A snoozy street in the Fengqing old town, by Andy

By Andy

2010/05/29 – 78 km

We start the morning with a search through town for the post office so we can send the tea we bought the previous day to a friend in Shanghai. During our search, we find that Fengqing actually has an old section of town. By old, I mean it looks Communist-era, with most things appearing to be built in the 1950s when the real Communists were around. With the exception of a few white tile buildings (why they built everything to look like a bathroom in the ‘90s is beyond me), everything is built in blocky, imposing, Soviet style).

What’s striking though is how alive the area seems compared to the new section of town where we stayed the night before. The streets are narrow, a single lane in each direction, and everyone is out and about. Street vendors peddle snacks, goldfish, bamboo brooms and anything else someone might be interested in purchasing on the cheap.

There’s even a big mosque, at which we take a quick peak on our way back to the main road. It is one of the unfortunate, white-tile monstrosities of the 90s, complete with cheap, blue, reflective glass windows. Unfortunately, there’s no one around from whom to learn any of the history, so we head back out to the main road and begin climbing.

The road, paved and in good condition once we get out of town, takes us straight up the mountain to the northwest. Below and to our right is the still under-construction highway that will soon make our road obsolete. On it, the occasional car or motorbike climbs over the piles of dirt that have been set up to keep vehicles off, a fairly ubiquitous but ineffective way of closing off roads in this country. Above, our road’s numerous switchbacks snake up the mountain, and the bridges and overpasses for the new highway, held up by tall, concrete columns, cling to the mountain face.

It’s nearly noon by the time we’re crawling up those switchbacks, and just as I’m considering a break to munch on some trail mix, we spot a small tea factory and stop to have a look.

Mr. Li finishes eating lunch before offering the rest to us, by Andy

Inside, the smell of drying tea leaves surrounds us, mixed with a hint of coal and wood smoke. A man in a blue jumper is loading rolled, green tea leaves onto a machine that appears to be wood-fired.

“Hi there! What’s that machine do?” Evan asks.

“It’s the dryer,” the man responds, loading another batch of the rolled leaves on.

The man says we’re free to poke around the factory, and tells us his two coworkers are down below eating lunch.

We walk down a short set of stairs into another room where two machines are rolling up fresh leaves, which are strewn in piles on the dirty floor. Down another flight of stairs we find two more men in blue jumpers eating lunch at a small table in a kitchen-like space.

“Come, sit down,” beckons Mr. Li, a man in his mid-forties with a crew cut, high cheekbones and a vein pulsing on his cheek. We sit down on tiny little stools, and they tell us they’re just finishing up and invite us to finish the rest of their food, which we’re all too happy to do. The other man, surnamed Luo, short, skinny and with slightly greasy hair brushed straight down over his forehead, stands up and returns with a cup each of green tea and black tea for us to try, after which they both return to work.

Mr. Luo sticks rolled leaves into a machine that shakes the crap out of them, by Andy

The green tea is a bit too tannic and bitter for our tastes, but the red is soft and sweet, with a texture almost like milk.

As we eat, the crew-cut Mr. Li returns to chat.

“Where did you learn to make tea?” Evan asks.

“Everyone in a tea village knows something about tea,” Mr. Li responds. “Everyone knows how to grow and harvest tea, most people know how to drink and enjoy tea and quite a few know how to make it.”

Mr. Luo returns and Evan asks who’s the boss in the factory.

“I’ve never even seen the boss,” Mr. Luo chuckles. “He’s in Kunming and just has the factory as an investment.” Knowing how hard it is for all these Western companies like Apple or Nike or anybody else to keep things in order at their Chinese factories and avoid getting cheated, this strikes me as a little crazy.

Before we leave, we ask if we can buy some of the red tea.

“You’ll have to go to the city below for that,” Mr. Li says, “but we’ve got some here for ourselves that I can give you. Hold on.”

A few moments later he’s striding back with a large, zip-lock bag of dark tea leaves, insisting that we take the whole thing. We offer profuse thanks, split the tea into two bags at our bikes, and continue up the mountain.

A man carries a cage to be filled with rocks and used to hold back the river on the under-construction highway into Fengqing, by Andy

We crest the mountain pass at 2,100 meters, which is a new record high for the trip. As we begin our descent, we pass the welcome sight of a blue sig reading “Continuous downhill next 18 kilometers.” I get such conflicting feelings abnout these signs. They always come at a point when I’m dying to do anything but go uphill any longer, but I can never help but think about what a hole we’re going to have to climb out of when we slide into the valley below.

This is certainly no exception. We descend for over 20 km (wait, Chinese signs aren’t accurate?) on gentle turns for which we don’t have to break (my favorite!) into a wide valley covered with green, reflective rice paddies, and then we’re climbing again. We climb for 16 km and gain back most of the altitude we just lost!

The final 30 km is rolling hills, 15 km of which is under construction, but we manage to get in, eat a small second dinner and find a hotel, all before dark.

A Uighur man stands on a pile of rubble in Kashgar's rapidly disappearing old town.

By Andy

We probably won’t be making it to Tibet or Xinjiang on this journey — the distances are simply too vast. A year seems like a long time to spend on a bicycle until you set the goal of circumnavigating a country of China’s size in that time frame. Evan’s recent post on our walk through the Tangyin old town got me thinking about my time in Xinjiang last year, and particularly in Kashgar, an old Silk Road trading town with a vibrant traditional section.

There is an apparent mindset among the Chinese leadership that anything of cultural and/or historical value in this country must simply be wiped out and as quickly as possible. Kashgar’s old town is a prominent target. A recent article in the Global Post puts a softer edge on what we on this blog would tend to describe as cultural rape:

Kashgar’s Old City is also an anomaly in modern China: A well-preserved, relatively untouched section of ancient but living architecture. Most of China’s cities have undergone sweeping facelifts amid the country’s economic boom, but the Old City of Kashgar, a small piece of the larger city of more than 3 million residents, is set off from modern city by a river and hills, distinctly unique and almost out-of-place.

A Uighur man hired to clear the rubble of Kashgar's old town tosses bricks into a dump truck.

I think part of this appetite for destruction stems from an incomprehensibly skewed incentive system for local officials. Despite years of promises for reform by the center, local government officials are still evaluated primarily on their ability to generate gross domestic product (GDP) growth. All other worries — the environment, quality of life, cultural and historical relics — are cast aside unless they can be easily harnessed and transformed into GDP growth.

This has all sorts of horrible implications, but I think one of the most interesting is the real estate industry. As most everyone is probably aware, despite thirty years of “reform and opening,” all land in China is still owned by the state (or by the “people,” as the state will tell you). In China’s cities you can own an apartment (read: a little concrete box way up in the sky), but the land on which the apartment building sits is owned by the state. Citizens can “lease” land for anywhere between 30 and a hundred years depending on the situation. Peasants generally till land on 30-year leases.

The thing is, there are no annual property taxes in China. Thus, the only direct way for local governments to make money off of real estate is through one-off sales of land to real estate developers. This usually involves confiscating land from peasants and offering them compensation amounting to less than they think their land is worth before flipping the lot to developers who then build luxury apartments that are sold mainly to investors at high prices — thereby locking even the middle class out of the real estate market.

A vendor sells bagels in Kashgar's vibrant, traditional old town.

I’d argue that this is one of the reasons for the apparent obsession with knocking down historic sections of towns and putting apartment buildings in their place. Local governments need to sell the land for fiscal revenue, and developers can make more money off of a plot of land if it has a 20-story apartment building with 300 families in it rather than a couple of two-story buildings with five families. Toss in all the secondary sales of renovation materials and furniture, and you’ve got yourself some career-boosting GDP growth.

In Kashgar, the government is basically proposing the leveling of the historic old town, to be replaced by a cheap, much taller imitation. The government argues that the old town in its current form is unsafe and could collapse in an earthquake and thus needs to be “renovated” (read: leveled and rebuilt). Maybe they’ve got a point, but the government didn’t seem to care that schools in Sichuan were far from earthquake-proof before they folded like pancakes trying to stand on end in May 2008. Those opposed to the “renovations” hold that the demolition is another one of the government’s measures to control and assimilate the local Uighur population, which the government accuses of having “separatist” tendencies.

As with numerous other cases in China, the government has resorted to ham-handed lies in an attempt to win over the local population:

Yet a public relations campaign boasting the benefits of tearing down the ancient Silk Road hub to replace it with a jazzier, new version of itself is underway, evidenced by a billboard affixed to a mud brick wall in town. The sign hints that demolition of Kashgar’s Old City — a controversial government undertaking facing international criticism from heritage and human rights groups – has the backing of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

. . .

The sign goes further, saying Kaldun and others agreed of the project: “We do consider it an action deserving of admiration internationally.”

Kaldun said the sign is just wrong. “I’m very concerned about this billboard,” said Kaldun.

The bulldozers have temporarily ground to a halt in Kashgar, possibly over worries about ethnic tensions after last year’s riots in Urumqi, the region’s capital, but of course no one can be sure as the Chinese government rarely feels the need to explain its actions.

“Kashgar Old City is as important to the Uighurs as Jerusalem is to Christians, Jews and Muslims,” said Henryk Szadziewski of the Washington, D.C.,-based Uyghur Human Rights Project. “It is a physical embodiment of the Uighur identity, signifying its past, present, and future.”

A Uighur boy stands in a courtyard entrance in Kashgar's rapidly disappearing old town.

This all ties back to Tangyin in that the town also has a unique old section we humbly believe is worthy of preservation, if lacking in spiritual significance to the locals. The town is literally disintegrating due to neglect. For local officials, letting the city collapse is a net neutral on the GDP-centric evaluation scale. I see two possible outcomes if, for some reason, a little money starts flowing into the town. In the first, the government preserves the old town. If the preservation of other similar old towns are any indication, that probably means razing most of it and rebuilding from scratch something vaguely similar. They then build a wall around it, pave over some adjacent farmland for a tour bus parking lot, and set up a ticketing booth. Voila, instant GDP growth. In the second, the government decides no one is likely to visit the town and pay to see it, so they kick the aging residents out, sell the land rights to a developer, and bam, GDP growth.

Unless China’s system of evaluation for local officials is changed to emphasize criteria like quality of life and cultural preservation, these are the only two routes I can imagine for any of the few remaining “unrestored” historic areas.

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.

We awake at 7 a.m. with a collective groan – two weeks of going to sleep well after midnight and waking anywhere between 10 a.m. has taken its toll. I check the weather on the iPhone: still 40 percent chance of rain until noon and 60 percent after that. A quick glance out the bathroom window, which looks out on a narrow alleyway between two buildings, confirms that it’s not raining, and we pack up and head downstairs. I’m the first one out the door.

“It’s snowing,” I say. I missed it looking out the window. I don’t really know how to feel about it. It seems better than rain.

“November rain,” Alexis jokes. His English is getting better, and it’s making for some unbearable puns.

China sits closer to the equator than the United States, which means insufferably hot summers just about anywhere in the country for a northeasterner like me. If my memory is correct, Zhejiang province and Hangzhou, the nearest large city to us, are on the same longitude as northern Florida and southern Louisiana. The snow is downright strange and makes me worry about what we’re going to face for the rest of the winter.

After a breakfast of subpar vegetable-filled buns, fried dough and soymilk, we set out. The first part of our ride is gray and industrial. The smell of coal in the icy air hits my nostrils. Throughout the ride, my fingers fare better than the day before, but the cold still cuts straight through the vents in my shoes, freezing my feet despite the two pairs of socks I’m wearing. We have to figure out a way to avoid cold feet, or we’re done for the winter, I think.

Wuzhen is only a 50km ride from our start point in Jiashan over flat ground, but the going is slow. My Achilles tendons, a recurring injury on this trip, are shooting pain up my legs in the cold. I pop a Fenbid at a gas station and remove a layer of clothing as the snow turns to light rain.

After passing through another town, we stop for lunch at one of those big restaurants set up to the side of a large, manmade pond full of farmed fish. Inside, we find a private room with a heater running and immediately take off our shoes and socks and rub our feet furiously to get the circulation going again. As we order, Evan asks if we could have some plastic bags, which the restaurant gives us free of charge. Since the frigid air is coming straight through the mesh vents of our shoes, we figure putting plastic bags over our socks will at least keep the air off our feet. Surprisingly enough, it works.

After a somewhat unsatisfying lunch, we move through another small town and turn onto a road that used to be the main artery between two towns in the area, but has been replaced by a highway. Besides the occasional scooter, it is deserted. Tall pines line either side, and an air of tranquility falls over us. I let Evan and Alexis pull away a little, and the only sound I hear is the pitter-patter of raindrops hitting my coat. For once, people are actually making use of all that the land offers to build something. In Hebei, Shandong and Henan we saw so much straw being burned off in the fields after harvest – here they use it to make thatched roofs for their barns and duck farms.

For a while, the architecture of the villages we pass through takes a turn for the bizarre in a nouveau riche de Chine sort of way. Three-story houses, covered in ugly combinations of tiles that just don’t match the environment, are topped off with pointed cupolas surrounded by shiny, metal railings. I joke that the richest man in the village must have built one of the houses once, after which the rest of the town played “keeping up with the Zhangs” until the town was covered with them.

Later, the strange castles are replaced with more familiar and traditional architecture – white houses with gray, tile roofs. They begin to look older, and I feel excited about Wuzhen, where I expect to find a whole town of similar but ancient buildings, interspersed with canals and other waterways.

Of course, when we get to Wuzhen, we find there is nothing of the sort. Indeed, there are white buildings with gray, tile roofs and some waterways, but the whole thing is reminiscent of Disneyland. As we ride into town, we pass parking lots of tour buses and tour groups in matching hats led around by a tour leaders with flags and megaphones. The old town is broken up into east and west sections. After stashing our stuff at a hotel, we walk around the east section, which seems to be free despite a ticket booth with a sign asking for a 100 yuan ($14) entrance fee.

When we make our way over to the west section, we find more tour buses and a huge, gaudy visitors center. Men in suits stand at turnstiles ripping 120 yuan tickets in half. Who can afford this crap? I think back to Dingshu and the kiln workers making 900-odd yuan a month. Evan asks one of the ticket takers what’s inside. “A scenic area – ancient buildings, waterways, teahouses, cafes and bars.” Cafes and bars. We head back to the hotel.

I imagine all local officials being given a handbook titled “The Path to Development” or some such nonsense. Inside, it details the possible ways: industry, finance, services or tourism. There’s no preserving something beautiful for the sake of preserving it – there’s no intrinsic value placed on the aesthetic in this country…only monetary. The only consideration is, “how much money will it bring in?” The contradiction is summed up perfectly by a slogan we see painted in characters on a white wall before the ticket offices for the east town that reads, “Advance the preservation and development of the ancient town (促进古镇保护与开发).” To me, that is a contradictory statement. To these local officials it is the key to climbing the Party ladder: simultaneously holding two contradictory thoughts. George Orwell saw it:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself…

I try to imagine growing up in one of these places, maybe even growing old there and taking a walk every evening by the river with my wife. Then, one day, I come down my street, turn toward the river and find there’s a wall, a turnstile and a man asking for 120 yuan. I don’t think I could take it.

Others seem to think differently. Evan asks a local what he thinks of what’s happening to the town. “Not much has changed since I was young. It’s protected, so they’re not allowed to develop the old town.” Maybe, but I doubt there were hawkers occupying every building, selling everything from local alcohol to Mongolian hand warmers back then. Alas.

Back in Shanghai, we bought two books in a series called “Traveling China’s Ancient Towns (中国古镇游) and were looking forward to visiting some of the untouched, ancient areas in the pictures and seeing what sort of culture we could dig up. After this experience we have to assume they are all phony. If anyone knows otherwise, please send us a note.

Tomorrow, if the rain is light enough, we head to Anji. The 100+ km trip will take us into the mountains for the first time since Shandong. We have been looking forward to the mountains though. They’re where the last vestiges of culture and tradition lie. They’re also where we’ll have the hardest time understanding anyone we meet. Adventure awaits.

A street scene we traversed as we followed leads to find one of Kaifeng's Chinese Jews. The city also has a more modern and commercial section of town, but we found the back alleys much more interesting.

On our second night at the hotel, we needed two double rooms because of our friend Gilles’ arrival. Unfortunately, we were told the double rooms were completely booked except for two in the basement, which happened to be completely lacking in the window department and had a mold problem. Nevertheless, we accepted given that the price per person was cheaper and we had no intention of spending too much time in the rooms anyway.

After a night of all-you-can eat and drink at a swanky Japanese restaurant and a late-night dip in the Pacific Ocean on Saturday, we spent Sunday trying our hands at bicycle maintenance, which so far seems to have been successful enough overall. We cleaned our bikes on a large patio outside from the basement, and hookers ran back and forth, giggling and laughing and generally acting like 12-year-olds with cigarettes hanging from their mouths. An older man did laundry, including that of the girls, in the washing machine on the patio for most of the afternoon. A sort of grandfatherly figure, he teased with the girls while waiting between loads. But when I went into our room after finishing the bikes to find the bike lock, he cornered me. “How about you get a foot massage tonight? What about one of the girls? I’ll give you a good price.”

Despite our strange surroundings, my overall impression of Qingdao was pretty positive. As I mentioned before, the narrow, winding, hilly and tree-covered roads gave the city some charm and separated it from Beijing’s vast boulevards and massive, Soviet-style architecture. The seaside air was an improvement and we saw our first blue sky of the trip on Saturday, which was certainly a treat. Perhaps most importantly, and in obvious contrast to Beijing, the city didn’t seem crowded, and despite the urban sprawl, the lack of traffic made traversing the city a fairly easy process by taxi. Of course, all that could’ve been the result of the regular residents being out of town for the holiday.

One strange thing we found was the layout. When we got to the city, we rode the whole way south to the oceanfront, which we figured would be the most happening place. But when we went out Saturday morning to track down our first cup of coffee in ten days, we found no cafes, no Western restaurants — not so much as a Starbucks. According to a taxi driver we asked, all that is found in the “development zone,” which is home to newer buildings, Western restaurants, bars and foreigners. The area is 15km away from the waterfront, which in contrast looks like it was built entirely in the 1980s or early 90s with the exception of a single McDonalds — where we got or first coffee. The driver explained that the waterfront is a “tourist zone” and no development is permitted. Of course. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of his understanding of city planning policy, but I can vouch for the run-down look of the “tourist zone,” which is unfortunate given what it could be.

This morning, we set out with Gilles to make or way out of the city. Before we knew it, our rested legs had taken us 50km with less effort than ever before. It appears we’re making some progress in terms of our physical condition. After a particularly poor lunch, we rode another 35km or so before we ran into a downpour. We dove into a vehicle repair shop in the town we were passing through, but not before we were drenched. After 45 minutes or so the rain died down and we rode down the road a bit further to a hotel in a little town called Ducun where we are staying in a big room with four beds and have hung our clothes up to dry. We ended up riding about 90km today, and it felt almost like we were just getting started. It’s encouraging that the 100km mark is no longer something we will just barely be hitting and then crashing, exhausted into our hard beds. Tomorrow we will have to decide whether we want to head south toward another coastal Shandong city called Rizhao before heading northwest into Henan or head northwest now. We’ll keep you updated.

We met a lot of very welcoming people as we walked around the Zhangguan old town in the morning before setting out.

Kashgar Old Town, Xinjiang

The universal language of flirting -- Kashgar Old Town, Xinjiang

A Uighur boy sells fried pockets full of lamb in Kashgar's quickly vanishing old town.