*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.

First and foremost, I’d like to wish everybody who cares a Merry Christmas. As I write this post on December 25th in the Sun Party cafe of Quzhou, I am physically surrounded by cheap Chinese renditions of Christmas paraphernalia and stereos blaring a strange holiday music mix of about ten songs on endless repeat, but as for the rest of the world outside the window, today remains just another day in a big, polluted, frantic urban mess. In a way I’m relieved that the commercial nightmare back home snuck up on us without my realizing it.

Back to the blog, here goes a review of our activities since last I updated. Before leaving Jingning, I stumbled across a She clothing shop all done up in quasi-traditional wooden motifs outside and was culturally compelled to enter. In the store the two young She girls working the floor explained to me that the She people’s traditional symbol is the phoenix, and let me tell you, they put it on everything. The shop, they told me, is one of a very few in the whole world that produces traditional She wardrobes (most She now dress the same as their Han counterparts, i.e. neo-modern tacky for youth or standard black LBX garb for the older generation). Apparently they even sell some outfits to overseas Chinese restaurants as uniforms — cool. Upon request, I got a tour of the upstairs workroom, where I had a funny conversation with the head seamstress. “The phoenix is the symbol of us, the She people. (凤凰是我们畲族的吉祥物),” she told me. Oh, you’re a She as well, I asked. “Well, no, but I know a lot about that sort of thing.” Oh you silly poser Han! At the end, I wanted to pick up one of their really cool shirts, but realizing it impractical to lug around for the rest of the year, I compromised and had a phoenix sewed onto my Under Armor shirt — now equally sweat-wicking and auspicious!

A sampling of traditional She minority outfits on sale in Jingning. They are used almost exclusively for formal She events and song/dance galas.

It's not the size of the phoenix - it's how you wear it

Next door to the clothiers we followed our curiosity into a store selling the local specialty Huiming Tea (慧明茶) and asked the young girl at the counter for an explanation of the tea’s history and characteristics, to which she responded with a blank look of stupefaction. Not five seconds later, however, a middle aged man emerged from within and magnanimously offered to respond for the girl, whose face flushed with relief (must have been overwhelmed by our stunning good looks). Mr. Lin, a friend of the owner who happened to be sitting in the shop doing some work, instructed the girl to pour us all glasses of the shop’s finest leaves and led us into the back room to sit, savor, and speak. “You can’t stand and drink fine tea,” he explained. “Drinking tea is all about the culture of it — appreciating the aroma, taking small sips, enjoying your environment, and accompanying the experience with refined conversation.” And refined conversation we had. Mr. Lin, a Han, talked at length about his home of Jingning, the She, tea, and the changing times. He spoke wistfully of bygone days when people appreciated the culture of their own home, saw beauty in good traditions, and valued their own dialect (his own children have forgotten their native tongue and speak to him in Mandarin) — things he sees slipping off the face of the land and into the realm of history. Amazingly he then added, “We can’t even be sure the culture will be preserved in history, because as you know, the history in the books here isn’t always true.” Wow. After thirty minutes of enlightened discussion, we exchanged information and parted — but not before one last question. What is it you do for a living that your speech is so scholarly and you spend afternoons in tea houses, Mr. Lin? “I write party history (我写党史).” His avowal both stunned me and made sense at the same time — he has the perfect vantage point to see what’s going on, even if he’s a part of the process he laments at the same time. Alexis today found that he had written about his encounter with us in his blog (in Chinese). Apparently we made quite an impression on him.

The next morning after a brief return to the clothing shop to pick up some spare phoenixes (you just never know), and a little chat with the owner (a She woman who was recruited at the age of 18 to sing and dance for the local Department of Culture and never left the entertainment circle and her Han husband who collects and resells ancient stone artifacts from the area), we took our leave toward Quzhou, where we’d pick up Andy, finally feeling knee-ready. Of course, we didn’t make our goal of arriving halfway to our final destination (I don’t know why we still bother to make plans), and night fell on us in the middle of a secluded, mountainous back road. A quick search yielded a flat bank along the side of a clear babbling creek, down to which we scrambled the 4 meter drop and set up our tents only just before it went pitch black. Again I slept poorly in the tent, plagued by weird nightmares about wolves with razor blades. Alexis hardly slept at all due to the cold, which we found in the morning had manifested itself in the form of ice everywhere — on the tent, on the ground, on the bikes, and in our bones. We didn’t get up the gumption to start packing until 9am (had to wait for it to warm up), and by then a road crew had installed a metal barrier along the road above our location, adding a level of complication to our sortie. How they happened to be scheduled for that installation on that exact part of the road on the day of our frigid misery is really evidence that there is a force greater than we in this world — and that force has a sick sense of humor.

Think we were cold sleeping in those?

From there we continued in our usual undulating up and down mountain cycling pattern along different streams and through various small villages. Lunch was fried rice noodles and eggs à la Zhejiang (鸡蛋炒粉干), the same thing we eat almost every meal these days, but augmented by a plate of fried fungal delicacy. This region, we found, in addition to being planted with the highest proportion of tea trees we’ve seen so far, is through the roof in production of shiitake mushrooms (香菇) — hardly any farm we passed for two days was without rows of mushroomery. Seeing a farm woman pulling the visqueen from over her rows of mushrooms, we stopped to request enlightenment. Apparently around this time every year the locals go into the forests to chop live wood and bring it back home to pulverize it. The wood chips are then stuffed into little plastic sacks, into which the farmers place some shiitake cultures before stacking them out in the sun. Every morning at 4am somebody goes into the mushroom shelter to look for new growths in the sacks and cut a little hole to let them emerge. Once given a space through which to grow, the mushrooms are full sized and ready to be picked in 2-3 days. What does our farm girl think of the flavor of her shrooms? “We’ve been around them for so many years that I can’t stand the taste of them anymore,” she confessed. All the same they’re selling for 8 yuan / kg, the highest price she can ever remember. Incidentally, I thought they were a homerun.

This kind women, here lifting the plastic coverings from her mushroom green house, explained to us how Shiitakes are cultivated in the region

Inside of the Shiitake green house

Down the road a little we came across Shicang village (石苍村) some of the most beautiful architecture we’ve seen so far — several well preserved, white walled, slanted-roofed, very large structures that seemed like temples at first sight. Upon closer investigation, we found out that they were in fact large, familial, communal houses, over a hundred years old apiece. The story goes that a long time ago the Que (阙) family moved into the region and set up shop. Gradually the Que’s grew to be the biggest name in the village until eventually — as now — they were the only family. The large houses we saw were built from necessity to hold ever expanding branches of the Que family. The inside of the houses were gorgeous, something right out of a book, and the kind of place you’d hardly expect to find outside of a museum. In the middle of the largest house throngs of old Que’s sat in a courtyard focused around the Que ancestral shrine, where old women were worshiping as we visited. It was like stepping back in time 100 years. The only man in the house who could speak Mandarin explained that the house had survived the Red Guards since the houses weren’t owned by landlords but rather by families already leading a traditional, communal lifestyle. It turned out that the winter solstice, to be the day after our visit there, was the Que family’s biggest holiday, and again we were invited to stay in the village. Alas, we had to push on to reunite with our long lost teammate. On our way out of the village, past old men sitting around smoking pipes, operating mushroom-drying rooms and drying woodchips destined to be fungalized, a mentally handicapped woman ran up to us wailing before being called back into the house by another villager. It may just be time for the entry of a new surname or two to revitalize the Shicang gene pool.

View of a Que house from the road

In front of the largest Que house. Notice the drying mushrooms.

Entrance to the largest Que household

Old Que woman worshipping at the ancestral shrine

Shiitakes drying in Shicang

Not as psychedelic as some of their relatives sold in Amsterdam, but pretty delicious anyway

That night we again fell short of a distance goal and crashed out early — utterly exhausted I should add — in the mid-sized county capital of Songyang. The next morning we both woke up feeling sick and called Andy to push back our glorious reunion (not to mention the day I’d finally be getting my new camera) one more day. A day of rest under our belts, we woke up refreshed and scrammed as fast as we could to cover the 120 km to Quzhou, albeit after an 11am departure (we’re bad about this). We finally did get here after 7pm that night, riding the last 35 km in the dark alongside a national highway (exhilarating as always). In town we found a Giant bike shop and had some much-needed repairs done on the bikes. You see, 2 days before in the middle of a long tunnel my chain had broken and fallen off, and at the same time my front derailleur twisted in on itself in such a way as to impede my riding the bike — all inexplicably. In the dim light of the tunnel next to passing trucks I jury-rigged the puppy into semi-functionality, but then proceeded to click-click the rest of the 2 days of riding. Anyway, our new Giant bud showed me yet another time why I’m an idiot and pulled my chain from over the flap of metal I had caught it on. After some other adjustments and equipment purchases, we rolled blissfully noise-free toward the long-distance bus station into which Andy would be arriving presently, thus beginning the beginning of our Quzhou police saga.

The first hotel we tried showed us a room and agreed on a price before somebody remembered, “oh yeah, foreigners can’t stay here.” Oh well, it happens. So we went a little further and tried again. Again, the boss lady showed us a room and agreed on a price, but balked when she realized we had passports and not Chinese ID cards (what was she expecting?). Strike 2. We tried a more expensive looking joint, and again after agreeing on a price and being on the verge of moving in, the boss’s wife popped out of the woodwork to tell us it was a no-go. Strike 3, and it was time to try a new strategy — but just then Andy called to request a pick up from the station, except now it was raining. And Andy was sick. It was one of those days. Alexis and I deposited him in a Lanzhou noodles shop and determined to ride to the police station to demand where we could be lodged affordably. You see, in cities of this size, local regulations require foreigners to stay in laowai-lodging-license holding fancy expensive hotels. Just before we got to the cop shop, we spotted another small hotel and gave it a try — this time successfully. After fetching our Andy over to the little dump, we thought it was all over.

Christmas Eve, the following day, we met up with Xu Bin, the peasant who builds his own aircraft, and our whole reason for coming here in the first place. A post on him is coming next. At around 10:40pm that night after we had already gotten cozy under the covers, a familiar, heavy knock echoed through the tight, damp little wooden room. “Goddamn! (我操!),” Alexis exclaimed in Chinese to the two cops standing in our doorway. What came out of their mouths was predictable: “it’s not convenient for you to stay here,” “foreigners should stay in certain hotels,” “your countries have the same regulations,” “you can’t register properly here,” etc. I immediately shot back that we were already properly registered (I took special care to enter all the info into the computer system) and that their behavior was openly racist toward guests of the city. Alexis chimed in that we’d move only if they found us a hotel the same price as the one we were in and that we’d camp in front of the police station if a reasonable solution was not found. Seeing that we meant to make their implementation of a ridiculous regulation a giant headache, they finally took our passports to another hotel, registered us there falsely, and returned our documents to us, whereupon we were left in peace. We realized, of course, that they didn’t actually care whether we left or not but that they’d probably lose their jobs if their boss thought we hadn’t been relocated. So presto change-o, on the books we had moved, and the illusion of security was restored.

This morning we headed back to take more pictures of Xu Bin’s gyroplanes, and that brings us to back to right now in the Sun Party cafe. Barring any additional stupidity, tomorrow morning we’ll leave this middling abyss of Middle Kingdom oblivion and head to the traditional center of Chinese ceramics, Jingdezhen. Until then, I hope you all got less coal in your stockings than China deserves jammed where the Sun Party don’t shine. Good night.

That lesson on the corrupting tendencies of power aside, we had a nice second day in Liugezhuang. We left our hotel a little after noon (drunken promise not fulfilled) in the industrial sector of town to walk down a new road – covered in tattered plastic and heaped over in so much dust you’d think they had it shipped in just to make the place look dingy – and took a stroll past some of the industry of the town, across the green river covered with trash (posted “bathe at your own risk”) and happened across a really interesting old neighborhood just beyond Main and Dusty Sts. The inhabitants were mostly shucking giant amounts of corn outside their courtyard dwellings or riding around on farm machines, but were mostly very affable. We found amid the yellowish-gray courtyards and piles of corn husks, to our surprise, a brand spanking new temple, outside of which a man of about 70 ushered us inside for a look. The temple itself was something. The architecture seemed authentic at very first sight, but there were several tell-tale signs of half-ass quality, including red paint splatters on the walls, an incorrect full-form character for “bell,” and a cheap feel about the statues and paint jobs. Another man in his 50′s wearing a white tshirt – apparently the full time guardian of the temple – told us it was 3 years old and built on the site of a previous, much smaller temple from donations by several citizens of the town (we had seen the list of donors, of about a hundred of whom, about eighty were surnamed Gao – go figure). When asked if the most of the temple-goers are Buddhist, he responded, “Some believe in Buddha, and some come to solve problems.” I could imagine a Catholic priest saying something similar.

Basically there were many parts of Liugezhuang that were beautiful and worth seeing, such as the old courtyard houses and the narrow streets of what was clearly the old city. They were charming, well thought out, and relatively ornate compared to their surroundings. However, the main drag of the town was a blight, and there were reeking piles of garbage strewn about everywhere, including right across from their new temple. We found out that the village mono-industry (just about all villages in China pick one industry and invest in it all-or-nothing) of insulating materials had recently gone nuts after Australia passed legislation subsidizing eco-friendly construction. Thus the village had come into some wealth, of which the temple was just one vestige. Despite that, the overall feel of the city was still utterly terrible, an example of what you might call “shitting where you eat.” As always the most recent additions to the city were the most despicable, leading me to believe more and more strongly that the (scientific?) development of these little places in recent years is really sucking the countryside dry of quality. As Andy said today in reference to one of the many nondescript Hebei towns we passed today, “I can’t imagine how they’ll develop all this into something good.” God, I hope we can find some traces of decency soon. At least last night we had a lively conversation with a Southern guest of our hotel, in town for over a month on business, who gave us a bottle of Johnny Walker black and took us to his favorite donkey cakes (local specialty) place. His arguments that Marxism is a valid religion and that China’s quality can be measured by its immense potential to change at any moment (which I said was pretty close to, “sleep with me today; we’ll get married tomorrow.”) were at least an amusing sidebar.

Today we made a 120 km jaunt across the rest of Hebei, stumbling across a group of bicyclists followed by a TV team, who gave us an on-the-spot interview. Afterward we followed them into yet another crappy third-tier city called Botou, where the police pulled us over from the middle of a crowded street to check our passports. After begrudgingly complying and telling the cops they made foreigners feel unwelcome in their city, we pulled out and a few hours later finally arrived in the greener (literally) pastures of Shandong province and a little Muslim enclave called Changguan (长官), complete with beautiful old Mosque and old city to boot. So far we have been treated by far the warmest by our Hui minority friends here of anywhere on the trip, and their neighborhoods are lively and colorful. Well, the old ones at least. We’re going to head out one more time tomorrow to see what we can find in the old city before starting to clip away at the next 450 km to Qingdao. More posts to come.

So it is with this background that I recommended from the beginning of our incident at the hotel to try to stay uninvolved. Morally, it is difficult to watch an innocent person suffer, but in the context of power and law in China, it is much safer to let events simply unfold around you.

We headed south slowly. Two days of hard riding (hard for us in our current physical condition) had worn on us. My knee had begun hurting the previous day as we pulled into Wen’an, and now it was hovering at about a three on the one-to-ten scale of pain. I’ve had problems with my right knee since running cross country in high school and knew that if it got to a five we would have to stop and wait for a recovery. Given Evan’s recent knee surgery, I received no objections.

We stuck to country roads, and the relative beauty of the countryside began to wash the taste of Wen’an out of our mouths, even though we were still shrouded in a gray haze. When we first left the city, the “hallos!” and baffled smiles directed at us from the locals were met with only cold stares from us, but as we moved out into the country, our spirits began to lift and we began responding with “ni haos” and increasingly enthusiastic waves of our own. Eventually our country road ended in a small village surrounded by corn fields. An inquiry toward three old men sitting on a stoop as to which way out would lead us to Liugezhuang, the next dot on our map, was met with some mostly unintelligible form of local Hebei dialect, and we peddled out into the corn fields.

We soon found ourselves in one of those perfectly planted, monoculture forests that are found everywhere in China. When the neat rows of aspen trees finally broke, we stumbled onto a patch of date trees and a family harvesting the dates, which had just come into season. As Evan described, harvesting meant whacking the trees with long bamboo poles to make the dates fall out or climbing into the trees to shake the dates down onto plastic sheets that the family had laid out below. The family was nice enough to take a break from their tree whacking to have a friendly conversation with us and offer us as many of their dates as we wanted, which quickly replaced the sour taste of Wen’an. This was why we came on this trip.

Perhaps as a result of the dirt roads, my knee had moved up to about a four-and-a-half, and when we arrived in Liugezhuang, I requested that we stay for the night and possibly the next day, although it was only 3:30 in the afternoon and we had traveled only 35km. A friendly man on a motorbike showed us the way to one of two hotels in town, and we got a huge room with three beds again for less than $1.50 per person. We  had dinner at the hotel and found that a rehearsal dinner of sorts was taking place before a wedding the next morning. By the end of the evening we were of course being toasted by the father of the bride and offered countless cigarettes. It turned out that most at the party were either local cadres, police or businessmen, who all treated us like honored guests. The difference between the city and a small town 35km away was striking. If we were going to hang out with the Party, we much preferred the festive atmosphere of the evening to the life-destroying power trip of the morning.

Not thinking much more of it, we went across the street for cheap grub after the obligatory pictures with the babies of all the other business owners in the vicinity. After the first bite of my shaobing (baked flatcake), the boss lady tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to go back to the hotel with her. Upstairs a plain-clothed, middle aged Chinese man showed me his Public Security badge and asked who I was, what I was doing, if I had stayed in the hotel, and a lot of nonsense questions. Finally he asked if the boss lady had registered us the previous night.

“Of course, we were registered. Four policemen came and took over an hour of our time making copies and going through our bags.”

That, however, was not the problem. Apparently the policemen had taken the copies of our passports for themselves, and the boss lady had not registered us in her computer herself. I tried pleading with him that of course, the police knew we were here, but he said that it’s not my responsibility to mind this affair. I suggested that if we all gave our passports now to make copies for the register, would that end the whole matter? So I went out and made copies of our passports after telling the guys to come for me if something happened. When I got back, the boss lady was sobbing at her desk. Through her sobs she told me they were going to revoke her business license and close her down. I tried to get her phone number or ask her to let me go downstairs to fetch money for her to pay to the policeman, but she kept saying it would only make matters worse. I asked her ten times about ten different solutions I could think of, but she didn’t want me to talk to the cop who was sitting in the back smoking or to go out and bring her money or anything. She just kept on telling me to remember that she was a good person and that she didn’t do anything wrong by agreeing to take us in, and that we will always be friends.

Enraged and befuddled, I walked downstairs and told Andy and Alexis about the situation. After much debate, we decided to all throw some money together and have Alexis take it up. He took it to her, but she refused several times. He gave her his cell phone number and promised to call us to let us know what happens.

So we left Wen’an with what Andy referred to as, “a bad taste in our mouths.” As I predicted before we set out, our major problems over this trip would all come from the government or their thugs (police). It’s likely, as we speculated afterward, that the cops are just trying to shake the hoteliers down for a huge fine or bribe. Either way, it stinks, and we are dying to remove ourselves from Hebei. Incidentally, it has finally occurred to me what is the biggest difference between here and Taiwan from my perspective. Today I’m sure it’s that only in idiotic dictatorships that everybody has to be registered to Big Brother at all times. In a place with nothing to hide, three goofball bicyclists with thousands of “USA-China Friendship Bicycling Team” cards would be seen as innocent and probably ridiculous, but not as terrorists or international pariahs.

Fortunately though, it wasn’t all bad today. We managed to get lost in some little village dirt roads covered by huge piles of corn husks among endless rows of corn and between little houses with courtyards covered in corn husks and husked corn (have I mentioned they grow some corn out here?). After getting really lost in one, we found a family of 5 with huge plastic sheets under trees, whacking them with huge bamboo poles. When we went up to talk to them, we found out they were harvesting dates, which have just come into season. When the papa of the family found out we took three days to get there, his wife told us he had once ridden to Beijing on a bike in one day. I’m glad they have appreciation for long bike rides (and that they called us out on being slow). Anyway, the point is that we still love Chinese people and even China. It’s just those prickly pricks in charge of things who bully locals for no goddamn reason who destroy it for everybody else. From here on it, hopefully we’ll leave places with the taste of good Chinese people and sweet dates and not the sour taste of oppression.

And as Alexis says, “nique la police!”

Former Filling Station Turned Corn Lot

Our Dongbei restauranteurs who had relocated to Bazhou, Hebei

Getting in shape is hard enough under any circumstances when one has been sitting in a desk job for two years without sufficient self motivation for a regular exercise routine. Getting in shape while breathing the air in Hebei province is an altogether different beast.

China has a severe desertification problem brought on by decades of equally severe deforestation. It is most evident in places like Inner Mongolia where lush grasslands have turned to sand dunes. In Beijing it can be felt in unbearably dry skin, heard in hacking coughs and seen in the sandstorms that blow in from the northeast in the spring. In Hebei there is simply dust everywhere. It covers the trees and grass, casting them in dull hues as if they are seen through a dense fog, and it covers the roads, which is what concerns us most. We spent much of our 75km ride today sucking dust as we rode alongside massive cargo trucks carrying who-knows-what toward Tianjin. The challenge was coupled with the already unbearable Hebei air, palpable in its polluted grayness from brick kilns, cement factories and other heavy industries.

After a late start, we left Gu’an for a town called Bazhou where we had lunch with a welcoming mother-son team running a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and hotel. The family had migrated from Heilongjiang province in China’s northeast 18 years ago for the father’s job. What we found interesting was that they had switched their hukou from their town in Heilongjiang to Bazhou in Hebei — basically an indication that they would never be going back. They were able to secure the hukou with a 2,000 yuan (approximately $300) processing fee per person and the purchase of a house. They had no idea what the processing fee would be today, but estimated that it would be much higher and that they likely would be unable to obtain the hukou at all. When we asked why (after all, China is more open and relaxed now than in the years directly after 1989, right?) they told us that people from the northeast are no longer allowed to get hukou here as they are viewed as hooligans and troublemakersby the locals .

From Bazhou we sucked dust for another 40km to a shitty city called Wen’an — a total misnomer, really, as it means “cultured and peaceful.” Evan has written more about our experience here in his post, so I won’t repeat, but I will say that I can’t wait for October 2 to roll around when I presume that the government will stop making local police so damn nervous that they overreact and treat a bunch of stupid bikers like terrorism suspects.

One good thing on our way from Bazhou to Wen’an was that we took our first “provincial inter-township road,” that is, a very local road running usually through rural areas. These are indicated on our map by tiny gray lines that often dead-end in this or that village, and these are the roads on which we will spend the majority of our time on this trip if all goes according to plan.

Lesson 2 is that we absolutely must stop staying in 3rd tier regional centers. We picked a city called Wen’an off the map because it was a good distance from Gu’an, our start (today was 75km), and it seemed like a good staging point to get into some real Hebei countryside tomorrow. Of course, when we arrived, it was another bastion of Chinese quick construction mediocrity, full of hilarious crosswalk signs and stores and restaurants indistinguishable from anywhere else, plus tons of traffic. That was par for the course, of course, but the police are the real reason we need to stop coming to these places (that and the fact they are not our goal). When we stopped in front of the first hole-in-the-wall hotel we saw, I went up to negotiate for a room as usual, and came down to find Andy and Alexis surrounded by LBXes and police, asking what we are doing here. After lots of staring and questions, one nice old man took us to another hotel where we got a decent room and rate and decided to move our stuff up the four flights of stairs to our room. Immediately after we had finally gotten every last thing up to the room, we were informed by the 4 policemen who had followed us in that we couldn’t stay here as they couldn’t guarantee “our safety” in such a place; that we would be safer in a more expensive hotel. After long negotiations of fighting illogic with illogic and lots of stupid catch phrases that police-types love, they allowed us to stay, needing copies of our documents. The head of the bunch a fat guy not in uniform with his shirt untucked and a lit cig always hanging from his lips, then tried to prompt me to tell him I was carrying weapons by asking, “so do you have anything for protection on you for this trip?” My answer of, “we foreigners aren’t allowed to carry weapons” was followed by, “no, you’re right. I’m afraid we’re going to have to check all your bags.” Entrapment much? After dumping out all our bags in front of 4 indifferent cops who were clearly just trying to save face in their department, they left us, but not before adding, “if you must leave, there’s food across the street, but don’t go far.”

So from now on we’re going to avoid these mid-sized blips on the map like the plague. Tomorrow we delve into real LBX territory south of here on the way to Shandong, and hopefully our first home-stay or camping experience to boot. With that, good night.