear anything like this from a member of the Chinese public is really quite
rare
,
but perhaps a symptom of a slight loosening of the tight ideological control
that has been such an everlasting feature of Chinese political culture. We continued to zip out of Chengdu on one of
the many outsized highways that cast their web over the new China, rocketing
past the biggest building in the world. This building is called the New Century
Global Center and is not the tallest building in the world but rather holds the
greatest volume. In the best traditions of economic expansion it is a cathedral
to soaring growth, filled no doubt with shops at times bereft of shoppers as
the government hopes the new generation will stop their habit of saving and
start spending to create an economy based on more than exports and government
projects. The building is a crouching beast, belying its vastness, a symbol of
the China’s self-confidence and constantly diversifying economy. As a symbol of
the new Xiao did not like it, no doubt many had been forcibly moved in the
drive for modernisation, more victims of the march into a bright oriental
future.
As we hurtled
out of the city this modern future slowly ebbed away into an edge land under construction,
a dust filled nexus between the past and the future. Suddenly we were on
country lanes, something I’d never experienced in my time in the vastly
developed Yangtze River delta region. We ascended and descended narrow belts of
dark tarmac, flanked by green fields, rice paddies, irrigation ditches, ponds
where fish waited for their inevitable demise on the dinner plate and there,
swollen with irrigation for the east, what must have been a vein of the Yangtze
fed by capillaries somewhere high up on the unimaginably remote Tibetan
plateau. We stopped in a town where Xiao took us on what felt like a stroll
into the past, not the China filled with piercing metal turrets and temples to
modernity, but relics of the past still surviving in the present, preserved for
a short while by the limits of development. In this town it seemed that
everything happened on the streets, shops with interiors did not figure largely
here. Cuttings lay on the ground in cohorts of green and brown ready to be
marched into service in the surrounding fields, barbers trimmed and shaved
under the dimly lit confines of a bridge, coffee-brown bunches of unshredded
tobacco lay by the road ready to be bought and stuffed in the ubiquitous pipes
hanging from the yellowing mouths of the gnarled peasant men. For the
population here was ageing, their children having largely succumbed to the pull
of endless possibility in the big cities to the east, leaving the familiar
combination of the old and very young to populate these vanishing pasts being
slowly trampled out by progress.
A barber under a bridge.
Cuttings for sale.
More cuttings
As we walked
along Xiao pointed out a vision of horror, there lay piles of teeth on a table.
Pictures of Dr. Christian Szell, the dentist turned torturer from the film Marathon Man, flitted across my mind, but this particular dentist was not the
torturing sort, although he did have an unusual surgery as it was by the edge
of a lane, open to the fog and drizzle of this moist province. A doctor was
also available in an open fronted surgery signposted by a collection of strange
herbs and remedies on the pavement. The doctor (yijia - 医家)
himself seemed unimaginably old, affably waiting to remove the domed suction
cups from an equally ancient woman with whom Celia was invited the pose, much
to the doctor’s amusement. These street side doctors can be found in updated
form across China as TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) clinics and chemists (药房). We
continued through the streets seeing various other outlets, such as shops
selling woven baskets, preparing white clouds of cotton and a man selling
cleavers, demonstrating their efficacy by destroying everything from pillows to
books with great zeal. Later that day we were to see the close connections between
the producers and shopkeepers in this thriving area, a sign of the past here,
in contrast to the aspirational drive by some to bridge that gap again in the
west.
Dental surgery with a difference.
Celia considers swapping doctors...
...then sees the treatment on offer!
We slowly left
these inedible goods behind and slowly entered an area selling foodstuffs,
starting with some hawkers of bread stuffed with pork, which turned out to be
quite delicious if a little oily, in keeping with the best traditions of
Chinese peasant cookery. We strolled through this area, littered with a rainbow
of overflowing plenty, stalls providing flavour from overstuffed bags of
pungent spices; tables buried under mountains of orange pumpkins, fleshy
tumescent lotus roots and forests of leafy green plants; and here and there
sacks of flower, brittle brown potato noodles and postcard sized squares of earthy
smoked tofu, like some forgotten file of decaying words recently rediscovered
by a roving collector. We strolled past the local equivalent of an artisan
brewery (although it is doubtful such pretentious taglines enter into local
parlance), glass jars full of translucent fluids of unknown alcoholic provenance
perched behind a steaming heap of spent grains, hinting at the starting point
of their lives. The meat and fish area was a riot of smells, visions and
wriggling buckets full of oily black eels. Here was a forest of hanging pork,
ostensibly displaying its bright pink freshness to the browsing consumer, there
was a cage of chickens ready for summary execution in the interests of protein,
and over here was a woman industriously working with a pair of scissors. One by
one she quickly plucked frogs from a bucket and deftly cut their heads off,
which pinged unceremoniously into another bucket set up to get rid of the
evidence. And finally, as we left the market, an old gentleman adorned with a
blue Maoist era cap and work clothes flashed a smile of playful cunning and
proved the local generosity, offering me a glug from his plastic bottle of
mysterious clear liquid, which I had to graciously turn down due to the early
hour of the day.
Piles of herbs and spices.
Booze of many interesting sorts.
Food safety, China style.
Off with their heads!
Tofu as you've never seen it before.
The alcoholically generous chap.
From
the shopkeepers we climbed down the ladder of industry to the assemblers and
producers. We arrived at a small open-fronted house, inside which sat a furnace
and various implements of metallurgy. This, it turned out, was a still
functioning blacksmith, not a tourist attraction or a factory, but a family
producer of the knives, quite possibly those blades we’d seen earlier assembled
in a neat row ready for the mutilation of books. The blacksmith fed his furnace
to a white hot fury, brought out a glowing ingot and began hammering it with
the rhythmical slam of a mallet. In a moment speaking of apparent
egalitarianism between the sexes his wife came out and started slamming the
iron from another angle, the rhythm doubled now into a flattening regularity.
The age and continuing hard work of this couple made me think, as many other
people in their later years do in China, about the immense socio-economic
changes these people have been through. These people very probably were children
when the new China emerged under the ambitious iron fist of Mao, starved by
farming malpractice but also socially equalised and heavily modernised, they
must remember the opening of China by Deng Xiaoping (
邓小平) and
the beginning of its stratospheric rise toward global economic dominance. Did
they think about any of this or is it only my western luxuries that allow me
the break from survival that gives me the time to consider these things? They
gave no hint in conversation, asking a few questions about where we were from,
showing a slight passing interest and asking what blacksmiths were like in
England, at which point I tried to convey the idea of artisan workers in
England, something they seemed to find more than a little perplexing.
The blacksmith couple at work.
Later, at a hat
making workshop staffed by industrious women weaving farm wear for some further
income, I thought about how these were fast disappearing annexes of the
industrial export empire that makes China the new workshop of the world. These
small cottage industries remain here near Chengdu, but perhaps not for much
longer. This bucolic small industry landscape would no doubt soon be subsumed
by the fog of authoritarian GDP and growth that heralds a new age for this
ancient country, bringing in a time of relative peace and prosperity after well
over a hundred years of strife and violence of varying degrees. It is hard to
be and unfair to be entirely negative about modern China, but Xiao’s concerns
about the forceful progress in the interests of growth are certainly worthy of
consideration. It is also hard not to be distracted by politics and opinion
when observing this unique country. This consideration of growth and change
contrasted suddenly with a funerary banquet being held in a village we passed
through. The turn-out was good, a multitude of locals feasting at an
archipelago of tables spread across the pavement, a quite normal village affair
according to Xiao. It was time too for us to eat, and we stopped at a local
restaurant, where we ate a delicious dish of stir-fried cucumber, fungus and
pork. We also ate a dish less than attractive to the western palate, bitter
gourd. This dish truly earns its name, twisting the consumer’s mouth into a
grimace of discomfort, sucking all pleasing flavours away. Luckily we’d ordered
a bottle of nut milk, a popular drink in China, it has the creamy texture of
milk but is produce using nuts and tastes rich and sweet.
Nut milk - yum.
Bitter gourd - not yum.
A lady making hats.
That banquet.
Soon we were
again challenged to consider the thoughts of the older generation here as we
stopped for tea in a village, once more there seemed to have been an exodus of
their offspring for brighter lights elsewhere. Even a workman from a nearby
road development was fairly old. These men and women worn out by history sat
quietly playing cards, smoking the local tobacco with great relish and sipping
on green tea from cracked mugs. They again registered a passing interest,
variously looking perplexed as I took some pictures, it must be strange to
these people that anyone would find a life they no doubt consider mundane to be
so interesting. There was no ill will, but certainly some raised eyebrows at
this infiltration into their quiet world and again some considerable interest
in where we were from, culminating in some hilarity a group of women found at
my extremely questionable attempts to speak Chinese. They laughed with the
gusto that can only be properly produced by such old ladies, leaving us with
good cheer and welcoming amusement.
That tea house and a man enjoying some of that tobacco.
Those laughing ladies.
More evidence of the geriatric nature of Sichuan's villages. And some chap of importance on the wall.
We continued to
meander along the winding ribbons of tarmac, through the verdant hills and past
tumble down relics of a vanishing past. We arrived at a collection of brick
houses filled with pottery, for this was an example of an old artisanal trade,
they were potters and makers of related art. The entire complex was filled with
thickets of pots in various stages of creation, from amorphous lumps, to smooth
brown pots characterised by the concentric rings brought by the potters’ wheel,
to the bejewelled glinting of the glazed finished articles. The largest would
go for around four hundred renminbi (
人民币 - about
forty pounds in 2014), but were at least five feet tall, making me consider
with wonderment the economic chasm between us. Here we experienced our first
real reticence, the master did not wish to be photographed at work on his clay
behemoth, but at the unstoppable insistence of Xiao and some small financial
transaction he was happy to allow it, despite our protestations that it should
be no concern. A younger man who seemed to inhabit some position of authority
was much happier with his new role as a tourist attraction however, and showed
us around wearing a wide grin. There were some younger women and teenagers
here, having not yet escaped from the confined of the countryside. They
communicated shyly with us in a mixture of Chinese and broken English as we
watched some children being instructed in the art of using a wheel. As we left
we saw an unearthly praying mantis sitting by the exit, as if to bid us
farewell with one last visual gift.
A very big pot being made.
Down time.
Finally, we
arrived at a small shop filled with strange equipment that would look more at
home in a chemistry lab. Bulging rubber pipes hung mysteriously from hooks on
the ceiling, black buckets sat waiting for an as yet unknown liquid, a large
earthenware pot sat being infiltrated by a belching pipe, busily boiling the
soy milk. This was a small soy milk and tofu making factory, another example of
small agricultural industry. The man running it came out clothed in a pair of
shorts stained by his trade and a pair of wellingtons. He proceeded to fill the
buckets with gypsum, combining with the milk to create a curd. Perhaps I now
knew more than many urban Chinese about the creation of tofu, perhaps not. In
any case this brought our tour to a close, and on the drive back to the Chinese
future we digested the enormous diversity of this disappearing or otherwise
changing lifestyle, I wondered how much of the rush forward was in fact the
will of the government and to what extent the populace acquiesced. It appeared
from the emptying villages that in large part they had voted with their feet,
but in reality land claiming remains a sore point in China, one of the major
causes of social unrest and protest (apparently this happens more than one
might think). The visit to the villages had at once been fascinating and sad, a
reminder of often involuntary sacrifices in the interests of China’s continuing
economic odyssey, a reminder of the youthful tendency to seek fortune in that
odyssey’s many twists of fortune.
The tofu-making room.
Gypsum being added to buckets to create tofu from soy milk.
Our final visual treat waving us goodbye.
Part
5 – A panda picture epilogue.
Visiting
Chengdu would not be complete without seeing the pandas at the Chengdu Research
Base of Giant Panda Breeding (a characteristically catchy name). Food or music
figures nowhere in this, I’d finally found a food that could not be (legally)
fried and eaten, but it would be verging on the criminal not to put up some
ridiculously cute pictures anyway. It is one of the most pleasant zoo or
sanctuaries I’ve ever been to in any country, perhaps surprising in a country
where I’d previously been treated to roller skating bears (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jl5DVnLjcs),
although Shanghai Zoo is another jewel in the rough of animal cruelty (or at
best ambivalence). These pandas looked extremely happy with life, living
in large pens and apparently doing nothing much except stuffing their faces
with bamboo and, if young, gambolling with surprising agility through the ample
foliage. The lazy nature and extreme infertility of these creatures make it a
wonder that they are not extinct, they probably would be were it not for an
immensely effective PR campaign New Labour would be proud of, centring largely
on the WWF (not the amazingly homoerotic actors, rather the Word Wide Fund for
Nature). Please enjoy my selection of pictures while producing obligatory coos
of delight.
Gamboling pandas.
The rather wonderful entrance to the centre.
Awwww!
Make sure you come in the morning so you can see the breakfast service.
More play.
