Thursday, February 22, 2007
Lijiang
After the shocking bus ride here, Lijiang seemed quite out of place. It doesn't seem like a beautiful, rich, entirely tourist-based town with nothing but souvenir shops an fancy restaurants should exist here. Lijiang dies not share a social continuity with the coal mining villages and with their old substandard houses. Lijiang is a mirage that lets its hoards of tourists think that all is well in Northern Yunnan.
The old part of Lijiang was built in the 14th century and after withstanding a strong earthquake in the 60's, it was awarded world heritage status. All the houses have black tiled roofs and are separated by narrow cobbled footpaths. There no cars in the old section, which allows you to hear peoples voices, and the soft sounds of peoples feet on the stones or the trickle of water. A winding maze of cobbled streets and canals make up the old section. Flowing water accompanies most of the streets in town. The canal in the main plaza has a school of bright orange goldfish, and in smaller plazas there are square pools - always in a connected series of three - for washing vegetables, meat and clothes.
In the mornings, the military runs through town, shouting short, loud shouts. This way, the Naxi people who live above their ships don't forget about China.
The people here are Naxi people. They are animistic and use the only photographic writing system in use today. They build white plastered buildings with exposed red wooden pillars, and there are a few brick buildings in town. Inside, they are spacious and you can see the bottoms of the tiles being held between wooden slats. Their windows are lined with the finest latticework and carvings of scenes with birds, animals and plants. The carvings let through light in all the places between the birds' legs and delicately carved blades of grass. The doors to their shop fronts are not attached -they are removed from the building and each day and replaced each night, and if you walk through the city late at night or in the early morning, it feels like a different city without the crowds of people in the streets and in place of shop fronts, there are dark wooden walls stretching the length of the street.
The people of Lijiang like to sing. Every night groups of girls in traditional garb sing a short song from a window, and chant "Ya So, Ya So, Ya Ya So!" and another grip of people in the street or in the bar across the street will sing a song and end it with the same chant. As the night goes on, and people get drunk, the verses they sing get shorter and shorter.
The streets are lined with red lanterns and people float candles down the canals to make wishes. Red lights and the warm wooden glow coming from inside buildings and the golden light of candles in the water make a beautiful sight on Lijiang's chilly nights.
The old part of Lijiang is like an ethnic theme park. It feels more like Las Vegas or Disney Land than a village where real people live. I would not be surprised if everything is an act for tourists. Perhaps that is the role ethnic minorities play in China today. I read somewhere that most of the Naxi who used to live in their old section have been bought out and pushed along by the incoming hoards of Han migrants with more money from the cities. Yet every shopkeeper wears traditional Naxi clothes.
I expected to find the Naxi, as an ethnic minority, to be similar to the Native Americans. I expected to find something more like NM pueblos. I thought they would be herdspeiople, tribal, somehow technologically inferior to the "Chinese". In some ways, their position is similar to the Native Americans'. They are being colonized and force-fed Chinese culture. Their land is being bought up and their language is being strangled out. The Naxi are simply a people from a country that through some fluke wound up within the borders of China, and like the rest of the minorities in China, and minorities all over the world, they are undergoing cultural genocide. It will not be surprising when the next generation does not teach their kids to speak Naxi, and if a few generations later, they simply call themselves Han. Being an ethnic minority in China is a mighty struggle. The central government is relocating people from the coast and other parts of China to the Western regions, creating minorities out of the cultures that live there, forcing them with the choice between assimilation and inferiority.
We met one young girl here who says she would rather speak Chinese or English than Naxi. It is a shame that an economic and bureaucratic Chinese dominance can make a language and a people irrelevant. They call Lijiang county a Naxi Autonomous Region, but all business must be conducted and written in "Chinese. Perhaps fewer Han would move here if the Naxi still held linguistic authority - if all the signs, labels, receipts and banks only operated in Naxi.
The new city of Lijiang is a typical Chinese city. The traffic, the market, the architecture, the chain stores, all of it is almost indistinguishable from other cities in China. Except, perhaps, for the vacant lots of rubble overgrown with weeds and weed!
Road to Lijiang
After leaving Pan Zhi Hua for Lijiang, one of the first things you see are mountain sides of coal that fall directly into the river. there are factories with smokestacks and coal elevators, a cable car with only containers for coal that is carried from the mountains to the riverside industry. Three nuclear power plants also help to warm the river just outside of town.
As the city traffic tapers off, the roads become full of big trucks overloaded with coal. The small towns along the way have traffic jams of the big blue dump trucks of coal. In small yards along the way, black dogs are chained to guard black ground where people with black hands and faces pound powdered coal into perforated round bricks for cooking. The sky is a smoky blue, even when there is nothing but terraced hills of rice in sight. These lonely country roads are arteries of coal being carried out past poor peasants in massive blue trucks that don't stop in the villages.
We passed through a valley full of beautiful rice paddies beginning to change color with the seasons. Terraces with rounded edges climbed up the steepest hills. Farmers worked in some, putting the rice into cone-shaped bundles to dry. Goats, water buffalo, horses and cows all shared the road and grazed along the unfenced fields. Everything up to the cliffs was terraced. Even small islands in the river had been completely conquered by rice. Where there was no rice, corn was grown on the terraces.
Past some of the most b beautiful scenery I've ever seen, our bus took us along a road carved into a cliff above the river. Across the river, we could see mine after mine with an alluvial pile of tailings cascading down into the river. Some were just like a doorway into the mountain, and others were entire hillsides with switchbacks for trucks and no trees. Where there was room, people were living on the tailings, in small hand built houses with black yards.
It is no wonder that China has "cancer villages" where 30 -40% of the people have cancer. I wonder if any fish can survive in those brown waters below the mines.
Chengdu
After leaving Xi'an for Chengdu, our train had some high mountains to steer around and tunnel through. The day was just getting light as we entered Sichuan province, and every time the valley widened enough, there was a nuclear power plant. One after another, like tumors on the river.
In the train, we made friends with a company of petroleum engineers heading to Panzihua for a meeting. They offered us beers and we talked and sat in their carriage. A bag of meat was passed around, there was no choice but to take some of what was offered. It was spicy pig stomach. As the night progressed, we came and went and a mound of trash grew on the floor in their sleeper compartment. With my feet buried in it, my exposed toes were kept warm by something behind a plastic bag. The only lady in the group was a higher-up in the company, and she told me not to worry "it's only trash, and rabbit heads". Later on, a cleaner came to take the trash and took a dozen warm greasy bags filled with rabbit heads in red sauce. With all the trash removed, my toes and the floor were covered in a thick layer of grease. Everyone was drunk, and we went to our own beds.
Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan province. Sichuan province was created sometime after the Cultural Revolution out of Ganzi, part of the Tibetan autonomous zone and minus Chongqing. Chongqing is one of those Chinese cities with tens of millions of people that almost never makes headlines in the West. Now nearly the largest city in the World, Chongqing was made a separate province to prevent Sichuan from gaining too much influence over Beijing.
Chengdu is a medium sized city of four million built up around some of China's most fertile land and on the border between the Chinese and the Tibetan worlds. In central Sichuan, the climate changes and becomes almost subtropical, and despite the drought, it is incredibly green and humid. As we have been travelling through China and reading headlines of this year being the worst drought in 50 years, we constantly tell ourselves that the drought must be somewhere else, somewhere our train has not passed through. Footage on TV shows parts of Sichuan where the water table has fallen and water, mostly to drink, is being shipped in in tanks in the backs of pick up trucks. It must not take a dust bowl to destroy crops.
Travelers arrive in the train station in the far North of the city, where all of the buildings are new and already falling apart communist style apartment blocks. The avenues are lined with trees, wide and full of traffic. Canals penetrate every part of the city and one of the rivers flows in a brick lined channel five meters below the city. Under a small bridge where clear water flowed into a canal, it created a window in the otherwise black stinky water where the rocks and plants on the bottom could be seen.
Arriving in chengdu, we were greeted at the station by a guy named Edward who was holding a poster advertising his hostel and who spoke excellent English. He and some of his family run a hostel here, and it is the nicest one we've stayed at in China. The hostel has achieved a hard to describe atmosphere that makes you feel at home. Perhaps it is an atmosphere created by the hostel or perhaps it is Chengdu that causes most of the travelers here to sit around the hostel all day and to remain in Chengdu longer than expected. The hostel, unlike most in China had self-serve laundry, an indoor courtyard and a small fish pond. Mostly European travelers lounged around, ate late breakfasts and played games in the halls and in the courtyard.
Chengdu is a city of tea houses. In many areas, tea seems to be their most common cause for business. There are not particularly many attractions in Chengdu, so tea becomes part of any visitor's routine. Downtown, the buildings are newer with glass-walled high rises and banks with carved gold plated doors fit for castles. Downtown is packed with people and rickshaws, constantly ringing bells at people straying from the overflowing side walks and cars that slowly push their way through cross traffic and defy the structured organization one might imagine is common to all busy roads. Drivers here do not honk as much as they did in Xi'an and far less than drivers near the coast. The rickshaws here are not like the ones attached to motorcycles in Xi'an; here, they are all powered by bicycle. The drivers are only seldom young and strong-looking. Usually, they are older, well-worn and tired-looking people.
"All business is done in tea houses", Edward told us. The tea houses are nice, with big comfortable chairs and prices that must only invite Chengdu's niveau riche. The presence of so many tea houses and the culture that goes along with drinking tea (even if it is mostly business men who go to many of the tea houses) has given Chengdu a noticeably slower pace than many other of China's large cities. There is a clear split in the service industry between places that cater to the well-to-do and those for the common people. Prices are hard to describe here as they vary widely.Today, a Chinese friend and I ate a lunch of noodles at the market for six yuan, this evening, Aja and I had a small pizza and two drinks for 75.
I went to the market with my friend Nick, and we shopped around for several hours for some saucers and plastic cups. It is not that there were any shortage of such goods at the market, but Nick wanted to be sure to get the very best price. Nick wanted the saucers to drink a special kind of Chinese liquor from in traditional style. There were no very shallow cups of the sort at the market, and he settled on some bamboo saucers made to go under tea cups. After asking in a half a dozen stalls about the price of cups and hemming and hawing about weather he would pay 3 or 4 yuan for a cup, he finally settled on one of the first shops we had visited, renegotiated a price, which he was not completely happy with. "I would have liked to have paid two" he told me.
The market was a haphazard arrangements of hundreds of stalls selling everything that can be mass produced. Heaps shoes with ripped-off name brands that looked just like their corporate twins were being sold by young guys eager to make a sale, but who only hesitantly admitted that the brands were fake. Some shops only sold chop sticks, some sold pots and others sold lights. Nothing had a set price, so every sale required a drawn out discussion where the customer would degrade whatever he wanted and ask a price far below what he was willing to pay. The shopkeepers worked hard to pull people into their space to look at whatever they had that a dozen other stalls in the market undoubtedly also had. The market is like a loud beehive of people buzzing around between different stations.
The market occupied a small neighborhood. Parts of it were indoors or under a large tin roof, and parts of it spilled out into the street. Nick took me to lunch in a restaurant that, although there was no wall between it and the street, it was almost invisible amongst the clutter that was the market. We ate spicy Sichuan style noodle soup and Nick was a little surprised that a foreigner was able to tolerate the spiciness of it.
Nick helped us get discount tickets to the Sichuan opera, which far outdid the Tang Dynasty Opera in Xi'an, and afterwards invited us to his house.
The opera was a fantastic performance of acrobats, magicians and people who could do spectacular things. One young girl, perhaps 14 years old balanced a large clay pot on her feet and spun it, kicked it up in the air and rolled it around in every direction. Then she did the same with a table. Another act involved an argument between a man and his wife, and she made him blow out a candle placed on his head, and he did. He also was made to crawl under a low bench with a candle balanced on his head and then get up again. The feature act was one called Spitting Fire Changing Face. These actors learn their act from their parents and the trick stays a family secret. They have masks on, and in a split second, they will wave their hand and have a different mask on or no mask at all. Of course, they also spit fire. One of them came into the audience and shook Aja's hand, and just as their hands met, his face changed right in front of us, and surprised us both.
Stefan
I wanted antibiotics for a mild stomach problem, and in the hospital, where the nurses couldn't speak to us, they called out for anyone in the waiting room who could help translate. A young guy volunteered, and after he confused some German words for English, it came out that he had studied music in Vienna and spoke good German. He helped us buy some antibiotics and Qinghao, a Chinese herb that is said to cure and prevent Malaria (and paid for them), and then took us to a museum where he paid for our tickets. He spent his whole afternoon with us. We were the only visitors at the Sichuan University's ethnography museum and Stephan helped explain some of the old artifacts and told us stories about the area.
We got Stephan's phone number and called him later to come hang out with us and Nick. At a portable shish-kebab stand we bought meat and vegetables grilled over coal and sprinkled with MSG to bring to Nick's house. Next to the kebab stand, a business in a large wooden box built onto the sidewalk sold us a bottle of hard liquor to drink from saucers.
Nick lived on the top floor of a typical communist style building tucked away on a small graffiti filled alley off of a 6 lane downtown road with his grandma.The walls in the stairwell leading up to Nick's apartment were covered in papers and stickers. Most of them advertised locksmiths and other domestic services. His grandma was asleep, but Nick told us that she had washed the saucers he bought at the market several times. There was little in the house. A light bulb hung from the high ceiling on a long wire. Nick had begun a mural of faces melting into each other in a swirl of black lines on the wall, but his father told him he had to stop because he might want to sell the apartment soon. We sat around a low table made of a board sitting on two boxes and learned how to play Majong.
In the Southwest of the city there was a Tibetan market. Not much seemed to be left of it. Since our map had been made, it had become an upscale part of town with almost western shopfronts behind large panes of glass. A few of them sold Tibetan clothing, carvings and souvenirs. Dumplings for half a Yuan sold at one restaurant from which steam billowed up onto the sidewalk through the stacks of bamboo dumpling trays. Near the Tibetan market was a section of the city centered around some pay-to-enter gardens that had been restored in traditional Tang dynasty style. The wooden eaves had all been painted red and green and red paper lanterns hung down in the narrow streets between high gray stone walls. Tour buses full of tourists filled the cobbled corridors and photographers with portable printing stations waited for groups of people to buy their photos in front of the picturesque walls. Nothing but tacky tourist shops and every sort of restaurant lined these popular streets.
At the center of Chengdu is a grand stone statue of Mao, and from him run the four major directional streets found in most Chinese cities: Renmin zhonglu, donglu, nanlu... and further out, the city is encompassed by a circular highway. In the Southeast, there are a row of electronic shops, three universities, and a few bookshops with English language books and a delicious Tex-Mex restaurant. The sweet smells and tastes of home was satisfying in the way no other food is. They played country music softly and American students and visitors took most of the seats every night. To walk across the city from the Tex-Mex restaurant back to our hostel took about 4 hours. no bus because of construction..
Renmin park is the highlight of the city. In the Northwest, it is a big, free park with ponds and a trickle of a stream running through it. Winding paths lead through a plaza where kids roller blade and past groups of older folks singing karaoke and others dancing folk dances and dances with flowing red scarves to music playing on blown out speakers. It truly is a people's park. Under overgrown lattice roofs where no one danced, people crowded around old men playing Chinese chess. In some corners of the park, old men in Mao-hats played sad songs on their one-string violins, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. A couple practiced Tai-Chi in a garden. A tea house in the park served a great variety of green teas in clear glasses with a big thermos of hot water. Men with tiny instruments like chimney sweeps that they vibrated with a tuning fork offered to clean people's ears as they drank their tea.
The park's walls kept the noise of cars and horns out and offered a momentary escape from the city. Barriers of trees and bamboo and wandering paths made each part of the park seem self-contained, invisible from every other part.
Emei Shan
Emei Shan is the most beautiful place in China. It is a little island of paradise still untouched by the grime of the cities. It was a sacred Buddhist mountain, stripped of its monks by Mao, and now it is a tourist attraction preparing for the Olympics (a new golden multi-faced Buddha statue built on top). Monks have returned to the monasteries with their cell phones and incense. Every morning just after 5:00, they wake up and chant and ring their bells and gongs and start their day.
Monkeys live on Emei Shan. They roam around in groups, and some sit by the trail waiting for snacks from hikers, or whatever they can easily steal from unguarded backpacks and pockets. They are friendly, but wary of people. They will show their sharp teeth if you get too close, they will crouch down if they feel threatened, and they growl as they follow you, waiting for an opportunity to sneak a hand into your bag. They are well groomed, but with red patchy skin on their faces and nervous expressions. They look like little wild people.
There is a good reason the monkeys are so wary of people. The people on Emei Shan seemed dead-frightened of the little macaques. A group of ladies walking in front of us told us we needed to arm ourselves with stones to protect ourselves from the monkeys. They held rocks larger than their fists. Some monkeys were in the path and these ladies told us to go ahead of them to take pictures and then proceeded to aggressively scare them off, throwing their rocks and waving sticks. An old man we passed stood on a ledge with a slingshot, shooting small stones at monkeys still quite far from him, and certainly not posing any risk to his bags. On a stone step was a tiny pool of blood.
The monkeys live in steep valleys where every cliff is dripping with water and the rivers are crystal clear. Every morning, the cool air turns the clouds that hang on to the mountainside into a misty rain, not quite strong enough to put out incense or candles burning in the courtyard. The water in the streams is crystal clear, and the trees grow moss on their black trunks. The whole mountain is covered in life. There are hundreds of colorful butterflies, dragonflies and we even saw a frog swimming through a crystal clear stream flowing between tall green cliffs.
From bottom to top, the pathways are paved with stone steps. It is an amazing feat of the Chinese to build stairs up all their sacred mountains. Today, some stairs are being rebuilt, not by monks, as I had imagined, but by workers who carry the stones, two or three at a time tied to the backs of mules. Climbing up and down the stone stairs with such heavy loads, the mules were exhausted, walking with slow heavy steps. As we ate lunch at a mist covered pass, a train of mules lumbered past us coming out of a blanket of fog and quickly disappearing into the whiteness of the dark forest.
After falling into disrepair during the cultural revolution, some of the old temples are being renovated, but many are still falling apart, suffering from the long absence of monks, who have only recently started returning. At a monastery with a tin roof and multiple slowly progressing restoration projects, there was a small shop selling food, water and walking sticks, we bought some more water and beef jerkey. It was only a few hour's walk from the top and only a few hours before dark. People at an inn behind the monastery warned us not to proceed and told us to stay with them. The next passers by also warned us that we would not make it to the top before dark. As the sun got low, we passed by a hut selling fruits and asked if we could stay there. No, but we bought some bananas. Just after it got too dark to walk in the woods, we reached a cliff from which we could see white clouds moving below us. Then, after walking for ten hours, we reached a parking lot. It was 8pm and we went into a fancy looking hotel and asked about their prices. 430yuan, they told us. We had paid 60 the night before in a monastery. "Sixty" we said, and they agreed almost immediately. We got a room with a sign on the door that said "Conference Room" and went straight to sleep.
On Emei Shan, you almost forget that you are in China. It seems like all the traffic, pollution, power plants and stinky cities must be on a different planet, far, far away. On Emei Shan, there is no drought and no environmental crisis. Emei Shan is like an escape from the unbearable problems existing in the rest of China, or a place you can safely convince yourself that they don't exist.
