by way of covering the gap of the unwritten past without writing too much in the present, here is something I wrote after we returned from a weekend trip to Pingyao:
Unless you’re going to a beach, you travel to learn. And usually the learning comes when you think you don’t need to be paying attention (last Friday we went to a play & I learned as much about China by watching the young audience fiddle with their cell phones than I did by watching what happened on the stage).
We left Beijing at 6:00 on Saturday morning to drive to Pingyao 平遙, one of China’s “ancient cities”—along with Dali 大理 and Lijiang 麗江 in Yunnan 雲南—that have been preserved or reconstructed to look the way they did over a hundred years ago in the Qing dynasty 清朝. Pingyao is celebrated for its city wall, one of the remaining few amidst thousands that were torn down since the Communist revolution decided they were relics of imperialism and an obstacle to regional development. In the middle of Shanxi 山西 province, a mountainous and rocky region whose greatest industry is coal-mining, Pingyao managed to be the financial capital of the Qing dyasty in the nineteenth century. Midway on the trade route between Xi An 西安 and Beijing 北京, Pingyao was where China’s first banks and money-wiring systems began, and today you buy a single ticket to gain entry to the old banks, the city wall, and the houses of the capitalists and merchants who were responsible for Pingyao’s prominence. In a forecasted lesson on globalization, the banks failed after the republican revolution of 1911 removed governmental patronage and created an influx of foreign banking capital to coastal cities like Shanghai 上海. In a lesson about China’s unique art-capital-politics relationship, Pingyao seems to have been a financial center without any artistic prevalence to speak of,—compare this to another pre-modern financial center, Florence, where the money-makers became patrons of the arts—a foreshadowing of Beijing’s cultural importance despite the financial preeminence of Shanghai.
Our first stop was not in Pingyao, actually, but at the Wang Family Mansion 王家大院, about an hour away. This huge compound of networked courtyards was built for the vastly successful Wang family, who eventually rose to prominence as a genealogy of officials out of the somewhat more humble background of a tofu-seller. It’s something of a novelty considering the kind of Chinese society I study—granted, I study a Chinese society about a thousand years prior to this—where the merchant class was denigrated and considered unfit for officialdom. Today a museum, the mansion is also where movies such as Raise the Red Lantern 大紅燈籠高高挂 were filmed, but aside from that it’s also where some lingering debates on communism and Chinese policy can be overheard. Communists would say that such a large compound housing the privileged in such an impoverished environment is irresponsible, while capitalists would say that if it weren’t for this compound hiring architects, builders, artisans, and craftsmen, the area would have been even more destitute. Immediately after the revolution, land redistribution brought a lot of people into the compound, but today no one lives in the museum. I saw more advertisements and propaganda for party membership on miniature billboards and posters in the parking lot of the mansion than I’ve seen almost anywhere else in China, too. What it all means, I’m not quite sure.
Pingyao is much more popular amongst European visitors than American, though I’m not sure why. We saw lots of French tourists, and I imagine that in French guides to China Pingyao is given some kind of prominence. In the old city, the only place anyone can stay is in old guesthouses in imperial courtyard style. It’s pretty impressive to walk through, but the beds are about as hard as is imaginable. The food, too, is pretty lousy all around. A lot of China’s ancient cities become hangouts for backpackers from the west, and so all the guesthouses advertise selling western food like omelets and hamburgers. The problem is that the chefs here have never seen—let alone tasted—western food the way it’s supposed to be, so the result is a mishmash of some pretty unpalatable cuisine. That said, the Chinese food is no better in Pingyao. Just like the tourist stands, selling the same crap at the same prices, the restaurants have figured out a way to serve lousy food to people who won’t be around long enough to do make any lasting complaints or establish any competition to undercut the saturation.
Despite all this, I probably learned most about China today from the driving. A while ago I read a New York Times Magazine article about the roads in China and learned that in 2004 Chinese road deaths accounted for 21% of the world total, and every day in China more people die in car accidents than died in the entire SARS crisis. Of course, SARS was a crisis because the disease threatened business; on the roads, the deaths are just a part of the collateral damage of an improving economy, and the government doesn’t want to do much to limit driving because that itself would threaten business. The highways themselves are new, and so are in pretty good condition, but the driving doesn’t quite match the standard. Police are practically nonexistent on the roads, and speeding is instead monitored by radar-powered cameras installed on periodic intervals of signs and posts. I wondered for a while about whether this was a good or bad way of enforcing traffic obeisance, and I finally decided it wasn’t good: essentially, everyone speeds until they see an electric eye, and then brake as quickly as possible so they don’t get ticketed. Such rash braking is of course a traffic hazard for anyone else driving, and besides, the problem on Chinese roads isn’t cars going too fast, but too slow. Especially in Shanxi, where mined coal needs to be distributed to the rest of the country, tucks line the roads like slow elephants. When these trucks were designed and engineered, probably thirty years ago, highways didn’t exist, and so no one needed to build engines that could carry tons and also drive at over a hundred kilometers per hour. Today, though, that means that these trucks are going about half the speed of the sedans and passenger cars from the cities. It’s actually a good literalization of the gap in China today between the developing cities and the underdeveloped rural areas: the cities / small cars keep getting faster, but their speed and safety is blocked by the larger, slower rural areas / trucks. And in the end, this mismatch is in no one’s best interest. To get past the trucks, cars pass on the right shoulders of the highways, a considerable danger not only for people passing on the left, but also for road crews who might be walking on the shoulder, too. Akiko’s dad is much better and safer behind the wheel than the majority of Chinese drivers, but obeying the law most of the time where no one obeys the law at all still doesn’t make you very observant, in the end. There’s a lot of swerving, a lot of zigzagging, and not a lot of looking in mirrors.
And then there are the traffic jams. On the way there we took the more direct route from Beijing to Taiyuan to Pingyao, but saw on the other side of the highway traffic at a standstill for miles. We didn’t want to find ourselves in a two-lane parking lot on the way back, so we took the highway less under construction on the way back, from Taiyuan to Datong to Beijing. The road was practically empty from Datong through Hebei province towards Beijing, until we got to where we needed to pay the toll at the end of the line in Hebei. Two kilometers from the toll booth we hit a traffic standstill. An hour later, we had swerved through enough trucks to make it to the gate, only to be cut off by an SUV from Inner Mongolia right at the tollbooth. I had had enough of this kind of aggression, and so I got out of the car to yell at and berate the driver. He offered a weak apology and I went back to our car, fuming over how once upon a time in modern China the people must have believed in cooperation, solidarity, and unity, but somewhere in the Cultural Revolution their trust had been eradicated, and pro-market reforms and the disappearance of the word “comrade” never reinstituted that kind of trust.
In the end, my blow-up against the driver from Inner Mongolia was probably futile in addition to being culturally arrogant and potentiall dangerous: he may think twice about cutting someone in line again (most likely not), but it didn’t even matter. Past the tollbooth was another twelve kilometers of completely stopped traffic. The people selling fruit, ramen noodles, and beer—yeah, beer—at the side of the road told us that it’s like this every day. At the entryway of Beijing, the police have established a checkpoint for all trucks to weigh freight so that they don’t wreck the roads and bridges of the city, and this caused a permanent traffic jam extending for a virtual ever. Mining companies pay by the driver, not by the kilogram, and so they overload their trucks to decrease expenses. The central government has asked for each province to weigh freight trucks, but because they don’t want to impede business, they tend not to. So the result is that Beijing literally has a greater burden to bear. Theoretically, there’s a lane for passenger cars, but with poor signage and truck drivers who don’t care, the passenger cars are stuck trying to navigate through a jungle of parked trucks and no way out.
One of the women selling ramen and beer offered some of the cars a deal: turn around, go back through the toll gate the other way, and she’d take us to another road that led to another highway into Beijing. She’d charge 100 yuan total for the job, and eventually three or four cars took her up on the offer. Each of our cars paid a deposit—twenty of the thirty yuan per car—and headed through back through the closed toll gate beside the one we’d just passed through. The plan was to drive along the right shoulder against the direction of the stalled traffic, then off an on-ramp coming from the other direction, merge into another tollbooth line, and then take a back road to another highway, at which point our guide would collect the rest of the money before we went off on our merry way. Of course, going against traffic on the shoulder of the road requires that the shoulder be accessible; it wasn’t. A truck had installed itself there and was happily passing some amounts of traffic until it came against the car in front of us, in which our guide was sitting as a backseat driver. Seeing the mess, she took the opportunity while her driver was on his cell phone to get out of the car and run away, very literally taking the money and running. So now traffic was stalled in both directions, until about forty minutes later a cop showed up and, surprisingly, not only didn’t ticket us for any number of counts—such as heading the wrong way on a highway, driving on the shoulder, soliciting an unregistered tour guide, and more—but directed traffic so that the truck before us on the shoulder had a place to merge into on the highway and we could drive on a clear path and descend down the onramp.
Which we did. And an hour and a half later we were home.
Unless you’re going to a beach, you travel to learn. And usually the learning comes when you think you don’t need to be paying attention (last Friday we went to a play & I learned as much about China by watching the young audience fiddle with their cell phones than I did by watching what happened on the stage).
We left Beijing at 6:00 on Saturday morning to drive to Pingyao 平遙, one of China’s “ancient cities”—along with Dali 大理 and Lijiang 麗江 in Yunnan 雲南—that have been preserved or reconstructed to look the way they did over a hundred years ago in the Qing dynasty 清朝. Pingyao is celebrated for its city wall, one of the remaining few amidst thousands that were torn down since the Communist revolution decided they were relics of imperialism and an obstacle to regional development. In the middle of Shanxi 山西 province, a mountainous and rocky region whose greatest industry is coal-mining, Pingyao managed to be the financial capital of the Qing dyasty in the nineteenth century. Midway on the trade route between Xi An 西安 and Beijing 北京, Pingyao was where China’s first banks and money-wiring systems began, and today you buy a single ticket to gain entry to the old banks, the city wall, and the houses of the capitalists and merchants who were responsible for Pingyao’s prominence. In a forecasted lesson on globalization, the banks failed after the republican revolution of 1911 removed governmental patronage and created an influx of foreign banking capital to coastal cities like Shanghai 上海. In a lesson about China’s unique art-capital-politics relationship, Pingyao seems to have been a financial center without any artistic prevalence to speak of,—compare this to another pre-modern financial center, Florence, where the money-makers became patrons of the arts—a foreshadowing of Beijing’s cultural importance despite the financial preeminence of Shanghai.
Our first stop was not in Pingyao, actually, but at the Wang Family Mansion 王家大院, about an hour away. This huge compound of networked courtyards was built for the vastly successful Wang family, who eventually rose to prominence as a genealogy of officials out of the somewhat more humble background of a tofu-seller. It’s something of a novelty considering the kind of Chinese society I study—granted, I study a Chinese society about a thousand years prior to this—where the merchant class was denigrated and considered unfit for officialdom. Today a museum, the mansion is also where movies such as Raise the Red Lantern 大紅燈籠高高挂 were filmed, but aside from that it’s also where some lingering debates on communism and Chinese policy can be overheard. Communists would say that such a large compound housing the privileged in such an impoverished environment is irresponsible, while capitalists would say that if it weren’t for this compound hiring architects, builders, artisans, and craftsmen, the area would have been even more destitute. Immediately after the revolution, land redistribution brought a lot of people into the compound, but today no one lives in the museum. I saw more advertisements and propaganda for party membership on miniature billboards and posters in the parking lot of the mansion than I’ve seen almost anywhere else in China, too. What it all means, I’m not quite sure.
Pingyao is much more popular amongst European visitors than American, though I’m not sure why. We saw lots of French tourists, and I imagine that in French guides to China Pingyao is given some kind of prominence. In the old city, the only place anyone can stay is in old guesthouses in imperial courtyard style. It’s pretty impressive to walk through, but the beds are about as hard as is imaginable. The food, too, is pretty lousy all around. A lot of China’s ancient cities become hangouts for backpackers from the west, and so all the guesthouses advertise selling western food like omelets and hamburgers. The problem is that the chefs here have never seen—let alone tasted—western food the way it’s supposed to be, so the result is a mishmash of some pretty unpalatable cuisine. That said, the Chinese food is no better in Pingyao. Just like the tourist stands, selling the same crap at the same prices, the restaurants have figured out a way to serve lousy food to people who won’t be around long enough to do make any lasting complaints or establish any competition to undercut the saturation.
Despite all this, I probably learned most about China today from the driving. A while ago I read a New York Times Magazine article about the roads in China and learned that in 2004 Chinese road deaths accounted for 21% of the world total, and every day in China more people die in car accidents than died in the entire SARS crisis. Of course, SARS was a crisis because the disease threatened business; on the roads, the deaths are just a part of the collateral damage of an improving economy, and the government doesn’t want to do much to limit driving because that itself would threaten business. The highways themselves are new, and so are in pretty good condition, but the driving doesn’t quite match the standard. Police are practically nonexistent on the roads, and speeding is instead monitored by radar-powered cameras installed on periodic intervals of signs and posts. I wondered for a while about whether this was a good or bad way of enforcing traffic obeisance, and I finally decided it wasn’t good: essentially, everyone speeds until they see an electric eye, and then brake as quickly as possible so they don’t get ticketed. Such rash braking is of course a traffic hazard for anyone else driving, and besides, the problem on Chinese roads isn’t cars going too fast, but too slow. Especially in Shanxi, where mined coal needs to be distributed to the rest of the country, tucks line the roads like slow elephants. When these trucks were designed and engineered, probably thirty years ago, highways didn’t exist, and so no one needed to build engines that could carry tons and also drive at over a hundred kilometers per hour. Today, though, that means that these trucks are going about half the speed of the sedans and passenger cars from the cities. It’s actually a good literalization of the gap in China today between the developing cities and the underdeveloped rural areas: the cities / small cars keep getting faster, but their speed and safety is blocked by the larger, slower rural areas / trucks. And in the end, this mismatch is in no one’s best interest. To get past the trucks, cars pass on the right shoulders of the highways, a considerable danger not only for people passing on the left, but also for road crews who might be walking on the shoulder, too. Akiko’s dad is much better and safer behind the wheel than the majority of Chinese drivers, but obeying the law most of the time where no one obeys the law at all still doesn’t make you very observant, in the end. There’s a lot of swerving, a lot of zigzagging, and not a lot of looking in mirrors.
And then there are the traffic jams. On the way there we took the more direct route from Beijing to Taiyuan to Pingyao, but saw on the other side of the highway traffic at a standstill for miles. We didn’t want to find ourselves in a two-lane parking lot on the way back, so we took the highway less under construction on the way back, from Taiyuan to Datong to Beijing. The road was practically empty from Datong through Hebei province towards Beijing, until we got to where we needed to pay the toll at the end of the line in Hebei. Two kilometers from the toll booth we hit a traffic standstill. An hour later, we had swerved through enough trucks to make it to the gate, only to be cut off by an SUV from Inner Mongolia right at the tollbooth. I had had enough of this kind of aggression, and so I got out of the car to yell at and berate the driver. He offered a weak apology and I went back to our car, fuming over how once upon a time in modern China the people must have believed in cooperation, solidarity, and unity, but somewhere in the Cultural Revolution their trust had been eradicated, and pro-market reforms and the disappearance of the word “comrade” never reinstituted that kind of trust.
In the end, my blow-up against the driver from Inner Mongolia was probably futile in addition to being culturally arrogant and potentiall dangerous: he may think twice about cutting someone in line again (most likely not), but it didn’t even matter. Past the tollbooth was another twelve kilometers of completely stopped traffic. The people selling fruit, ramen noodles, and beer—yeah, beer—at the side of the road told us that it’s like this every day. At the entryway of Beijing, the police have established a checkpoint for all trucks to weigh freight so that they don’t wreck the roads and bridges of the city, and this caused a permanent traffic jam extending for a virtual ever. Mining companies pay by the driver, not by the kilogram, and so they overload their trucks to decrease expenses. The central government has asked for each province to weigh freight trucks, but because they don’t want to impede business, they tend not to. So the result is that Beijing literally has a greater burden to bear. Theoretically, there’s a lane for passenger cars, but with poor signage and truck drivers who don’t care, the passenger cars are stuck trying to navigate through a jungle of parked trucks and no way out.
One of the women selling ramen and beer offered some of the cars a deal: turn around, go back through the toll gate the other way, and she’d take us to another road that led to another highway into Beijing. She’d charge 100 yuan total for the job, and eventually three or four cars took her up on the offer. Each of our cars paid a deposit—twenty of the thirty yuan per car—and headed through back through the closed toll gate beside the one we’d just passed through. The plan was to drive along the right shoulder against the direction of the stalled traffic, then off an on-ramp coming from the other direction, merge into another tollbooth line, and then take a back road to another highway, at which point our guide would collect the rest of the money before we went off on our merry way. Of course, going against traffic on the shoulder of the road requires that the shoulder be accessible; it wasn’t. A truck had installed itself there and was happily passing some amounts of traffic until it came against the car in front of us, in which our guide was sitting as a backseat driver. Seeing the mess, she took the opportunity while her driver was on his cell phone to get out of the car and run away, very literally taking the money and running. So now traffic was stalled in both directions, until about forty minutes later a cop showed up and, surprisingly, not only didn’t ticket us for any number of counts—such as heading the wrong way on a highway, driving on the shoulder, soliciting an unregistered tour guide, and more—but directed traffic so that the truck before us on the shoulder had a place to merge into on the highway and we could drive on a clear path and descend down the onramp.
Which we did. And an hour and a half later we were home.
posted by Lucas at 12:21 PM
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