Fuddland

This category is a subcategory of Travelling in China.

Perhaps due to its location—fairly far removed from other famous tourist destinations or ports of trade [as well as it being in one of the poorer provinces in China]—while the local government seems to have gone some way towards designating certain areas to be of interest to tourists, the old streets and buildings of Bozhou that are in the traditional Chinese style are still plentiful in number mostly because they are still functional: people still live and work in and around them.

Wherever we went, on the street outside shops or walking down dusty side streets, glancing into open doors, we saw game after game of mahjong being played—it reminded me a lot of what I saw in Chengdu, although at least most of these people seemed to be at their actual places of work not working, rather than hanging out in the park all day not working. The general aura of a relaxed attitude to life may or not be related to Bozhou being the hometown of the founder of Daoism [aka Taoism], Laozi [aka Laosi, Lao Tse, Lao-Tzu, Laotze, and Laocius].

Every evening we were there we ate out at a sprawling food court just across the road from our hotel. At around four or five in the afternoon, dozens of tables and plastic stools are set out beneath an old marquee, with several different proprietors offering an enormous variety of dishes cooked before your very eyes. Since we didn’t really know any names of the local dishes that we could order, and even if we were told the names we wouldn’t know what it was, we settled on a much more convenient method of ordering: we simply chose the ingredients and asked to be made a tasty dish using them.

This sort of Chinese fare tends to use only one or two vegetable and meat components, given its pep with spices, garlic and sauces, so it’s quite easy to choose, say, a nice-looking aubergine and get served a huge plate of it flavoured with some sort of thick gravy-like sauce that you’ve never tasted before, but is nonetheless delicious. And of course there are staples like steamed dumplings, rice, and some sort of thick, tapioca-like soup with soy beans that seemed to be a local speciality to fill you up.

There were a few other parks and temples that we didn’t go and check out, but I think we saw the lion’s share of what Bozhou has to offer, and it was well worth the trip. The people were friendly and not overly-curious, even though we were the only foreigners we saw the entire time we were there. The only embarrassing “special treatment” we received was at the train station trying to buy our tickets home. As we were queuing, with a good twenty or thirty people in front of us, a new window was opened and we were beckoned forward. I was half-expecting to be spoken to in English, but [as with every other local that we interacted with in Bozhou] the attendant didn’t seem to know anything beyond, “Hello”. I felt quite awkward being allowed to buy our tickets ahead of all the other people waiting in line, but I expect politely refusing the service and re-joining the queue would have created great confusion [as well as unintended offense], and it was nice to be able to secure sleeper tickets for the ten-hour or so train ride back to Suzhou.

In stark contrast to the imperious Cao Cao, one of his contemporaries and another resident of Bozhou was the legendary physician Hua Tuo. [And when I say “legendary”, I of course mean, “I’d never heard of him until I went to Bozhou, but he does seem to have been pretty important.”]

As well as being a renowned practitioner of traditional medicine, perhaps his most significant achievement was the first recorded use of anaesthetic during surgery—1,800 years ago.

He might have passed his extensive knowledge on to future generations had he not irked Cao Cao by refusing to treat the tyrant’s chronic headaches exclusively—a stubbornness that cost him his life. [In fairness, his recommended treatment was to numb the pain with hashish then split Cao Cao’s head open with an axe to extract the pus, so one can perhaps understand Cao Cao’s desire for continuous pain-relief treatment rather than extreme surgery.]

The fairly simple former monastery of Huazu’an that has been designated a tribute to Hua Tuo doesn’t offer much to see beyond a tastefully-displayed statue of the man himself with a potted biography and a few other historical artifacts, but is worth seeing if only for completeness.

One of the other claims-to-fame for the city of Bozhou is as the present-day form of the birthplace of the warlord Cao Cao, who lived during the time of the Three Kingdoms around the second and third centuries. [This period is the subject of John Woo’s latest film, Red Cliff.]

Despite being traditional portrayed in stories from this era as a big of an evil bugger, Bozhou is seemingly rather proud of its tyrannical son, and an enormous [albeit almost characature-like with his barrel-sized chest] statue looks out over the city from in front of the train station.

One of his sneaky tactical ideas is also now a tourist attraction named Dixia Yunbing Dao [which I’m roughly translating as “army-moved-underground tunnels”]: he dug out a short network of subterranean tunnels beneath the city for his army to hide in, waiting for an invading force to wander in under a false sense of the scale of his defences. The tunnels—although quite well-lit with bare lightbulbs and not in the least bit maze-like—are still pretty claustrophobic, smelling of damp earth, barely wider than my shoulders and forcing me to stoop throughout their length. The thought of waiting down there for any length of time, jam-packed between fellow soldiers in the darkness makes me quite uncomfortable.

The last Cao Cao-related attraction we visited confused me a little until I did some background reading. I thought I was visiting Cao Cao’s tomb, but in fact it was the tomb of Cao Teng, Cao Cao’s foster-grandfather, which is nothing more than a grass-covered mound of earth about twenty feet high surround by small flowerbeds, but also on display is the jade burial suit of Cao Song, Cao Cao’s father. [I can’t find anything (in English) that tells me where Cao Cao was laid to rest.] The longer I looked at it the eerier it became, the simplistic facial features somehow making it seem like it could sit up at any moment and start clomping towards me with its oversized feet. [I think I’ve seen too many Mummy films.]

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 Bozhou in the province of Anhui.

Despite being home to some quite significant historical and cultural places of interest, Bozhou’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.