*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

After a night of New Year’s Eve celebration and a day of New Year’s recovery, it was time to start looking for some porcelain culture. Following a tip from our breakfast noodle man, we traversed the street from our hotel, crossed a giant open construction site into a muddy alleyway network known as “Imitating Ancient Street (仿古街).” There were little shops in the first floors of all the buildings along the narrow ways selling all manners and sizes of ancient-looking porcelain ware. I asked the patron of one of the stalls if we could see where the magic happened, which I assumed must be just upstairs. His response was that it was made in his family’s workshop elsewhere in town, but that we’d have no trouble finding a workshop anywhere since in Jingdezhen, “every family is producing (家家户户都在做).”

This woman in her shop on "Imitating Ancient Street" has mastered the three P's of Jingdezhen: Porcelain, Painting, and Pajamas. Photo by Andy

On "Imitating Ancient Street," porcelain representations of really horrible things that happened during the cultural revolution. I can't imagine going to Germany and seeing little figurines of SS agents executing Jews, but such is the collective incredulity of China. Photo by Alexis.

It took less than fifteen minutes of trudging through the mud of “Imitating Ancient Street” to realize that it was full of mostly low-quality replicas and shrewd hawkers interested in making quick sales. We exited past a wall covered in flyer ads for STD clinics and one announcement offering a million yuan to the man who could successfully impregnate a 30-year-old woman (and 200,000 yuan just for trying… man, what a gig) and headed to the area of high ceramics density around the Wal-Mart (how’s that for ancient Chinese charm?).

Our friend Cathy, who was in visiting us for New Year, at this point commented that Jingdezhen was essentially one giant trinket market. From what we had seen so far, she was right. It was like the Beijing Dirt Market on crack — just loads of kitsch in every direction you looked. Once we saw a man in one store around the commercial district putting stickers on vases, we knew it was time to test the waters elsewhere.

The commercialized shop area around the Walmart was just full of kitsch you'd expect to see in one of the gaudy tourist markets of Shanghai or Beijing. Photo by Alexis

To this day I am dying to know who shows up at the ceramics market street in Jingdezhen, sees a framed picture of Hu Jintao's smile-less mug, and thinks, "Well, I came for some porcelain, but wouldn't that piece add that final touch of je-ne-sais-quoi to our living room?"

Accordingly, we hopped in a cab and asked the driver where we could find the “art of porcelain” and not just some commercialized pile of it. “The area around the Ceramics Institute and the Sculpture Factory (陶艺学院、雕塑瓷厂附近)” are the places to be, said he, and so there we sped. Upon first glance, it was evident we had finally found somewhere different. The buildings were all new, but built in the whitewashed, dark roofed, graceful style we had seen on the road in from Wuyuan (婺源). Fortunately when we arrived, the Saturday morning student porcelain market was in full swing, with a crowd picking over booths full of surprisingly high quality ceramic wares.

A nice young girl who served us good coffee (a welcome change) in the artsy Pottery Studio cafe informed us that the area was named after old Sculpture Factory, which had previously been a giant-scale state run factory during the days of the planned economy. After Reform and Opening, when the state-owned enterprises went bust, a bunch of young porcelain artists, mostly graduated from the Institute (the juvenile detention center we had passed on the road in was the new campus of the old Institute, which was just around the corner from the Sculpture Factory), took over the neighborhood.

A student of the Jingdezhen Institute of Porcelain sells his wares at the Saturday morning market, by Alexis

The area, as promised, was full of little porcelain studios spinning, drying, glazing and selling all sorts of porcelain. Behind the bright red Chinese flag-themed door of the China Rhino studio, one of the colorful shops partitioned out of one of the Sculpture Factory buildings, we found young porcelain master Xu Ning (徐宁). “This area,” he explained, “developed in a similar way to 798 in Beijing, except that these factories have always been used to produce porcelain.” Before Reform and Opening, all the talent of Jingdezhen had been herded into several of the giant factories in town, which mass produced various time-tested products but didn’t allow any innovation on the part of the artists. Since the decommissioning of the factories, Jingdezhen had mostly reverted back to the old style of individual masters running small studios. The difference now is that most of the “masters” are comparatively young — we later found one master running his own shop of seven employees who was only 25!

Xu Ning and his "China Rhino" studio have been doing well since a recent exhibition in Beijing's 798 put him on the map. Photo by Alexis

Xu, hailing from a nearby village, had moved to Jingdezhen several years earlier. His display room was a hodgepodge of rhino statues of various sizes (his bread and butter) and funky modern art designs. The workshop of the young Ceramic Institute graduate, out back, was something quite different. His old mother sat finishing her lunch next to coal fire burning in an old metal bucket. His five year old daughter ran around between the back room of drying rhinoceros statues and the open yard where a graveyard of fading SOE ceramics were piled unceremoniously. Xu, who had recently gotten nation-wide recognition after a successful exhibition in 798, had set up his highly creative design studio right in the skeleton of the passion-less ceramics assembly line.

Behind Xu Ning's workshop, a recently abandoned statue of a woman's body covered in Braille sits in a graveyard of mass-produced statues leftover around the Sculpture Factory from its days as an SOE. Photo by Andy

Remnants of darker days gone by weren’t limited to piles behind Xu’s studio. Everywhere in the brick walls around the Sculpture Factory, creepy leftover mass produced statues were cemented into the walls. More than that, the cafes, small workshop operations, and little shops were full of color and personality — and they played music! It was oddball in the way an artist’s enclave ought to be, and a refreshing break from the monotony of the rest of the city.

The walls around the Sculpture Factory area were all full of eccentric art, some leftovers from the area's SOE planned economy era, and some pretty inexplicable like these. Photo by Andy

A sculptor in a workshop in the Sculpture Factory area reels off tea cups en masse. Photo by Andy

On another tip, we then made a move to Old Factory Street (老厂街), another center of porcelain activity and reputedly the best place in town to pick up quality glazes. The very first studio we saw turned out to be exactly the sort of place we were seeking. An old man sat before a table, attention completely focused on quick, delicate brush strokes across a two-foot-high, white vase. In front of him sat several completed vases on which were painted exquisite scenes between beautiful traditional designs, and all in the radiant blue that is one of Jingdezhen’s most popular flavors.

As we entered his shop, Master Jin, 70 years old, we saw that the scene he was so intently painting was an old man quietly fishing (水乡渔翁), but surprisingly he was working in gray paint, unlike the bright blue finished vases on display in front of his work desk. The blue-and-white paint (青花漆), he explained, goes on dull gray but finishes brilliant blue after kilning. When I asked the price of the finished product, his wife, who was standing at his side polishing another vase, responded for him, “1500 yuan, but he has a Master’s Certificate (大师证)!” Master Jin then produced said document from his desk drawer and explained that he had been trained in fine painting in his home of Nanjing, where he had been a professional painter most of his life. Five years ago, he retired his post as professor at an art college and came to Jingdezhen to open his small atelier. “Painting is my passion,” he said by way of explanation. As far as he is concerned, the money he makes from his works, which are sold to dealers in far away Shanghai and Guangzhou through distributors, is inconsequential as long as he gets to keep refining his art. I was moved equally by his passion as by the enchanting nature of his old fisherman painting, as it evoked memories of a calmer time in China that I can only imagine, since I’ve yet to see it myself. I would have bought it on the spot if it weren’t for our pesky habit of touring China by bike.

70-year-old Master Jin spends all his days painting porcelain in the old Jingdezhen style because it's "his passion." It's a rare treat to find that attitude around here. Photo by Andy

Master Jin's hand-painted "Fisherman in a Watery Region (水乡渔翁)" made me feel like I had shot back in time hundreds of years to a China where such scenes were common. After it's fired, it will be bright blue like the rest of the "blue flower" style vases. Photo by Alexis

The rest of Old Factory Street, however, was less inspiring. The muddy, litter-strewn alley ran maybe a half mile toward an open garbage heap. The porcelain workshops and glaze stores were interspersed between various disorderly shops selling cheap goods. A long, brick wall was flyered over in want ads for “experienced spinners” and “glaze specialists,” among others, as well as for STD cures. Along the train tracks at the back of the street, hundreds of freshly spun ceramics in clusters of identical shapes sat drying under the sun. The owner of one of the little workshops, a middle aged man watching television on the bed in the corner of a large room completely filled with identical vases, had a less passionate relationship with his ceramics. He explained that his family, one of several in a long row, all produced roughly the exact same product en masse all the time. One of his vases, which he could spin in minutes but which required another two days of drying, reshaping, and kilning before it could be sold to an artist to paint it, would make him between five and six yuan of profit. We spent the rest of the day drifting between different factories mass-producing decal-ed, porcelain baijiu bottles, but found nothing else of an artistic nature.

A muddy alley in the Old Factory area sports a railway and several small porcelain workshops. Photo by Andy

These women spend every day of their working lives putting the same blue stickers on the same spots of the same bottles to be filled with the same baijiu. I just can't imagine that existence, but baijiu drinkers worldwide sure are happy to have them around.

The next day we returned to the Pottery Workshop cafe next to the Sculpture Factory. Incidentally, it was here that we met a few other foreign visitors to Jingdezhen, some in town to study ceramics, and one European artist overseeing the production of her own line of porcelain. After a few more good coffees (nectar from heaven, I swear), we took one last tour around the area for conversations with the young artists.

In the 0798 shop (0798 is Jingdezhen’s calling code), inside a busted, funky room we found wrap-around display cases full of vibrantly colored tea sets of all shapes and sizes. On a couch in the corner sat a young couple wearing identical pink coats labeling them “music lovers.” The man, Little Zuo, entreated us to sit down for ginseng tea and proceeded to explain his operation. Zuo, a native of Hunan and recent graduate of the Institute, had pooled resources with four other friends to open the business six months earlier. Their model is simple, he explained. All five of them make teapots, cups, and bases however they see fit and put them on display. Occasionally they get a walk-in like us to buy an individual set (which run 150-300 yuan), but more usually it’s a distributor who makes an order for between ten to upwards of several hundred of one style he thinks will sell. Naturally I assumed this meant he would make a mold for whatever designs were profitable. “Oh no,” he said in the stereotypically bubbly manner of a young artist, “molded pots have no character!” He grabbed a pot from under his desk that had been made from a mold and had us touch it. “Do you feel how it’s uniformly thick all over? Now feel this one,” he said, handing us one of his own 100% handmade pots. “You can feel the extra thickness where I joined the spout and the body. It has its own personality, and that’s what gives it value, not just the style!” After another ten minutes of fervent explanations, and we were convinced: the man was passionate about pots.

I again naturally assumed that he had been making tea pots his whole life, and had for that reason been accepted to the Institute. “No no,” his slightly more reticent girlfriend Little Ge fielded the question. “We were both just interested in art growing up and knew that Jingdezhen was a good place to learn one of China’s traditional art forms.” Both Ge, a native of Hubei and a second year student majoring in “ceramic art design,” and Zuo had been admitted to the Institute after passing an entrance exam that tested their painting and literary skills. Ge, petite and sporting the really intense bangs that young Chinese girls are so fond of, still had no idea what the future may bring. As for the Zuo and the team at 0798, they are in what you might call the “starving but energetic artist” phase, scuttling between large-scale exhibitions in Jingdezhen, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to show their work to potential distributors. Zuo’s plan for the future is to continue developing his art and gaining recognition. His hope is that after attaining status as a master, instead of running around self-promoting, by building the better tea pot, the world will beat a path to his door.

The rest of the shops in the area were mostly owned by recent graduates not over 30 years old. One such artist/owner surnamed Xu (许), a native of China’s Northeast who at the age of 27 had been in town for 6 years, had filled his shop with a superb collection of his own handcrafted statues, plates, and vases. Taking notice of one of his finer vases, I asked if the cracked, green style was traditional or his own idea. “The technique comes from ancient times, but we’ve improved upon it. This is better quality than what you’ll find in the museums.” What do you mean it’s been improved on? “Glaze makers never stopped improving their formulas and techniques.” Not even during the Cultural Revolution? “There were years where no progress was made, but even then the masters of the trade never lost the art.” I was blown away to hear that porcelain in Jingdezhen, far from being a dead art to be mimicked cheaply and sold for a quick buck across from the Walmart, is in fact alive and evolving!

The experience in Jingdezhen left me hopeful. Yes, most of the city was more worn down, muddy, and oppressive than many of the cities we’ve visited so far, and yes, it was crawling with charlatans peddling mass-produced replicas. However, real, passionate artists like Xu Ning and Master Jin, and the thriving community emerging around the Sculpture Factory give me hope. If Cathy was right in her comment that art never dies, then like saplings rising through the ashes of a cultural forest fire, Jingdezhen seems to be on the way to rebirth. That is, of course, if external forces (i.e. a meddling government and/or overcommercialization — see the case of 798 here and here) don’t rip the fragile saplings out by their roots during this crucial phase.

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.

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.

*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.

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.

After a quick poke around to make sure there was in fact an old section of town, we were in the midst of our hotel search when we again found a police car blocking us in the street with our Uncle Policemen (警察叔叔, as we’ve come to call Chinese cops) again flagging us down. Still all smiles, they requested that we follow them to the police station.

I immediately bristled and asked, “What’s the issue?” His response was that somebody from the county-level public security bureau (宜黄县公安局) was currently en route to “have some tea and chat with us. (跟你们喝茶聊天).” Having no choice, we followed them a block to the station and sat in the courtyard parking lot, not wanting to go into the station itself. We sent out text messages and Tweets with our exact location just in case anything unexpected happened.

The fat cop who had stopped us in the first place tried to make polite conversation, periodically answering his iPhone with its ring tone of “Heavenly Road (天路)” (a song about how the CCP’s construction of a railroad to Tibet has brought endless happiness to the people there), and generally trying to grease us up. Thankfully, Alexis was in an upbeat, chatty mood and played the “good cop” in the routine we’ve fallen into.

The car from Yihuang finally arrived after 20 minutes, and from it emerged a young woman — maybe 23, long hair and in her police blues — a slightly older man dressed in civvies, and most importantly a middle aged man in the uniform of somebody important, complete down to the combover. This last one, who introduced himself as the Director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of Yihuang County (宜黄县外事局局长), upon realizing that we spoke Chinese and there was no need for translation by his female associate, began his buttering up routine.

“We extend you a very hardy welcome to our county! (非常欢迎你们来我们宜黄县旅游!)” he began. “Have their been any inconveniences on your trip so far? (你们路上遇到了什么困难或不方便吗?)” I was about to give him the obvious response, but Alexis saw my mouth open and grabbed my arm to shut me up. Next he asked to make copies of our passports, which we were used to since it’s the standard law all over China. That said, I knew he hadn’t come all the way here to see our passports. While the pudgy officer who had brought us in was off making photocopies, the director’s male crony kept interrupting to ask us about our bike trip and tell us how great we were.

After ten minutes, the director finally killed the suspense, “Our county is a sensitive area, and we would like to look at any pictures you have taken here (我们宜黄县属于敏感地区，所以我们想看看你们在这里拍的照片).”

A sensitive area? What does that even mean? What the hell did he think we were doing anyway? I let Alexis and Andy know through an animated torrent of vitriolic vulgarities that I had no intention of showing those you-know-what’s my pictures and we would get the you-know-what out of their you-know-what town if we weren’t welcome. Ironic images of the sign on the way into town exhorting the locals to develop the tourism industry (大力发展旅游产业) flashed in front of my eyes. The crony picked up on some of my choice words and translated very unnecessarily to Herr Director, “F***. Camera. He isn’t happy (F***. Camera. 他不高兴).” The female translator kept her mouth shut.

Realizing that we weren’t the helpless farmers he’s used to dealing with, the director stepped away and talked on his phone for a minute. When he returned he told us in a manner-of-fact tone, “We are from the Foreign Affairs Bureau. We have the right to look at your pictures (我们是外事部的, 我们有这个权利).”

I was ready to show him the right to my middle finger, but suddenly I remembered the content of the first picture I had taken that day. “Ok, I’ll show you the first picture I took today in your county, I said. “What is that, ancient architecture? (那是什么？是古代建筑吗?)” the slack-jawed underling asked as I showed him a picture of a strikingly large turd I had snapped in the outhouse at breakfast. Wow. Maybe it wasn’t all that stupid though as it was indicative of the country’s general attitude toward cultural preservation. I sifted forward to a shot of a large roadside billboard which featured a male and a female hand touching a condom and the caption, “We should really use a condom (咱们还是用避孕套吧).” The underling asked why I had taken it, to which I replied truthfully: because it’s pretty funny. “It’s not funny,” he said, “In China our population is too large. This is our Planned Birth Policy (这个不搞笑，中国人口太多了，那就是我们的计划生育).” His mechanized response only took the juvenile humor of the sign up to a whole new level.

Eventually he saw that I was taking my usual roadside pictures of water buffaloes and LBX’es and nothing “sensitive” (unless they’re ashamed of their own people). Fortunately I was the only one whose camera was visible, and finally the grand poobah blessed our departure, about 45 minutes after we had arrived.

As we were leaving, the mindless underling looked at his watch, saw it was 1:30 and said in a very chipper tone, “You should really get lunch soon. Everything closes early here!” Yes, lunch, where we had been going before that monumental waste of time. I didn’t look at the combover-crusted mug of the director or any of his cronies again as we rolled out of the station parking lot abruptly and without words.

After I had calmed down a little, it occurred to me that Herr Director probably never gets any foreign visitors to his county, and on the momentous occasion that some actually happen to roll into town, he has to jump on the opportunity to put some party feathers in his hat. If word had gotten out that foreigners had come through, and the director hadn’t intervened personally, I imagine somebody above him would question him for dereliction of probably the only duty with which he’s been charged. In that sense, I do have compassion for them — as they are just pawns in a much larger and more disturbing system of idiocy.

But what really gets my goat, beyond all the insanity of the situation, is that in the end they didn’t even offer us any tea!

Steaming mad, we rode back to the hotel to set down our things, packed our computers in bags (as we suspected the cops would not be below rooting around the room while we weren’t there), and set out. At lunch in a small restaurant, we were surrounded by a group of local Insurance Investigators from PICC (保险查勘队, I still have no idea what that means), who had baijiu’ed themselves to oblivion before 2 p.m. A middle-aged woman among them, who called herself Big Sister Chen, told us it was an honor to have foreigners in town and picked up our tab. After posing for a group photo, she entreated us to find her online whenever we had time to play video games. This awkward but unexpected display of hospitality almost completely extinguished my rancor following the police session.

Finally, after all the shenanigans, we were able to start exploring Tangyin itself, which I’ll detail in a separate post as this one has already become monstrous.

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.

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?

Yes, by the way, I did say there was a baijiu factory on the first floor of our “hotel” (which was really just a family house with a few rooms rented out). That was amusing because a week later we were on the fourth floor of a place whose third floor was one giant fluorescent pink “health massage” center with young girls lined up on a couch under a blanket staring into the stairwell where we lived. You never know what’s going to be below you in China. The rest of the road into Jiangxi was relatively uneventful — so uneventful, in fact, that there was no sign whatsoever to tell us we had arrived. Incidentally, every day we rode was short, 50 km, to ease Andy back into the riding.

Northeastern Jiangxi was, to our surprise, full of really beautiful old architecture. Proud looking white houses with characteristic dark roofs and ornate paintings above the door were strewn about the mountains and rice paddies everywhere, a real treat for the photography nuts. There was one hitch, though, as Alexis’s back rim started coming unattached from the wheel and made a louder and louder bang as it clanged into his rear brake. As we came into Jingdezhen on Dec. 31, he was thud-thud-thud’ing something awful (it was absolutely impossible to convince him to disconnect his rear brake, as it’s absolutely impossible to convince him to do anything else really) when a middle aged cyclist started talking us up and, seeing our condition, called his bike shop owner buddy to come meet us on the road. Once he had led us into the city past the helicopter works where Xu Bin went for advice, his shop manager told us they didn’t have a replacement rim and would have to put a crappy Giant wheel on his bike. Well, crap. As it was New Year, we just left it as was, about to blow out completely. Speaking of blown out completely, we headed straight for the Walmart, nabbed a bottle of Jim and some cheap wine, picked up our visiting New Years angel Cathy from the airport — who was kind enough to bring us champagne and good French wine! — and had us a proper celebration (just in case you were concerned that our lives are too rigid out here, I underscore here: no cause for worry).

Jingdezhen was a weird place, totally uglified and decrepit from years of commie mismanagement, but still very cool for the porcelain culture there. A separate post about it is coming… eventually. After a few days, we bade farewell to our New Years angel and started trekking southwest, toward the provincial capital Nanchang to reprocess Alexis’s visa (yeah, it’s a pain). Incidentally, he did get that Giant brand wheel put on his bike, with 32 instead of 36 spokes, in what he personally described as an LBX-rig (pretty much like spit and feathers holding it together). More on this later. The ensuing days could be summed up as cold, brutish, and short. I say cold because it was below zero just about every night and morning, and it rained for 24 hours on the second day, 28 km of which we stupidly rode through. From there it was ice covered fields as we looped around China’s biggest freshwater lake, Poyang, at less than 50 km a day — hence short –due to the intense misery of the operation. Honestly my feet went completely numb every day despite 4 pairs of socks. I have never dealt with more cold induced misery in my life than biking through ice covered northern Jiangxi. By the way, the fates have aligned against the timing of this trip as the Saints have 13 wins this year, the Yankees finally took back the world series, and the coldest winter in 60 years is hitting China. If the Saints win the super bowl, I’ll know it’s a conspiracy.

One sidenote is that one of the places we stayed during the cold days was a somewhat nice hotel on an insanely muddy strip of new buildings completely uninhabited and dirty — the same place that had the bright light massage downstairs. After dinner around 8 pm, when middle school let out (yes, 8 pm), a little girl corrected an older woman who told us that nobody sold fruit in their little rathole of a town. As she led us to the market street, we asked her what she thought of her home. “We’re poor. We don’t have as much money as you,” was the first thing she said, followed shortly by, “our economy isn’t developed enough. We need to develop it to be like your countries.” She was in 7th grade. I asked her who gave her those ideas and if she’d studied or even knew what the hell economics is. Answer: in school, and not a clue. There was a lot of stuff I was interested in in 7th grade, like Xmen and girls, but I promise you I didn’t even know the word economy (or get out of school at 8pm for the love of all things decent and holy).

Anyway, we finally did get to Nanchang, where Alexis got his visa in a snap (unlike the stupidity of last time). Unfortunately, his right trigger finger couldn’t bend down (making braking a hazard, not to mention freaking him out), and so he had it checked at the hospital. The docs didn’t know what it was, but that didn’t stop them from prescribing over 400 yuan worth of medicine (I love this medical system!) and telling him to come back 3 days later for blood analysis. Stuck in a giant, bland city (4.5 million people), we resigned ourselves to an internet and coffee binge (yes, we are weak). The owner of the cafe across the street from our hotel was a cool artsy type who had a workshop in Jingdezhen, and covered his walls in self-done paintings. He also gave us a bunch of locally grown tea and some local yangmeijiu (杨梅酒). Sweet dude. Incidentally the food in Nanchang wasn’t bad, and the local specialty of little bowls of soup slow cooked in a giant ceramic oven (in the bowls, it’s a little quirky) were kind of a cool local flavor.

After days spent zoned out reading, listening to NPR (we’re trying to contribute some writing to them… but its going to take a little study and literary elbow grease), and writing, the analysis came back: nothing wrong. Except his finger still can’t bend right (did I mention I love this medical system?) Alexis and I got new gloves (he got a traffic warden’s vest too… for other reasons), and it was off again, but this time finally (and blessedly) due south.

That brings me to the title of this post. A week or so ago I read about the hyper-endangered South China Tiger and how the government here is considering releasing some into the wild. The likeliest release site is apparently Jiangxi, since, as the article put it, it’s the wildest place left in Southern China. That news got us all giddy and goosepimpled until the the first part of our ride turned out to be a veritable revisitation of the industrial hellishness of the North China Plain. It was so bad around Poyang Lake that we started to call it the Hebei of Jiangnan (think the New Jersey of the Appalachian South). We consoled ourselves by saying over and over: the south must be better, the south must be better! Yesterday, the ride out of Nanchang started predictably industro-uglized, but the terrain gave way to some better farmscapes, much easier on all the senses.

In the interests of time, I’ll give a few bullet points about central Jiangxi:

• They use pee to fertilize fields. Yes, pee. Every indoor pee we’ve taken has been in a bucket, and we see guys all over the place carrying urine-reeking buckets balanced on bamboo poles toward fields. Is there a pH requirement we don’t know about in these fields?
• There are water buffalo EVERYWHERE. Whether the giant beasts are being pulled around by strings in their noses or just free grazing out in the paddies, their numbers are impressive. Also numerous are the ducks. I dig how the locals have this local ecology thing down: raising rice and other veggies, letting their ducks forage for bugs in the paddies, and using the buffalo as labor savers and for meat.
• The locals here are just painfully bored and freak out excessively when they see us. More than anywhere before, people here have been encircling us to stare for upwards of an hour (when we sit in one place that long). The questions they ask are just crazy too. They don’t get out as much here as they did in Zhejiang.
• “The party is strong in this land, Master Yoda.” We haven’t seen a more thoroughly propagandized province since Henan. And in addition to endless “scientific development,” and other harmonious BS we’re used to, they’ve got some real GEMS. “Maintain the principal status of party members; Protect the democratic rights of party members (保持党员的主题地位；保障党员的民主权利 — what the F does that mean???),” and today, maybe the best one so far, “Urbanize the life in farm villages; the loving kindness of the party is greater than the sky (农村生活城镇化；党的恩情比天大).” (if only Liu Xiaobo had seen this sign a while ago, imagine all the trouble they could have saved!!!!). My personal theory is that the people tend to be way more zapped out intellectually wherever we get strong party vibes — aka that there is a cause-effect relationship, but I’m not sure which begets which.

As we guessed it, too, Alexis’s silly back wheel did indeed start giving us trouble again, as it came badly out of true and slid incessantly out of its grooves (we didn’t know it was possible!). After we got that somewhat under control, his rear brake seized up, causing us to have to disconnect it. He’s certain it’s the 5000 year old curse of the Jews — I’m starting to think he’s right. Anyway, more temporarily successful spit and feather solutions, and today after about 80 km we’ve arrived in a funny backwater with again one hotel, whose front windows are all broken. I’m typing this post from under the watchful gaze of a young Andy Lau poster inside a really hilarious room, covered over in plastic in such a way that, as Andy said, it makes you think they’re preparing us for a slaughter. A naked lightbulb hangs from a long, sad looking cord about 5 feet over the ground, and our 3 bikes block the way to the door. I really hope I don’t have a nocturnal urge to go out and walk to the end of the freezing cold wooden corridor (who am I kidding, it’s freezing in here too) to pee in the common bucket “shielded from sight” by a 4 foot piece of plywood. Oh yes, life is good. And that’s all he wrote for tonight — catch you in a few days!

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.