Sunday, 7 November 2010

Chengyang Dong Villages and the Longsheng Rice Terraces: Part 7 of China's Far Southwest

Update Dec 2022. From publication in 2010 until now this post was called 'Ma'an and the Longsheng Rice Terraces'. While producing a map for the updated post I learned that Ma'an (actually Maan) is a very minor part of Chengyang, eight linked Dong villages in the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County. We maybe had lunch in Maan, but our visited was clearly to Chengyang more generally, so I have changed the title to reflect this.

A Dong Metropolis and a Masterpiece of Agricultural Engineering

Chengyang, a Major Dong Settlement

06-Nov-2010

China

Driving southeast, we left Guizhou Province and entered Guangxi. The first town we encountered was Sanjiang, the administrative capital of the Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County in the north eastern corner of Liuxhou Prefecture. We stopped here for Dylan, our excellent Guizhou guide to hand is over to Liu who would be our Guangxi guide.

Guangxi Province and its position in SW China

Liu suggested lunch in Sanjiang, but the power was off and anyway a half hour drive to the Dong villages of Chengyang promised more interesting fair.

Approaching Chengyang

It was quickly clear the eight villages making up Chengyang cluster together to form a small town. They had the usual Dong features including several drum towers....

Drum Tower, Chengyang

...a wind and rain bridge...

Wind and Rain Bridge, Chengyang

...perhaps even one each...

Another Wind and Rain Bridge, Chengyang

...and plenty of wooden houses.

Wooden Houses, Chengyang

Unlike remote, rural Guizhou, where nobody had tried to sell us anything, the bridges were lined with souvenir stalls. Several older women hawking only handfuls of tenpenny tat employed the persistent, wheedling sales tactics that are barely half a step up from aggressive begging.

The stalls are a consequence of a regular supply of tourists; the aggressive selling/begging starts when enough of those tourists are rich westerners (though few of us would actually consider ourselves ‘rich’). A critical mass of foreigners then drags in the chancers and con men intent on separating easy targets from the contents of their overstuffed wallets. As each side loses sight of the other’s humanity a tourist industry evolves dedicated to guaranteeing foreigners only meet ‘safe’ Chinese. They explain a watered down culture, take the character out of the food and generally ensure the experience never becomes too demanding. In Guizhou we had met people who were proud of their culture for what it was, not for what they could get out of us. The Miao found us as exotic as we found them, but we were only two – plus the excellent Dylan – so they could show us genuine hospitality and we treated each other with courtesy and respect. Foreigners in Chengyang were still short of the critical mass, but Liu was part of a tourist industry primed and ready.

The smartest restaurant was full so Liu, rather reluctantly, took us to her second choice. Travelling with Liu was obviously going to be different. Dylan, Miao himself, entered Miao villages with a sense of belonging and was equally comfortable among the Dong, though our comments about Dong villages’ relative untidiness produced a distinct glow of Miao pride. Liu, a tall, thin, rather prim Han, kept using words like ‘primitive’ and ‘simple’. She regarded the Dong as quaint, if rather grubby, exhibits in a museum, whilst we were porcelain dolls that she must not allow to become dirty or broken.

If she had fussed around the open kitchen any harder she would have been doing the cooking. Unfamiliar flavours must not be allowed to upset our delicate palates, so she ensured every dish was appropriately bland and policed a rigid ban on chillies. We said we liked chillies, so she permitted the token sprinkling of three dried flakes on the top of one dish. We sent it back for more. Eventually we negotiated a tolerable if unexciting meal.

We continued our tour, pausng to observe, among other things, the treatment of harvested rice...

Harvested rice, Ma'an

...and a woman picking sticky rice, stalk by stalk, on a field leading down to the river.

Picking sticky rice

We stopped for some oil tea, a Dong speciality that had so far passed us by. Tea leaves are first fried in oil to bringing out their bitterness, then water is added along with a few peanuts and other less recognisable solids. The result is poured into a soup bowl and served with a spoon. It was a pleasant, though rather insipid brew. As we left Liu said, “she didn’t fry it as long as usual because that would have been too bitter for you, and of course she left out the chillies.” Liu was part of an industry that had told her that she knew more about our tastes than we did, and she was determined to defend us from all things Chinese (or at least Dong). We obviously had some work to do with Liu

A bowl of oil tea

Ping'an and its Remarkable Rice Terraces

We were happy to leave Chenyang, and an hour’s drive took us into Guilin Prefecture and the 'Longsheng Various Nationalities Autonomous County'. Longsheng town itself is an unremarkable place, but it is the gateway to the ‘Longsheng Scenic Area’. A brief stop was necessary in the huge car while Liu visited the ticket office. Then we drove through the barrier and up the mountain road towards Ping’an, the village where we would spend the night.

The road does not quite make it to Ping’an, but ends in a car park a steep forty-minute walk below the village. As we stepped from the car we were besieged by porters, all anxious to carry our case up to the hotel. Although I am used to carrying my own bags, I was happy to give employment to someone who needed it, but I found it embarrassing that all the porters were women - some of them by no means young. We let Liu pick from the scrum, and we were soon handing over our case to a stocky middle-aged woman. It was too big to fit in her basket, so she strapped it to the top with an octopus clip and bounced off up the path leaving us trailing in her wake. It was a stiff climb and we were grateful to be walking unencumbered, particularly near the top, where we had to negotiate uneven steps in gathering darkness. We arrived short of breath to find our porter sitting calmly on the hotel steps. She then insisted on carrying the case up to our fourth floor room as the creaky wooden building had no lift.

Ping'an

The other guests were a French tour group. We ate our chicken and peanuts that night surrounded by European faces, as though we had somehow stepped into a Chinese restaurant in France.

07-Nov-2010

In the morning we asked for a local breakfast of spicy noodle soup with a fried egg and smugly watched the French party picking at the sweet flaccid bread and scrape of yellow not-butter which they were encouraged to cover with a jam which was sweet but with no discernible fruit flavour. Such is a Chinese ‘western breakfast’. When we had eaten, we went out and climbed the rest of the way up the mountain.

The Longsheng rice terraces are striped across the hillside from the 900m ridge to the stream 500m below. Built some five hundred years ago and still very much in use they are a tribute to mankind’s indomitable determination to wring a living from an unhelpful countryside. We stood on Longji (the Dragon’s Spine) looking down upon thousands upon thousands of terraces covering the flanks of the dragon and reaching out along his legs.

Terraces reach out along the dragon's legs, Ping'an

The terraces are, without doubt, a marvel. They look fabulous in spring when they are full of water, wonderful in the summer when the young rice is green, splendid in autumn when the mature rice is yellow and ready to cut, and magical in winter when covered with snow. Unfortunately, just after the harvest they just look brown and, with the hazy sunshine straight in our faces, very difficult to photograph.

When we returned we found our porter sitting on the hotel steps waiting for us. She had been there, we were told, since eight o’clock to be sure to get the job. I still felt guilty about letting her carry my case, but I realised how important the small quantity of cash was to her.

There goes our case

Ping’an was once a Zhuang village but is now largely a collection of tourist hotels. With 18 million people, the Zhuang are China’s largest ethnic minority, though many of them, like Ping’an itself, have become assimilated into the Han mainstream. As we climbed down the mountain, we passed a range of stalls, mostly manned by Zhuang wearing their traditional costume for the tourists.

At puberty Zhuang women cut their hair for the only time in their lives. They cover their heads until marriage, after which they wear their increasingly long hair coiled and uncovered. Two thirds of the way down we paused at a stall run by a middle aged woman and her teenage daughter. For a small payment from Liu the older woman uncoiled her hair and combed it out, holding up the cut hair of her childhood which had been incorporated like a hair extension. We took the obligatory photographs but felt uncomfortable, at best we were watching a freak show, at worst it was a cultural violation. Liu treated the woman like an exhibit, and was keen to take a photograph of us with her. I declined rather more quickly and probably more rudely than I should, but it seemed so wrong. Smiling, the woman recoiled her hair and pinned it on her head, doubtless she would do the same act many more times during the day.

Our last brush with ethnic minorities

This sad experience was our last brush with Chinese ethnic minorities – at least for this trip. We felt we had been privileged to travel through Guizhou and encounter the rural Miao and Dong cultures while they were strong, and while women still wore traditional clothes as a matter of course and not just for tourists. In the longer term, though, I suspect the cultures are doomed and it is not tourism that will kill them, but the riches and opportunities of the modern age. With the exception of electricity and a few agricultural machines, the rural lifestyle has changed little, but whenever we saw a village from above - and that was often in such a mountainous region - it was impossible not to notice the satellites dishes sprouting from almost every roof. Villagers see how their urban cousins live, or at least a version of it, and they want some of that, just as their urban cousins see a version of how we live and want their cars, dishwashers and pop-up toasters, too. The people will be assimilated into mainstream life and their culture, confined to shows like the one we saw in Xijiang, will be as relevant to everyday lives as Morris Dancing is to the English.

The end of a distinctive culture may be sad, but Miao life is no rural idyll. The people are small, the old people diminutive through a lifetime of inadequate nutrition and their tired, lined faces tell a story of hard toil. The traditional Chinese peasant’s dream of abundant food may have now been achieved, but we saw countless farm workers staggering along the roads, the baskets slung on their carry poles so heavy that their knees bent with the effort of carrying them. We saw people whose horizon would never be wider than the backside of the buffalo hauling their plough. We heard the echo of women whose whole waking life is spent hammering cloth. To return to a theme this blog has encountered before, I cannot expect people to live in picturesque poverty just to please me. If they aspire to some of the advantages fate has showered on me, then it would be hypocritical to criticise.

China's Far South West (2010)

Part 1: Kunming and The Stone Forest
Part 2: Shilin to Xingyi
Part 3: Xingyi and on to Huangguoshu
Part 4: Qingyan, Guiyang and on to Kaili
Part 5: Kaili, Xijiang and Rongjiang
Part 6: Rongjiang, Zhaoxing and on to Guangxi
Part 7: Chengyang Dong Villages and the Longsheng Rice Terraces
Part 8: Guilin and the Li River
Part 9: Hong Kong
Part 10: Macau

Saturday, 6 November 2010

Rongjiang, Zhaoxing and on to Guangxi: Part 6 of China's Far South West

Meeting Two of China's Ethnic Minorities in the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture

05-Nov-2010

China

We spent the night of the 4th in the county town of Rongjiang County, sometimes called Guzhou City sometimes (and in this blog) Rongjiang. It is a dismal place and we had a poor dinner in a very ordinary hotel.

The next day we set out to meet the Miao and Dong inhabitants of the two southernmost counties of the the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture. The Prefecture is in the southeast of Guizhou Province in south western China.

This post is about the three most southerly counties of Qiandongnan Prefecture in Guizhou Province

Leaving Rongjiang

Rongjiang means ‘Banyan River’ and we hoped it might make a better effort at living up to its exotically attractive name in the morning sunshine. It failed. Several industrial sites and the building of a new highway had churned up the chalky soil and deposited a layer of white dust over the streets, the buildings and even the trees. As we left, I tried to imagine how the town might look without the dust – it was still ugly. As our road climbed into the hills, Mr Wu looked back down into the valley and said something to Dylan. ‘He says it looks like Afghanistan’ Dylan translated.

Congjiang County

Tingdong Livestock Market

We were soon in pleasanter countryside and, after crossing the hills, descended into the valley of the Duliu River at Tingdong.

Tingdong livestock market

On a field below the road, Tingdong livestock market was in full swing. Walking down the grassy ramp we passed a huge bull buffalo tethered to a stake away from the other cattle. Miao may no longer dismember chickens in the cause of marital harmony, but bull fighting remains a big entertainment. These huge beasts are not pitted against men, but against each other in what must be a titanic battle for the honour of the owning family.

Young bull, 4500 Yuan, Tingdong livestock market

There were buffalo, humped cattle and a compact but powerful breed of what we would recognise as normal cattle. All looked in fine condition and we were offered a young bull for 4500 Yuan (£420).

Miao Women in Traditional Clothing

A small lorry disgorged a load of bristly yellow piglets. They ran about their pen, swarming all over each other in a squealing pile of pigs. Back by the entrance a women pulled a black piglet out of a basket and held it up by it hind legs. The piglet’s loud complaints gathered a small crowd of potential purchasers.

Miao woman baskets of piglets, Tingdong Livestock market

Like livestock markets everywhere, it was largely a masculine affair, but the piglet woman was not alone; other women, were setting up food stalls or selling chickens and eggs. They were all dressed in traditional costume, short skirts or colourful pinafores worn over a tunic and tight leggings of a navy blue cloth with an unnaturally shiny texture. They were all Miao and wore their long hair oiled and coiled in Maio fashion, though the shiny cloth was originally a speciality of the Dong people, another ethnic minority of eastern Guizhou. Locally the Miao have adopted Dong clothing and there has been some intermarriage, although the two communities live largely parallel lives in separate villages.

Miao women, Tingdong market

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Tingdong to Congjiang

From Tingdong to Congjiang we followed the Duliu River. Although its wooded valley is steep, the river is broad and shallow, sparkling over gentle rapids and swirling into lazy pools where fishing boats congregate. It is a clean, beautiful river, reminiscent of the Loire, except for its bright green colour and lack of chateaux.

Congjiang is a long narrow town jammed between the river and the mountain. The main drag is, of necessity, much narrow than in most Han towns, and we felt as though we were driving down a canyon.

Yintan a Dong settlement

Yintan

We turned up a side valley to visit the Dong settlement of Yintan. Most of the three million Dong live in eastern Guizhou with some communities in neighbouring provinces. Unlike the Miao, they build their houses in the valley bottoms. In Yintan, the ground floors are of brick with wooden overhanging upper floors. Yintan is built around the confluence of two streams, both of them full of rubbish.

An ear, some entrails.... Pork stall, Yintan

Dong Drum Towers

Every Dong village has a Drum Tower; a tapering wooden tower like an open pagoda. Larger villages like Yintan, which is more of a small town, have two or more. Built and maintained by one extended family, an extra storey is added for each new generation; some had fourteen or fifteen levels.

Drum Tower, Yintan

Wind and Rain Bridges

Being in the mountains every village has a stream, and across every stream is a ‘Wind and Rain’ bridge, an elaborately carved wooden structure placed, typically, just outside the town. The bridges have two purposes, apart from joining one river bank to another. Situated between the town and its fields they provide shelter for agricultural workers during inclement weather, and in the evening they are a place where young Dong men and women can meet away from the inhibiting eyes of their elders

Wind and Rain Bridge, Yintan

Yintan seemed a bustling little town particularly after the rural quiet of the Miao villages, but along with that bustle came clutter. Miao villages are unnaturally tidy, but in Yintan the streets were full of building material, discarded agricultural equipment and just plain rubbish.

Lunch in Congjiang

We returned to Congjiang for lunch. In a private dining room on the first floor of a small hotel we ate an excellent fish, fresh from the Duliu, served on a bed of spring onions and chillies. Along with this came a dish of runner beans and aubergines, a bowl of mashed pumpkin, some pork with peanuts and chillies and a plate of quartered ‘thousand year old eggs’. The eggs are not really that old, but have been buried long enough to become completely black. The yolks looked like the dyed yolk of any hardboiled egg, the black ‘white’ was shiny and translucent. At first their taste was simply eggy, then a flavour of the sea emerged, like a fresh oyster, and finally there was an aftertaste where the rot and decay seemed to linger. I liked them – until that aftertaste kicked in.

Basha and the 'Long-Haired' Miao

Basha Miao village, up the hill from Congjiang, is the home of the ‘Long-haired Miaos’. The women's hair is immensely long, but neatly coiffed. Dylan said it was the men who have the long hair, but they were all out in the fields, we had to take his word for it. Or not.

...dark blue cloth painted with egg white..., Basha Miao vilage

The women, all in traditional costume, were hard at work treating cloth. The dark blue cloth (we saw a brown version elsewhere) was first painted with egg white, then with pig’s blood and hung up to dry. Once dry it was beaten with large wooden mallets, the plonk, plonking sound being audible all over the village. After prolonged beating the cloth becomes shiny and, to some extent, waterproof.

The cloth is laid out to dry....., Basha Miao village

....and beaten with wooden mallets. Basha Miao village

The village was set among trees, high on a valley side, above terraced fields. Following a path lined with wooden frames draped in drying rice we reached a dell set aside for festivals. The local Miao are animists and a tree is planted at a child’s birth with the hope that, in the fullness of time, it will provide their coffin or at least shade for their burial place.

Drying rice, Basha

Liping County

Leaving Basha we returned to the valley and continued downstream to Diping before turning up a side valley. We travelled deeper and deeper into the mountains and the road rose higher and higher. Terraced fields stepped down the valley sides towards the stream far below. The higher we climbed the more vertiginous the terracing became. Down the noses of truncated spurs, the terraces hung one above another like boxes in a theatre.

Terraced fields, Basha

We climbed to the head of the valley and over a pass into the next one. Instead of descending, we turned along this valley side, first contouring and then climbing even higher to another pass.

Zhaoxing

We descended into a lush valley hidden deep in the mountains. Zhaoxiang nestles on the valley floor, a Dong town of richly mature wooden houses lining a main street with more horse drawn vehicles than cars.

Zhaoxing at dusk

We checked into our wooden hotel next door to the wooden police station and opposite a drum tower. Taking a stroll through the town, we found ourselves walking through a China we had thought only existed in photographs from the beginning of last century. If Rongjiang had been China at its ugliest, Zhaoxing was China at its most delightful.

We had a light meal at one of the barbecue stalls lining the main street. The lady of the house sat behind a brazier nursing a child, the food lying on skewers in front of the brazier. Her husband, specialising in fried rice, operated a wok over a gas ring. We chose skewers of beef, pork, heart (we think), tofu, green beans and a long green leaf threaded backwards and forwards like a concertina. We were relieved when it was served by number one son without any barbecued infant parts being included by mistake. My reluctance to eat scorpions is merely squeamishness, my objection to eating children - call me a bleeding heart liberal if you must – is more ethically based.

Hopefully not popping the baby on the barbecue

Returning to the hotel we could still here the sound of wooden mallets falling rhythmically onto cloth.

06-Nov-2010

In the morning Dylan arrived to show us the way across town to breakfast. Zhaoxing had risen early, we passed a silversmith’s where girls were hard at work on the polishing machines, and we could already hear the sound of mallets upon cloth. There are people whose whole waking lives are spent hitting cloth.

Zhaoxing in the morning

In the morning we crossed town to a restaurant for breakfast. Zhaoxing had risen early, we passed a silversmith’s where girls were hard at work on the polishing machines, and we could already hear the sound of mallets upon cloth. There are people whose whole waking lives are spent hitting cloth.

We passed two lads squatting beside a fire in a metal bowl, roasting rats on kebab skewers. We watched the fur sear off and the skin begin to blacken. Dylan reached behind their front door and brought out the rattraps – spring-loaded snares – which they set in the rice paddies every evening. I half hoped they would offer us a taste despite the rats looking supremely unappetizing. I was mostly relieved when no offer came. Presuming that, as no one would eat rat by choice, that must be all they had and they were far too poor to share, we wandered off to a less challenging breakfast of spicy noodle soup and a fried egg. Later Dylan told us later they ate rat because liked it, and in the market their catch would fetch a similar price to chicken.

Rat kebab

Tang'an

After breakfast we drove back to the top of the pass, then turned up towards the mountain top. The village of Tang’an offers magnificent views over the terraces down the valley to distant Zhaoxing.

Tang'an

Built almost on a flat mountain top rather than a valley bottom Tang’an has been maintained in a strictly pre-industrial state in a Chinese/Norwegian collaboration to produce a living eco-museum. Its site is extraordinary, the views breathtaking, but the village itself is, for the moment, unexceptional. As other Dong communities develop, the isolation will help it maintain its deliberately primitive status, but the authorities will need to ensure the continuing cooperation of the villagers themselves.

Zhaoxing at the bottom of the valley

From the valley top we retraced our steps to Diping, the small town where we had left the Duliu River. We stopped for a closer look at the Wind and Rain Bridge, considered one of the finest in eastern Guizhou.

Wind and Rain Bridge, Diping

After Diping we followed the Duliu River downstream as the valley gradually widened, eventually crossing into Guangxi and arriving at the sizable but undistinguished town of Sanjiang. Here we said farewell to Dylan and Mr Wu and met Liu, our Guangxi guide and her nameless driver.

Ham on a motorbike, Diping

China's Far South West (2010)

Thursday, 4 November 2010

Kaili, Xijiang and Rongjiang: Part 5 of China's Far Southwest

We were woken at five thirty by an artillery barrage which turned out, on closer inspection, to be firecrackers. I was still wrestling with the concept of sleep when there was a repeat performance, this time including rockets. They were impressive fireworks, but at half past six…..?! Kaili, we discovered later, had been woken in celebration of a forthcoming wedding. I hope the noisy couple have a long and happy marriage – and enjoy it far away from me.

Impressive fireworks - at 6.30 am, Kaili

We left town on a good new road heading southeast, but soon ran into a roadblock. Some people who had worked on the road had not been paid. Promises had been made and repeatedly broken, so they had taken matters into their own hands, hauled a couple of logs across the road and stopped the traffic. There were some very angry people, but they were not interested in us, so they let Mr Wu improvise a way round the roadblock, in the knowledge that buses and lorries would be unable to follow our route.

It takes a brave and/or angry person to demonstrate in China. We can only guess at what might happen when the police arrived, as they surely would, but the most likely scenario involved the demonstrators being beaten and arrested.

A little further on we stopped across the valley from the Miao village of Jidao and walked down the rough road and over the stone bridge towards the wooden buildings. Jidao is a show village, which means the government have concreted the paths and put up a few signs, but otherwise life carries on as normal. Normal meant almost everybody was away working in the fields, but those who were left, largely older women, got the favourite aunty treatment from Dylan and greeted us warmly.

Drying corn, peanuts, chillies & tobbacco, Jidao

Entering one of the wooden houses, we met an old woman sitting beside a bucket of pork, carefully rubbing a mixture of salt and spices into each individual slab. The cured meat would eventually find its way into the smoker nextdoor.

Curing pork, Jidao

Outside was the main square, and in the corner of the building opposite a small shop. The diminutive shopkeeper dashed out and grabbed hold of my arm. She seemed genuinely impressed by my enormous height, which was a novelty as I generally think of myself as being on the stumpy side. However, as she came up to my elbow, and I was a head taller than Dylan, who might also be described as ‘stumpy’, perhaps she had some excuse.

The sign on the ‘hundred year old barn’ possibly underestimated the age of the village’s second largest building. It is now a communal storehouse but was once used as place of retreat in the event of attack. The largest building had started life as a normal sized house but sections had been added generation by generation as the family had grown until it now occupied the whole of one street.

Like Qangmen, the ground floors were for animals, the balconies were decorated with drying vegetables, and the village was built on a hillside. We walked through the village and down the hill to the stream, which was crossed by a plank bridge. We could have returned to the stone bridge, and that was Lynne’s preference, but eventually Dylan persuaded her to walk the plank – provided she could keep a firm hold of him.

Walking the plank, Jidao

Xijiang, the ‘biggest Miao village in the world’, is reached by driving up a side valley near Jidao, climbing over a pass and then dropping down into the deep valley beyond. It is a town rather than a village, several hundred wooden houses perched on a steep slope above a green river. Despite its remote location, it has been commercialised and we had to pay an entrance fee before negotiating a parking space among the tourist buses.

Xijiang

At the entrance to the village, a group of women in ceremonial costume were lined up as if for a procession, shuffling on the spot to recorded music. We watched them for a while but they seemed in no hurry to move off. Dylan looked at his watch. ‘Time to go’ he said, ‘the show will be starting soon.’

Lined up for a procession
Xijiang Miao village

We hurried off to join the crowd in the main square, but the show started late as a party of VIP guests insisted on demonstrating their importance by holding everybody up. I enjoyed the ‘pensioners’ choir’ and some of the folk instruments, but I am not a fan of dance at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. Scenes from Miao life were acted out to music. Girls skipping daintily through imaginary water filled rice paddies prettily plonking down the open-ended barrels used to trap rice paddy fish may have been idealised, but going fishing in full ceremonial dress, complete with silver horns, seemed a ridiculous idea. The final scene, the fantasy wedding of the Miao ‘Prince’ and ‘Princess’ would have graced any production of Aladdin. I turned and caught Dylan’s eye. ‘It’s not like that, it’s just not like that’ he said shaking his head. The show was culture sterilized and packaged for undemanding tourists and did real Miao culture no service at all. It is customary to blame western tourists for this sort of thing, but of the five hundred or so spectators, four hundred and ninety eight were Chinese.

Aladdin
Xijiang Miao village

Walking from the performance area to the main street, Dylan met a ‘cousin’ from his home village who had recently moved to Xijiang to open a restaurant. There was, he explained, a lot of competition and he was struggling. Dylan loyally led us to his cousin’s little restaurant, but it was immediately obvious that the business was hardly functioning. We sat at a table and drank tea while the cousin chatted with Dylan about what he might cook. The speed with which Chinese restaurants provide food is based on all the chopping being done well in advance, but here nothing seemed to have been prepared. Dylan’s face became increasingly sceptical and we could see the cousin’s self-belief ebbing away as they talked.

Leaving Dylan to solve the problem, we took a stroll through the market that occupied the main street and several side roads. A few stalls were aimed at tourists and sold handicrafts and silver Miao horns, but most provided for local needs. There was little order, a blacksmith selling spade and mattock blades (bring your own handle) stood between an electronic games stall and one hawking cheap clothing. A man with baskets of dripping honeycombs was filling old water bottles and another was selling cheap reading glasses, demonstrating their strength and durability by putting them on the cobbles and smacking them with a mallet.

Honey salesman, Xijaing

While we were walking, Dylan decided his cousin was not up to the job. We would eat with Mr Wu in a nearby restaurant, while Dylan did the decent thing and endured his cousin’s cooking alone.

The restaurant was on the first floor of the building opposite and the planks moved uncomfortably under our feet as we made our way to our table. I wondered for a moment if the constructers had ever considered the possibility of solidly built westerners treading their boards.

The centrepiece of the meal was a firm fleshed, delicately flavoured rice paddy fish, but we also had shredded pork with mushrooms, some green vegetable and a bowl of what looked like thin tree roots with bits of bacon nestling in it. The bacon turned out to be smoked pork, the meat we had seen being cured in Jidao. It was too smoky for my liking – I want to taste what went into the smoker as well as the smoke – but went very well with the roots, called Zhe-er-geng in Mandarin. They had been gently cooked to retain some crunch and had a strong floral, perfume-like flavour, similar to Sichuan pepper, but without the mouth numbing quality. It was an excellent lunch, but every time I shifted on my little wooden stool, I could imagine the three of us plunging through the floor in a shower of rice, fish bones and tree roots.

Zhe-er-geng on sale (in Hong Kong)

The centrepiece of the meal was a firm fleshed, delicately flavoured rice paddy fish, but we also had shredded pork with mushrooms, some green vegetable and a bowl of what looked like thin tree roots with bits of bacon nestling in it. The bacon turned out to be smoked pork, the meat we had seen being cured in Jidao. It was too smoky for my liking – I want to taste what went into the smoker as well as the smoke – but went very well with the roots, called Zhe-er-geng in Mandarin. They had been gently cooked to retain some crunch and had a strong floral, perfume-like flavour, similar to Sichuan pepper, but without the mouth numbing quality. It was an excellent lunch, but every time I shifted on my little wooden stool, I could imagine the three of us plunging through the floor in a shower of rice, fish bones and tree roots.

It took all afternoon to drive over the mountains to Rongjiang where we would spend the night. The distance was modest, but parts of the road were being constructed as we drove over it and twice we had to wait for road building equipment to finish a job before we could move on. Darkness had fallen before we reached our destination.

The road to Rongjiang being constructed as we drove over it

The Chinese love neon; arrive at any town after dark and you will be greeted by acres of red, purple and lurid green. Any town, that is, except Rongjiang, a dusty, untidy and unloved 40-watt bulb of a town specialising in dimly lit shops and dark vacant lots. Turning off what seemed to be the main street into a courtyard, we found the Dongxiangmi Grand Hotel. Most of the grandeur was in the name, but our room was clean and comfortable enough.

‘Eat in the hotel’ was Dylan’s advice, ‘there’s nothing else here.’ It was after seven and he was concerned it might close before we got there. As it turned out they went on serving for some hours and the restaurant was a comfortable and apparently sophisticated oasis in the urban desert. Unfortunately, this was only an appearance. Our ‘fragrant chicken’ was dire: tough, lukewarm and in no way fragrant. It was our worst meal of the trip – and among the most expensive.

Later, we walked along the dusty main street to see if there had been an alternative place to eat. There were few people about and the town looked closed, but we did find another restaurant – and it was on fire. A knot of people, presumably the proprietor and family, stood outside in a state of shock, while the residents of adjacent buildings milled about anxiously. Very soon, a fire engine arrived, the flaming wok was quenched and the excitement subsided. There would be cleaning up to do, but there was no real damage.

Rongjiang means ‘Banyan River’ and we hoped it might make a better effort at living up to its exotically attractive name in the morning sunshine. It did not. Various industrial sites and the building of a new highway had churned up the chalky soil and deposited a layer of white dust over the streets, the buildings and even the trees. As we left, I tried to imagine how the town might look without the dust – it was still ugly. As our road climbed into the hills, Mr Wu looked back down into the valley and said something to Dylan. ‘He says it looks like Afghanistan’ Dylan translated.