While "random photos from around Asia" might not be the greatest blog title this is in essence what these are. I quite like the photo of the Beijing Bird's Nest Stadium and the tourist with the drone from Laos. Overall I think I am most happy with this set of photos. I guess with travel I saw new places so consequently the photos of those places are new. In Shanghai I often did just my daily life or saw the same things several times.
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On my second day in Xiamen, my group of ECNU international students was taken three hours away form Xiamen to visit the home of the Hakka People (客家民族), one of China's 56 ethnic groups. The particular Hakka community we visited, the Fujian Tulou Earthen Buildings site, is one of China's many UNESCO World Heritage Sites. We did have some delays in getting there though; one of the roads was ripped up for construction so it took us about half an hour just to pass that small stretch of street, eventually though we did make it to the site. The Tulou buildings are Earthen buildings built to protect the Hakka people from the roving bandits and wild animals that were common in the mountains of Imperial China. Each Hakka clan would have their own Tulou building that house all the essentials for relatively comfortable living at the time, such as water wells and Buddhist temples. Since most bandits just wanted to get the booty quickly and leave, they were unwilling to besiege the fortified Tulou buildings. The site was interesting I guess, I got a lot of good photos and the Fujian Tulou buildings were defiantly neat but I don't know if it was worth the six hours on the bus there and back to see them. Walking around the site, it was clear that many other people weren't willing to make the drive. While the buildings are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a China National Tourism Authority AAAAA Tourist Site, for China there were hardly any people there. It felt like Zhangjiajie got more tourists in the off season than the Fujian Tulou did in far better weather. If you compare the Fujian Tulou to the number of tourists China's really famous world heritage sites get, like the Forbidden City of Beijing or the Terracotta Army of Xi'an, the Fujian Tulou felt down right abandon. For both lunch and dinner I had Hakka food. The Hakka were traditionally an agrarian people and their salty vegetable biased foods reflect this. I wasn't super into our lunch, I guess we went to a touristy restaurant that knew none of us would ever come back there for the food. Dinner was actually really good, the local Hakka restaurant in Xiamen proper was tasty and seemed thrilled to have such a large group of foreign customers. The food served for both lunch and dinner weren't pretty, I can't picture the Great Qing Emperor digging down on a plate of the tofu we had for lunch or the eggplant we had for dinner. It was all filling though which is what you want after a long day in the field. All in all, I guess I am glad I went if for no other reason than I can say I did.
A few weeks ago in my Chinese Cinema class we watched a movie called Farewell my Concubine (霸王别姬) about the world surrounding traditional Peking Opera from the waning days of the Great Qing Dynasty to Reform and Reopening under Deng Xiaoping. While Farewell my Concubine touched on several interesting topics from the Cultural Revolution to gender roles to raising orphans to the relationship of childhood friends in adulthood, the topic that most peaked my curiosity was Peking Opera itself since I actually knew very little about it. Thankfully, my Chinese midterm gave me a great opportunity to do some research, since it is a presentation on Peking Opera and its many meny complexities (可是,我只好用中文为我的汉语口语中考试). Unsurprisingly, Peking Opera has an extremely long history with some of the traditional plays coming from ancient Chinese stories, though what we would now call Peking Opera really developed in the late 1700s. Peking Opera remained relatively popular until the Cultural Revolution, since the Red Guards saw it as old therefor something that should be destroyed. Interestingly enough, Farewell my Concubine actually depicts Red Guards humiliating members of the Opera troupe, a sight still extremely rare in Chinese cinema. While Peking Opera did live on in the Nationalist controlled Taiwan long enough for the mainland to drop the madness of the Cultural Revolution it never regained the popularity it once had. Since most of the operas themselves are quite old, they use archaic language that most modern Chinese can't really understand, even the Chinese in China have to have Chinese subtitles to understand the Chinese. There have been attempts to rejuvenate Peking Opera for the modern age by introducing new shows; apparently you can watch Peking Opera interpretations of Mao's war against the Japanese and Shakespeare. Still the traditional divisions of martial & civil operas, serious 大戏 & fun 小戏, and the four traditional forms of performers (生旦净丑) remain even while the actual costumes, production management, and training have been changed and adapted for the modern world. Chinese films, particularly by the 5th Generation of Chinese Directors like Farewell my Concubine, have come to embrace Peking Opera as a way to help tell their story. Peking Opera has also been embraced by the growing tourist trade, both domestic and international. If you are in the capital of Beijing, why not see the capital style of opera (the 京 in 京剧 literally means capital while the 剧 is some type of theater)? I have read some complaints though that much of this new Peking Opera is a bit gimicky since most people in the audience of a Peking Opera don't actually know what Peking Opera should be like. Still, it is nice that Beijing Opera is kind of hanging on.
In my recent post about the inclusive religions of China, I mentioned Puyi (溥儀) who was the last Emperor of China and the only Emperor of Manchukuo. I realized that not everyone might have the context for what Manchukuo was and how did Puyi end up as its Emperor. In short, the Great Empire of Manchukuo (大滿洲帝國) was the Japanese puppet state set up in Manchuria, northern China, after the Japanese took the region form the Chinese in the early 1930s. Legally Manchukuo was a constitutional monarchy with the Concordia Association of Manchukuo (滿洲國協和會) serving as its only legal party; minority groups were permitted to have their own political organizations (there were actually two Jewish political organizations, the Betarim Jew Zionist Movement and the Far Eastern Jewish Council under the direction of Dr. Abraham Kaufman but I can’t find much information on ether) but they could not contest the rule of the Concordia Association. In practice, Manchukuo was never independent form Japanese rule: the Manchukian military relied on the Japanese military, Japanese officials wrote most of Manchukuo’s laws, and Manchukuo was a member of the Japanese backed Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In Puyi’s book From Emperor to Citizen he describes the Manchukian Privy Council Meetings where the Council would meet to agree that the Japanese wrote awesome laws and that Puyi should sign them without question. The Japanese also attempted to make Manchukuo more Japanese: Japanese was an official language of Manchukuo, a large number of Japanese settlers moved to Manchukuo, the Emperor of Japan Hirohito was equally revered to Emperor of Manchukuo Puyi (in Form Emperor to Citizen Puyi mentions that all classrooms in Manchukuo had portraits of both himself and Hirohito), the Japanese tried to integrate the Manchukian Imperial family into the Japanese Imperial family (Puyi discusses how the Japanese were able to get his brother to marry a distant relative of Hirohito and how they wanted him to marry a Japanese women), and (as I mentioned in the inclusive religions blog post) the Japanese attempted to get the Manchukians to worship Shinto gods. While the Japanese did attempt to preserve some elements of China, for example Puyi became Emperor because having the former Qing Emperor be the Emperor of Manchukuo would give legitimacy to the new state, I believe that Manchukuo would have gotten less and less Chinese as time went on. I do not believe that Manchukuo would have remained independent for very long if the Japanese won the Second World War, Manchukuo would have eventually been annexed into Japan like Taiwan or Korea. Today Manchukuo is not remembered well, Chinese historians will often call the Great Empire of Manchukuo something like the “Illegitimate Manchu State” or the “Manchu Puppet Government” and write about the war crimes that took place there. Since 2004, there are a small number of people in Hong Kong who claim to be the Manchukuo Temporary Government (滿洲國臨時政府), but they are kind of a Poe’s Law type entity where it is hard to tell if they are serious about reestablishing the Empire of Manchukuo, commenting on the modern Chinese government, joking, or are basically a bunch of Chinese political historical LARPers. Oh ya, if you are worried about poor poor Emperor Puyi don’t. He died peacefully in a Beijing hotel 1967 after being pardoned by the People’s Republic working as a gardener for the Beijing Botanical Garden (Puyi quite liked gardening and spent a good deal of his time as Emperor of Manchukuo gardening).
This morning, I was woken up by a Skype call with my Mom who is actively at my family's Thanksgiving party in New Jersey. Because of how time zones work, even though it is November 25th in Shanghai, it is still the 24th on the East Coast of the United States. I enjoyed popping in for Thanksgiving, even if it was a bit confusing for not fully awake me. While this 12 or 13 hour (depending on day light savings time) is somewhat difficult to wrap your head around, fear not China has even more time zone weirdness if today also being tomorrow or yesterday makes too much sense for you. If hypothetically I was studying in Western China in cities like Lasa, Tibet Autonomous Region or Chengdu, Sichuan Provence the legal time difference would be the same 12 or 13 hours. Unlike many countries, all of China legally sets their clocks to Beijing's time zone instead of using the 5 time zones China actually covers. While this is ok for someone like me in Shanghai who would be in the same time zone as Beijing anyway, the significant difference between solar time and clock time poses a real problem for people in West China. Many just ignore the law altogether and use either what time zone they should be in or they adjust their schedules to compensate for the difference in solar time and clock time; hypothetically you would have lunch at 10:00AM when it is solar noon instead of having lunch at 12:00PM which is clock noon. This time zone oddness also means that the largest amount you would ever officially have to change your clocks by crossing one time zone is if you went from far West China (UTC +8:00) to Afghanistan (UTC +4:30). Afghanistan is one of a few countries to use a non-standard half an hour time zone. China also borders North Korea who, interestingly but kind of unsurprisingly, uses the non-standard half an hour time zone of UTC +8:30. If you really wanted to mess with your time zones and didn't care what countries you had to go to do it, an overland trip from Afghanistan, through China, and ending up in North Korea would be your best bet. I fully expect that Thanksgiving I won't have to deal with any of this time zone stuff, since I will be celebrating Thanksgiving from New Jersey, USA.
Don’t Take a Deep Breath
I unfortunately picked up a cold during my short trip to Beijing, but the silver lining is that I can now simulate the experiences of a heavy smoker in China’s air. I heard from my friend that smoking is getting a bit less popular in China because the women don’t like it (which I guess is a good enough reason to stop doing anything) and avoid dating men who smoke heavily. Still, smoking is common and you can smoke basically anywhere. While ECNU technically bans smoking in the buildings I have noticed the security guard in my dorm smoking in front of the “no smoking” sign. To be perfectly honestly with you, I don’t understand how you can physically survive after smoking in this country. According to today’s the AnyHelper Broadcast for Shanghai the Air Quality Index (AQI) is 163, the United States Environmental Protection Agency considers an AQI of 0-50 to be healthy and an AQI of 150-200 to be unhealthy for everyone. I am having a hard enough time breathing through my cold, none the less if I had a serious lung condition like pulmonary emphysema that makes it hard enough to breath in the United States, a country with relatively good air quality. The really scary thing is I know it gets worse. The US Embassy in Beijing keeps an accurate record of the AQI in the city, as of today at 11:00AM the air quality is a relatively good 132, unhealthy for sensitive groups, but last December the Beijing Municipal Government called for an air quality read alert as the AQI reached a shocking 291, very unhealthy. I am very glad I was not in Beijing with my cold at that time and I seriously can’t believe that people with serious lung conditions could breathe at all. The poor air quality is largely caused by old fashioned dirt coal power plants. In the government’s current 13th Five Year Plan they have committed to improving the air quality by switching from coal to nuclear power, but it is important to remember that the environmental goals were the only goals that the Chinese government itself admitted in failed in the last Five Year Plan. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to see if I can find a can of clean Canadian air, which is a product I heard you can buy in particularly polluted Chinese cities. Happy late Holloween everyone, 晚大家万圣节快乐! Offically I posted this late because I needed to experance Chinese Holloween to wrote about it, not because I didn't get around to it until now. You may be suprised to hear that the Chinese actually somewhat celebrate Holloween, but (and this may be my own scewed and small scample) it seems more like ayoung adult thing than a kids thing. While in Beijing the stores did have some Holloween decorarions and some did sell Holloween stuff the real Holloween parties happaned at the night clubs and bars. All the clubs had Holloween themed events and serious decorations, including costumed forigners. Holloween in Shanghai feels a bit more like American Holloween. Some of my friends got to pass out candy to trick-or-treating kids at Global Harbor Mall in costumes. One of my Chinese friends who did not go out still dressdd up for the day. Still, the bars also did stuff, James Bar by campus had free beer from 8:00-9:00 and a costume contest. Chinese Holloween is like Chinese Christmas, very commercial, still I had fun with it. I also don't believe the rurual areas have much Holloween at all.
I have had a bit of time to think about my trip to Beijing. While Beijing is a cool city I personally like Shanghao more. To get the two biggest things out of the way: Beijing has a fare superior collection of historic stuff than Shanghai and definatly feels more Chinese (Shanghai is often discribed as being basically its own thing). The food in Beijing is also pretty good even though the Hui make better noodles then the Beijingers. Beijing is a very poluted city though, I still have a cough I picked up in Beijing. Beijing also has a slower pace than Shanghai and, unlike Shanghai, closes. If I had to conpair Beijing to an American city I would say it feels like Phildelphia with different major problems. Both Philly and Beijing close early and are very historical. While Beijing is more historical then Philedelphia that is kind of an unfair conparison since Beijing is so much older than the discovery of America. For some Chinese this statement will be contreversial, since Beijing and Shanghai have a New York LA rivalry thibg goung on, I enjoyed Beijing but I like Shanghai more. I would still recomend going to Beijing if you are ever in China, you simply can't beat the history.
I have safely returned to ECNU just now form Beijing and am ready for class tomorrow. I am planning a Holloween post and a Beijing retrospective some time this week so keep your eyes open for those.
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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