Fuddland

One of the villages in county of Yuányáng (元阳) was either selected or has the savvy [and I suspect it was the former] to charge tourists to wander its streets. Beside a particularly beautiful expanse of terraced rice paddies about halfway between Xīnjiēzhèn (新街镇) and Duōyīshù (多依树) lies a small market where you can haggle over silver trinkets and hand-finished throws, and a large entrance gate to the village of Qìngkǒu (箐口).

In a masterful sales move, this entrance gate leads to a path that winds fairly steeply for fifteen minutes or so down into the valley below, and it is at the end of this path that you pay for your entrance ticket to the village: anyone who didn’t know about the tariff would surely take one look at the way they’ve just come and decide they might as well pay to explore the village before they huffed-and-puffed their way back up to the main road.

On their part, the citizens of Qìngkǒu have installed a small museum of local culture, and restored and maintained their homes and buildings in their traditional designs with thatched roofs, although there are one too many brazenly-displayed gift-shops, and they couldn’t quite conceal their use of modern technologies such as satellite dishes by using them to dry their traditional clothing. But it was nice to spend a couple of hours exploring the designated attractions such as the old mill house, as well as going off the beaten path. At one point Mary acquired a new potential suitor in the form of a little boy who followed us for a while crying, “Miss! Miss! You’re beautiful, I love you,” until he got to his house, at which point he stuck out his tongue and ran inside.

Back up at the main road, waiting for the minibus to ferry us back to Duōyīshù, we watched a steady stream of elderly women walk past us carrying large baskets of damp sand on their backs, depositing them further up the road for a group of men to use in the building of a new wall, occasionally stopping for a rest and a chat on the way back.

While we waited for the minibus [which actually took almost two hours to turn up], Mary was subjected a couple of instances of drive-by photography from Chinese tourists deciding that she was part of the scenery, and we were both entertained by a tiny young girl — she couldn’t have been more than four- or five-years-old — who was in charge of collecting the fee for using the public toilets. While I was busy looking the other way for an alternative means to get us back to our guesthouse, Mary saw this little girl, dressed in beautifully woven clothes and a wearing a hat decorated with silver, allow a tourist to pose with his arms around her, before she marched up to the photographer and demanded a payment of one yuan for her troubles. Qìngkǒu: village on the take.