A Taste of the Old World

So, the last trip took in China that I have to write about, aside from ones from the beginning of the year for which I’ve lost all pictures, but might be able to get around to sometime 4 or 5 months from now, was a trip I took during the spring to the province of Fujian, with the purpose of visiting three locations: Xiamen, Wutaishan, and Yongding Village.

I never actually got to Wutaishan, so this instead will just be about Xiamen and Yongding.

Xiamen is generally considered to be one of the most pleasant cities in China, by Chinese people, and they might be right. Its towards the southern tip of Fujian, on the coast, and technically is an island, though its so close to shore that the railroad and highways continue uninterrupted, making it easy enough to fool anyone into thinking its a normal part of the mainland. Its a pleasant enough city in its own right, but its really famous for one thing, another island, called Gulangyu, which roughly translates into “Little Island that Breaks the Waves” (as per my own stylization).

Gulangyu used to be pretty important, now its just pretty. Back in the day, in the middle of the 1800’s, the Western Powers (most notably the UK, France, and Germany, though all the others were still interested, and the USA grabbed at any leftovers it could) came to China with some big boats, which had big guns. Up until that point, for the previous couple hundred of years, China had been closed to the rest of the world for the purposes of trade. Capitalism doesn’t care for the idea of closed markets, so when all else fails, capitalism uses guns to blow the doors open, and it often works.

China had seen a slowdown in technological evidence during those couple hundred of years that left it militarily inferior to the new technologies used in the West. With naught but a few gunboats in front of them, they threw in the towel and said “okay okay, we’ll buy your crap and sell you some other crap.”

To facilitate this, the Western powers secured five “treaty ports”, places along the coast where the Western powers would be given concessions of land to establish, operate, and maintain permanent trade institutions and the communities necessary to sustain them. These treaty ports included Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Xiamen. I forget the fifth, maybe its Qingdao? Correct me if you can, this is from the top of my head.

Anyway, so Xiamen was one of those treaty ports, and obviously that heightened its importance. The Portuguese had already previously established a presence on that little wavebreaking island in the 1600s, but it became even more important during the city’s time as a treaty port, and the various Western powers mostly used the buildings there as its offices. As such, Gulangyu retains a distinctly Mediterranean/Western look that parlays quite well into excessive wedding photo opportunities, as you might recall from an earlier blog post.

SO. With that history lesson out of the way, I headed down to the area for a four day or so trip, and met up with Jing in the city of Xiamen. I ended up taking a flight, which was pretty reasonably price, only a bit more than a train, and a fifth of the time to get there. This was offset by the fact that I got in at about midnight, and that I hadnt been able to make a hostel reservation for that night, only the next couple of nights. So I had to use a taxi and trust a taxi driver to take me to the cheapest place he could find. He did actually call quite a few hotels, but because it was a special Chinese holiday weekend, the prices had all been raised, and a lot of places were booked full, so I had to accept a 30 USD a night hotel. I know that probably doesn’t sound so bad to a lot of people, but the hostel I ended up using was around 5 dollars a night for a nicer room, so, there.

It didn’t take too long to get to the hotel and checked in, and I took my stuff to my room, then took a shower. I came out and found a calling card for a prostitution company (offering both men and women!) slipped under the front of my door, which I decided to use as a bookmark for a book I was reading on the history of the volcano Krakatoa, which I had incidentally bought at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport on the way to Xiamen. Here’s a picture of the books they sell at Hongqiao:

I spent a lot of time perusing them, as I had gotten to the airport early for once, and I realized you can probably learn a bit about a country by seeing what books they offer for sale in their airports. The books on money, finance, and people who had made a lot of money, and China all made sense; I’ve yet to figure out exactly why the Krakatoa book was also for sale, but I think it might have something to do with exactly one chapter that related to China within.

Anyway, so after receiving a new bookmark, I headed out of the hotel to just wander a bit, for whatever wandering I could manage. Boy, there wasn’t much. I walked both directions along the main street outside of my hotel for a while to find basically nothing either way, not even a decent convenience store or street food, so I went back in, read some more, and slept.

The next morning I headed over to the train station, where Jing would be coming in, and after meeting up we got into another taxi, with some McDonald’s flurries in hand, and headed to the beach, near which we’d find my booked hostel.

It wasn’t an easy find. It was in the middle of a maze of alleyways and passages whose names were probably the sort of thing whispered in the night, like the name of the bogeyman, which no one is quite sure of. As you can imagine, this makes for a tough time for a taxi driver, who doesn’t care enough to find out anyway, so we got kicked out and ran in circles until I was finally forced to admit I had made a very simple error in typing the hostel’s phone number, and changing it so we could finally call them. Good looking out on that one, Jing.

Someone came out to fetch us and take us directly to the hostel, which we would never have found on our own.

Inside the hostel, we did the usual shenanigans of passport checking and bunk claiming, then chatted with the manager for a while, who was a very nice lady, and owner of a couple of adorable little kittens, which pretty much kept me from doing anything else for a while, given how much I love little kitty cats.

Here they are!

After twenty minutes or so, I was finally able to pull myself free from the kittens, and Jing and I set off for Gulangyu. Just outside of the maze of alleyways was a bus stop that would take us to the ferry station we’d have to use to get to Gulangyu, so after waiting maybe ten minutes, a bus came and picked us up.

It was packed. The most packed bus I’ve ever seen. Technically I shouldn’t have been allowed inside, but my willingness to perform some acrobatics to stay out of the way of the door as it closed might’ve helped keep the bus driver from forcing me off. That, or the usual lack of caring from a Chinese worker.

A bumpy, squished, uncomfortable twenty minute ride later, we were at the ferry station, and quickly got on the boat. It was a really short ride over to the island, and our boat might’ve been overfilled. Here’s a couple pictures from that ride:

On the island, it was quickly obvious that today, being a holiday, was going to be a really packed day. Tons of people were there. The line to get back onto the boat was enormous, as shown here:

After disembarking and getting through the terminal station, there was a commercialized little town available to us to get McDonald’s or KFC. So thoughtful, right? That area was also swamped. So pretty quickly Jing and I chose a direction and started walking. I had seen a map and settled on a basically circular course around the island, that would hopefully give us some nice views and let us see all the main destinations on the islet.

First we cut through some of the old town segments, got some crappy little lunch:

And went through a park area. By this point, the crowds had mostly thinned out, owing to herd mentality that keeps most huge crowds from actually exploring everything in a tourist area. Thank goodness for mass psychology. At that park, we were able to break through to the coastline of the islet in an area where there still werent too many people, and soon found our first section of beach, where a bunch of people were having fun in the water:

This photogenic little old man fished by himself on a pier separated from the crowd a short walk away, with the whole world in front of him as his proverbial oyster:

We continued to walk on, and then we found a park with a super odd assortment of bronze sculptures. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me, being not that well versed in old traditional Chinese life, but apparently these were displays of that which I just said I wasn’t well versed in. From far away, these sculptures looked like madness. Below I’ve included three pictures of this, the first one being a pretty obvious barber scene, the next one being a not so obvious old game of two guys tensing their abs against a pole and pushing, trying to force the other guy to fall or something, and the third one just basically looking like two guys having a good time:

We worked our way further around the circumference of the island, reaching some more popular beach spots, pausing a moment to soak the ocean air in, then beginning the ascent up into the park area of the island, which required a fairly substantial 20 dollars entrance fee if I recall correctly. However, that fee allowed access to a whole lot of things, and this trip was basically intended to see those things, so I thought it was worthwhile. However, we had only a few hours until the sights would be closed down, and the ticket office lady said “Yeah I think you guys are a little late, you probably shouldn’t bother.” This certainly discouraged Jing, but my stubbornness and estimation of the average person’s pace of sightseeing that they were figuring on won out the day, and I argued that we could probably do it just fine.

Jing relented and up we went. The first sight was really just an overlook of the island, which was quite nice, although halfway up the stairs this charming sculpture presented itself:

After ascending the rest of the way, we were given clear uninterrupted views of a lot of the surrounding area, particularly including the rock outcropping in the middle of Gulangyu, which, its said, if you don’t visit, you haven’t really visited Gulangyu.

I took some more pictures as well on top of a building in this overlook, a building which served to launch cable cars over to that rock outcropping. So here’s a few of the pictures I just mentioned combined, plus one from the cable cars:

One short cable car ride later, and we were at this overly highly marketed rock outcropping, along with the populace of China. Seriously, this place was one big traffic jam. A couple photos will show why:

Narrow pathways, a small viewing area at the top, and lots of people on vacation don’t mix well. Some army were on hand to expedite people and then yell if you didn’t leave the viewing area on top in a timely fashion.

The army wasn’t all bad though, they moonlight as amateur photographers for you and your loved ones if you so chose:

Here’s another view shot from the top just for kicks. I did wait in line for a long time, after all, so I feel obligated to show it:

From there, Jing and I went down the stairs and back down to the rest of the island. We exited through a Taoist temple ground, and then started traipsing through more rustic Mediterranean style alleyways.

We suddenly found ourselves back in the midst of tourist central, where all the shops and stuff were, and swiftly ran away down another alleyway. The next destination was an organ museum. Which is to say, the musical instrument, not the squishy bags inside our ribcages. I forget the original reason why, but Gulangyu inherited a big tradition of piano playing, which is now reflected in its organ museum and two piano museums, and a piano training institute that still operates on the island.

The building the organ museum was located inside of was rather nice, but the displays inside were lacking. Not the organs themselves, they were actually quite exquisite and numerous. However, they were barely signed, with little to no information, in either English or Chinese, with only a couple of exceptions, as well as signs that said quite clearly “no photography”, which I flaunted numerous times, as you can see:

Here’s my favorite, though, an uber bizarre organ tucked away in a corner room on the second floor, away from all the main action of the museum, which also had no information:

And so we started wandering again. Then lo! Possibly the weirdest warning sign I’ve ever seen:

Basically, this sign amounts to a warning that you shouldn’t sew or knit while holding our children, because you might poke their eyes out. Yeah, that little child in the picture? She’s now lost an eye.

This was right outside a kindergarten, by the way.

Anyway, after a bunch more wandering, we found ourselves close to that Taoist temple ground we had emerged from earlier, but this different angle provided a stunning realisation. This was not just any Taoist temple, but the Taoist temple to the great Soccer God, apparently. (There is no great Soccer God). Look at the evidence, though:

Your guess is as good as mine.

Next was a path towards a nice enough park with a good little stone maze to get up to the top, leading to the piano museums. They also said no photography here, and were a bit more serious about it, but I still snapped off a few before attracting their ire:

After that, it was getting late. We had one last stop to make, really, which was to visit a really big statue of a guy whose name, in the English language, we spell as Koxinga, a bastardisation of the Cantonese pronunciation of his name. In Mandarin, though, he’s known as Cheng Cheng Gong, and he was the guy that conquered Taiwan, more or less. In China, they call it “liberating” Taiwan. I’m not going to get super political here, but basically in 1640 or so, the guy brought a bunch of boats over to the island and kicked out the Dutch that had only been there for about 20 years, and took over in their position, creating the first Chinese colony on the island.

They never occupied the entire island, only the southern third of it or so. The guy had a history as a pirate, but had also gone through the Confucian civil service tests that would allow him to be an official Chinese bureaucrat, and it was basically agreed by the Chinese Empire that he could be the magistrate of the area, as long as he sent money to them. Some liberation, eh?

Its pretty important, though, as this marked the time that Taiwan really entered Chinese history, and marked the time that Chinese people really started coming to Taiwan. If you talk to a Taiwanese person today, there’s a 70% chance or so that their family goes back over 15 generations to this time, when Chinese people from Fujian launched off from Xiamen (or northern neighboring port Fuzhou) to find another life on the island of Taiwan. Up until then, the people living on the island were ethnically, religiously, linguistically separate from Chinese people, a part of what is known as the Austronesian family of people in the world; closer in ethnicity to the people in Hawaii or the aborigines of Australia than to Chinese people. After Koxinga, though, it was basically fate that ethnically Chinese people would be rulers of the island for the rest of time.

I’ll touch more upon Koxinga when my blog catches up to my travels in Taiwan, but that’s enough for now. Here’s a couple of pictures of his ridiculously large statue, ostensibly looking out towards Taiwan:

After that, we queued up for getting on another ferry back to Xiamen, and my god. There was a TON of people there.

I think we waited something around an hour or so to get on the ferry, when previously, there was no wait time at all for getting on from Xiamen to Gulangyu. However, it was getting close to closing time for the island (and for the shuttle services), so everyone was trying to leave at the same time, which is naturally a problem.

We did get through, though, and from there we wandered into downtown Xiamen, and found some cheap Muslim restaurant, where Jing added a ridiculous amount of spice to her soup:

I like spice, a lot, mind you, but I don’t know how she does it. She literally consumes at least twice as much spice as anyone else I’ve ever known, at least.

The rest of the night was unremarkable, mostly. We tried to go get a glimpse of some nightlife in the city, gathered from some information I had read online. I had the worst taxi driver of my life, who, after breaking ten traffic laws every second, said towards the end of our ride “Hey, do you want me to drop you off directly in front of the club, or is it okay if I drop you off from the other side of the road? If I drop you off right in front, I’d have to break a law, and I’d rather not do that”. The clubs and bars were all immediately disappointing, with horrible music, bad prices, and boring people (although still quite full), so instead we got a couple of convenience store drinks and headed to some inexplicable pyramid shaped grassy mounds in a park area right outside the main nightlife strip, and sat around at the top, just chatting for a while.

We finally left, but still walked around some more, crossing by an unexpected skate park, which was of course barren, but hey it was like 1 or 2am at that point. This meant it was late enough for us to go home to the hostel, and get some sleep before the next day, when we would be going to Yongding County, a very special place.