Letter from China: Part the Last

[dolorous_ett]

This is just a few bits and pieces of China travel that got missed out in the ten days or so between my last China-post and now. It's very gratuitous and self-indulgent of me, as I left China on the 29th of August, but the travelogue entries have been fun to write, and I'm going to treat myself one last time, as the exciting entries from here one in are going to be mostly just the products of my imagination. Look away if it offends.

Someone asked about the Kashgar market, which I was about to go and visit in my last. Well, it was quite a spectacle and worth a visit, although I think the Lonely Planet guidebook hyped it up a bit, and it has also suffered rather from the unfortunate tendency of the Chinese government to tidy everything up. So it was not the Arabian nights or anything of that sort - most of the bazaar proper was housed in a large network of concrete structures that could have been the local cash-and-carry market anywhere in China, despite a half-hearted attempt to make it fit in by putting on a few Muslimy curlicues along the roof, and making the entrances pointy. And there were a fair number of tourists around with BIG cameras, hoping for interesting pictures.

Fortunately, the market is interesting enough in its own right to afford quite a few snapshots. To begin with, there was the largest donkey-cart park I have ever had the pleasure to see. I was excited enough when I heard the first hee-haws, as donkeys are pretty rare both where I live and where I used to live in China - and took a picture of a cluster of half a dozen all tethered together - then I rounded a corner and saw that the actual park proper contained about a hundred of the beasts, packed close together and putting up with it with relative patience and good humour (bar the occasional agonised bray), the flat carts they drew all in a big heap off to one side. An elderly man in a skullcap was going around collecting parking fees.

Inside the building, they sell things every day of the week, and it's all surprisingly prosaic, as the booths selling prayer-rugs, musical instruments, dried fruit, gauzy fabrics for veils and souvenirs are far outnumbered by stalls selling shoes, ordinary clothes, bales of toilet paper, clothes racks, washing powder and basins to wash your feet. Still, that makes it more interesting in some ways. Q bought a large Uighur tambourine as a gift, which encumbered us throughout the rest of our journey, and I bought a kilo of the best sun-dried apricots in the world - a caramelly mid-brown, with the stone still on - tough as leather but worth all the effort.

The really photogenic stuff was going on outside the main building, where the people from the countryside were coming to sell or barter their wares. There were superb grapes, huge watermelons sold by the fruit or by the slice, and huge strings of garlic hanging from the necks of vendors. The small stands of dusty vegetables and meat-stalls containing half-carcasses of lamb or beef (a notable absence of pork) were not visually exciting, but the whole was caught up in this vast crush of people, occasionally pushed out of the way by a motorised three-wheeler laden with veg, or perhaps a fat-tailed sheep (I'm a sucker for fat-tailed sheep - can't get over the way their bottoms wobble as they move).

The outskirts of the bazaar were also interesting, as that's where locals who just have one or two things they'd like to sell set up - just standing at the side of the road with their wares at their feet. We passed a small puppy-and-kitten market on the way in, where the vendors had cardboard boxes or small cages at their feet, hawking their small, fluffy wares, plus the odd peddlar of collars and leashes. This pulled quite a crowd, especially children, as there were some very sweet animals indeed - often confined in spaces that were far too small to the Western way of thinking, which made me rather want to get one for myself, but common sense prevailed. Still, at least one tourist gave in to temptation - I saw a middle-aged, prosperous-looking obvious Han tourist with a large camera round his neck gazing thoughtfully at the small, brown puppy in his arms, as if wondering what he'd got himself into.

That was the end of our stay in Kashgar. That afternoon we got the train back to Urumqi, from where we were to get another train to Beijing.

I'm on record as saying that I love trains in China - and so I do - most of the time. The journey from Kashgar was of the good kind - we ended up in the same compartment as a middle-aged cadre from Kashgar accompanying his daughter to Beijing to enrol at university. It was touching to see how well the two of them got on, and the official turned out to be a very interesting bloke in his own right - reading between the lines, he was probably quite high up in the local heirarchy, and (once I'd expressed a proper disapproval of and contrition for the removal by a British "archaeologist" of priceless manuscripts from the caves at Dunhuang in the late 19th century) he proved to have some very interesting things to say (as is often the case with the more intelligent kind of official - who mercifully do still exist, in spite of all), and I came away far more insightful about life in Xinjiang (at least from the Han Chinese angle) than when I got on the train.

The journey from Urumqi to Beijing, however, was less fun. Now don't get me wrong because I'm not complaining - a lot of the people on the train were in a lot more discomfort than I was, and I counted myself very lucky to have two sleeper tickets between the two of us. (Luck? Ha! There was no luck involved - a clever travel agent and considerable so-called "administration fees" for the station staff, more like). But we weren't long off the train from Kashgar (1000 km, give or take), and I'd overlooked one very important detail: the time had come for university students to go back to college. There are a lot of university students in China, and while most go to college in their home province, a fair number of the better ones go outside it, and they all want to take the train. With all their luggage. And accompanying relatives. And bags of melons or crates of grapes as gifts for family friends at their destination. The station was an indescribable scrum, and the jockeying for luggage space in the racks and under the beds quite devoid of the usual good humour (I'd aquired quite a big pack by this point too, which didn't help). Then half of the people with a sleeper ticket also intended to go turn and turn about with a friend from hard-seat - who sat about on the lower berths, looking shifty and avoiding everyone's eye in case someone asked them to leave. The air-conditioning couldn't really cope with all the people, which didn't help, though no-one would really have been mean enough to kick the extras out. Except the carriage attendants, who did the rounds every evening, evicting people without a sleeper ticket in furious, shrill voices.

But as I said, I have no case for complaint. I had to pay one final administrative fee on board the train (legitimate, this time), which involved an excursion to one of the hard-sleeper coaches. At which point I truly understood the Chinese expression "people mountain, people sea" for crowds. It took the best part of an hour to get to the front of the queue, and when I had paid up, people had to physically squeeze me out again, like a cork from a bottle.

Some people go through this process once or twice every year for four years - and most of them can't get sleepers. I spent a lot of my time in China wishing I still lived there. But not on that train.

The journey was timetabled at 46 hours, and in fact was closer to 50. Find a map of China, look for Urumqi and Beijing, and you'll see why. In fact, you'll be impressed that 50 hours was all it took, especially considering the thousands of people who must have been on that train.

I suppose I should say a word about Beijing, though a lot of other people have been there before me and done it much better. And I'm not an expert - my base in China is the damp, laid back southwest of the country - Beijing is too dusty and dry, very big, very developed and the people baffle me.

Every time I take a taxi in Beijing, I think of Harry's first reaction to Hagrid: "too big to be allowed". In the drive for modernisation, a lot of the old, one-storey dwellings or low-rise blocks of flats have been pulled down and replaced by gargantuan blocks thirty storeys high. The old roads have been remade as six-lane freeways, and you'd be forgiven, if all you saw was that kind of view, for thinking that Beijing people are all Grawp-sized at the very least (not that Grawp would be welcome in Beijing - not at all the modern, sophisticated image the city planners are aiming for).

Yet Beijing has enormous character of its own - and even hicks and transients like me get the odd glimpse of it from time to time. You find people with real knowledge, passion and pride about their culture (both ancient and very modern) here, in a way that you almost never do in peaceful, green Guizhou. And you can tell it's a centre of government - ordinary people here are also very politically knowing in a way you don't see much of elsewhere. And not all the old districts have been destroyed - some still exist, and are by all accounts very charming.

Beijing also has Peking Duck, which we ate on our last night there. We paid more than we quite liked at one of the more famous duck joints, but it was worth every crispy, fatty, melting mouthful.

The last thing visitors to Beijing often see is the airport - a pity as it's one of the nastiest, most stress-inducing places in the capital. A worse place to say your goodbyes - to people or to the country - I can hardly imagine. Still, no doubt it will be torn down and replaced with something more snazzy in time for the Olympic games. I hope they do it when I'm there, as I will jump up and down on the rubble, cackling in glee.

There will be one more China entry, if I ever get my scanned photos emailed from China - I left the disc behind when I went on my travels. *headdesk*

Comments

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's not in the least self-indulgent -- some of us are really enjoying your travelogue entries, and will miss them.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the kind words!

I'm glad you enjoyed the travelogues - they were fun to write, and have actually helped me sharpen my memory of those places.

There will be more next year, if I'm still LJ-ing at that point.

[hannahmarder.livejournal.com]

Hooray for another travel entry! The train platform sounds a bit like nine and three quarters only busier - sorry, I've got HP on the brain! The market sounds great, thanks for putting that in. I love donkeys so I'd have been wanting one of them! The train journey sounds pretty awful - I'm a bit claustrophobic, especailly over 50 hours! I'll miss your travel entries, and please do post your photos. I've got such interesting mental pictures of the places from your descriptions, I'd love to see them for real as well.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Glad you enjoyed the entries. It's certainly been nice to have your comments - one of the reasons I carried on with them.

I'm still working on the pictures thing - hopefully soon... the trouble with having them emailed over is that I can't control which ones I receive and which ones I don't.

As I said above, I'm going back to China next summer, so there should be more China entries then.

Your comments about Platforn Nine and Three Quarters were intriguing. It's interesting (if pointless) to speculate what form Wizarding education might take in China - there are various options, depending on whether you want the Chinese wizarding world to be Communist or traditional in nature - but either way I don't think the Hogwarts model would work there. Especially not the idea of getting on a train unobserved in somewhere like Urumqi - I just don't think it can be done, magic or no.

[ignipes.livejournal.com]

That sounds like quite a train journey you had. And I very much agree about the Beijing airport -- if they tear it down to replace it, I will one of the people celebrating.

I hope we get to see your pictures. I've loved reading these entries about your travels.

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your kind words! Much appreciated.

There will probably be pictures soon, though my next entry is more likely to be the final part of "The Hall of Heroes", which I've just finished and am letting simmer down overnight before posting. *yawn* *should be in bed*