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The public zoo here in Suzhou really needs to work on its publicity. I’ve lived here for over three years and it wasn’t until about two weeks before I was due to leave that I learned that the zoo houses two of only four known remaining Yangtze Giant Soft-Shelled Turtles—possibly the largest species of turtle in the world.

Even more worrying, of the four that are left, three are male. The sole remaining female lives, along with one male, here in Suzhou. The other two males are in Vietnam. A conservation breeding programme is in effect, which I learned about through a public talk given at The Bookworm, but you really wouldn’t know it just from visiting the zoo.

The water in the turtle pond is part of Suzhou’s network of polluted canals; the pond is open-air and there are no staff on hand to stop idiotic members of the public throwing cakes, biscuits, bread, soft-drinks, as well as spit and litter into the pond; there is construction going on all around, which is apparently going to lead to a much-improved living environment for the turtles, but the stress of all the noise and chaos isn’t really going to help these last two hopes for the species to produce any offspring.

Almost as soon as they were introduced, despite not having seen an opposite member of their sex for a very long time, their instincts took over and the female deposited some eggs in the pitiful sand pit at the top end of their enclosure. Half were collected by the conservation staff and placed into three different incubators [three different temperatures], and half were left in the sand to develop naturally. But none survived.

The female is around 80 years old and the male could be 100, or perhaps older, and if their life-expectancies are similar to other species of turtle then they may only be in middle-age. Turtles have been known to reproduce virtually up until they die of old age, so there may still be a chance that future batches will be more successful, but so little is known about this particular species that they’re not even sure if they are giving them the right diet—although it’s a safe bet that biscuits and spit are not exactly part of a natural diet.

For political reasons, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of the other two males being given a shot at becoming fathers anytime soon—at least, not through natural means. At the talk, the possibility of using artificial insemination was discussed and is an option they are considering. It’s worth mentioning that just a couple of years ago, there were six of these turtles left, but two died while the conservation programme was in the process of being set up. If the female passes away just as suddenly, that’s it: another extinction, right under our noses. Perhaps being well aware of her critical importance, the smaller female stayed well away from the public end of the pond, but the big male swam over and gave us a chance to see this incredibly rare creature from just a few feet away.

I quite often have to talk to students about Western dining habits—the differences, the etiquette, and so on—and one of the phrases that appears in their vocabulary list is, “going Dutch”. The phrase always requires an explanation, after which the students generally nod and say that in China it is called “AA”.

The term “AA” has puzzled me since I first heard it, being made up of English letters as opposed to Chinese characters, and no-one seemed to know what it actually stood for. In fact, most of them had never even thought to wonder.

“What does ‘AA’ mean?” I would ask.

“Go Dutch,” the reply would come.

“No, I’m not testing you on something you just learned. I mean, what does it stand for?”

“Oh … we don’t know.”

They wouldn’t even guess, and I was similarly stumped. [I could see no obvious connection with alcohol or automobiles.] Until, that is, yesterday, when a student was finally able to put me out of my misery.

As anyone who has learned a language while living or working alongside its native speakers will testify, one’s vocabulary can have some fairly eclectic entries. I knew how to say “mobile phone charger” in Chinese before I learnt the colours of the rainbow, simply because buying a new one was more of a priority than shopping for oil paints. [And when I do get around to building up a palette, it will probably conspicuously lack a purple, because I have immense trouble pronouncing that particular hue.]

And so it was that, somehow, a student who earlier in the class had no idea what “to go on a date” meant, was able to inform me why “AA” means “to split the bill”: it stands for “algebraic average”, which is what most people mean when they say, “take the average”, but in the world of maths is more commonly called the mean.

This of course answers another question that I frequently get asked, namely why—given my background—I’m not teaching mathematics in China. Any country that adopts a mathematical phrase into its everyday language clearly doesn’t need any help from me.

It’s been over about three years since I wanted to transfer money from here back to the UK, so I did a quick search for what information I needed to provide to the bank and was pleasantly amused to find my own post about it come back as one of the first hits. Armed with the relevant details, I went to my local Bank of China branch and told the nice lady at the Foreign Currency Transfer desk what I wanted to do.

Unfortunately I hit a bit of a snag because, as I was informed, a foreigner is only permitted to transfer up to US$500 worth of RMB per day. The amount I wanted to transfer was a bit more than that, and I didn’t really want to be going to the bank every day for the next couple of weeks, paying bank changes every time, so I asked if there was a way around it.

The first suggestion was to get an official tax statement from my company declaring that I’d paid the relevant taxes on my income. Whilst I have indeed been paying said taxes [honest gov’nor], I’ve tried getting the official form in the past and the best my company offered me was a spreadsheet printout stamped with the company seal of officialness. I showed it to the nice lady and she said it wasn’t the right thing. I was just about to leave and steel myself to try and extract the official official tax statement from my company, when the nice lady had another idea.

Chinese citizens are apparently allowed to transfer up to US$50,000 a year out of the country, and it turns out they can do this on behalf of a foreign friend. Naturally I can’t vouch for the true legality of this, but I was reassured by the nice lady that no trouble would befall the Chinese citizen in question provided they did not exceed the yearly limit. In that case, I said, could she be my friend for the afternoon and help me transfer the money on my behalf? [Having been asked countless times by complete strangers here if we can be friends, I had no qualms about returning the request on this occasion.] But she said that as a bank employee, she could not help me.

So I made a call to my very good friend and colleague [who happened to be just upstairs in my office], and within a few minutes the transfer process was underway. For some reason you have to state the amount you want to transfer in the destination currency, even though you only really know for certain how much money you have in RMB. There was a brief period of mild farce where every time they double-checked with me the amount I wanted to transfer, the exchange rate had changed and we had to recalculate that I had enough in my bank account to cover it. But it was all relatively simple to get done, and two days later the money had arrived in my Smile bank account.

By the way, my friend and I had to sign a total of four forms to complete the money transfer. When I arranged to get a throwaway pay-as-you-go SIM card for my Dad during his week-long visit, I had to sign six different pieces of paper. But at least the mobile phone company gave me a two free toiletry bags containing a toothbrush, toothpaste and a face towel for my troubles. The bank couldn’t even copy my name out of my passport correctly when I first opened the account, so it was particularly satisfying to finally close my—or rather, Davind’s—account with them.

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…”

Although I’m sure it makes a very pleasant day out at most times of the year, there’s really only one time of year that, if you happen to be in the area, you should make an extra effort to visit Tianping Hill [in Chinese, Tianping Shan]: in the latter weeks of autumn, from mid-November to early December, the maple-tree forest turns all shades of reds and deep oranges.

The park is nicely laid out so that you wander through the trees to the foot of the hill, peering into numerous small temples along the way should they take your fancy, before taking your time climbing the 221 metres up the not-too-steep carved-out stairway to the peak. At the top we found nothing more than some interestingly-shaped boulders and a fairly out-of-place fairground shoot-the-balloons game, although there were signs to a tea house which takes it water from a nearby spring that we never got around to following. But being able to look down and appreciate the contrast of the leaves against the surrounding evergreens is the real reason to have made the climb, as well as looking out towards Suzhou and trying to make out the skyscrapers through the haze of the pollution.

After a few minutes checking out the view in each direction, I wondered aloud if the collection of large pools of water in a quite bare-looking area below was a quarry—and if so, was it still active?—when the ground suddenly shook underfoot and a large rumble came from the direction I was looking: an explosion had just gone off, which seemed to confirm that it was indeed a quarry and it was very much still active.

Back down in the maple tree forest, we came across the obligatory couples having their wedding photos taken [every beauty spot comes with them], and of course no Chinese park would be complete without some sort of performance watched by a smattering of pensioners and teenage girls. We stood for a few minutes to watch the feats of a man standing on a wobbly plank, but decided not to stay for the graceful acrobatic displays of the girls with their coats on over their leotards.

One particular treat was coming across a local artist painting the view across the pond. At first I thought she was faking it for the benefit of a professional-looking photographer who had set up a tripod just behind her, but she really was putting paint to canvas. I don’t know how she was managing to hold onto her brush without gloves, let alone put the paint where she intended it to go without shivering, but manage she did, and the results were looking pretty good.

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.

I’ve just started working at the Longwin Modern English training centre 环亚琅文现代英语培训 in Suzhou, under the management of Michael Hsu.

So far, everything seems okay.

Summer has hit Suzhou with its full force, which means several days of sweltering heat [pushing 40°C] followed by torrential rainstorms which, although a welcome break from the sun, turn the streets into dirty rivers and bring sticky humidity when the temperatures rise again the following day. It’s a far cry from the refreshing change of the final week of my holiday a few months back, which I spent on the southernmost shores of the southernmost part of China, the provincial island of Hainan.

I admit I was fairly dubious about visiting a beach resort out here, and while it wasn’t quite up to the standards I’ve seen while visiting Nantucket or Cancun, the water was clean enough, and the beaches were kept rubbish-free despite the generally carefree Chinese attitude to littering. [Some days it’s all I can do to pick up the sweet wrapper that the kids in front of me have just thrown on the ground and thrust it back into their hands, but then a street-cleaner usually sweeps it away before I have a chance to move. This obviously works for them, but for someone with a deep-ingrained aversion to dropping litter, the lack of convenient bins every few hundred metres means I sometimes walk for miles with a sticky ice-cream wrapper flapping about in my hand.]

All along the south-east shores of the town of Sanya are lavish hotels and resorts with private beaches, but being a man on a budget I stayed in the Dadonghai area, home to two youth hostels, the better of which I found to be the Blue Sky International Youth Hostel. It was right around the corner from a very nice stretch of beach, with plenty of restaurants overlooking the sea and lots of street vendors peddling deliciously fresh fruit—I’ve never tasted better mangos.

The area is apparently astoundingly popular with Russian holidaymakers—so much so that most of the shops and roadsigns are displayed in both Chinese and Russian, although a Ukrainian woman that I met at the hostel told me that the Russian was mostly as amusingly wrong as much of the Chinglish that can be seen all over the country.

Walk a few hundred yards away from this vibrant, luxurious district and you find several huge hotels that have gone out of business. It was quite eerie walking around these deserted places, which looked as though everyone had simply walked out one day and never come back: through the padlocked glass doors, I could see plants that had wilted and died in the lobby, newspapers on the coffee tables; the adjacent restaurants still had their tables and chairs set out. [I half-expected the Chinese name of the hotel to translate as Mary Celeste.] A large smelly skip was thankfully downwind from the currently-populated areas.

Between these two areas were small groups of local fisherman, whole families catching crabs and molluscs, and—to be expected—more than a few wedding photo sessions taking advantage of the scenic backdrops. Despite not being much of a beach person, I did enjoy my week or so walking with the soft sand between my toes, my breakfasts of coconut jam on toast, and the surreal experience of Chinese taxi drivers and waiters trying to speak to me in Russian.

One of the must-dos in the province of Guangxi is a leisurely cruise down the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo, taking in 83 kilometres worth of the renowned karst scenery. The weather was not totally on our side, presenting us with a rather overcast day, but it was still a lovely way to spend five-or-so hours.

A coach picked us up from our hostel and stopped off at a couple of other nearby hotels to collect the other members of this particular scheduled cruise. Once we were all aboard and on our way to the pier, we were given a brief history of the region by the tour guide, but the most entertaining thing he said was when, since lunch on the boat was part of package, he enquired if there were any vegetarians on board. Several people raised there hands, only to be told:

Okay, can you tell me who you are again when it’s time for lunch? All foreigners look the same to me.

[Aside: this appears to be genuinely true and not an intentionally ironic twist on the racist stereotypes displayed in many a terrible British sitcom from the 1970s; several other Chinese people have told me they have a hard time distinguishing many Western people from each other. Mary explained to me that this is because although people of East Asian descent generally all have straight, black hair and brown eyes, they have a much wider variation in their facial features—the width and positioning of their eyes, the length of their noses, and so on—than Caucasians. So whilst people of European descent are conditioned to use the visual clues of hair and eye colours when recognising others, if those aspects are subconsciously disregarded, there’s a lot less to distinguish one Caucasian from another.]

The journey took us past some imaginatively- and not-so-imaginatively-named rock formations such as Yearning for Husband Rock, the Painted Hill of Nine Horses, and Writing Brush Peak, and there was a sublime moment of comic timing when, just as we were tucking into our lunch below deck, our guide informed us that we were about to glide past the most famous of all the Li River vistas—the one that appears on the back of the ¥20 note.

The cruise ends at the town of Yangshuo, which these days is entirely given over to tourism: literally every place of business is either a travel agent, restaurant, cafe, bar, hotel, souvenir shop or some such establishment. There were more eating places specialising in Western food than Chinese cuisine, and at night the main streets are garishly lit with ill-thought-out neon, waging war on your eyes while your ears are similarly assaulted by the clash of dance music pumping out of every bar. That’s not to say these places are all dreadful—the Karst Cafe and Drifters Cafe both had good food and wine, and we sampled the Rosewood Cafe’s ice cream menu a couple too many times. My two-years-in-China anniversary on February the 17th was celebrated with Shepherd’s Pie, apple crumble, and a nice bottle of French red—not a particularly Chinese meal but delicious nonetheless. But the real reason to spend any time at all in Yangshuo is to visit the surrounding countryside.

I think most people hire bicycles, but we opted for what we thought would be the easier option of an electric scooter. [For the benefit of any parents who might be reading, let’s all pretend that, yes, of course helmets were provided.] We asked what the best direction to head was, jumped on, and away we went.

Now excuse me while I gush: whizzing along the roads through the undulating countryside—karst after karst towering over small plots of farmland; passing through small villages and townships—with Mary riding pillion, her hands tucked into my coat pockets for warmth, her face pressed against my back as she too admired the scenery, is simply one of my happiest memories of the past thirty-one years. Even though the battery ran out of juice earlier than we estimated because we kept going further and further out and, despite stopping for a late lunch at a roadside noodle place and borrowing their electricity to charge it up for an hour, we ended up having to push the scooter for about 10 kilometres back to Yangshuo, in the dark and the rain, and I was a cranky old so-and-so for most of this time, thinking about that day gives me a goofy little smile that I have no intention of hiding.

Tearing ourselves away from the beauty and tranquility of Duoyishu and the surrounding countryside of Yuanyang was hard, but we also wanted to go and see the famous scenery of the Li River in Guangxi, which meant we had to first get back to Kunming in order to catch a train to Guilin.

The bus that we had originally caught heading south from Kunming to Xinjiezhen in Yuanyang left in the mid-morning and took about eight hours. So, when boarding the return bus at half past four in the afternoon, we were figuring on being back in Kunming somewhere between midnight and one o’clock in the morning—not ideal, but not too bad.

But when the bus turned out to be of the sleeper variety—comprising no seats but two rows of bunk-beds along either side of the aisle—we started to suspect that we were in for a longer ride than we were banking on. Neither of us had been on a sleeper bus before, and the experience was a lot less comfortable than the comparatively-luxurious sleeper train carriages. The duvet covers provided were a hotch-potch of children’s designs [we had Pokemon], all of dubious levels of cleanliness. Smoking was allowed throughout, and the driver’s reckless confidence at handling the mountain bends had Mary cutting off the blood-flow to my hand for most of the evening.

In order to warrant the use of a sleeper bus, it seems that the driver had been instructed to stretch out the journey as much as possible, so we found ourselves making many more stops than on the way down, and of course given that any and all activities in China must stop dead at mealtimes, there was an extended break beside an outdoor restaurant a few hours after we first set off. [Having spent so much time getting comfortable in our twin top bunk, we opted to stay aboard and chow down on the snacks we had brought with us.]

It was now well past sunset and there were so many more stops for toilet breaks and the like that eventually we just stopped trying to ascertain where we were and, after some reassuring of Mary that I would do my level best to prevent the driver from careening off the mountainside, we drifted off to a restless sleep.

At some point I half-woke up, enough to notice that we had yet again stopped for some reason, and caught a glimpse of another bus parked immediately in front of us. I almost wondered what was going on, but it was still pitch dark and I instead immediately fell back to sleep.

Some time later, Mary and I both woke up to find it was daylight, but we still weren’t moving and, moreover, I saw that the same bus was still parked in front of us. We then noticed that there were yet more buses parked all around us. We were, we had to deduce, in a bus station. Kunming Station, to be precise, and had been there since before whenever it was that I had woken up.

It was gone nine o’clock on the morning. Sitting at the front of the bus, chatting around a charcoal fire in a metal bucket, were the driver and the bus attendant. The rest of the bus was completely empty, and all the beds had been made up. We had arrived in Kunming in the middle of the night, but rather than wake up the dozing foreigners, they just let the rest of the passengers disembark around us and then allowed us sleep for about five more hours, which meant that we had missed the possibility of catching a morning train on to Guilin. I still can’t decide if their hearts were in the right place or they simply didn’t care whether we were still fast asleep when the bus started making its way all the way back to Yuanyang.

One of the villages in county of Yuanyang 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 Xinjiezhen and Duoyishu lies a small market where you can haggle over silver trinkets and hand-finished throws, and a large entrance gate to the village of Qingkou.

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 Qingkou 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 Duoyishu, 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. Qingkou: village on the take.

Having got delayed for longer than we wanted to be in Kunming due to the whole of China shutting down to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Mary and I were itching to get away from all aspects of city life and enjoy a bit of peace and quiet. Nine hours by bus later, we arrived in the mountainous county of Yuanyang, famed for its sprawling hillsides of terraced rice paddies.

The first township we settled in was Xinjiezhen, our bus winding its way up some precarious mountain hairpins and getting there in the late afternoon to find it all a bit foggy. The hotel we checked into was supposed to overlook a spectacular expanse of countryside, but all we could see from the balcony was the blanket of cold, grey cloud that pervaded the interiors of the buildings as well as the town streets.

After a cold and damp night’s sleep, we woke the next morning to find the weather exactly the same as yesterday’s, so rather than hang about in the hope that the cloud would soon burn off or blow away, we elected to try and move on to one of the smaller villages further up the mountain. I’d read about one called Duoyishu that had a well-recommended place to stay called the Sunlight Guesthouse, run by an elderly local couple. This turned out to be one of the best decisions we made on the entire trip, and possibly of all time.

We had escaped from the miserable weather below and from the rooftop of the guesthouse could look down the valley at the paddies stepping down the hillsides. For three idyllic days we slept late—“We’ll definitely get up for the sunrise tomorrow!” We sat in the courtyard in rocking chairs, read, drank tea and looked at the view. We walked to and through some of the other surrounding villages, past busloads of Chinese tourists armed with foot-long camera lenses and, for some reason, dressed from head to foot in all-weather gear like they were going on an Arctic expedition instead of being ferried up and down the mountain on a heated coach; down through tea plantations to teeter along the edges of the paddies and back up to the road; past oxen coming down from the fields and enormously fat boars suckling their boarlets; children playing in the stream running though their village; women in traditional dress buying live chickens from the market; men in their standard modern-day clothing of loose-fitting slacks and a dark-coloured suit jacket chewing on and spitting out chunks of sugar cane. We caught the minibus back to Duoyishu when we got tired of walking, and wondered why so many of the women were getting physically travel sick. In the evenings we ate good, home-cooked meals together with the other guests around the kitchen table. Our decision to leave was based entirely on time-constraints and having other places we wanted to visit. If we had had more time or nothing else we wanted to do, I think we could have happily spent the entire trip staying at the Sunlight Guesthouse.

An hour’s bus ride out of Suzhou is the small historic water town of Luzhi. Just over a square kilometre in size, and dating back 1,400 years, it’s famed for its surviving small bridges and a Buddhist temple containing treasured sculptures of arhats—the term for those who have attained enlightenment.

A single ¥60 ticket gains you entry to eight local sites of interest—as well as the temple there are a few museums displaying farming tools and detailing the lives of some of the town’s famous inhabitants, as well as some historic houses—all within walking distance of each other, and it makes for a nice little daytrip. Luzhi is rather less touristy than Tong Li, but then it is also less well maintained—although that didn’t seem to bother the good few local artists from setting up their easels along the canalsides.

One of the more interesting sights was housed within the Buddhist temple: three thousand-year-old ginkgo trees, which I have since learnt is a species of tree with no close living relatives—an example of a living fossil [think crocodiles, horseshoe crabs and coelacanths]. But I was most intrigued by this sign off to one side in the arhat room:

Anyone got any theories as to the meaning of “119”?

Whilst the Christian world gets on with all things Easter, this weekend saw the Chinese festival of Qingming Jie, which goes by any of the following translations:

• Clear Brightness Festival
• Festival for Tending Graves
• Grave Sweeping Day
• Memorial Day
• Tomb Sweeping Day
• Spring Rememberance

Whatever you call it, the traditions are the same: on the fifteenth day after the Spring Equinox, people honour and remember their ancestors, with a graveside clean-up and offerings of food, tea, wine and other goodies. It’s another busy time of year when train-travel isn’t recommended, as city-dwellers travel back to their hometowns to join their families in the sombre festivities.

Long-time readers of Fuddland might be aware that I tend to support Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day whenever it comes around. In the past this has been in the form of sponsored commenting, donating an amount to the charity based on the number of comments I receive on Red Nose Day.

This year, due to living in a foreign country and suffering complications of bank accounts and general relative skintness, I decided on a different tactic to show my support: I waited until someone else had a genius idea, and then proceeded to wheedle my way into it.

Thus, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend to any, all and more of you reading this to make one, several or indeed nine purchases of Shaggy Blog Stories.

A collection of 100 short humorous pieces from the UK blogosphere. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Comic Relief charity. Contributors include Richard Herring, Andrew Collins (BBC 6Music), Emma Kennedy, James Henry (TV’s “Green Wing”), Abby Lee (Girl With A One-Track Mind), Catherine Sanderson (Petite Anglaise), Zoe McCarthy (My Boyfriend Is A Twat), novelist David Belbin, Anna Pickard (The Guardian), and a diverse selection of some of the UK’s most talented bloggers.

Should that list of well-known names not be enough to encourage a purchase, then perhaps the tingly news that the sixty-fourth contribution to be found within its pages is from this very weblog. In the interests of intrigue, I’ll not be telling you which of the 1,656 [including this one] entries I’ve written over the last almost-five years it is. [Oh okay, one clue: it’s not the one you’re reading now. That narrows it down a bit.]

For full details of all the contributors, and more of the story behind its creation, I’ll point you in the direction of the book’s brainparent and masterminder, Mike Troubled Diva. I’m chuffed to bits to have made the final cut, but even if I hadn’t, I’d still be pimping this book like … I’m sorry, I’m just far too English to finish that sentence. Just go and buy it, and I’m sure you’ll be chuckling at at least 99 of the stories.

One of the most fascinating things about the Terracotta Army is that, in their Chinese name Bing Ma Yong, according to my dictionary the last character 俑 translates as “earthen figures buried with the dead in ancient times”—isn’t it lucky they came up with that one, just in case they should ever need it?

Getting to the site, about an hour’s drive from Xi’an, is very simple even if you don’t want to go on an organised tour [which I didn’t, both to save money and to have no time constraints]—you catch the green 306 bus from the car park on the east side of the train station and get off at the very last stop. The ten-minute walk up to the main site is disconcerting; it feels as though you’re walking through a modern housing development [and not a very populated one, most of the buildings appear to be empty], with pointless Chinese rock music blaring out of speakers [disguised as fake rocks] and hordes of peddlers repeatedly offering you miniature warriors until you punch them on the nose to make them go away. [Believe me, saying, “No thank you!” has no effect whatsoever.]

Once you’re through the museum gates life is a little more peaceful, although for some reason those souvenir sellers are also allowed in to harass the visitors as they wander around. I think most people head straight for Pit 1, the main hangar housing the largest restored collection of figures, but we veered off to the right and went for Pits 2 and 3 first, saving the “best” ‘til last. These two smaller pits contain many broken, partially-uncovered figures, horses and chariots, and work is still going on to unearth the remaining artifacts, the majority of which are still completely buried. It was nice to be able to see the statues without obstructive glass or netting, but how long this will be the case I’m not sure, seeing as there was a half-drunk bottle of Pepsi and a tourist map accidentally [I hope!] dropped into Pit 3.

The main pit is enormous, and it was a relief to actually be impressed by the scale of things—even moreso when you consider that, having recovered around 1,000 statues, there are supposed to be another 7,000 or so to go. Towards the back of the hangar—we entered through the exit, continuing our maverick, shoot-from-the-hip approach—is a reconstruction area, where you can see dozens of partially-restored figures and a big pile of broken pottery, together with a couple of computers and other gadgets which help with the jigsaw puzzle. The remaining two-thirds of the building is dedicated to the main show, and after the relatively dim previous pits, it was a surprise to see so much sunlight allowed to flood the room. The more you look, the more you come to realise that it really was quite an achievement for the people of the time. It’s hard to imagine even today people working with such patience and dedication to produce this volume of individually-crafted figures [and let’s emphasise this: each and every figure has a different face!].

Not everyone was so in awe of the millennia-old sight before their eyes: as I stood overlooking the main site, I turned and realised that the Chinese man next to me was not, in fact, taking photos of his cultural heritage, but decided that it was much more important to snap pictures of the foreigner. I quickly ducked out of view and gave him a look that said, “Oi, ninny, no!”, although this might not have translated very well as he immediately tried to take a photo of my Australian friend instead.

[Aside: back in Suzhou, I was walking down the street the other day, a few feet behind a Western man with his two young children when suddenly two Chinese men pulled up on their bicycles. One produced a camera and motioned [repeatedly saying, “Very cute, very cute!”] for the dad to pick up his sons and pose with them for a photo. Somewhat dazed by the speed at which it was all happening, the dad complied. I have no idea what they wanted these photos for. It was all a little creepy.]

Those of us of a certain age and nationality will fondly remember the classic Japanese kung-fu television treat that was Monkey Magic—the story of a Buddhist monk, Tripitaka, and his three mystical protectors, Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy, on a quest from China to India and back, seeking sacred Buddhist texts and battling all manner of demons in a variety of camp costumes.

The story is based on an ancient Chinese legend, Journey to the West, in which the monk is called Xuan Zang, which begins and ends in what is modern-day Xi’an. On his return to the temple of Daci’en Si, Xuan Zang requested the construction of the stone pagoda Dayan Ta within its walls to house and protect the precious scripts as he translated them into 1,355 volumes [as well as negotiating the rights to the television series, sticker albums, action figures and so on].

The Temple is currently undergoing a face-lift and, sadly, looks as though is was all constructed in the last twenty minutes instead of portraying its 1,500-year-long history, although the pagoda itself has largely been left alone and looks sufficiently weather-beaten for you to believe the legends surrounding it, and even today, still emits enough mystical energy for a few moments of levitation…

The Muslim Quarter, in the north-west of downtown Xi’an, is the place to go if you want to buy some nice-looking souvenirs, antiques and trinkets—from local crafts such as intricately-cut patterns in paper and jewellery, to novelty items such as Mao Zedong watches and playing cards. All the haggling can make you hungry—luckily there are plenty of restaurants and street vendors selling cheap and delicious food on the supposedly-pedestrianised road perpendicular to the shopping street. New dishes for me included yangrou paomo and hu la tang, as well as the Xi’an speciality, candied dried fruit [beware the mixed bags: they also contain thick slices of ginger, which may be mistaken for pineapple at first glance and lead to nasty taste-bud-related surprises when you bite a chunk out of it].

Tucked away Tardis-like off the narrow winding market street is Daqingzhen Si—the Great Mosque—the largest mosque in China, dating back to 742. I was slightly confused by its backwards [I thought] layout until it was pointed out that China is east of Mecca, so they pray to the west in this part of the world. Still in use today, it’s surprisingly peaceful considering its proximity to the bustle of the eateries and stalls, and resolutely Chinese in its design: I really was expecting to see a golden-domed building like the London Central Mosque that I’ve seen many times [and I’m quite sure once visited on a school trip, although that was possibly a different mosque], and was a little disappointed to be presented with a traditionally-Chinese structure instead.

The two large museums in Xi’an that I visited—Beilin Bowuguan and Shanxi Lishi Bowuguan—both contained an impressive display of the region’s renowned history. I found the former more interesting simply because I saw stone tablets detailing conversations with Confucius, the first record of Christianity in China, and the first Chinese dictionary [so it claimed], all displayed with uncharacteristic subduedity. [I think I’ve just made up the word for the quality of being subdued.]

The History Museum houses a nicely-chronological collection of locally-found pottery and metalwork, and it was nice to really see the skills of the craftspeople becoming more and more refined over the hundreds-of-years, although perhaps the most striking thing for me was realising that we, us human type people, seem to have an innate sense of beauty such that the designs on pottery dating back thousands of years are still pleasing to the modern-day eye; we all still like a nice, simple geometric pattern on our breakfast bowls don’t we?

Xi’an and the surrounding area is positively brimming over with sites of historical importance, and it’s well worth spending a good few days visiting the city of you want to be sure to make the most of the places of interest on offer.

The downtown area is enclosed by the imposingly-tall city walls, first built in 1370 then rebuilt to last in 1568; eighteen metres thick at the base and not much narrower at the top, you can certainly imagine they formed a bit of a barrier to anyone contemplating a city invasion. You can walk along the wall by ascending at any of the four city gates, and it’s a great way to get a feel for the city below, as well as admire the architecture of the gatehouses and [very recently restored] watchtowers. I started at the South Gate and was intending to walk only as far as the East Gate, but I found the views so interesting, and the stroll so peaceful with hardly anyone else around, that I ended up circumnavigating the whole downtown area along the wall—a 12 kilometre walk that took me about three hours, with plenty of stopping for photos and gazing down at the people and buildings below. [For a high-speed version of the same route, you can hire bikes and tandems for an unusual limit of 100 or 200 minutes (an attempt to decimalise time?)].

The east end of the city was particularly interesting, being noticeably more rundown than the rest of the downtown area and consisting mostly of tightly-packed low blocks of flats along narrow streets, each one with small, almost spontaneous-looking fruit and vegetable markets. Dust and grime pervades Xi’an, an omnipresent cloud that varies in intensity day-by-day and coats the buildings and streets throughout the city in a layer of filth despite efforts to keep the dust down by spraying the roads with water each morning, but the east end of town seemed to be losing the battle faster than elsewhere.

One of the lesser-known gems in Chengdu is Wang’s Tiny Museum of Mao Memorabilia. The name says it all: down a side street that I had to ask three people how to find despite having the address and a map, it’s a small, dark, cluttered room, brimming over with posters and photographs, badges and plaques, statues and busts, books and hats, and all manner of other representations of Mao Zedong, amassed over the last fifty-six years by one man: the eponymous Mr Wang.

Read the rest of “Wang’s Tiny Museum of Mao Memorabilia”…

Right next door to the hostel I was staying at in Chengdu was the Buddhist temple of Wenshu Yuan; it is a Chan temple, Chan being the Chinese for what is more popularly known as Zen Buddhism. Although initial visual impressions resemble any of the numerous restored dynastic palaces you might find in China, one key difference here [aside from being a temple not a palace of course] is that the temple is still in use, so mingling with tourists like myself are Buddhists monks and Buddhist Buddhists, paying their respects to the many statues housed within the temple walls, lighting incense, or chanting in procession.

Read the rest of “Wenshu Yuan”…

Aside from the dominant Han Chinese nationality, there are 55 other officially-recognised minorities in modern China; the province of Sichuan is home to four of them, and the village of Taoping has been occupied by the Qiangzu people for around two thousand years.

The houses are all hand-built from rock, wood and mud, with running water provided by diverted streams coming down from the mountains. At least one of the still-habitable homes is claimed to have been built a thousand years ago, and they all display a large lump of quartz on their flat roofs—if I understood correctly, this is to ward of evil spirits, although I could be wrong and pehaps it’s because everyone used the same architect with a penchant for lump-of-quartz-topped roofs.

Still a largely agricultural region, the townspeople—or, thinking about, probably the local government—are slowly wising-up to the fact that this historic town could be a hot tourist attraction, but when I visited it was still relatively unspoilt, leaving me free to wander the streets and get a good feel for life in this small, peaceful, unpolluted village, where I didn’t feel harrassed or hurried despite being the one and only remotely foreign face there at the time.

[More photos tagged with Taoping form part of my Chengdu and Sichuan photoset.]

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