Fuddland

Photo-based entries from my time in China.

This category is a subcategory of Photos.

The good news: following a bout of pretty heavy rain, the massive scary spider has gone.

The bad news: we don’t know where. Eeeek!

The best news: the kitten is still around.

I had oh-so-very high hopes for this eclipse.

My attempts at viewing the Cornish Eclipse in the summer of 1999 were thwarted by overcast skies, so I was quite excited to learn that the path of the total eclipse of the century was passing straight over Suzhou. I decided that heading out to Tianping Hill would give me a good vantage point, surrounded by trees below and noticeably less pollution than the downtown area.

But, as much of the rest of the eclipse-watching world found, when the day arrived there was nothing to be seen but an overcast sky. Ever the optimist, I got together my camera, tripod and newly-purchased solar filters and was soon making the ascent in the light drizzle.

About halfway up, the skies opened and the rain went from drizzle to downpour in a matter of minutes. In my morning grogginess I’d forgotten to pack an umbrella, but a passing pair of students sidled up to me and offered me one as they huddled under another. It soon became obvious that the Sun was never going to be visible, so I thanked the two girls for their loan and headed back down to catch the bus into town. I was still on the bus when the darkness descended, which was impressively swift and all the more eerie for the torrents of rain that were hammering the roof and roads.

Still, at least I got a couple of decent shots of the lotus pond at Tianping Hill before the rain started … and there’s still next January to look forward to.

With new-found confidence stemming from a combination of a macro lens, a photography partner or two [in the form of my Dad and my friend Lauren] and generally getting over my previous reticence, I have recently taken a great deal of candid and not-so-candid photos of people going about their daily business here in Suzhou.

Any guilt one feels about taking photos of people without their knowledge, let alone permission, is somewhat negated by the countless occasions on which I or foreign friends have been not-so-surreptitiously snapped while we’re having dinner or just walking by.

My Dad recently visit me for a week in Suzhou. He lent me his macro lens while he was here. Now I wants one.

I had oh-so-very high hopes for the first photo.

I’d been wanting and planning and saving to buy a new camera for quite a few months now, so I knew it had to be something special. Maybe I’d head out to some relatively nearby mountains at dusk or dawn and capture the sun’s light scattering into unusually-breathtaking reds and oranges; or perhaps Lake Tai would miraculously freeze over and I’d stumble upon a cute local family venturing out on their ice-skates. And then I thought, a personal photo would be more meaningful in years to come, and yet more images filled my head.

Of course, all this was made unceremoniously moot by the saleswoman who opened the box and made sure that I took a photo there in the shop to prove the camera was in working order before I left. And so the very first image that I composed, brought into focus and saved on the memory card was of three tripods against the blurred background of several camera counters.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Late last year work began on the first of four planned underground lines in Suzhou, a huge construction job which I imagine is made even more difficult given the city’s extensive network of canals and generally chaotic roadways, especially in the city centre.

Major roads are having to be diverted, making rush-hour even more frustrating for commuters, and all the enormous construction vehicles and equipment—not to mention the tonnes of excavated mud and unsightly makeshift temporary accommodation for the migrant workers—will be putting a serious strain on Suzhou’s reputation as one of China’s most beautiful cities until work is completed in about four year’s time.

Last month I was treated by my nursery school to join them on a daytrip to Shanghai Wild Animal Park. Having had a pretty bad experience with the zoo back in Benxi, I was a little apprehensive, but thought that a modern, wealthy, progressive city such as Shanghai might be a little more clued-in animal-welfare-wise.

Can you guess what’s coming?

To be fair, the animal enclosures were of a decent quality: good sizes, and the animals [for the most part] looked to be in fairly good condition, which is surprising once you witness the general public’s complete disregard for any and all prominent notices [of which there were many] imploring them to not feed the animals.

It was simply amazing: children and adults alike, gleefully throwing bread to the red pandas and offering cake and biscuits to the ostriches, or trying to pet birds doing the best they could to avoid the out-stretched hands whilst tied to a perch by a six-inch chain.

One mother couldn’t seem to accept the fact that alligators generally don’t do very much apart from sit on rocks for most of the day, especially when the weather is on the chilly side, so she decided to lob a plastic bottle at them so they’d get up and do an elaborate five-minute song-and-dance routine for her precious son. Sadly for her, the bottle just bounced off their tough hide and they barely even raised a scaly eyebrow. [One of the teachers decided that they were not, in fact, real alligators, but statues, although if she could have been bothered to stand still and simply look at them for a few minutes, she would have seem them blink and move everso slightly.]

But all that was left in the dust by the grand finale: a 45-minute long animal show, featuring, amongst other things:

• an elephant performing acrobatics with two girls, being encouraged to stand on its hind legs through the use of a metal spike on a stick

• three monkeys on chains scurrying up and down poles

• a chimpanzee dressed as a shoe-shiner engaging in slapstick routine with his handler [who, for some reason, was dressed as a Frenchman]

• a bear riding a bicycle, and later being made to walk upright with cymbals strapped to its front paws, whilst two other bears [also upright] took part in a wedding ceremony, attended by the elephant, monkeys, a llama, and a zebra.

Still, at least: the kids were pretty cute; I got to see white tigers for the first time; and, most importantly, there were many fine examples of Chinglish on display, my favourite of which was in the stay-in-your-vehicle stage, and said,

In case of breakdown, please dial 61180113. In case of no communication equipment, please whistle for a while, our working staff will tow out your troubled car.

The part of Suzhou where I live goes by two names: to English-speakers it’s called SIP—Suzhou Industrial Park—which, for me, conjures bleak images of factories, vast warehouses and smoke-spilling chimneys. Contrarily, the Chinese name is Yuan Qu—Garden District—which sounds altogether much lovelier, with lush green parks, skipping children and tweeting birds.

The reality is somewhere in between: there is certainly a large number of factories and office blocks littering the area, but in the residential parts, amongst the apartment complexes, are little pockets of green, constantly maintained by a small army of workers continually weeding, planting non-weeds, picking up litter and sweeping all things sweepable. In the last few weeks spring has sprung right over itself and almost become summer temperature-wise, but the blossom is out in full force.

Question: have I just never noticed it before now, or is it quite unusual for one tree to have two very different shades of blossom?

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”?

Update: Disappointingly, it appears that 119 is the emergency number for the fire service. I was hoping for some kind of mystical significance, but I suppose this is still quite useful information that I really should have known before now. And what kind of sign is that anyway? Surely, “In case of fire, dial 119” would be a little more effective than a cute but cryptic couplet?

As if sensing that I’d not been inspired to post anything for ages, I’ve been gifted with a couple of interesting, “You don’t see that every day” type things. Presenting, firstly, the Men Painting a Building Hanging Precariously from Ropes and Only Using Rollers:

And for the main event: Man Strapping a Fridge-Freezer to His Bicycle:

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”…

Happy Chinese New Chinese New Year! Or, as everybody is saying around here, xīn nián kuài lè [新年快乐]. The fireworks started early yesterday afternoon, went on through the night and are still going strong today. I joined a thousand or so people down at the lakeside to watch the public display [and can confirm that Chinese people make exactly the same “Ooo!” and “Aaah!” noises when watching fireworks that will be familiar to all Westerners], then headed down town to watch a few local friends mark the start of the year 4704 with deafening firecrackers and bangers.

There’s plenty of information about the many traditions associated with New Year over at Wikipedia, including the handy tip that buying pants is considered bad luck at New Year. Unfortunately it’s not clear if these are American pants [trousers] or British pants [pants], so I’ll just have to refrain from buying both.

Foolishly, I’d mentioned earlier to one of the other passengers on the bus how good the driver was: up in the mountains of Jiuzhaigou park the winding roads were still covered in snow, yet he managed to keep a steady pace without skidding at all. I was feeling quite safe as we headed back down the [clear] mountain highway, despite it having a large number of hairpin bends and the driver deciding that his tea was almost ready and he needed to step on the gas—until he chose to overtake a wide lorry on one of the bendier bends. Overtaking means pulling out into the cliff-side lane. Wide lorry. Cliff-side lane. Bend in the road. Brown-trousers time, to say the least.

The lorry was as far over to the right as it could manage without veering into the drainage ditch, but it wasn’t quite far enough, and—luckily—our driver didn’t fancy careering over the edge of the cliff, so instead the side of our bus scraped along the lorry, ripping off its wing mirror and front bumper.

When vehicles collide in China—and they everso-frequently do—even with relatively minor damage, they simply stop dead in their tracks. None of this polite pulling over to the side of the road to allow other vehicles to pass by [with an obligatory rubber-necking, of course]—the vehicles involved won’t budge until the shouty-shouty is over with and all the blame has been assigned [and, especially if somebody is a driver by trade and doesn’t want to lose his job, an appropriate wad of cash has been handed over to keep schtum].

Thus, we sat waiting in the bus, blocking oncoming traffic, whilst our driver, the lorry driver and several thousand other drivers from the other vehicles, inspected the damage to the lorry [blocking the other lane]. Whilst the lorry driver was ranting and, seemingly, saying the same things over and over [“I couldn’t pull over any further! Look at my mirror! Look at my bumper! I was as far over as I could go! My mirror! My bumper!” etc.], our own driver had adopted the other stance that seems to be popular amongst Chinese drivers: the impassive-faced, silent, I-know-it-was-my-fault-but-I’m-saying-nothing look.

[I’ve seen a moped crash into the back of another stopped at traffic lights, and the driver at fault simply stared at his victim without even a single word of apology, as if to say, “Look, it was bound to happen sooner or later.” Likewise, the crashee looked back and intimated, “Actually this happens all the time, I’m used to it. Still quite annoying though.”]

Eventually some rope was found, the bumper was secured, our driver doled out a couple of hundred yuan, and we were on our way, but not before the coolest man I have even seen crept through the gap between our bus and the lorry on his motorbike-cum-trailer, clearly not caring one jot about the drama he was passing by—or perhaps he knew his companion would fill him in later.

Those enormous gloves attached to the handlebars are fantastic. I want some, even if I don’t have actually a bike to put them on.

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.]

In typical in-at-the-deep-end style, I’ve been rather busy for my first couple of weeks with my new language centre, teaching children every morning and afternoon, and adults a couple of evenings a week—but thankfully it all comes to a dead stop on Thursday, when I get a lovely two-week holiday over Chinese New Year.

I’ll resume my Tales from Sichuan series once I’m on my break, but I have found time to upload three of my favourite photos from the trip, all taken at various stops en route from Jiuzhaigou back to Chengdu. I especially like them because I almost never take photos of people—I feel incredibly self-conscious and, also, not owning a super-duper telephoto lens, it’s hard for me to take candid snaps of people acting naturally, which is what I’m really after most of the time. Having said that, I do love the cabbie’s cheeky eyes and standard Chinese pose as he leans out of his Songzhou bicycle taxi.

The woman attending the toilet at a mountain-road rest-stop was momentarily distracted by something out of shot and only turned her head in my direction at the very moment my finger pressed the shutter. I’m not sure what animals have been skinned and stretched out on the frame behind her—they looked like some sort of hyena, but I forget what someone told me the Chinese name was, so I can’t look it up for a translation. The little girl was simply oblivious to anything that wasn’t her notepad, and lay there singing to herself as she doodled in the sun.

Just outside Ding Shan is a series of caves open to the public, the largest of which is Zhanggong Dong, set in a small park with the usual offerings of ponds, rocks and winding pathways.

The caves would be a lovely place to spend some time exploring, admiring the stalactites and listening to the drip-drip-drip of water echoing around the chambers as you ascend—you actually climb a hill, but from the inside—except they’ve been ruined [in my opinion] by obtrusive, unsubtle lighting, bathing everything in either yellow strip lighting running along the celing, or the same bright green spotlights that they’ve lit the trees with in every city I’ve visited here. [The fact that everything was well-lit made a mockery of the torch I’d hired at the cave entrance.] Fake cement columns have been dotted here and there for no good reason, and stairs have either been added or simply carved out of the existing rock.

I might still have been able to enjoy the caves despite these things, if not for the fact that I continually felt the urge to keep moving due to the other visitors deciding it was more fun to ignore the natural sights and instead yell, “Hello!” at me at every given opportunity. Now I’m all for being friendly, but when the same group of people follow me around, shouting and asking to take my photo, I tend to get a bit annoyed, so I chose to sod foreign relations and curtly refuse their requests. My apologies if this has set the Anglo-Sino relationship back at all.

Walking back some of the way to Ding Shan, I saw a lot of independent pottery works: each house seemed to have its own small-scale clay-pit in the back garden, where they’re been digging out the clay for years, bringing it back to their personal kiln and working and firing it into the various types of pots that lined the front of the house. Most of them also had hundreds of bonsai trees in the garden—I couldn’t tell if they were for sale or simply decorative—as well as small watermelon plantations [as in, small plantations, I’m sure the watermelons were on their way to being watermelon-sized], or whatever the correct term for an area growing grapes is [a grapery?].

Do the curly locks of the golf caddy on the left of the photo look vaguely familiar? That’s right, it’s none other than yours truly, helping out a clothes-designing friend of mine by being a clothes horse for her…

Read the rest of “Shooting the shoot”…

Our initial attempt to visit the border with Russia ended in partial failure: we were indeed taken to a border crossing by a taxi driver, but it was the purely functional one for immigration and import/export purposes—entirely uninteresting, tourist-wise. However,…

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Having befriended a quite crazy local cab driver willing to take us far and wide, we went to Dalai Hu—about an hour’s drive south of Manzhouli—and were surprised to discover that, despite the recent warm weather, the lake was still…

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Since we have a whole seven days off work, starting tomorrow night, Alan and I thought it might be fun to get out of the city for a while and head north, up to Manzhouli—the city where I was originally…

Read the rest of “Shenyanged”…

With the weather warming up [that is, above zero for most of the day], more and more people are spending their time outdoors—men sitting chatting with friends, women singing together, both playing cards, or, like the people I snapped out…

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A group of us foreign types took a hike up the highest of the mountains surrounding Benxi: Pingding Shan [平頂山, Flat Top Mountain]. We cheated by taking a short bus journey to the outskirts of the city, which rises part…

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The main event of the day was a visit to the Imperial Palace of the Qing Dynasty. The following is taken from the information sign on display at the main entrance: The Imperial Palace in Shenyang was the founding base…

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After grabbing a quick snack of baozi [steamed dumplings], our first stop was the enormous statue of Mao Zedong, situated in the centre of a huge roundabout since 1969. With his arm raised in gentle salute, he almost looks as…

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I used up one of my valuable days off this week to take a day-trip to Shenyang, the capital of the Liaoning Province. Catching an early-morning train meant I was able to gawk at the many dozens of people practising…

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Aside from the worrying vistas, I took some more pleasing [at least, to my eye] shots on my recent walkabout. [More of a walk-up-and-down actually, since it mostly involved climbing lots of stairs.] This is the long stretch of steep…

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On one of the clearer days I’d experienced since arriving, I walked up to one of the local hill-top parks to get my first real view of the city I now call home. It was quite an eye-opener. Although I…

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