Portrait of an LBX

By Evan (with significant contributions from Andy)

*Click here to see all the  pictures we took in the old town of Tangyin

The path between the fields on the outskirts of town and the stone compounds of the Tangyin Old Town, by Andy

In Shanghai we decided to modify our methodology of just fluttering around China wherever the four winds blow us toward a system of identifying some worthwhile destinations in advance. As such, we picked up some books about ancient towns (古镇) in Jiangxi and Fujian. Pushing into central Jiangxi, we had a chance to make use of our guides and pedaled toward the recommended ancient town of Tangyin (棠阴镇). As we crested a green mountain pass topped with a sign exhorting the locals to “develop the tourism industry (大力发展旅游产业),” we feared a repeat of our last ancient town experience in Wuzhen (乌镇), Zhejiang — an over-commercialized, touristic, stupidscape with a extortionate entrance fee and nigh zero meaning whatsoever.

A street bisecting the main road at first seemed to confirm our worries — Commercial Street (商业街), as it was called, was a filthy, cluttered, little road with hawker stalls on both sides. It appeared that the city was trying to enact its goal of tourism promotion but, not knowing what to do, resorted to the tried-and-tested “tourism alley” strategy. We were encouraged, however, to see many old structures just beyond the end of the street, and determined to find a hotel and return on foot to explore.

Unfortunately, we soon found our path blocked by two Uncle Policemen (警察叔叔, as we call them) telling us we needed to come to the police station to “have tea and a talk” (跟你们喝茶聊天) with superiors from the Foreign Affairs Bureau from Yihuang, the county seat that we had passed through 15 km earlier. After 45 minutes of foolishness came to an anticlimactic end, we were finally able to move into a hotel and explore the town.

The narrow alleys of Tangyin, by Andy

Breaking off from the modern main street, we traced a path that ran between the old town and beds of brown, wilted lotus plants, the local big-money cash crop. The real draw to the town, and the reason a television series was shot here, said one local man, is that it is full of old, wooden, clay-roofed houses. The buildings are rugged and in sore need of upkeep, but you can feel the history just from looking at them, a quizzically rare phenomenon in this ancient country. This makes Tangyin a somewhat unique place in our travels — a chaotic mishmash of decaying antiquity and modern peasant life.

A winding trail leading to the interior of town took us between stone and wood houses and vegetable gardens to the hulking, maybe 10-feet-high doorway of one such structure, into which an old woman had just balanced two bamboo baskets on a bamboo rod that were full of… bamboo. We entered the house at her invitation and helped her move the two baskets into an inner room (heavy heavy baskets — our old lady had evidently been eating her spinach). The inside of the house was really something from a movie — huge, wooden beams propping up the roof and gorgeous inlay work on all the rafters, with an impressive ancestral worship station to boot.

Chickens peck around in the trash above the roofs of Tangyin, by Andy

Eventually we wandered to the center of the old town, where one Mandarin speaking Mr. Wu (吴, the big last name in town) offered to guide us to the two landmarks of Tangyin. Mr. Wu himself lived in the second-largest with his family and seven others, as the buildings had been allocated to local peasants after the revolution. The old houses, he told me, used to belong to rich families but had been repossessed and reinhabited by peasant families such as his. The massive wooden beams that held up the house were intricately hand-carved into beautiful designs, between which scores of old communist propagandisms were written in large, red letters. Chickens and silkies ran hither and thither among scattered trash and piles of this-and-that that covered the floors of the once-stately residence.

Mr. Wu then led us to the town’s largest old house, the Wu Family Residence (吴家大院), which contained, he told us, upward of one hundred rooms, complete with quarters for the former proprietor’s mistresses (小姐房). Downstairs in the main hall, a vast, covered, open-air space complete with an equally awe-inspiring ancestral worship grotto, a group of old peasants sat conversing loudly in the local variant of the Gan (赣) dialect or minding small babies. The hall, we discovered, was previously the seat of the county government after the landlord had been expelled. Around ten years before our arrival, the government had built itself a new concrete home on the main drag and had divvied up the space in the giant home for old peasants. We knew it had been around ten years since there was a “Planned Birth Checklist” written in chalk on a blackboard noting up to 1998 the number of children born, forced abortions, IUD’s administered, fines for over-birthing, etc. There was an old dispensary adjacent to the main hall next to which was the large room that had previously been the meeting room for the town party committee — all now just storage rooms for the elderly occupants. The walls were full of intricate carvings and old paintings, and the flow from room to room was sublimely designed — the kind of rigorous attention to detail we just never see anywhere in modern China.

But the old mansion, which had survived so much historical turmoil, was now falling apart around us as we meandered through it. There were piles and piles of trash, farm implements, wood, and bamboo everywhere. Chicken coops occupied most of the corners. The upstairs attic, which previously housed the mistresses and to which clung the nearly decomposed remains of a beautifully patterned wallpaper, was not used at all and was falling through in places. Raw pork hung curing from blue clothes hangers across a line in the central hall. It was sensually overloading and somewhat disconcerting to stand there in the vestige of old Chinese gentry that had been reworked as a communist government center and was now being used as a farmhouse for superannuated peasants.

The inside of the temple at the local elementary school, by Andy

Leaving the decaying mansion, another of the town’s many Mr. Wu’s, a noodle slicer in the Tangyin Fensi Cooperative Building, led us to the local middle school, which had been built around an old Buddhist temple. Across the basketball courts where young students were screaming and running, the old temple, bookended by concrete buildings, stood out like an elephant at a rodeo. An exploration revealed that the interior had been completely covered in revolutionary posters and educational material about the various accomplishments of the party.  While Andy and I snapped pictures, Alexis wandered off and found the school’s ten principal “rules for the little friends (小朋友的规则),” the first of which was “Ardently love the fatherland; ardently love the people; and ardently love the Chinese Communist Party (热爱祖国、热爱人民、热爱中国共产党).” I had to wonder exactly how much of that chicanery the “little friends” could actually process. At the same time, however, I have to admit that they put a lot of pretty crazy religious ideals on the walls throughout my long Catholic education.

Curing pork dries on clothes hangers as an old resident gazes toward the old dispensary in the inner courtyard of the Wu House, a former 100-room landlord residence, by Andy

On our final photographic walk through the fields on the outside of town, I thought back to the old landlord mansion, now divided among hoary peasants who were kind enough to allow us to wander around their collective home. On one hand, it’s fortunate that the government has not yet restored (read: knocked down and rebuilt) the place and started charging exorbitant entrance fees (or just put an apartment complex in its place), but at the same time it’s tragic that the beautiful relic of a bygone era is allowed simply to rot. I’m all for providing struggling local farmers with a place to live, but the aged peasants living therein are not going to invest in preservation. For one, the entire place is commonly held, so there is no impetus whatsoever for improvements — the tragedy of the commons. Even if they had the desire to maintain the homes that were given to them, they have been survival-minded farmers their whole lives and probably have no concept of high art or preservation. As it stands, it is at once owned by a dozen or so families and by no one in particular and can be taken away on a moment’s notice. I can completely understand why they’d treat the mansion like a barn. Why worry about the future now at such an advanced age when you’ve only been able to worry about the immediate present your whole life?

Andy mentioned that it’d be great if somebody could buy the property and restore it to something more fitting of its history — his parents used to do that sort of thing, and he thinks about it all the time. I could only think of the incongruity that would then exist between it and its neighbors, which would still be the neglected homes of the local peasants. Tangyin isn’t the kind of place where go-getters and people with vision tend to stay in China. If any are born there at all, they are all sucked away to far off metropolises to make their fortunes. There’s little hope that a local with some pocket change could buy the place as a fixer-upper.

The view from the lotus flower fields outside of Tangyin, by Andy

And then there are the new homes — basically sloppy brick boxes, under construction — encroaching in on the old town. Seeing them interspersed between the crumbling houses on their tight, little alleys made me think: even if there were a value placed on reclaiming the aesthetic attainments of the past, who would have a clue of how to go about doing it? They couldn’t even get the Forbidden City renovated without splattering paint all over the ancient cobblestones. Could a construction team in rural Jiangxi be expected to do any better?

Our time in Tangyin went to reinforce our experience throughout most of the countryside — namely that there is no happy medium for most things in China, only extremes. Most of the old parts were fortunately spared the torch of the Cultural Revolution, but their reward for survival has been conversion into rotting farmhouses. It could, of course, take the alternative route of Wuzhen and become a countryside Disneyland, but there’s no scenario we’ve yet seen in which the area ends up as a livable, well preserved relic of history that can be enjoyed by both locals and travelers passing by.