Portrait of an LBX

By Evan

*Click here to see all our nifty Jingdezhen pictures.

**This article was meant to be posted weeks ago, but was badly delayed due to author incompetence and a Wordpress bug.

During the last week of 2009, despite ever-dropping temperatures, we had decided ostensibly against common sense and the self-preservation instinct to actually ride back north (see route page here just in case you weren’t sure we’re crazy) just for the historical significance of visiting one of the premier sources of China’s ancient wealth and the cradle of porcelain culture all over the world, Jingdezhen. From the Ming Dynasty vases Indiana Jones threw around in the German castle to the invaluable relics stored in Taiwan’s National Museum down to the fine china my grandma used to sell in her gift shop in Florida, just about all of the world’s fine porcelain owes its heritage to the little city in northern Jiangxi.

Considering its weighty cultural value, we hoped Jingdezhen would be a pleasant surprise, or at least that’s what we told ourselves as we pushed up across the cold provincial highway leading thither (the ride through Wuyuan county was at least visually rewarding in its own right). What we discovered when we arrived, however, was just more of the same, only more so. On our way through the eastern edge of the city, we came across the “New Campus of the Jingdezhen Institute of Ceramics,” which in its brown brick boxes of buildings looked more likely to contain a remedial boys school than an academy of one of China’s oldest art forms. Further into the city, past the sprawling, state-owned complex of Changhe (昌河), a car and helicopter manufacturer and the city’s largest single employer, the urban landscape emerged as a muddy, uniform mess. The streetlights were decorated in the style of old painted ceramics, in homage to the city’s tradition, but they only made the run down tenements stand out more. And the place was everywhere covered in mud, the kind of mud you spend ten minutes cleaning from your boots at night. Suffice it to say, from our highly disappointing first impression, we could scarcely predict how positive we were to eventually feel before leaving.

This scene from downtown Jingdezhen really says it all. Photo by Alexis

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A woman carries a load of firewood down a treacherous slope in two bamboo baskets hung from a bamboo pole across her back. While the U.N. says that China has brought more people out of poverty in the past forty years than in any other country in history, many among China's massive rural population of some 800 million are still struggling to survive.

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A little girl stands alone outside a wooden Jiangxi home built by her grandfather in the 1960s while her parents and grandparents work.

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An elderly resident walks the halls of the former Wu Family Household, a 100-room mansion in Tangyin. After being confiscated by the communists during the revolution it was turned into county government and planned birth offices. It is now crumbling under the collective ownership of more than a dozen local peasant families, mostly consisting of the elderly grandparents and infants still left in the town.

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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. (more…)

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By Evan

Every once in a while a new acquaintance asks us if anything bad has happened to us on this trip. The honest answer is yes, any run-in we have with Public Security organs or the state in general is an event we wish we could forget, but we usually bite our tongues. In truth, the police have been our biggest worry since the planning stage of Portrait of an LBX began about a year ago. Nowadays we frequently pass signs on the side of the road that say, “If you have a problem, call the police!” accompanied by the cute little cartoon police characters Jingjing and Chacha (think comical cop icons called Po-po and Lice-Lice). “What if your problem is the police?” we wonder.

The long-standing fear reared its repugnant head in Tangyin (棠阴), Jiangxi just after we had ridden past a statue of the solemn fiberglass police officer saluting us in front of the busted town hospital with a rusted-out, tire-less car out front. As we stopped to take pictures, a cop car headed in the opposite direction suddenly turned around and cut us off. We were braced for confrontation, but the cops, after hailing us to stop, simply offered any assistance they could and, amid the usual compliments on our Chinese ability and exclamations about our height, gave us words of praise for our bike journey. Whew, that was a little too easy. (more…)

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We found a fitting welcome at the edge of Tangyin, Jiangxi province where we went specifically to see some old architecture and ended up being harassed by a group of Foreign Affairs Bureau scum who made the trip over from Yihuang, the county seat, to "have tea" with us.

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Today we finally made it to Tangyin (棠阴), Jiangxi province. With the exception of a long period of harassment by the police and Foreign Affairs Bureau from the nearby county seat, we found the town to be charming and completely devoid of tourism -- a relief after seeing a slogan on a sign leading into town calling for the spirited development of the tourism industry. Locals scoffed when we asked if there was an entrance fee, and for good reason: the entire old town is falling into a sad state of disrepair. A beautiful old house, once the home of a landlord before the revolution and of the county government thereafter (trading one landlord for another?), is now falling to pieces under the collective ownership of a number of peasant families, as is the rest of the town. There can be no entrance fee until the place is restored, and there is no money to oust the current occupants and restore (read: build anew, poorly) without the money that an entrance fee would bring.

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By Evan

That last post was the product of a little long-article-being-deleted induced rage and a few days spent withering in a silly metropolis… but I still stand by it. Anyhow, after over two weeks without updating about life on the road, today it’s about time.

I left off last in Quzhou, where we had hung out with the flying man, Xu Bin (as an aside, he was really awesome, but nobody’s picked up on the article about him yet). From there we headed west in our quest to leave Zhejiang, where for over a month we did rest. Our first day out we stayed in a little town where we were snowed in the following day, giving us ample opportunity to become acquainted with a couple of alcoholic highway workers from Guizhou who had been stiffed on compensation for a job in the area and were hanging out until the boss gave in. The second night we got a little loopy on huangjiu and the baijiu made on the first floor of our hotel, after which the linchpin Guizhou’er, named Erfa, staggered in three sheets to the wind himself, insisted on buying two more kettles of huangjiu, and proceeded to tell us stories about prison life and show us his gang tattoo. Awesome. It was no small surprise the next day at breakfast to find he had skipped on the bill. Oh Guizhou’ers, when will you learn?
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By Andy

Apologies: I posted this yesterday, but something happened to it when I made my latest photo post. Not the first time Wordpress has been buggy and destroyed things.

Today I see moss for the first time I can remember in China. Lush, green moss.

For the most part, despite its oft-noted 5,000 years of history, most things in China aren’t old enough to have moss on them. Up north, where I’ve spent most of my time, it’s too dry for moss anyway, or for anything else very green for that matter. We are delayed this morning on our way out of Nanchang by our usual grogginess, a trip to an outdoor store to pick up new gloves for Alexis and a fruitless search for a new bungee chord for Evan after his snaps. In the meantime, the battery for my odometer dies (why I let the bike shop in Maryland talk me into a wireless odometer for a year-long ride in no-where land is beyond me). Of course, it’s some specialty battery that I won’t be able to find until we hit another big city, if ever.

The first part of our ride is uneventful – another trek out of a city, through the requisite industrial zone and finally back out into the countryside. After a late lunch, we finally escape the horn-blaring cacophony of the national highway and move onto a country rode – our favorite kind. We pass through a small town as the sun begins to hang low in the sky, on the outskirts of which we finally come across some of the traditional architecture that’s been absent since we first came into Jiangxi. It is here that I find the moss covering the top of a compound wall.

The most striking of the traditional buildings a pink-walled temple and school with a large, white, stone entrance façade. The outside wall is painted with the slogan, “The ‘Two Bases’ Open the Road to Wealth for the Family” (发家致富, ’两基’ 开路). If I remember correctly, the “Two Bases” is a campaign to teach Mandarin Chinese in addition to the local dialect in primary school before switching over to pure-Mandarin education thereafter, but I will have to look it up again when we have Internet. The only other time I recall seeing ‘Two Bases’ slogans is in Xinjiang, where the native language is Uighur, which unlike the Gan dialect prevalent in this area is a Turkic language unrelated to Mandarin Chinese. The fact that a campaign is necessary here is intriguing.

Indeed, when we arrive in the town of Zhangxiang just a few minutes down the road, Mandarin speakers are few and far between. The hotel we find is across the street from the local middle school, and even the children in the mob that immediately surrounds us are difficult to comprehend. Young people are usually a slam-dunk for Mandarin ability as a result of compulsory Mandarin education. We have some difficulty communicating with our hotel proprietor, but eventually secure an unheated, three-person room for 45 kuai.

After a late bedtime last night and an early rise this morning, we are hitting the sack early for a big day tomorrow.

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