Fuddland

For a different sort of Christmas we headed out of town for a few days of peace and quiet in the pine forest-covered rocky mountains of Lu Shan. This area was created for and by the wealthy foreigners who mostly lived in Shanghai from the 1800s until the establishment of the PRC, as a holiday-villa settlement in which to escape the cloying humidity of the city. There are still many fairly-well-maintained villas remaining, the most significant of which belonged to Chiang Kai-Shek.

Glories of the past

It subsequently became a regular meeting-place of the CCCPC, and Mao’s former residence has been converted into a combination of a museum of local geology [a few rooms with some rather uninspiring collections of rocks and dirt, together with poorly-translated signs and comically-naff paintings of scenes from the bygone millennia] and a shrine to its previous occupant, complete the preserved bedroom in which everything on display was, it proudly claimed, “personally used” by the man himself.

This claim was not so proudly advertised—although one can’t help but infer it—at the villa of Chiang Kai-Shek, at which Mao was a guest once or twice and, for some reason, includes the bathroom as one of the rooms on display. Perhaps it was to highlight the multi-cultural aspects of its past, containing as it did both a squat- and Western-style toilet as well as a bidet.

There was also an intricately-carved ivory tusk that must have been a metre in length—and however much we may tut-tut over its origins, it was fascinating to see the level of detail they could carve out without destroying it.

Off-peak peaks

Despite it being close to zero Celcius at this time of year, we deliberately chose an off-peak season simply so that we didn’t have to contend with hoards and hoards of tourists [like ourselves, for example]—make no mistake, Lu Shan is one of the most popular destinations in this part of the country and on national holidays is teeming with visitors, foreign and [overwhelmingly] domestic. Our plan worked and we wandered through the peaks in relative solitude, apart from the odd tour group and one particularly boisterous group of male students.

There are well-defined pathways and staircases all over the mountains themselves, which lead you quite naturally to each and every one of the designated vantage-points and places of interest—or rather, to those that weren’t frustratingly closed for the winter. [The frustration lay in the fact that we had to reach the entrance to the place before we found out it was closed. This included one occasion when we purchased one-way tickets for the cable car in the belief that at the other end was a pathway through the mountains that eventually lead back to the town. It was only at the other end that the staff told us it was closed. What did the ones at the top think we were going to do, tightrope-walk back? In fairness, once we protested that they should have really been told at the top, they gave us a discount on the return ticket.]

As if it wasn’t quite clear enough that there is something worth stopping and having a look at, we found most places had been set up with a now-badly-weathered wooden platform from which one can recreate a photo of Mao at the same spot. Previous visitors’ photos were proudly displayed, which somehow all managed to include one balding Chinese man with a paunch doing his best to adopt the pose of his past leader. These fellas must be a hoot at every fancy-dress party. “Oh, I see you’ve come as Chairman Mao … again…”