Fuddland

Last week was China’s National Day holiday, and thanks to some fortuitous timing of the calendar I ended up with a whopping eight consecutive days off, the better part of four of which Mary and I spent in the little-known city of Bózhōu (亳州) in the province of Ānhuī (安徽).

Despite being home to some quite significant historical and cultural places of interest, Bózhōu’s tourism industry has barely gotten off the ground. There are street-signs to most of sights throughout the city, but ask a taxi driver to take to you one of them [or even pointing at the sign when you become convinced you must be pronouncing it completely incorrectly] and they have to yell out of their window at one of their fellow cabbies to ask for directions.

Still, we did manage to see almost all the city has to offer, and we started with the main reason we wanted to go there: the enormous traditional Chinese medicinal products marketplace. [Depending on your source, it’s either the world’s largest, or just China’s largest, or just one of the four largest, but just take it from me: it’s pretty blooming big.] As well as the weird and wonderful things that we were expecting to see, one surprise was just how good the place smelled — and not just the market, but throughout the city we got whiffs every now and then of pleasant aromas that we couldn’t quite place.

It was also nice to find that, despite being the only tourists in the entire place [by which I mean, the whole city, for the whole time we were there], the people were completely relaxed about us just wandering into their shops and around their stalls, snapping away with our cameras and poking our noses into the boxes, sacks and tanks on display. The few times I tried to enquire as to what unrecognised items were, or how to ingest something, I fell foul of a combination of a lack of vocabulary and an inability to even make out what words they were saying in a thick, guttural accent that they steadfastly refused to attempt to make clearer, but we were happy enough just taking it all in.

#1

Cai Jingjing | 2008 / 10 / 07 – 11:43

I’m the first one see this article , wow ~~ so many medicinal products , some of them i have never seen before!Great!

#2

Thane | 2008 / 10 / 11 – 00:20

Do you ever actually do any work down there these days? It all just seems to be one big holiday. And no, I’m not in the least bit jealous…

#3

David | 2008 / 10 / 11 – 10:45

Re #2: Hey, this was my first holiday since February!

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