South of the Clouds

An Exciting Day in Twitter-Guo

2009-12-19T15:44:00.002+08:00

Yesterday was a bit slow at the office, so I had time to do some playing on the internet. The internet, of course, is never short on fun little distractions, but the real action yesterday was in what I call Twitter-Guo, aka the Chinese side of twitterland.

Twitter has of course been blocked in China for many months, but it’s not really that hard to get past the great firewall. Though twitter lost quite a few Chinese users after the block, there are still thousands of users in the mainland, and they’re a very lively bunch. Not surprisingly, these people are often quite politically aware, and there are many dissident types roaming about. They often use the service to spread the word about protests and human rights issues.

The events that took place in Twitter-Guo yesterday are a fine example of why the Chinese government is so scared of social media tools. Beifeng (north wind) is a very active blogger and commenter based in Guangzhou. He is also one of the original signatories of Charter 08 . He describes himself in his profile as an “Internet observer who is dedicated to breaking China’s stranglehold on information”. Oh, and he has nearly 12,000 people following his tweets. Since he only tweets in Chinese, it is a fair assumption that the majority of these followers are Chinese.

Yesterday, at roughly ten o’clock, he posted the following tweet: “The police are at the door, wait for further info”. He then promptly went silent. Then Chinese tweeters went nuts. Thousands of tweets went out, spreading the word of Beifeng’s predicament. Within the hour, he had a dedicated hashtag (#wych for his handle @wenyunchao). People were spreading word that his computer was confiscated, his phone was out of service, and that he may be facing arrest. His home address was posted, and people were being asked to show up there and start asking questions. This was apparently aimed at letting the police know that the community was watching. People also began downloading Beifeng’s profile picture and using it as their own. I’m not sure if that was intended as a show of solidarity, or a move to confuse the police. At one point, I was getting over 100 tweets a minute about the unfolding situation

Roughly two hours after the police arrived, Beifeng began posting again from an internet café. He was okay. The police, who had identified themselves as “internet supervision police”, came under the pretense of checking for explosives as a security measure for the upcoming Asian Games, hosted by Guangzhou. They had seized his computer and phone, and he was now scrambling to change all of his passwords. The fact that politically-aware people scattered across the country can hear about such incidents in a matter of minutes is something that the Chinese government didn’t have to contend with even just a few years ago. The Guangzhou police were quite lucky that Beifeng was able to send out the all-clear before the Iranian Cyber Army’s hack attack shut down Twitter yesterday.

Much ink and blogspace has been dedicated to the power of social media services such as Twitter, and their role in political events such as the Iranian protest movement. There is no revolution going on in China, but Twitter-Guo is definitely changing the game. It is becoming part of exactly the kind of diverse and assertive civil society that keeps China’s leaders up at night. Frankly, if I was one of them, I’d probably block it too.

Sausage Party

2009-04-13T18:29:00.006+08:00

(note: pictures below)

For all of the city’s endowments, the Kunming cultural scene is surprisingly weak. Many of the great artists, musicians and innovators produced by the province are lured to the big cities of the east coast with its promise of wealth, fame, or just exposure to more kindred spirits. Fortunately, though, this trend seems to be reversing. The past few weeks have seen a slew of art shows, music events and other fun stuff taking place in the city of eternal spring.

I was fortunate to take part two weeks ago in one of my more favorite local events, the Kunming Creative Art Fair. In a way, our involvement represented the convergence of two of the most heartening trends I’ve seen here recently, boutique design and craft food.

Though Chinese contemporary artists have shaken the art world with their work, and Chinese manufacturing has reshaped the global economy, there’s always been one component that’s missing: an explosion of Chinese style and innovation. That’s the case, at least, if you don’t live in China.

If you do live in China, you might have noticed something different though. In the side streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and a dozen other Chinese cities, young people are finding a material way to express their new ways of life, making all kinds of crafts from handbags to clothes, jewelry, stationary and household accessories. This has been followed by a profusion of creative fairs and compartment shops. The former is a kind of periodical flea-market where likeminded people come together to display, barter and sell their unique wares. First held in Guangzhou, this event has enjoyed growing popularity, and they are now regularly held across the country. The latter, what I call the compartment store, is a kind of collective design boutique business model where a shop owner rents out small compartments along the wall to creative folks that lack the money or market to finance a whole brand roll-out.

Without this, despite a flood of consumer goods and an array of options that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, young people in China would really have a paucity of choice in terms of fashion. The other options are highly generic mass-produced Chinese clothes and accessories, or overpriced foreign brands that for complex tax and anti-piracy reasons, are manufactured in China, exported to the US, then shipped back to China for retail at exorbitant prices. Of course, you can always save a few bucks buying the knockoffs and “factory overruns”, but that only works if you want to dress like either Allen Iverson or Zhang the salaryman. Now, thanks to the compartment stores and creative fairs, all kinds of new styles are sprouting up, and they have a strong market to support them.

This trend is particularly strong in Yunnan, for a few reasons. First, Yunnan, especially Dali, is a kind of testing-ground for the Chinese version of the bohemian life. Slackers from across the country come down here and encounter new forms of music, cheap, laid-back lifestyles, and certain types of plants that became popular in the West in the ‘60’s. Secondly, they enjoy a wider market than most places, fueled by the tourists who come down to Yunnan and fall in love with the bohemian culture that blossoms here, bringing a piece of it home in the form of hemp handbags, tie-dye skirts and Tibetan-inspired jewelry. That brings me to the third factor at work; in Yunnan, conformity-oriented Han Chinese culture encounters the diverse artistic styles of Yunnan’s minorities, and exotic aesthetics flowing in from nearby South and Southeast Asia, usually in the bags of backpackers. This makes for a unique mix, and it’s actually had a strong influence over hipster culture across China (thanks, for better or worse, to tourism).

The other trend I mentioned was craft food. Yunnan is blessed with beautiful weather, and the mountainous topography has ensured that most agricultural operations are small. The great weather means wonderful fresh fruits and vegetables year-round, and the small operations lend themselves to experimentation. Recently, Yunnan has seen a rise in small organic farming operations, something which the foreigner scene and the traveler scene have started to put to use. We have less access down here to the luxurious imported food selections that well-heeled expats in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou enjoy, so we’ve always had to figure out how to make do on our own foodwise.

Now, one group of Kunming-based expats, Green Kunming, is arranging regular deliveries of fresh organic veggies. A foreign family in Dali is making excellent mozzarella and feta cheeses, as well as a range of foreign agricultural products such as raspberries, artichokes and lemons. The Bad Monkey Bar in Dali is starting to make some truly excellent western food. Phil Willson and I are making our own handmade sausages.

Sausages? The variety of available western fare in Kunming has been steadily increasing over the years, and the food at the cafes is getting better, but some key things have always been missing from the equation. I’ve always loved gourmet sausages, and that’s one thing you just can’t get here. I brought a few batches of foreign sausages back from Kunming last year, and we shared them at a barbecue. They were disappointing. Phil said to me, screw it, we should be making our own sausages. And that’s how we began our quest. It’s always fun scouring the Kunming markets for this or that, but this mission turned out to be more complicated than we expected. Though there are plenty of sausage makers in the city, they prefer the Chinese dried variety, which I find particularly dreadful. Also, none of them was willing to go through the trouble of finding proper skins for us, preferring instead to wrap them up in plastic. We found this unacceptable. Finally we found a street-vendor selling his own (albeit crappy) sausages, and Phil convinced him to help us make ours.

The first batch was, well, mediocre, but exciting. We had done it, and with a few tweaks, we’d be able to fatten ourselves up in no time. Word started getting around about our wacky little venture, and the requests, and advice, started pouring in.

Liu Lifen, a founding member of 943 Studio, which runs the Kunming Creative Fair at Nordica, was ecstatic. “We’ve been trying to get people to make food for the fair since it began, but no one ever does. Please come and sell your sausages!” So we loaded up my gas grill into a van, and made a massive 20 kilo batch of sausages, figuring we could eat any leftovers ourselves.

The creative fair was awesome, with all kinds of cool people creeping out of the woodwork. The Dali contingent came out in full force, bringing products, impromptu performances and a cool vibe. Locals scattered in boutique shops from across the city converged on the place, and plenty of people with nothing to sell just came to hang out. There was a lot of dancing and drumming, and even a graffiti wall by the gates of the loft. The festive atmosphere was no doubt fueled by our wonderful sausages. We were worried that 20 kilos was too much, but having almost completely sold out on the first day, we had to make another, even better batch of at least 15 kilos on the morning of the second day.

mmm...

I’ve never been a street vendor before. Now I have a lot more respect for them. It’s tiring standing there and cooking all day, and dealing with change is a drag. But we had a blast talking to everybody, making them happy with our little segments of fatty goodness. Phil and I had help from Satchi Willson, his wife, and Georgia Xiong. Best of all, there was a real feeling of community, of kindred spirits coming together to do something for themselves. I don’t think I’ll ever try to make this sausage thing into a real business, but I’ll definitely be back for the next fair.

Musician Han Ying's handmade instruments and self-published album

Rongjie from the Bird Bar (Dali) struts her stuff

Music by the Dali crew. Han Ying at front

strangely, we didn't have a group picture taken. That's Satchi to my left

Graffitti wall

Phil behind the wheel. Notice the burning "fire" character behind him

Most of the photos are courtesy of Liu Lifen at 943 studio. Thanks!

Anything else would be uncivilized

2009-04-08T12:32:00.003+08:00

I had an interesting encounter on the phone yesterday. A local magazine called to interview me about my thoughts on Kunming's latest push to "civilize" its citizens. Seriously. The city plans to engage almost all of its residents in civilization training courses, and has recently released what it calls the "civilization compact", which is actually a list of behaviors, such as spitting, pushing and cursing, that will now bring fines.

The party has been putting this word to some interesting uses recently. Walking around town, you see it everywhere, from billboards exhorting passersby to "construct civilization", to plaques asserting that such and such company is a "civilized work unit". There is a sign on a street corner that labels it a "civilization index observation point". But my all time favorite is posted over urinals in men's rooms around the country, saying "one small step closer to the urinal is one giant leap for civilization".

Anyway, the obviously inexperienced reporter wanted to know my take on the whole thing. I've dealt with a lot of Chinese reporters before, and I have learned the hard way to be very careful about what I say. Interviews such as these are hazardous, as they're almost never quoted verbatim, and the reporter is almost always interested in having you make sweeping, uninformed generalizations about China and your home country. You can select from the following possible outcomes: a) sound like a bigot, b) sound like a mindless pro-China running dog, or c) sound like a total idiot.

Here are some of the hard-hitting journalistic gems that were tossed my way:

- In your opinion, how civilized is Kunming?

- How civilized is China compared to the United States?

- Which uncivilized behaviors in China annoy you the most?

- What do you think civilization training should focus on?

In the end I broke down and gave the reporter a bit of a lecture on civilization. We started with the distinction between "civilized" and "civilization", adjective and noun. Though people may say that certain actions such as spitting and cutting in line are "uncivilized", that has nothing to do with civilization. Civilization is a blossoming of high culture, literature, the arts, technology, etc that blossoms from complex societies. The only part any government can play in making that happen is provide a bit of order and then step aside and allow it to flourish. I also told her that in my humble opinion, Kunming is a rather civilized place. In fact, I just wrote an article in Yunnan Magazine about Kunming's outsized contributions to modern Chinese thought.

I went on for quite a while, but it all went in one ear and out the other. I'm actually a bit worried about how the interview is going to look when it hits the press.

What's Going on at 798?

2009-03-17T15:18:00.003+08:00

There have been a lot of rumors flying around China about the collapse of the art market, mass gallery closings at 798 and other mayhem. I haven't been up to Beijing for a while, so I don't exactly know the details, but let's face it, the art market has taken a turn for the worse since the financial crisis. On the other hand, I think that rumors of the death of Chinese art are premature and far overblown. Here I'll try to shed a little light on the issue.

First, let's tackle the reasons behind this rumor. Obviously reason number 1 is that the Chinese contemporary art market has never faced a downturn before. For many years the art scene was hot but the market was not. That all changed in about 2003, when leading Chinese artists were holding exhibitions around the world, and they started to garner higher auction prices and attract big name collectors. Then, domestic Chinese investors, pockets full of hot money with nowhere to put it, started playing the game, and the market exploded. For a while it seemed that if any artist could reasonably argue Chinese heritage, he could add an extra zero or two on his pricetag. Now that this isn't the case, people are reasonably freaking out.

Reason number 2 is a lack of transparency. There are no publicly listed galleries out there, and many of them work on an almost exclusively cash basis. The only way to take a peek at the market is through the small, highly distorted lens of auction results, which represent but a fraction of the transactions going on. Auctions haven't been doing well recently.

Reason number 3 is the one that is feeding the mainstream rumor mill. Last year, when the market was full of euphoria, the 798 art district was chock full of galleries, and every weekend the place was mobbed with people. Galleries averaged a new show once a month, and even mediocre artists could expect a dozen group exhibition opportunities and three solo shows a year. Now the place is empty, new openings are rare (bad news for the free booze schmoozers), and a lot of places haven't been open for a while. So everyone who strolls through there says, gee, this place has tanked.

As an aside, there was a lot of badmouthing going on about 798 last year. People said it was too commercial, too simplistic and too noisy. Most of those accusations are correct, but I think most of the detractors were secretly (or subconsciously) angry that the place had made art so accessible to the public. The loudest complaints were heard from art communities way out in the outskirts of Beijing, impossible to find by outsiders. For political reasons, Chinese contemporary art did much of its development beyond the prying eyes of the public. I for one think that art should engage the broader public, but what do I know.

Back to the topic, what's really going on out there? To be frank, things are bad. One of China's most prominent private collectors put it to me this way: "basically, western collectors started buying, expecting a newly affluent China to one day pay top dollar to buy back all their art. Chinese collectors started buying in hopes that they could sell it to western collectors for lots of money. Now the music is stopped, and no one wants to foot the bill". There was a lot of speculating going on, and it was full of irrational expectations based on past performance. Back in the '80's, artists would sell great paintings for a few hundred dollars to pay the rent. Some of those paintings have garnered hundreds of thousands in recent auctions, with better specimens breaking the million dollar mark. Based on that expectation, the painting I spend several thousand dollars to buy from a mid-range artist today should be worth hundreds of millions in 2020. Seriously, guys, did you really stop to think this through?

So let's sift through what we actually know. Yes, galleries have closed, but it's impossible to tell which ones have gone kaput, and which ones have cancelled some exhibitions to cut costs. Of the ones I can confirm, the closed galleries were all either newcomers or just businessmen out for a quick buck. The real pros are still around. Second, auction prices are down, but they're not falling through the floor. This makes sense. Much of the auction heat was stoked by all the new money floating around, namely finance and natural resources. So it makes sense that auction prices have taken a hit.

But I still feel that all of the rumors are overblown. Writer Xia Yanguo broke it down pretty well in a recent article on artnow.cnHe brings up a point that many others have ignored - that winter is a really slow season anyway. I think that galleries are cutting costs, and taking an opportunity to give out all those vacations their employees piled up during the last two cutthroat years of 24 hour workdays. This mirrors my recent experience. All last year we were working at over 100% capacity to provide translation for our slice of the art market, and then saw a major slowdown after the first poor auction results in November, and an almost total halt at the end of the year. Then, like magic, my inbox began to fill up two weeks ago. One day, nothing, the next day, five new jobs. The galleries (luckily I deal with the serious ones) are all gearing up for spring season with its festivals, expos and spring auction offerings.

So while I'm not totally optimistic about the 2009 season, I think things will be okay. Here's what I expect to see: less exuberance at the spring auctions, but also more conservative offerings; a weeding out of flighty speculators; a culling of the expos (way too many of those last year if you ask me); and finally, some more professionalism among galleries and collectors. China is and will continue to produce a lot of great art, but there was a bit too much in recent years.

Some artists with good ideas simply made or sold too much of their work (seems Zeng Fanzhi dodged that bullet). Over-eager collectors jacked up prices for mediocre work, and allowed for a blossoming of the counterfeit trade. Some galleries, pumped up by seemingly limitless market demand, spent a lot of money on flash and not a lot of time cultivating their collectors or budding new artists. All of these people need to take a closer look at what they're doing, and hopefully a more professional class of art people will emerge.

So what am I looking forward to this year? I'm looking forward to a lot of things. One, I'm definitely planning on expanding my chunk of the market. Two, I'm hoping that all those Yunnan artists who flocked to Beijing in recent years will come back, and that we can start having fun down here again. Three, I'm hoping for the Chinese art scene to do some growing up. Besides, scars give you character...

Some rare good coverage of China

2009-02-17T10:24:00.002+08:00

Over at Telegraph, Shanghai bureau chief Malcom Moore has been travelling through the Yangtze Delta, China's second largest manufacturing corridor, to try and get the skinny on China's lot in the financial crisis. I read most everything produced by major western media outlets on China, and I must say I'm impressed. Though I don't agree with the Anti-CNN crowd about some grand conspiracy to demonize China, I am getting tired of seeing every little tidbit of information getting filtered through a lens of Chinese repression and every single economic statistic being pointed out as the potential spark for a future uprising of disgruntled peasant masses. Mr Moore has been poking around factories, wholesale markets and workers' dorms talking about shrinking export orders, laid-off workers and the like, and his prognosis is that things aren't all that bad after all. In fact, he chimes in with Morgan Stanley to say that "China will be the first major economy to recover from the recession".

The basic gyst of his argument is that orders are down, people are getting paid less, but things aren't as bad as they're made to look in other media outlets. I'm not angling for an apologist or blindly flattering stance on China, I just think that his coverage shows a rare mix of balance and hard work. There's no sensationalism to be found here. Anyway, his special series is worth a look, and I'm looking forward to seeing what this guy produces in the future. Now you know...

On the AP and Artistic Freedom

2009-02-11T10:11:00.004+08:00

As the New York Times reported, artist Shepard Fairey, maker of the iconic Obama campaign poster, has preemptively sued the Associated Press over image usage rights. Fairey's poster, pictured above in it's new home at the National Portrait Gallery, was based on an AP photograph taken by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia. The AP has been threatening to sue Fairey for copyright infringement, demanding part of any proceeds from the image.

First off, any judge following fair use precedents will most likely decide that Mr. Fairey's artwork fits pretty snugly under all categories of fair use. The image is definitely transformative, using the photo merely as a reference for a pose in a very good piece of art. Though it has generated a bit of money, it was originally made to support a political cause, not to profit off of. It doesn't use the entire content of the image, and finally, it has not negatively affected the value of the original photograph. In fact, the photograph is certainly more valuable now.

Having that out of the way, I have a deeper psychological and emotional reaction to the AP's jack move. One widely accepted explanation for the rise of pop art is that it was in response to the deluge of images hitting us with the rise of the media age. Before commercial advertising and the widespread enforcement of copyrights, artists were free to engage, copy, transform and respond to anything that entered the visual field. Now everywhere we go we are barraged by images meant to convince us to buy certain things, and these images, mass produced, "belong" to corporations. Pop art appropriated this new flow of images, taking them out of context or transforming them to make statements about society and or the nature of this new commodity culture. This also extended to the appropriation of mass-produced objects, such as Duchamp's Fountain. The nature of mass production itself has become a medium and topic of art as well. My favorite example is Piero Manzoni's "Merda d' Artista", literally cans of his own shit.

Back to the topic at hand, what AP is trying to do is turn this tradition on its head. If they were to succeed, then artists would no longer be free to respond to the imagery that invades our visual field and are quickly coming to dominate our perception of the world. The artist would be forced to engage in a commercial relationship with the image owner, literally selling out before his brush even touches the canvas. Our visual field has expanded vastly since the birth of mass media, but the AP wants to make that part of the visual field off limits to artists.

The AP pays for its photos, and rightly demands payment when those photos are used in newspapers and websites around the world. But this has just gone too far. Nothing that enters our commons, nothing that affects our lives should be off limits to artists. Period. If you can't deal with that, keep your images to yourself.

Besides, there's still some dispute about who owns the image. Mannie Garcia claims AP never paid him for the photo. He has also praised the artwork, and said that he wouldn't pursue damages against the artist. Good on him.

Fairey is also the creator of the iconic "Obey" image that popped up in cities across America in the '90's. Here's my favorite derivative of that one.

Partisan Gods

2009-01-24T13:28:00.003+08:00

This just in: in an apparent PR coup, China's door gods have joined the ranks of the PLA. The afterlife communications secretary declined to comment.

Happy Chinese New Year

Obama coverage on CCTV

2009-01-21T23:12:00.006+08:00

This is great:

For those who don't understand Chinese, here's a rough transcript:

Obama: "Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism..."

[simultaneous translation]

[fadeout]

[cue startled looking anchor] Wang Haiying (a correspondent), Wang Haiying...

Wang: yes?

Anchor: what economic challenges does Obama face?

Apparently they tried to do live coverage of the inaugural speech, but someone freaked out and pulled the plug when they heard that bit about facing down communism. If they had just left it alone, no one would have noticed, or better yet, it would have sparked a debate among ultranationalist youth about Obama's "attack" on Chinese ideals (actually, some people are arguing about that on the youtube page for this clip). Instead, they freaked out, and now it's all over the place. If they had stayed, though, I wonder what would have happened when Obama started talking about those who would crush dissent being on the wrong side of history.

The next question is, of course, who is going to get fired for this mess? Will it be the guy who thought it was a good idea to have a live broadcast of the speech without an advance copy? Maybe. But it's more likely to be the interpreter taking the blame. That's rough. We've got enough to worry about without having to do political analysis at 80 words a minute.

PS: props to Danwei.org for their coverage, and to Hoiking for posting the video.

Colors in Chinese!

2009-01-14T23:40:00.002+08:00

I was very pleased to see this copy of Colors magazine for sale in Beijing the other day. I've been able to grab a copy or two before, but usually older issues in specialty stores. This issue is different for two reasons: it was at a regular bookstore (O2 Sun at Xiandai SOHO), and it's in English and Chinese.

I am happy to report that Colors has set up operations in China, and apparently has plans to publish regularly in China. If you haven't read a Colors magazine before, be sure to pick up a copy. It will change the way you see things.

This actually wasn't a huge surprise for me. Last year Colors put out an issue on Beijing, and I noticed that it was almost entirely done by local editors. That is a great issue and it's worth tracking down if you haven't seen it yet. I wondered at the time if they weren't taking the steps to set up shop out here.

We've seen some previous foreign magazies fail out here, as with Rolling Stone (twice, despite the efforts of the esteemed Hao Fang). I hope that Colors is here to stay. Spread the word, people.

Update on the Bombing and its Coverage (or lack thereof)

2009-01-03T01:24:00.003+08:00

Gokunming.com has been doing a great job of keeping everyone posted, but I feel a need to do a followup on my last post regarding the bombing at Salvador's Coffee House.

Police have released evidence that clearly links the deceased bomber to the bus bombings of July. Evidence also shows that Salvador's was most likely not the target of the attack, and that the bomb was inadvertently detonated as the bomber left the bathroom (after ordering, I've been told, coffee and waffles).

Several days after the incident, Reuters finally picked up on the story. The headline was something like "Bus Bomber confesses on his deathbed". Basically, the bomb at Salvador's wasn't a story, and was barely mentioned. New York Times followed the next day with a short blurb to the same effect in their back pages. My letters to several major news outlets, including NYTimes and Wall Street Journal, all went unanswered, which is very disappointing.

So I guess we can all breath a bit easier now, knowing that there's one less maniac out there.

An Unfortunate Incident

2008-12-26T22:49:00.002+08:00

On Christmas Eve I was saddened by the news that my favorite café in Kunming, Salvador’s Coffee House, fell victim to a bomb attack. Luckily, none of the patrons or staff were seriously injured, though the bomber died of his wounds later that day.
In my nearly nine years in Kunming I have always viewed the city as a safe place, much safer than most American cities, and safer than many Chinese cities as well. The idea of a bomb attack that apparently targeted foreigners still seems ludicrous.
Salvador’s has been an important part of the community, and was heavily frequented by locals and foreigners alike. The American owners are friendly and easygoing, and have a very enlightened approach to business’s responsibility to the community.
The specter of foreign-targeted violence is very unsettling, as are a few other things that I’ve recently noticed.
First, and probably the most baffling, is that no major international news outlet (with the exception of South China Morning Post, based in Hong Kong) has picked up the story. Why would that be? It was a bomb, someone died, the city was recently victim to two bus bombings that remain unsolved, and foreigners were targeted in a region that is heavily dependent on international tourism. THIS IS A STORY!
I have a few theories as to why they haven’t picked up on the story yet. The first is that the bomb failed to produce a large body count. Sensationalism sells. The second is that the incident fails to fit into the “story-arc paradigm” that so dominates the international press these days. When the bus bombings took place, you had tons of reporters writing things like “China faces growing security risks during the approach to the Olympics”. Reporters were also quick to point their fingers at a farmer protest in southern Yunnan, because newsworthy stories can only be understood in light of other events that made the news. With the Olympics over and things calming down in Tibet, this incident is rather hard to explain. The third theory is less odious, but doesn’t let the international media off the hook. The bomb hit Salvador’s on Christmas Eve, when a lot of newsdesks are stripped down to a skeleton crew. By the time they notice that news actually happened during their time off, the story will be too old to report. Regardless, every China desk should be ashamed for failing to find and report this story.
Another unsettling development is that even before the bombing, Kunming was feeling less and less like a safe city. Two buses were bombed at morning rush hour earlier this year. A man was recently shot by police snipers after a five hour hostage standoff in a Kunming Carrefour. I myself was present at the Box, a bar near Salvador’s, when some drunken men stormed the place with crowbars. I also recently witnessed a massive gang fight in Kunming’s disco district which local security guards and police were helpless to stop. What the hell is going on here?
The Box incident, though paling in comparison to the recent terrorist attacks (there, I said it), is an interesting case. When police were summoned to the scene, they actually caught the guys coming back to finish the job. Nevertheless, the young men were questioned and released. Then an officer came in and proceeded to grill us about why these people (whom we’d never seen before) would be so mad at us. After releasing our assailants, he was basically trying to lay the blame on us. Perhaps he was angry that we had disrupted his drinking session. One of us noticed that he was not wearing any identification, which is a violation of police procedure. We asked for his badge number, and he threatened to arrest us for not carrying passports (surely a much worse offense than attempted assault with a crowbar). He eventually conceded only that his surname was Yang, and that he is an officer at the local Wenhua Xiang police station.
I am very familiar with that police station, as it is right next door to Kunming’s largest purveyor of pirate DVD’s. I wonder if perhaps this kind of attitude towards policing might be contributing to the growing atmosphere of lawlessness in the city.
I’m rambling. Back to the unsettling things. The most recent unsettling development is taking place on Gokunming.com, an excellent Kunming expat blog that has been following the Salvador’s attack and doing a good job. At the beginning, the comments section was an outpouring of sympathy for the people at Salvador’s. This seems to be quickly degenerating into a flame war, as shameless ultranationalists are pointing the finger at foreigners. One comment told all foreigners to go home before “bringing more danger to our country”. Another told us all to “fuck off and die”. I really wish these people would realize that they’re not doing their country any favors. If they really cared, perhaps they would direct some of that anger at the people who put so many innocent lives at risk.

That is my rant. Now to the important stuff:

I love Salvador’s and all of the people there. I am overjoyed that they are all okay, and I can’t wait to go back down there for a cup of excellent coffee as soon as the place reopens. My heart goes out to their family members who right now can only worry from the other side of the world. Let’s all stay positive.

Something fun

2008-11-04T17:05:00.002+08:00

This is just great: signs of the times

Supergirl Li Yuchun and her 50 cent Army (With Update at Bottom)

2008-10-24T14:50:00.004+08:00

I've been following an interesting exchange recently on Danwei . I'm sure that everyone is familiar with the Chinese netizens who flood web postings about China with all kinds of comments, usually 'defending the nation's honor' against perceived bias and whatnot. Some of these people are believed to be employed by the Chinese government in what one sinologist terms the '50 cent army'. He believes that these people are paid small amounts of money per post they make supporting certain stances held by the party. Of course, the majority of these people are not in anyone's employ, but the theory makes sense. Check out any Economist article on China to see what I mean.

The interesting thing is, this is a huge phenomenon in the Chinese netsphere. Chinese celebrities have their own armies of netizens, paid and unpaid, to shower them with compliments and flood negative coverage with scathing criticism. One of these, I found out yesterday, is Supergirl Li Yuchun.

An article about a recent listing of Beijing heroes by Time Out Magazine has been flooded with dozens of comments that basically heap her with praise. What makes it interesting is that Danwei is a hangout for people who constantly scrutinize Chinese media, whether it's for a hobby, professionally or as academic research. It's like a mycologist getting a fungal infection.

Anyway, it's worth taking a look. In the meantime, I am currently hiring conscripts for a 50 cent army of my own. Apply within...

Update: the 50 cent army seems to be taking it easy with Danwei. I estimate they've only made about 70 posts since the story started last week. That's understandable as the article wasn't negative, and it was, after all, in English. While I was playing around in the postings, I came across a woman named Lili who is researching this specific phenomena. She shared a very interesting anecdote:

Actually, I have seen these kinds of wrecks many times. The worst time was Li's haters attached her fans' Baidu Post (BBS or public forum), using program generated curse comments. The auto-comments could reach 60-100 pieces per minute. Her supporters learned to use the same strategy to defend. Eventually, they drove Baidu servers, the biggest internet engine in China, to collapse for a few days.

That's just awesome.

What's Going on Here?

2008-10-08T10:28:00.004+08:00

Note: Update at bottom

I just had an amazing bike trip through Yunnan for the holiday, which I'll hopefully get back to soon. Today, though, a little bit about the Chinese art market.

It's nearly impossible to estimate the size and health of the global art market, because so much of its volume is carried out between private individuals and galleries, which are all in private hands. The auction market is considered a barometer of market health, but it is a slippery one, because as some say, "it's only the tip of the iceberg". We get good figures from them because many of the big auction houses are public companies, and because the auction events are always highly publicized, but no one is even willing to guess what fraction of the total art market their sales represent.

Nevertheless, we have to keep feeding the habit, as much of the market watches what happens at these auctions and adjusts prices accordingly. This has especially been the case in China, where so many of the collectors are speculators, and there are rampant rumors of price manipulation through insider bidding. China's art market has been soaring in recent years as Chinese private collectors and finance have jumped in, where only a few years ago the vast majority of Chinese contemporary collection was done by foreigners.

As I watched with the Puer tea market and again with the Chinese stock market, many of these new entrants seemed to believe that the market for their particular good was not subject to the laws of economics. Works by top flight artists are now selling in the millions of dollars, and efforts by newcomers to discover the next big thing have driven up the prices of much less established artists, even ones who haven't yet graduated from art school. Though I think that in the long term Chinese art will continue to be very strong, we're definitely in for some kind of correction, basically a smack in the face to remind people that the laws of physics still apply.

So I wasn't too surprised to see Sotheby's fall auction in Hong Kong fizzle. We are, after all, in the midst of a global financial crisis. Though top artists like Zhang Xiaogang (my fave) and Cai Guoqiang had pieces that sold for over USD 2m, almost a quarter of the lots failed to sell, and the ones that did only clocked in at the low end of their estimates. I think that this is a good thing. We need to start weeding out those artists who see painting as merely a license to print money, and those galleries and collectors who appraise artists solely based on their potential to go up in price. That makes room for true artists to do what they do best: art.

The confusing thing though, is the reaction I've seen on the internet. The auction results have of course garnered a lot of media attention, being written up by Wall Street Journal and all of the art websites. But one site in particular caught my attention. A recent newcomer, Artintern.net is a well designed bilingual website on the Chinese art scene. The Chinese coverage is excellent, and their English writing is better than a lot of other bilingual sites which have popped up recently. So I was surprised to see yesterday the headline, in English, "Chinese Contemporary Art Sell of Sotheby's (sic) is Still Strong". It cited another website, Artzinechina.com, as saying that sales still remained strong, citing only the high prices that did make the cut, and not one word about the failed lots. Their Chinese mirror site got it right though, citing a "disappointing performance". What's going on here? Was it a bad editing job, or are something else? I checked Artzine, which says on the top of its news page that the Sotheby's auction had a "surprisingly poor showing". One of the first sentences that Chinese students of English learn to say is "My English is very poor", so I doubt that they could have misread the article.

Update: Artintern has caught the mistake, and now has not one, but two articles about the poor Sotheby's results.

Gen Dequan

2008-09-17T17:33:00.002+08:00

Gen Dequan, the famous Dai folk musician, passed away last night of an apparent brain hemorrhage. He was a master of the Hulu, a reed instrument fashioned out of drinking gourds which is popular among the Dai and many other ethnic groups throughout Yunnan and Southeast Asia. He was fifty years old.
Known as King of the Gourd, Gen Dequan was instrumental in popularizing the folk music of the Dai people, and making their music a household name throughout China, synonymous with the cultural diversity of Yunnan Province. Throughout his career he toured many cities and countries, sharing the musical traditions of his people.
I was fortunate to know him. We first met on the Yunnan Revealed tour in 2005, when I was tour manager and he was a performer. He came again with us to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2007. He was a good man and a phenomenal musician.

Virtual City, Empty Fortress

2008-09-16T13:37:00.004+08:00

Hosting the opening ceremony

Last weekend I made a journey to the virtual city. Though it doesn’t really exist, the portal to this city was on the west side of Shanghai. Shanghai was boiling with artists that weekend that flocked there for the three major art expos that happened last week. Though the city definitely plays second fiddle to Beijing in the China art scene, this time it was host to probably the most important art happening of the year with thousands of artworks and dozens of satellite exhibitions.

Virtual City was one such satellite exhibition. It was conceived by Yuan Gong, Shanghai real estate mogul-turned supersized art patron. He recently established the Yuan Gong Art Museum, Artra Space and Yuan Gong Art Organization at a complex of buildings on Gubei Lu near the old Hongqiao Airport. He’s been tossing around money and doing some really cool stuff over the past few years.

Visitors descend on the Virtual City

The concept behind Virtual City was to manipulate the environment in a way that created an impossible space, one in which the physical environment interfered with reality in absurd ways, and in which virtual reality expanded the experience into another dimension. The complex was filled with installation, sculpture and new media works by over fifty artists, and the complex itself was transformed by a web of obstructions and labyrinths which made navigation all but impossible.

I was there to serve as one of the hosts for the opening, as well as general translator. I had friends in the show and friends who came out to see me, and between them and the needs of the event, I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. The obstructions created by the space and the massive crowds – especially around the installation with a live exotic dancer on a mechanically bouncing bed – made the day next to impossible. I was constantly cursing the labyrinths and hidden stairwells as I ran back and forth, and I barely had time to look at the artworks. But of course I knew that this feeling was exactly what the curators had intended.

One of the creepier works on display

I did have time to see some of the stuff, though. Unfortunately much of the work would have been unremarkable if it weren’t for the stellar presentation. The best artwork of all was the exhibition itself. Two pieces, however, stood out. One was “Sounding off for 5.12”, an interactive media installation about the May 12th Sichuan Earthquake by an artist whose name escapes me. A crushed truck had been removed from the wreckage of the earthquake and shipped to the exhibition space, where it was placed in a cavity in the floor. It was covered in stripped down speakers and lights, and more importantly, an array of motion and sound sensors. The speakers and lights reacted to the sensory input from the audience, and emitted sounds and lights accordingly. The most striking thing about this installation was the sound. Two separate sounds were recorded. The first was the sound of every car horn, factory whistle, siren and other noisemaker in the country, which were sounded off in unison during a nationwide day of mourning for the nearly 70,000 victims of the earthquake. The second sound was that of survivors hammering away at the ruined buildings looking for scrap metal they could sell to supplement their food rations. These were sounds of solidarity, sounds of despair, and sounds of the invincible human spirit. I’d like to spend some time alone with the piece some day.

Cang Xin's tower
The second piece that struck me was a three-story scale model of Shanghai’s new World Financial Center, the tallest building in China, in wax. It was a perfectly executed replica by artist Cang Xin and his crew of workers. The building was in an atrium inside one of the compound houses. As it towered over the other artworks and by the various balconies, it was being slowly melted by a massive torch suspended over the artwork. I always have trouble reading into Cang Xin’s works, but there’s never a dull moment with that guy. In fact, though it was much different from a lot of his other work that I’ve seen, I knew it was his without even looking at the label. The first thought that ran through my mind was “only in China”.

Before long I was pulled away to catch a really cool experimental dance piece directed by Wen Pulin, followed by an academic forum. The original idea was that I would translate for any foreigners who wished to attend, but they were all lured to other exhibitions by the free booze. Since I was seated at the main table, it would have been rude to leave, and besides, these were some of China’s top critics. I had translated many of their essays, and was keen to get to know them a bit better. The forum was quite interesting, because on top of some of China’s best critics and curators, there was also a philosopher, Philip Zhai, who happens to specialize in the philosophical concepts and issues of virtual reality. He had captivated our dinner and drinking session the night before, and did the same with his opening remarks at the forum. He argues, among other things, that as virtual space becomes a larger part of our lives, it may one day become more important than the real world, and when that happens, the virtual will become the real, and the real, virtual. Interesting guy.

Halfway through our forum, the speaker was interrupted by the sound of approaching sirens. Someone joked that maybe Cang Xin’s wax tower had set the building on fire, and we all laughed. The forum continued for another hour or so, during which time I got a text message from a friend, San San, Ms 33, saying, “We’ve been evacuated to the parking lot and are trying to decide where to go next. When are you finished up there?”

San San is an attractive young artist and event promoter that I met on a previous trip to Shanghai. She had a piece on the roof of the same building as Cang Xin’s piece. Her installation was a cluster of small structures covered in clippings of newspaper headlines and other media info, in a statement about how much media shapes our world these days. She had kept a fire extinguisher next to the work as she put it together all week, just for safety’s sake. When she finished the artwork, she decided that she liked the fire extinguisher, and also covered it in newspaper, placing it in the center of the installation.

That made her the guardian angel of the virtual city. Sometime in the afternoon, the torch above Cang Xin’s artwork managed to burn through the ceiling, surprise surprise. Falling embers ignited the entire wax tower, which promptly collapsed and sent flames flying everywhere. My good friend, Huang Zheng, true to his style, helped evacuate the audience members, and joined with Cang Xin in trying to put out the flames; a job made that much easier thanks to San San’s fire extinguisher. The two men were the last to leave the building just as the fire brigade arrived.

Imagine the firefighters’ rage when they found they had to navigate a labyrinth to get to the fire site and that there were no evacuation routes. Our forum was in a building on the other side of the compound, oblivious to the whole thing. When we finished the discussion, we were astonished to find that the labyrinths, the obstacles, the entire virtual city had disappeared without a trace (except for maybe a smoldering blob of wax) on orders of the fire brigade. I congratulated the curators on a job well done. They had succeeded in creating a truly impossible space. Had it ever really existed in the first place?

Oh and by the way, San San retrieved her fire extinguisher. Maybe one day when she makes it big we can put it in a museum next to Duchamp’s urinal.

A Little Shaky

2008-08-31T18:53:00.002+08:00

I was working away yesterday when I noticed the ground was shaking. More appropriately, the building was shaking. I'm on the top floor of a building on a hill, so things were shaking quite a bit. It turns out a 6.1 quake hit the town of Panzhihua yesterday, just across the border in Sichuan. This is in a different spot from the one that hit May 12th. There are reports of some casualties and collapsed buildings over there. It's too bad. There are a lot of poor, remote areas in the hills around the area, and Sichuan's still having a tough time in the rescue effort from the previous, more deadly quake.

For everyone with friends out here, Kunming is fine. No damage, as far as anyone has heard. The ground shook again the same time today, but less intense. This is getting old.

Damn Good Wine

2008-07-22T15:36:00.000+08:00

Sunday was a particularly fulfilling day. I had given up yet another weekend to my translation work, cramming for two major deadlines. Lo and behold I sent out the documents at five on the dot, a time that means less and less when you’re working at home.

Usually the weather in Kunming is absolutely beautiful while I’m holed up inside at work, and turns to sh-t whenever I have free time. On this day, however, it had been raining all day, but things were just quieting down as I finished the last few sentences.

It’s been a while since I’ve had some quality time on the roof. I grabbed some wine leftover from the night before and moseyed out into the garden with Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name is Red”.

It was as if the clouds had parted just for me. To the east was a low ceiling of grey rainclouds, no doubt still relieving themselves on all my friends over there. On the other side, the Western Hills were dwarfed by a massive, multi-tiered cloudbank. Bathed in the magical golden Yunnan sun and seeming to billow and stack up endlessly, they were definitely renaissance clouds, capturing all the glory of the creation forever on the ceiling of some rich Venetian trader. And right above me was a flawless, endless blue.

Captivating as it was, my Turkish murder mystery just couldn’t beat the weather for pure entertainment value. I grabbed my glass of wine and wandered off to the western edge of the garden. Gnats and flies must have been lured out by the fresh moist air, because I was presented with the spectacle of thousands of dragonflies on the prowl. They filled the sky over the tiny, lush garden valley that the next door slum carved out of the endless rows of housing complexes. If I were down there, I would be able to watch the children chase the dragonflies with nets. Tie a hook on the back of a dragonfly and you have an amazing, living, flying fishing lure to take with you to the lake.

But up here there was a different kind of hunt going on. Sparrows and other small birds, attracted by the buzz of wings, were hunting down the dragonflies, pulling off effortless war maneuvers. I’ve always wondered why, here in the middle of China’s most thriving ecosystems, I only ever saw slum birds. Maybe it’s just too nice out there in the hills.

There is another kind of bird in the picture. Several of my neighbors raise flocks of pigeons on the rooftops. Today there were two flocks out, flying in tight circular formation around the waving flags of their keepers. As I sat back down to my book, the garden was periodically swept by the shadow of these pigeons as they flew overhead. Once I master the pigeon language, I’ll thank them for never shitting on me after so many flyovers.

I glanced back at the massive golden cloudbank over the Western Hills. It was so distant and expansive, it looked almost like a giant movie backdrop. I spotted a black dot in front of one of the clouds. A bird? A plane? No, it’s an old man. In my American youth, kite flying was a father-son sport, where the father would toss the kite in the air and the son would run around seeing how long he could go before the kite hit the ground or caught a tree. In China, kite flying is about old men in the park effortlessly launching their kites into the stratosphere. On any good day one can spy tiny clusters of black dots hovering motionless over the city.

Seeing all this beauty at once reminded me why I had missed Kunming so much during my dust-covered days fighting through the social ladders of Beijing. It reminded me why I call this place home, why I had quit my corporate job and come back here to live the quiet life of a translator.

I leaned back, listened to the birds overhead and enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun on my back, and I thought, “damn, that’s some good wine.”

A Word of Optimism

2008-04-19T14:50:00.004+08:00

Let's go back to take a look at what I was talking about in my last posting. I still feel that a bit of caution is necessary in dealing with the Chinese art market, but things are still going well. The Sotheby's auction actually went quite well, and prices stayed quite high. One example, Zhang Xiaogang, saw a single painting from his much sought after Bloodlines series sell for HKD 42 million.

I still see a bubble looming on the horizon, but whatever happens, Chinese art is here to stay. One of the biggest reasons for optimism is that the Chinese themselves are starting to acquire a taste for art. We're starting to see more local collectors, and they're more than just a bunch of successful artists buying each others' works. That's a good sign, as the political situation in the past allowed Chinese contemporary art to explode without causing even a blip on the local cultural radar. Foreign collectors were snapping everything up, and most of the locals were none the wiser. We're even seeing homegrown corporate and institutional investment in art, thought that's still in its infancy. One of the most promising new developments is the arrival of homegrown non-profit art organizations and events, which is absolutely necessary if we're to see a renewal of dialog between artists and the society around them.

The scene in general is slowly growing beyond a simple market organization. Beijing's 798 Art District is now home to two large art centers, the Ullens Center (founded by a big-time European collector) and the Iberia Center (founded by the International Art and Culture Foundation of Spain). Though foreign, these two institutions are more focused on exhibitions, education and outreach than pure sales. In fact, they're not selling, at least not the stuff they exhibit. Overall that's a good thing, but the fact that 798 and a lot of the other art districts are located on the edges of this sprawling city guarantees that the Chinese art scene will remain an insider game for a long time.

opening day at the Iberia Center

I was quite impressed the other day when I attended the Iberia Center's opening exhibition. They've rounded up a lot of talent, leaning towards younger, more adventurous curators and organizers. Another good sign is their film center, which will house a media archive, studio and screening room for independent documentary film. To make this happen, they've tapped Zhang Yaxuan, who is definitely one of the most knowledgeable and active figures on the scene. I met her a long time ago at Yunfest, and I'm really glad to see that someone's willing to give her the money and resources she needs to take things to the next level.

There are still a lot of problems with the art scene, and I could make a long, boring list of them (and don't worry, I will keep ranting in the future), but I think they all boil down to a single problem, which is that they've never seen a bubble. Bubbles happen all the time in New York, London and Paris, and eventually people pick up the pieces and wise up a bit. It's a necessary process that weeds out the bad seeds every once in a while. But the more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that this run still has some legs. There are a lot of collectors who are just getting into the market, and a lot who haven't made it out yet. Just as with everything else in China, everyone wants a piece. Hopefully things won't get too out of hand.

A Word of Caution

2008-04-09T15:29:00.003+08:00

The Chinese art phenomenon continues, and shows no signs of abating despite all of the economic problems. Once relegated to the underground, Chinese contemporary art has hit the mainstream in a big way ever since it began raking in untold billions. At the various gatherings of artists, critics, dealers and hangers-on recently I’ve seen nothing but optimism and enthusiasm, with everyone waiting expectantly for the next big thing to explode on the scene. Sotheby’s and Christies (not to mention Poly, Guardian and a host of new mainland upstarts) are gearing up for ambitious spring offerings, and no one seems phased by the financial meltdown at all.

I don’t see any big surprises happening this season, but I am seeing good reason to be cautious over the coming months. Having just walked away from a speculation bubble in the tea market, I may be a little biased, but more than a few art insiders have been expressing a lot of curiosity about that bubble recently, so maybe we’re on to something.

The first issue is that the market has gotten too big, too fast. Though I think that a good Zhang Xiaogang painting is worth every penny of $1-2 mil, I’m seeing way too many artists in the upper mid-range, selling at tens to hundreds of thousands. I think that Chinese artists are producing some of the best art in the world right now, but I have a little trouble swallowing the idea that hundreds of Chinese artists are going to make it into the world art history books and make their mark on the emerging global aesthetic. The prices now would reflect the expectation that each and every one of those guys will be the next Basquiat.

Much of the buying and selling I’m seeing seems to be focused on potential future value, with artworks treated as financial tools rather than objects of desire. It’s easy to fall in this trap when a work that was sold by a starving artist for a few hundred dollars in the eighties is now hitting the auction block for hundreds of thousands. Puer tea traders fell in the same trap when they saw the ’88 Qing vintage start at thirty cents and top off at 1500. The bottom fell out of that market when everyone realized that there was too much production and speculators outnumbered drinkers by several orders of magnitude.

I could go on and on about this, but to make a long story short, approach Chinese art with caution. If you’re entering into the market strictly to cash in, you’re likely to get burned, sometime soon. Having said that, if you’re in it for the art, a careful approach should reward you with some great stuff for your collection.

A slightly clumsy English version of Zhu Qi’s article is available here

The original article is available on Zhu Qi's Blog

Free as a Bird

2008-04-09T15:26:00.002+08:00

It’s a beautiful, kind of sunny spring day as the train rolls its way past the towering apartments of Kowloon on its way to Mainland China. I’ve been in Hong Kong for the past few days sipping free champagne, chomping on finger snacks and looking sideways at little blocks of color, thinking of profound-sounding things to say to impress pretty young women in cocktail dresses.

That’s right, it’s art season. Actually, it’s the feeding frenzy that leads up to the massive Sotheby’s spring auction, which this year is making one of its largest offerings of Chinese contemporary art ever. A long run of record-shattering auction prices for Chinese contemporary has attracted the players from every corner of the industry for a week-long session of art shows, banquets, name card exchanges and mass bar runs. I can’t claim innocence here; I came down specifically to join the cheering section for one of my favorite artists and clients, Ye Yongqing.

Commander Ye, as we call him, is an interesting case. He was extremely important in the conceptual and artistic movements of the eighties, collectively called the ’85 New Wave, and became even more so during the nineties as he travelled the nation and the globe not to promote himself but to promote the development and recognition of Chinese art, and to build links with other budding scenes especially in the Third World.

He was one of the first artists to enlist me in the field of art translation, and he has always been one of my staunchest supporters, nearly singlehandedly responsible for my reputation and client base (I can take at least a little credit in that department).

The funny thing is, I didn’t really become familiar with his art until about a year ago, and though his work is highly respected by fellow artists, he never really took off on the market or in the media until recently. There’s a very simple explanation for that – he’s just too damned busy. It’s surprising he’s had any time at all to develop his creative style what with his job as a professor at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art, his founding of one of China’s first bona-fide art communities (Upriver Loft, Kunming) and his dozens of trips around the world to foster intercultural exchange. Yet his artistic style has followed an amazing trajectory, from his early days as a bit of an impressionist and dabbler in cubism, through his graffiti and archaeology inspired conceptual experiments of the nineties to his somewhat abstracted, highly meticulous and meditative works today, his artistic path has stretched farther than many artists half as busy as he.

His work now consists mostly of large birds or giant squiggles scrawled onto roughly treated canvases. From a distance they appear to be composed of broad, carefree strokes, but a closer look reveals that these are works of excruciating labor, made of thousands of tiny “chicken-scratch” strokes with a tiny brush.

The birds and squiggles resemble smaller ones that often featured in his earlier works. He often used birds and cages to play with ideas about freedom and confinement, and his own life is best described as migratory, which also helps explain the fascination. The squiggles are a bit less clear, but he’s always been playing with graffiti and scribble effects.

The term that pops to mind when trying to describe his recent works is “meditations”. To him, painting seems to have become a meditative exercise, and the resulting images the embodiment of the mental state he reaches. In this way, he shares as much in common with the traditional Chinese painters of old as he does with his peers in contemporary art.

But I’m not a critic, I’m a party crasher, and my skills in that department were put to great use this week. The main event was the most comprehensive Ye Yongqing retrospective ever held. It was organized by Anna Ning a young, up and coming dealer in Hong Kong, but it drew from many collectors and galleries to bring out pieces from almost every important stage in his development. Call me a cynic, but I have a feeling that this cooperative spirit was aided more than a little bit by the fact that a few of Ye’s works are going on the auction block this week.

Anyway, Anna did it up right, taking over a great space at the Hong Kong Art Center and putting a bunch of us up at the lavish Grand Hyatt right on the edge of the harbor, and coincidentally, a stone’s throw away from the Sotheby’s preview show.

So many people made the trip out that there were jokes about an evil cult assembly, mafia election or alien invasion. Whatever it was, once you get a few dozen darkly dressed Chinese guys in shaved heads together, you’re bound to attract some stares.

The opening was followed by a lavish five course meal for nearly 100 guests at the lovely Verandah Restaurant in Repulse Bay. We must have drained half their wine cellar that night. I had a chance to catch up with some of my favorite artists and meet some great people from the gallery, auction and critique fields. I decided to stay another couple of days to check out the Sotheby’s preview and crash the opening for Chen Jiagang’s exhibition.

Chen Jiagang is the current flavor of the month with a series of captivating photographs staged in the ruins of the Third Front, an area of China’s hinterland that Mao built up with military factories to shield them from an American nuclear strike. The massive buildup is now slowly returning to the soil, and the people who once ran it are now the forgotten heroes of China’s maniacal political history. His photos are lovely, but he’s become an overnight star and one must wonder if he’ll be able to live up to the hype in the future.

That was the inaugural show for Contemporary by Angela Li. Angela has been working in the field as a consultant for many years and is now going into full time business. She’s smart, personable and attractive, and I have every reason to believe she’s going to have a long and fruitful career. She definitely knows Chinese art like the back of her hand.

The after-party was held at the China club, on top of the old Bank of China building. Step through the doors and you’re in 1930’s Shanghai. They’ve done a beautiful job making the atmosphere there, and David Tang’s impressive art collection makes it just that much more special. But it was the view from the top floor balcony that stole the show. I tend to favor natural scenery, but I have to admit, Hong Kong is one of the most striking modern cities I’ve ever been to.

All in all, Hong Kong was a blast. In the past it was just a place for me to refill my China visa and load up on English books, magazines and cheap tailored suits. Now I’ve finally had a chance to see more of the city, and though I don’t think I’d want to live there, I’ll jump at the chance to go back.

A(mao)rica's Idol

2008-03-29T20:46:00.000+08:00

Today I was watching the “All China Youth Singing Competition”, a yearly extravaganza held on China's national television network. I'm only watching this stuff because I have a few friends in the competition. This very odd television show is one of the most important trials for any young person who wants to survive in China's music industry. Every province and region sends representatives, and the prize for winning is national fame, endorsements and the ability to command high performance fees.

When I turned on the TV, a beautiful Mongolian girl in a golden dress was singing a lovely flowing song from the grasslands she calls home. It wasn't the best folk song I'd ever heard, but then again I've heard a lot of this stuff in my day. But here's the clincher: when she finished her song, an announcer took the stage and asked her a question - “The Summer Palace and The Great Wall are the English names for two famous Chinese landmarks. What are their proper names in Chinese?

I have to say that the perversity of this whole spectacle never ceases to amaze me, even after all these years. Apparently a singer, even a folk singer, cannot be a true professional unless her head is crammed with all kinds of trivia that is wholly irrelevant to her life or career.

Of course, the girl was stumped by the question, and that's going to hurt her score in the long run. She didn't make the cut because she doesn't know the English names of two tourist sites in Beijing, a city worlds apart from where she was raised. One of the judges (there are about thirty of them and they're all really old) made the following remark: “Some people may be wondering why we've added so many English questions to this year's trivia section. It is because there will be many foreigners here this year for the Olympics, and we need to be able to tell them about our great historic landmarks.” There you have it folks, she can't be a superstar because she hasn't made enough effort to become a perfect Chinese citizen in the party's image. Don't believe me? Wait until you hear the next question they asked her. Footage from some Cultural Revolution music video was shown for a few seconds, and she was asked to name the song. Of course, this time it was multiple choice, because the Cultural Revolution was a long time ago and the Olympics are THIS YEAR. So just in case you stumble on a foreigner deep in the Mongolian steppe who is looking for the Summer Palace, make sure you know enough English to tell him that he's hopelessly lost, otherwise you'll never be a superstar.

Other questions I've seen include “name the cities that these famous European soccer teams are from”, and “name the period that this Italian Opera piece was written in”. And the topics are numbered instead of named, so you have no way of shooting for a topic you're good at. In fact, they're so worried about people cheating on the test that they release no information that might help people prepare for it. You either know it or you don't.

But don't worry, my people tell me the whole thing's fixed anyway, so there's no use in memorizing that encyclopedia.

Caravan Stop 1 – Kunming

2007-12-24T02:02:00.000+08:00

I’ve ranted and raved a lot about Kunming before, so there’s no need to introduce the place again. We came on a mission, but we were basically there to soak up some of what the city had to offer. Between marathon meals and walks in the park, we actually managed to get some work done. For the first day, I called on my old friend Xie Mohua who is the director of the Yunnan Minority Nationalities Museum, which in my opinion is one of the most overlooked gems in the city. He gave me big face by offering us free access to the museum with his top researchers acting as guides, then free use of his lecture hall. He also brought out some of Yunnan’s top historians to tell us what they know about ancient Yunnan and the caravans.

The museum is right down by Lake Dian on the southwest edge of the city, across the street from the zoo-like Yunnan Nationalities Village theme park. Though most tourists only bother to visit the theme park for a dose of cultural misconceptions, the museum is almost always empty. It has an amazing collection of Yunnan clothing and textiles, as well as just about any artifact you can imagine including religious implements, musical instruments, ritual masks, hemp looms and weaponry.

One of my favorite exhibits there is called “Memories of Mankind”, which is a complete collection of every form of written language and communication system found among the peoples of Yunnan Province. There are stacks of Tibetan sutras, Yi scriptures and Thai palm-leaf sutras. There are old texts in the Dongba script from the Naxi of Lijiang, which is the only pictographic script still in use today. One can also see the Daoist paintings of the Yao people, who adopted Daoism and the Chinese writing system, though they changed it around along the way making the Chinese characters something akin to the work of an American tattoo artist. One of the most interesting sections of the exhibit is reserved for communication by illiterate peoples. In one culture, sending palm leaves woven in a certain way tells the recipient “I like you a lot, but I’m in a relationship right now. Sucks to be you.” A chili pepper sent to a relative says “it is time to exact our revenge”.

Every time I go to the museum, I end up spending most of my time (and money) in either the bookshop or the clothing shop. The book shop is entirely dedicated to books on China’s minority cultures, and any Chinese book on the topic worth its salt can be found or ordered there. The clothing shop downstairs is a well kept secret among textile nuts that I am revealing for the benefit of my handful of dedicated readers. The shop is run by the museum’s former appraiser, who basically oversaw the purchase of the museum’s entire collection. Ms. Wu now uses her extensive contacts in the countryside and her keen collector’s eye to track down the best traditional clothing, embroidery, jewelry and knickknacks to be had in Yunnan. The shop is overflowing with the stuff, but I haven’t come across a single item that she couldn’t pinpoint to its exact village and ethnic origin. Ms. Wu claims that 90% of her business is in long term repeat buyers, and I believe her.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time blowing my wallet that day, because the lecturers were on a tight schedule. Our first lecture of the day was by Mu Jihong, something of a legend among puer tea fanatics. Some time in the nineties, he and a few colleagues heard chatter about a possible southern passage on the Silk Road. Somehow, artifacts from Yunnan and Sichuan were turning up in places like Kazakhstan, and it just didn’t make sense for this stuff to travel all the way up to Xian to cross the desert or all the way across India to end up in Central Asia. Mr. Mu and five others got together to tackle the problem, and soon honed in on the old Tibetan traders that used to send caravan teams into Yunnan for tea and salt. They made a small caravan team of their own to retrace the path and find out everything they could. They found that the caravan trading routes were much more extensive than previously believed, stretching across Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibet, and reaching into India and Central Asia. The trade dates back at least 4000 years. In later ancient times, Yunnan and Tibetan merchants amassed large fortunes trading tea and salt (two scarce necessities on the Tibetan Plateau) for prized Tibetan horses, which they sold to the Chinese Empire, which was always under attack from northern nomads.

The six men returned and named the trading route the “Ancient Tea and Horse Road”, as they saw plenty of tea and horses, but not a lot of silk. Mu Jihong gave us a wonderful account of his travels, and explained the economics and history of the trading route to us.

Our next speaker is an old friend of mine, Guan Yuda. He teaches art at Yunnan University, and gave our people a background on Yunnanese art and culture, as well as a colorful explanation of why the place has always been a vortex for all kinds of whackos. A lot of people don’t realize this, but Yunnan is one of the most important places in China for modern and contemporary art, and also served as an important conduit for the exchange of artistic ideas across Asia in ancient times (more on that in the Dali section). One of the first modern art movements to make waves abroad was the Yunnan school in the early eighties, with its flashy and seductive oil color renderings of Yunnan’s tropical borderlands. That was just a blip on the map, but China’s contemporary art scene has exploded on the world stage, and no other province, region or city has produced more tier one artists than Yunnan. We’re talking Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing, Tang Zhigang and Pan Dehai, not to mention Zhang Xiaogang who is currently number one in terms of sales prices and cultural influence. Guan’s explanation is that Yunnan has always been exposed to and receptive of outside influences. It has always been an amazingly diverse (and poorly controlled) frontier region as well as a dumping ground for bad elements and banished officials from Beijing. Yunnan’s modern culture dates back to the ‘30’s when China’s entire top-tier education system sought refuge there from the Japanese, establishing the Southwestern United University, flooding the city with China’s most forward-thinking intellectuals. They bumped shoulders with the French, who still hoped to make it part of Indochina, and the Americans who came as the volunteer fighting outfit soon to be dubbed the Flying Tigers. Yunnan today still beckons to lost souls from all generations who wander there for various personal reasons and end up smoking dope, dancing barefoot and bringing home the seeds of China’s new bohemian culture.

Our last speaker was Li Kunsheng, incidentally also a professor at Yunnan U. He teaches in the history department, and is one of the most important minds in Yunnan archaeology and ancient cultures. He gave us a rundown of the political and cultural situation of Yunnan during the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, a period of several centuries that coincided with the Tang and Yuan dynasties in the rest of China. The Nanzhao Kingdom is believed to have been a kingdom of the Yi people centered in Dali. It traded with Tibet, China and India, and at its height controlled a territory stretching across the province and all the way to the Indian Ocean. It held its own against the peak of ancient Chinese civilization (the Tang) and once even defeated an army of 100,000 soldiers. One of its greatest cultural treasures is the series of stone carvings in the mountains of Shibaoshan, which I will return to in the Dali chapter.

Our last major happening in Kunming was a dose of traditional folk culture as it lives and breathes. I took my posse to check out another posse of mine, the Yuansheng dance group. This is a folk-based group consisting of a lot of the traditional dancers we brought to the states in 2005 (see Yunnan Revealed ). They’ve built a theatre in Kunming’s Loft Art Community and have been holding regular performances there for the past year. It was great to see my old friends. They’re living well, spreading the word of cultural preservation, and gaining support in their continuing community work. The hypnotic music brought me back to one of the best moments in my life, stirring up some of the happiest and saddest memories of my days in Kunming. It was the first time for my posse, and they were absolutely blown away. I’m glad that they got to learn a bit about Yunnan from bona-fide peasants, because they represent Yunnan and what it’s about much more than any group of the most accomplished scholars.

The rest of my weekend was about preparing for the trip and going out for drinks with a lot of old friends you’ve never heard of. I won’t bore you with the details. Next installment, the trading town of Weishan and the mighty kingdom of Dali…

On the Caravan Trail

2007-12-24T01:49:00.000+08:00

My latest trip to Yunnan was an interesting one, finally fulfilling a longstanding urge to get some more travel in. This time I was on the company dollar and had seven people in tow. We were making a research trip along the Tea Caravan Trail, for a really interesting project that I can’t quite talk about yet.

We had a simple goal, to learn as much as we can about the history, traditions and cultures of the Caravan Trail, and record as much as we could in photos, interviews and sketches (there were three artists in the group). After some time in Kunming running around the Minority Nationalities Museum and soaking in the wisdom of the experts, we hit the road heading west. Our travels took us through Weishan, Dali, Jianchuan, Lijiang and Deqin, from the central heartland to the Tibetan border. I had been to most of these places before, but it’s been a long time. We ran into some old friends, made some new ones, and saw some stuff I’d never seen before. It was a rocking trip. I’ll introduce a bit about each place below.

The Story of Tea

2007-09-28T10:56:00.000+08:00

I recently recieved an advance copy of the new book The Story of Tea: A Cultural History and Drinking Guide by my friends Mary Lou and Robert J Heiss. I have to say, I am quite impressed. The heavily illustrated book is organized rather like a textbook, and covers a wide swath of tea knowledge, from history to cultivation to production, culture and accessories. It even has a section with tea-based food recipes. The knowledge in there is spot on, as the Heisses have been travelling around the world and researching the background for a long time. But what makes this book really great, aside from being a solid reference tool, is the writing. The book, though organized like a textbook, reads like a piece of literature. One can see right away how the authors are totally captivated by this great beverage. I've read a lot of books about tea, and most of them tend to mystify the subject, as if the leaf is some holy, esoteric thing that should be romanticized but not approached scientifically. The authors manage to work in a lot of the romance and allure of this leaf without trivializing, mystifying or being condescending. Here's one of my favorite bits, from the opening of Chapter 7:

Imagine the following: a Japanese tea master wishing to teach his student the importance of perception dashes a cup of tea to the ground, breaking the cup and spilling the tea. The tea master wished to illustrate the point that the broken cup was no longer a cup but just a pile of shards, while the tea was still tea, immutable and unchanged. But as the tea could no longer be consumed without the cup to hold it, the true importance of the cup becomes clear. It is the empty space of a teacup that performs the most essential duty, one with greater importance than merely the fleeting beauty of a pleasing shape, fetching design or lustrous glaze.

I first met the Heisses while on the Yunnan Revealed tour in 2005 when we performed at Dartmouth College. They were fawning over our handcrafted Yunnanese instruments, and bought some of our best pieces with little hesitation. I was working the craft table that night, so I moseyed over and introduced myself. We quickly figured out that we were all tea nuts and entranced with Yunnanese culture. Since then we've kept in touch, trading shop talk and stories about China. The Heisses have a shop in Northampton Massachusetts called Cooks Shop Here, which provides high quality cooking products for good cooks. Somewhere along the line they turned their attention to tea, and have since crafted themselves into what NYTimes foodwriter Nina Simonds calls professors of tea. They have amassed over 100 varieties of the leaf for their dedicated customers, and in the process have travelled around the world to learn and source the good stuff, and have brought their culinary approach to ingredients on their investigations of what this stuff is and what you need to know.
This is a great book and a must-read for anyone who is interested in tea. People across the west are beginning to get the idea that there's a lot more to this beverage than bagged black tea and iced tea in the bottle, but taking a peek at this vast world with thousands of tea types and grades of quality from nearly fifty countries can be intimidating. Put a copy of this on your coffee table (sic) and you're set for your new adventure.

Mike the Bike

2007-09-17T15:30:00.000+08:00

On the afternoon of August 26^th, Michael Sutherland – known as Bike Mike to his friends – died in a rafting accident in Mi’le County, south of Kunming. The rafting trip, consisting of six people on a raft and one on a kayak, ran into trouble shortly after embarking on the Nanpanjiang River, which had been swollen by summer rains. Mike’s girlfriend of many years, Li Limei, and a Sichuan man, Guo Zheng, also died in the accident. The other four members of the team survived.

The three bodies were found and identified by one of the survivors who stayed behind for five days to assist the massive search party and liaise with the US Consulate and Mike’s family.

Bike Mike was one of my closest and oldest friends in Yunnan. We met soon after I arrived here in 2000, and his passion for the area and its culture helped shape a lot of what I’ve gone on to do. He will be sorely missed and fondly remembered forever. As he often did in life, he has once again brought our ragtag community together, as longtime friends and admirers creep out of the woodwork to offer assistance, pay tribute and share great stories from Mike’s many years in Asia.

Bike Mike arrived in Kunming fourteen years ago after riding his bike from Guangzhou. The adventure that followed became legendary among travelers and kindred spirits everywhere. He hung around Kunming for a while before setting off on an epic journey that covered most of Yunnan Province, continental Southeast Asia and South Asia, all on bicycle. Then he returned to Kunming, all the wiser from his journey, and settled into the community here.

It is hard to find someone in this town who hasn’t been affected by Mike’s life here. He spent many years traveling around the area, and built a business upon the longstanding hemp traditions of Yunnan’s ethnic minorities. His clothing company produced limited edition hemp clothing lines for the likes of Quiksilver and Rip-Curl, as well as his own brand, People’s Hemp. Mike has also assisted various government departments and companies in the promotion of hemp industries and research. Upon his death, he had recently been reelected to the board of directors of the Hemp Industry Association, of which he was a longstanding and highly respected member.

But it was the personal touch that we’ll remember the most. Mike was always eager to take in wayward travelers, offering a place to stay, the run of the town and his unique insights into the people and places of Yunnan. I’m one of the many people he helped into the world of traveling by bike, and one of the many people who crashed on his couch. He always had a passion for this place, and took great joy in bringing others into his world. This is the end of a great chapter in Kunming history, though our city will always bear the mark of his presence, through the scores of people whose lives he touched.

I miss you bro.

Dream of a Red Mansion

2007-08-15T11:49:00.000+08:00

Beijing Evening Press

Interestingly enough, Beijing has a pretty hot theatre scene, though linguistic and cultural barriers will probably keep it from ever taking a spot on the world stage. Last night I went to the closing performance of Zhang Guangtian's new play, Dream of a Red Mansion, which has generated more than a little controversy in Chinese cyberspace.

A hot topic in Chinese media is the upcoming production of the Chinese classic novel for television. The TV station announced that it would be holding "American Idol" style open auditions for the leading role, and the controversy over that has generated a lot of publicity for the film long before production even began. To add to the mess, the director has adamantly refused to work with any actor selected this way, setting off a big media fight. Most people in the culture scene, though, see this as just another publicity stunt, and they're probably right.

With impeccable timing, Beijing playwrite Zhang Guangtian knocked out a script for a play of the same name. A few months ago, I met him in an incident that almost immediately slipped my mind. A bunch of cultural and media folks were sharing drinks in the courtyard of the Jianghu bar, and we started talking about all of this Red Mansion controversy. He said he was working a script for a contemporary take on the novel, and had come out to smother his writer's block in cheap booze. People started talking about what the book meant to them, mostly talking about the poetry of the writing style and the intricately woven plot lines that play out in the Red Mansion, the ornate home of a large, wealthy Beijing family.

I gave him the western take on the book, which is that the book, as beautiful as it is, is obsessed with the petty intrigues of old China's moneyed elite, and is totally detached from the social reality around it, which, being a folk novel, was probably a deeply veiled social critique. I said that if the political climate were different now, one could make a great play by recasting the characters as the children of high level cadres and well connected captains of industry in latter day China.

Apparently he took my words to heart. I returned to Beijing to find that the play had generated a lot of controversy. The director saved me some tickets to see the play, and even posted a bluntly paraphrased version of our conversation in his blog, quoting me as the "American Imperialist" who had challenged him to take a radical and socially critical approach to the novel. My friends joked that I should go down there and demand my royalty check.

I finally made it to the play last night, and I have to say that it really rocked, though rumors of my influence were widely exaggerated. Of course a lot of it was over my head. Language issues aside (the script was a mix of Beijing slang and classical Chinese), it was a real post-modern work loaded with symbolism and inside jokes. A lot of the symbolism was just way out of my depth. Why was the novel's protagonist, Jia Baoyu cast as a woman, and what's all that stuff about her thrashing around in a fish tank being whipped by goons in raincoats? See what I mean?

Overall the play was excellent, and I wish it was still on so I could try another crack at it. The book's author, Cao Xueqin, is a down on his luck spoiled child of low level officials. It follows him and his wife in a witty dialogue as they hammer out the idea for the book. Between their dialogue are surreal scenes of the book's characters as they take shape. But it goes much further than that. The play is loaded with lampoons of the Chinese media and the state of Chinese society, where fame is shamelessly capitalized and sex is nothing but a cash-only commodity. The play is also a musical, as Zhang Guangtian got his start writing scores for movies, including Zhang Yimou's excellent film, Shanghai Triad.

The play is sexy, hilarious, audacious and confusing. Though I don't think anyone quite understood the whole thing, the audience was repeatedly thrown into fits of hysterics as they watched contemporary society dissected on the stage.

Unfortunately, a lot of the controversy was misplaced. Most of it centered on the director having the gall to reinterpret the Chinese classic tome. It's as if it was a crime to be an artist, or do anything but a verbatim staging of the original. And a quick scan over irate comments on the blogs shows that most of these people didn't even bother to see the play. Though China's cultural gurus are breaking some amazing ground, the general audience seems far behind.

But there are rays of hope. The house was packed and everyone was totally entranced. The cast was extremely talented. I was especially impressed by Guo Xiao, who brought his impressive skills in Beijing-style comedy talk into his rendition of Lin Daiyu.

All in all, I see some amazing potential in the Beijing theatre scene, and I plan to watch it as it comes into its own. And of course, I plan to keep stirring things up with my American imperialism...

Glossary:
戏剧: Xi4Ju4 - Drama
红楼梦: Hong2Lou2Meng4- Dream of a Red Mansion
张广天: Zhang Guangtian
高干子弟: Gao1Gan4Zi3Di4 - children of high-ranking cadres
美帝国主义: Mei3Di4Guo2Zhu3Yi4 - American Imperialism
争论: Zheng1Lun4 - Controversy

March On...

2007-08-14T15:29:00.000+08:00

I was wandering around the net today and stumbled across a couple of old friends I’d like to tell you about.

Ed Jocelyn and Yang Xiao are living and breathing gods among China’s outdoor adventure community. The two of them have been retracing the steps of China’s famous Long March campaign all across the country, with nothing but what they can fit on their pack mules.

Along the way, they’ve met some amazing people and found some of China’s most stunning natural scenery. Of course, they’ve been taking pictures and writing about it the whole way, and I’ll give you the address in a minute.

They’ve also been working to document the histories of the people involved, and are some of the most informed people I’ve ever met on this subject. In fact, they were doing this long before Cui Yongyuan and CCTV, who did the My Long March event that we sponsored. They were the inspiration for this event, as Cui interviewed them months before he took his own march. To Cui’s credit, he admitted as much to me, if not publicly.

About the guys:

Ed Jocelyn is an Englishman who’s been living in China for years and speaks Chinese quite fluently. We actually often speak to each other in Chinese so as not to leave our Chinese buddies out of the conversation. I dig him, not just because he can get away with something like this adventure, but because I see in him the same interest and involvement in Chinese culture that I have, and he even takes it a bit further (thousands of miles further, to be exact).

Yang Xiao is a native Chinese all-around outdoorsy guy and top-of-the-notch equipment freak. He elevates the science of bag-packing to the level of quantum mechanics, and is far more comfortable in the wilderness than anywhere else. I’ve spotted him several times using his foldable camping cup and re-usable chopsticks even in big Beijing restaurants. This calls to mind the My Long March participants, who found that after marching for nearly a year, they became prone to car-sickness.

I met them in Beijing last year, and we’ve hung out a few times at my favorite Yunnanese restaurant in the city, Emmo’s Place, which is a big hangout for the hiking and jeeping crowd. The owner, Emmo, is a really cool Wa guy hailing from Lincang Prefecture in Southwest Yunnan. I have a post somewhere in the archives from when I went to his hometown to make a film. The restaurant looks just like a lot of backpacker hangouts in Yunnan, and serves up some great homestyle Kunming food. It’s also a great place to check out photos from the long march odyssey. A series I particularly like is photos of propaganda slogans painted all over the walls of the Chinese countryside. There’s really some funny stuff there, such as slogans warning against marriage by closely related mentally challenged people, as well as a lot of graffiti propaganda spoofs.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you about these guys now is that they’re at it again, this time following the path of the 6^th Division which went to some of the remotest parts of China. The two should be somewhere in eastern Tibet right now. Check’em out at www.newlongmarch2.com.

The Young Priest

2007-07-19T11:05:00.000+08:00

Another person from the folklife festival that I’d like to profile is He Xiudong. Mr. He is a Dongba, which is sort of like a priest for the Naxi People in northwest Yunnan Province. “Dongba” can be translated as “wise one”, as these people are more than priests, they are the carriers of their culture.

The duties, rituals and knowledge of the Dongba are passed from father to son, and at one time there were many active lineages of these priests. The rituals they perform are animistic in nature, making offerings to various gods and the spirits of nature. As the story goes, man and shv (spirits of nature) were half brothers, with man given domain over all domestic life, and shv given domain over all of nature. They used to live in harmony, but the shv became angered by man’s constant intrusions into the natural realm, and the wanton destruction of their property (ie trees, waterways etc). The chief role of the Dongba is to mediate between the people and the shv, so that angry shv will not cause earthquakes, storms, avalanches and other forms of natural mayhem.

The other role of the Dongba is as the carrier of the Naxi People’s cultural knowledge. Their main tool in this role is the Dongba pictographic script, which is the only such script still in use today. Many of the Dongba scriptures write out the numerous steps of each Dongba ritual, but there are many other types of scriptures as well. Some contain medicinal knowledge, while others contain histories, myths and stories of the Naxi people. Traditionally, only the Dongba would learn the pictographic script. Thousands of the scriptures found their way to the library of Congress, where they are being digitally catalogued. You can view them here

And now, back to He Xiudong. Mr. He comes from a long line of Dongbas in a village in Tacheng, along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. He is the 24^th generation Dongba in his family, though he says this only traces back to the family’s arrival in the area, and it is impossible to say how long his family carried the tradition before that. The tradition skipped a generation with his father because of the Cultural Revolution. This happened to a lot of lineages, and many more had ceased for other reasons. There are only a handful of practicing Dongbas today.

He Xiudong learned the traditions of the Dongba from his grandfather and other family members of that generation. His family was once a very large clan of important Dongba, but now only he remains. His training was incomplete, as there wasn’t enough time, but he spends much of his time these days scouring the countryside for Dongba scriptures and practicing Dongbas. He also collaborates with the Dongba Research Institute, a government supported organization dedicated to the preservation of this tradition.

These days there are only a handful of Dongbas left, and almost all of them are in their seventies and eighties. One of the most striking things about He Xiudong is that he is only 27.

He came with us to the folklife festival to represent Naxi culture. He is not a performer, though we got him on stage a few times to sing a traditional drinking song. His main role was to perform a ritual offering at the festival, which he did several times.

There’s an interesting story here. The original plan was for him to perform an ablution ceremony, where he blessed and ritually cleansed an area including a gate made of woven bamboo, through which onlookers could walk to become blessed. He sent a detailed list of the things he needed and instructions on how to prepare the area, but much of it was lost along the way. On the first day of the festival, we scrambled all over the place looking for everything he needed. When we were getting close, he looked at me and said, “where’s my chicken?” He figured it was common knowledge that a chicken had to be sacrificed for the ceremony. Anyone who is familiar with the state of affairs in America today knows that there’s no way the Smithsonian could get away with ritually sacrificing an animal on the mall every day for two weeks, respect for religion be damned. It took Mr. He quite a while to find a ritual that didn’t call for ritual slaughter, but he eventually settled for an offering to the shv, which could be done with rice and fruits.

On and off-site, He Xiudong’s charisma quickly became the stuff of legend among festival participants and staff. He can’t speak a word of English, and even his Chinese is pretty shaky, but he made friends and fans everywhere he went. Sulking around in his robes, beads and black hat with a three-foot-long bamboo pipe hanging out of his mouth, people began to gather around him wherever he went. I did my best to translate for him as he interacted with the other people around him, but I also made an effort to make myself scarce whenever possible. He turned out to have an uncanny capacity for wordless communication, and everyone seemed to have more fun when I was gone.

By the end of the festival, people were lining up to wish him well and bestow him with gifts of beads, feathers, homegrown tobacco and the like. One guy even pinned a dollar to his robe in old-school New Orleans Mardi Gras style. There was a general consensus among everyone: this guy’s the shit!

I was touched by his ability to reach out, but even more so by his dedication to the traditions of his people. At a time when many Naxi youth are either diving into modern consumer culture or assisting in the commoditization of their own cultural heritage (I’ve actually seen a Budweiser poster with Dongba pictographs in Lijiang), he is staying the course, and reviving the spirit of a people against impossible odds

Folklife: the Shangri-La Boys

2007-07-14T16:56:00.000+08:00

Probably the best profile to start with is the Shangri-La boys, because so much of what happened at the festival started with them. The Shangri-La boys are a singing quartet from Diqing Prefecture, home to the recently dubbed “Shangri-La County”, the beautiful Tibetan area in northwest Yunnan that is hoping to attract more tourists by masquerading as the mythical land of Lost Horizon.

The quartet is made up of two Tibetans, Lurong Nongbu and Damo Luzhuo, as well as two Lisu men, Feng Yuehong and Yu Minghui. They sing, dance and play their fiddles to the traditional sounds of their hometown. They also harmonize really well in a fashion that led us to dub them the “barbershop quartet”.

They do a lot of great traditional stuff, especially paired off by ethnic group, but when you get the four of them together they’ve got this crazy, syncopated song and dance thing that is at once so funny and so cool that it steals the crowd.

These four long-haired guys in Tibetan robes and hemp vests were the center of attention on-stage, off-stage and at the afterparty, among other places. They loved having a good time, drinking and carrying on by the hotel swimming pool, pounding out beats on the table as they belted out drinking songs, and handing out beer and cigarettes to any bystanders who lingered for more than a minute.

This was the scene late one night early in the festival when the first true cultural exchange of our trip began. The boys had been singing a soft drinking song when three people approached our table, the usual one next to the pool. They asked me to translate, saying “we are from the Virginian tribes; we love your music, and my friend here would like to honor you with a drum song.” “Hao!” was the answer. Yunnan folks are always down for a good time and always happy to make a friend. Then one of the three stepped forward with his hand drum, and belted out a beautiful song from his people. Thus began a nightly exchange of stories, histories and especially music and dance, between the indigenous peoples of Yunnan and the Powhatan nation of Virginia. That was one of the coolest things to happen at the festival, but a deeper description of it will have to wait until a later installment.

What you need to know is that this was the formation of our icebreaking ‘cool circle’ that hung out every night and welcomed various festival participants and staff to come out and party with us every night. At that table, we communed with musicians, storytellers, craftsmen and professional organizers from all over the place, and that’s what made the festival so cool. The daytime performances and audience interactions were of course wonderful, but it was the nightly hotel social with its two dollar beers that we looked forward to every day. Some of us joked that the festival on the mall was just a façade get funding for the true festival, which was the behind-the-scenes party among folklorists from around the world.

The Shangri-La boys, with their scraggly charisma, became an anchor for these parties. The parties were held by the cool people at the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, who brought their guitars, basses and banjos to jam out with the festival participants every night. That was really cool, listening to old-time mixing with the sounds of Northern Ireland, but after a few drinks, the Yunnan crew would always steal the show, belting out Yunnan mountain songs that filled the room. Of course we started out simply for our own entertainment, but soon the whole room was applauding the Shangri-La boys, and the old-timey musicians were grimacing from the other side of the crowd.

The Shangri-La boys are already big stars in their hometown. They are the unofficial mascots of Shangri-La, performing at every cultural event in town. They also travel a lot, performing in China’s major cities and various countries on the outside. I have a lot of respect for these guys. Not just because we made friends and had such a blast, but because of what they are all about. These young men are from traditional cultures that have been fading away in the face of modernization and tourism. They never made a conscious decision to pursue a profession in music, they just lived the life. Here they were, young men from their communities carrying on the musical traditions of their people, and even making it look cool as they’re heaped with acclaim from the outside world. If they party back home like they did in DC, which I’m sure they do, then you can safely bet that there is a whole generation of young kids in their community who want to be just like them. That is how culture thrives.

Back in the Jing

2007-07-14T16:28:00.000+08:00

So now I’m back in Beijing after a few weeks in the motherland. It was good to be back. I enjoyed the hot but otherwise beautiful weather, staring at the clear blue skies, and being surrounded by trees. I came to enjoy the civility of things, what with people waiting in line and opening doors for each other. I loved the fast, unblocked internet and the tasty, fattening American pastries. To say the very least, I made the most of my trip back.

The funny thing is, it didn’t really hit me until I got off the plane. Though traveling always sucks, my escape was one of the smoothest ever, everything neatly laid out before me and proceeding in an orderly fashion. I even managed to score a whole row of empty seats in economy plus. I spent the better part of my thirteen hour journey horizontal, and the last time I did that was just after 911, when no one in their right minds would want to fly (except me).

It all began as we started getting off the plane. I could see the overseas Chinese around me going through a mental transition, steeling themselves for the ordeal lying ahead. We were all doing it, reawakening our China selves, the personas that are discomforting to think about in the aura of happy-go-lucky America.

Ahead of us lay the long sweaty customs lines, the long wait at baggage, and then the gateway. Once you get to the gateway, there’s no turning back. The people, bags in hand, flow together towards the claim exit and face the massive. Even before the line reaches it, people are beginning to complete their transformation, beginning to jostle for a strategic position ahead. Out there you can already hear the massive, the throngs of people swarming around the exit, waiting for loved ones, clients and tour groups. Their numbers are so strong that we have to fight our way past them.

And there I am, tensely steering my overloaded baggage cart between clusters of people stopping to stand in the most inopportune places, and playing chicken with other oncoming travelers. The crowd there, the likes of which are only seen in America during big summer gatherings like Independence Day, is just business as usual at the Beijing airport.

The next step in the back-in-Beijing ritual is to park the cart by the door and grab a smoke. It’s not nearly as hot as I expected it to be, but the dirty humid air gives me a sticky embrace right away. It’s mid-afternoon, but the sky looks like evening in winter. Everything is gray and dim, the sun blotted out by clouds and smog.

After my dose of nicotine, I’m ready for the next part of the ordeal. I get in line behind a few hundred people to wait for a taxi. I swerve my cart side to side as the line progresses to cut off the people wanting to sneak ahead of me. I hold my elbows out as far as I can to let everyone know that I’ve played this game before. We all move forward in tense staccato steps to hold formation and finally I’m assigned a cab. Now the rest of my journey becomes passive, as it’s the driver’s job to deal with identical conditions on the roads.

My driver’s good at that, though scary as hell. He zips around buses and into the emergency shoulder (which is just as packed as all the other lanes), blaring his fancy reverb-effect horn as he fights his way to the fourth ring road. Of course, I’m already back into China-self, and I hardly take notice of the chaos outside as I glance up from my book (High Fidelity by Nick Hornby today).

Last night, or at least the last time it was dark for me, about 36 hours ago, I had a bunch of my friends out to a local bar. I was psyched to have them all together before leaving, and many of them, all old friends, had never met each other before. One question they asked a few times was whether I was excited to go back ‘home’. I drew a blank at first, because the last two weeks had so utterly ripped me from the China setting that the whole China thing seemed like a dream. Even though I was about to leave in a few hours, I hadn’t really put any direct thought into it. One of the few perks about running all over the place is that you can slip into a new setting right away, and let your consciousness get absorbed in the surrounding reality. I knew that I’d have to get back to China to know what I thought about going back to China. And now here I am.

The Beijing welcome was so typical and complete that I’m right back in the zone. It’s nothing to be excited or nonplussed about, it just is. It’s going back to my life, picking up what I put on pause and continuing like nothing ever happened. Besides, I was only gone for two weeks.

The Beijing welcome, as harrying as it was, is just a part of what makes Beijing whole. You can’t just take the most enjoyable and stimulating things about it in isolation. None of it would be complete without the blunt force that its reality applies to your head at every turn. Though I often have feelings like “if I have to live in a big city, why can’t it be a nice clean one with lots of trees”, I want to keep riding this Beijing thing for a while and see where it takes me. I still have lots of fun to have yet, and this last trip once again affirmed for me that I haven’t become utterly dislocated from the US.

Life After Folklife

2007-07-10T22:56:00.000+08:00

After two weeks of living in a hotel, pulling fifteen hour days, answering endless questions and untangling countless snafu, I have lived to see the end of the 41st Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It was challenging, exhausting, unending and one of the most fun and interesting experiences of my life. I couldn’t wait for it to be over, but I never wanted it to end.

Now, decompressing in the comfort of my family home, I feel conflicted in exactly the same way. I am elated to be relieved of my flock of fifty-plus performers, craftsmen, presenters, officials and a few shamans, but I’m really sad to see them go.

Over the past two weeks I have met some of the most amazing and interesting people out there, from cultural carriers of the four compass points to the people who’ve kept this amazing festival going on for years. I witnessed and helped facilitate a friendly clash of cultures from the Appalachians to the Himalayas, from the British Isles to the islets of the Mekong Delta. The whole process has left my brain in a funk.

I was hoping to make constant reports during the festival, but I was too busy, too tired and too cheap for the ten-dollar internet connection. But while the story is still fresh in my head, I hope to write a few pieces about this great thing that we all took part in. Hopefully I’ll be able to crank out a few decent episodes and people profiles before I run off to my next big messy busy thing, whatever that may be.

So stay tuned. Also, I plan in the future to bring you updates on many of our Yunnan artists. If you stick around, you’ll be among the first to know when the Shangri-La Boys and Rongba Xinna finally press their first albums, or when any of them get a chance to come stateside again. A lot of things were started at the festival, so let’s keep them going…

Party at Jianghu!!

2007-06-22T04:00:00.000+08:00

Now that I'm back in the states, I've got the time and the connection speed to make a post about my birthday party last week. Thanks to everyone who came, and all those who gave me liquor and made me look like an alcoholic.

The staff at Jianghu were great, basically giving me the space for free, knowing that we'd drain them dry (we sure did).

Tunes were supplied by a Chinese/French Jazz band, and Kro showed up halfway through the night with a big stack of fresh pizzas. I gotta start charging this guy for product placement.

As you can see, a good time was had by all. I hope to see everyone again next time around.

By the way, it's not really your birthday unless you get proper plowed and wear a crown:

Mekong River Folklife Festival

2007-06-14T09:31:00.000+08:00

I'm heading back to the states next week. It's been almost a year since my last visit, so I'm looking forward to uncensored reading material and gaining lots of weight.

But this trip isn't all about fun and games. I am travelling to DC to take part in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This year's theme is Mekong: Connecting Cultures. Folk artists and craftsmen from across the Mekong Region (Yunnan, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam) will be descending on the Washington Mall for about two weeks to present their traditional cultures and folkways to the United States in a face-to-face live exhibition.

The Mekong River begins in Tibet and winds its way through Yunnan and all of Indochina before reaching the sea in Saigon. With dozens of cultures, languages and religions along its banks, the Mekong has been called the most culturally diverse river in the world.

I've had the opportunity to play a small supporting role in translating and planning with the Smithsonian Center for Folklife Studies and the government of Yunnan Province over the past few years, and now I will take part in the festival as a presenter (and babysitter) for the folk artists during the festival.

Some hilights of the Yunnan segment will include performers He Jinhua (Naxi), Gen Dequan (Dai) and Luo Fengxue (Yi), all of whom travelled with us on the Yunnan Revealed Tour in 2005. Also in attendance will be He Xiudong, a young Dongba priest of the Naxi People, who is descended from a long line of such priests. He is one of a small number of dedicated youths in China working to preserve the ancient living traditions of Yunnan's ethnic groups. In all, there will be performances of the traditional music and dance of the Yi, Naxi, Dai, Pumi, Jingpo, Lisu and Nu Peoples, as well as the craft traditions of many of the above, as well as Bai and Han. There will also be food presentations from all over the province.

Let's not forget that this festival is about the whole Mekong Region, and that the other countries will be representing with just as much force and diversity. I don't want to spoil all the fun, so just come out and check us out. We'll be on the mall starting June 27, and out there until July 8. Be there be there be there...

A Grounded Taste of Chinese Art

2007-05-28T10:37:00.000+08:00

Buddha's Wisdom by Yu Yao
As some of you readers know, I have spent a lot of my time in the past few years translating and working in China’s hot contemporary art scene. The Chinese art scene is one of the most dynamic ones out there, and the story of how it came to rise out of the ruins of the Cultural Revolution makes it all the more fascinating.

But a growing number of people are starting to grumble about overly inflated prices and the increasingly unattainable status of premium artworks. The luminary figures who came of age and made their names in the eighties and nineties are among some of the richest living artists in the world. Many of the artists I know own private villas in the outskirts of China’s cities. Fang Lijun, one of China’s stars, is also the owner of a large and successful chain of chic restaurants, and Zhang Xiaogang, the superstar of the Chinese contemporary movement, last year became one of only five living artists on earth to have a piece auction for over two million dollars.

There are a lot of reasons behind this, and a lot of interesting stories to tell about this scene, but that will be for another article or articles. Basically what you need to know for now is that prices for good Chinese art are extremely high, and international dealers and auction houses have been flocking to Beijing and Shanghai over the past few years hoping to get in on the action. All eyes are on the auctions, as the standard business model seems to be to buy art on the cheap, create a buzz about the artist, and auction the stuff at Christie’s or Sotheby’s.

This was one of the main reason’s behind the Affordable Art Fair, which was held for the second time last month at Beijing’s 798 Art District by the local English listings magazine, TimeOut Beijing. The magazine staff brought together several local galleries to showcase work by promising young artists with a maximum price of 1,000 USD. With over 600 works on sale, the show was quite a success, as there are plenty of people in Beijing, myself included, who just want something nice for their apartment. If it can be sold for a profit a few years down the line, all the better.

I missed the opening day, so I missed out on some of the better works. I was actually feeling a bit disappointed, until I made my way to the back of the gallery and ran into Jessica and Tony from the Amelie Gallery (www.longyibang.com). They impressed me not only because they were actually there and actively involved even on an off day, but because of the philosophy behind their gallery.

Opera Actress by Zheng Yukui

As a matter of principle, the Amelie team shies away from the expo and auction scenes, preferring to take a hands-on approach to nurturing and promoting promising artists with depth of vision and a new approach to their art. They also deal almost exclusively with artists in the affordable range, ie stuff they can sell for less than 2,000 USD.

Girls by Li Jinru

They showcase a lot of young contemporary artists who either use traditional media such as woodcut and silkscreen, or are blazing into new territory such as cartoon and graphic design. They also focus a lot of effort on what they choose to call Chinese Neo-Classicism. The sculptors, photographers, painters and printers in this field all show an amazing breadth of knowledge in ancient Chinese cultural traditions, and are taking them in new directions, from Zheng Yukui, who sculpts women in contemporary styles but according to the traditionally revered body-type (no anorexic models here), to Yu Hang, a female artist who body-paints her model in traditional Chinese motifs and photographs her strutting through Chinese cultural memory. The gallery also highlights folk art masters in paper-cutting, embroidery and sculpture, bringing living folk art to the status it deserves as fine art.

The mantra at Amelie is ‘making social progress through art’. They are of course in the business to make money, but for them it’s more than that. Tony has a master’s degree in art from London, and Jessica is deeply grounded in business and client management. They are here for the long run, for the art, and not just to make some quick millions under the auction hammer. I plan to be seeing a lot more of them in the future, and not just to check up on the artists I’ve collected. Besides, I’ll probably never be able to afford the artists I translate for anyway.

In other art news, the final manuscript for my translation of “Huajiadi” has reached my hands. If all goes well, the book should be off the presses this fall. This book, by Tang Xin, talented female curator and artistic director for Taikang Life Insurance, traces through interviews the experiences of China’s top artists as they grew and developed from 1979 to 2005. It is already a very important work in the Chinese art world, and I can only hope that my translation is good enough to do the same for the English speaking world. More on that later.

Above images courtesy of Amelie Art Gallery.

A New Infusion

2007-05-25T13:26:00.000+08:00

Those who know me are aware that I’ve abstained from posting on this blog about a big part of my life, which is my involvement in the tea industry and my infatuation with puer tea. The main reason for that is that I usually posted my tea rants on the LJ Puer Tea Community (http://community.livejournal.com/puerh_tea), which is the most lively English forum out there and a must read for any wannabe aficionados.

Unfortunately, politics have intervened recently. While the Chinese internet has opened up in a lot of ways recently, many foreign-hosted sites that had grown popular with Chinese bloggers have been blocked from the mainland, including Live Journal.
So the bad news is now I can’t post on my favorite forum anymore, but the good news is that now I will start to post more tea related articles here. Besides, I’ve been really slacking in keeping this blog up to date recently.

I’m not going to bore everyone with detailed tasting notes. Instead, I will write a bit to introduce the background of my favorite tea, and some cool things that are going on in the market and the culture of it. As I haven’t had time for much else recently anyway, the next few posts should follow in that fashion.

Puer tea is one of the most ancient forms of tea out there. It is produced from a special variety of tea that so far only grows in the mountains of southern Yunnan Province. Certain bacteria that reside in the leaf cause a complex chemical process over the years, turning the tea from a strong, bitter drink to a smooth, earthy infusion. The best teas have been carefully aged for decades, and can command thousands of dollars on the market, giving puer such appellations as the ‘drinkable antique’ and the ‘wine of teas’. Of the some 3,000 types of tea out there, puer has the most complex array of flavors, and is probably the most difficult tea to master.

Southern Yunnan is likely the birthplace of tea. Ancient ancestors of the Khmer peoples are believed to have begun cultivating it from local wild trees over 2000 years ago, from where it piggy-backed its way to the rest of the world along the old salt trading routes.

Ancient traders would steam and press the harvested leaves into brick and gum-drop shaped cakes to ease packing and storage, in a tradition that continues to this day. Along the journey, over long periods and highly variable weather conditions, the tea would take on a much richer flavor. This was one of the key elements in the spread of tea to the world. If it lacked the aging properties like most modern teas, it never would have survived the long journeys across the ancient trading routes to the end consumer.

Cantonese traders caught on to these special properties, and were storing the tea in large warehouses as early as the Qing Dynasty. Puer tea collection has always been a popular pursuit among the well-to-do of the overseas Chinese communities, especially in the Pacific region.

Until a few years ago, due to a lack of interest and a steady supply of good, cheap product from state run factories, puer was considered the poor, unkempt step-brother in the world of tea. But back then, all tea was pretty cheap, as China’s rich were chasing after Swiss watches, French wine and European luxury cars. One of the positive effects of China’s continuing economic growth is that many people are tracing back the roots of their tradition, and a cultural revival of sorts is taking hold as people find a totally Chinese outlet for their consumer habits.

This has led to a revival of puer tea, which is collectible and investment-worthy like fine wines. Puer has now for the third time in its storied history taken its place as a coveted connoisseur item, and prices are shooting through the roof as investors seek shelter from the growing bubbles in the property and securities markets. Will this recent market craze last? Probably not. But I think that puer is here to stay, and besides, it’s just so damn good…

The City Awakes...

2007-04-20T12:14:00.000+08:00

Spring has finally come to Beijing, and everyone, myself included, is starting to wake up from self-induced hybernation.
Now my winter here was anything but uneventful, but one just can't be bothered to go out all the time with the wind howling and Beijing's dark, hazy winter skies. Nor can one be bothered to throw rocking parties and bring out top-notch live music. I was beginning to lose hope for this city, which all the locals brag is one of the most dynamic and happening places on earth.
Well, it's almost t-shirt weather now, and a few unheard of spring rains have blessed the city with some much needed greenery. It's like there's some conspiracy in Beijing that all the freaks wait to come out until the thermometer hits 20c. Last week, my mailbox and cell phone were suddenly flooded with invites to all kinds of parties, new bars and gallery openings. I can't believe I still have time to go to work these days.
Last week started with an exhibition at the LA Gallery up by the airport, which promptly turned into a backroom tea session and whirlwind tour of all the galleries and studios in the neighborhood, followed by a 30 person feast at a nearby Korean BBQ. We must have demolished a whole side of beef that night.
The next day, on invitation from someone I met the night before, I headed into a maze of hutongs, or old alleyways, to a poorly marked Qing-era courtyard house that now serves as the Jianghu Bar. Equipped with simple wooden furniture and littered with folk art from Yunnan and Tibet, this is the prime hangout for a group of young musicians and hipsters who mostly met each other hiking and jamming through China's mountainous frontier. Their favorite pasttime, after drinking, is holding improv open-mike jam sessions on a stage the size of my coffee table in the corner of Jianghu.
Kids were breaking out harmonicas, bongoes and just about anything that makes noise. There was plenty of scatting, plenty of freestyle blues, and more than one half hour drum trance. These are all things I thought I had left behind forever back in Yunnan. Thank goodness I was wrong.

This young lady, whose name escapes me, was being begged to get on stage all night. My cellphone mike doesn't do her justice, but rest assured, she's got a killer voice. I plan to spend a lot of time this summer up at the Jianghu bar, but don't bother asking me where it is; I'm gonna keep this place to myself for a while.

I used up all my weekend fizz on friday night. It started out in the normal way, with a marathon taxi run across the city at rush hour to meet my friends at a popular Xinjiang restaurant. Man I hate the traffic in this city.
The occasion: my buddy Hong Qi, a folk rocker from Xinjiang, was giving face to the backers of his latest album. Hong Qi knows everybody, and by the time I arrived at 6:30 (I left the office at 5), there were at least ten people at the table, including a Mr Hao, the senior editor for Rolling Stone Magazine's China edition, Old Men (more on him later), who is a filmmaker for CCTV, a couple of Xinjiang wanderers, and half of Hong Qi's band.
We managed to eat and drink there until 10:00, accompanied by impromptu songs from the Xinjiang contingent and several reloads of roast mutton kebabs. The smart ones found ways to excuse themselves along the way, but Hong Qi never lets me leave. I finally found a proper excuse, so I could run off to another jam session in another antique Beijing house, at Jiangjinjiu.

The expat trendchasers already know about this place, so I can tell you: Jiangjinjiu is a tiny music bar in the park area behind Beijing's Drum Tower. At least 150 people were packed in a room the size of a one car garage to hear a Chinese/Spanish outfit jamming out on a smooth latin-fusion groove. Hong Qi and co managed to track us down, Kro from the Kro's Nest (best damn pizza joint in town!) and a lot of the kids from Jianghu showed up, so we managed to take over half the bar. The stage is only about two inches off the ground, so we were more dancing with the band than to them. Definitely another place I'll be seeing a lot of in the future.

That was a great week, but this week was just taxing. The Roots, one of my favorite bands of all time, brought their amazing live hiphop/jazz/everythingwithabeat act to Beijing on their first trip to China tuesday, and gave an excellent show to a sold-out house at Star Live, just next to the Lama Temple. I've always respected these guys for their instrumental skills and rich knowledge of musical heritage. I guess they were out to educate the local scene, so they mixed their own stuff with musical interludes of everything from Maceo Parker to Black Sabbath and Method Man.

After dragging my worn-out body through another hectic day at the office, all I wanted to do was go home and curl up with a good book (I'm working on "Living to Tell the Tale", Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memiors), but then I realized with horror that I had to go back to the exact same club for another night of music and fun. Tonight was Hong Qi's concert and Old Men's birthday. I had to go. Had to.

Hong Qi has been in the folk rock scene for over a decade. He wandered into Beijing from Xinjiang with nothing but a guitar on his back about ten years ago, and has been constantly organizing music events and helping out small bands ever since.
His brand of folk rock has never caught on in a huge way, but he has a scattered and devoted following around the country. He's helped to popularize the idea that artists should write, play and sing their own songs, a practice rendered nearly extinct by China's karaoke culture, and he's dedicated to helping out any and everyone who does so. He uses his website , massive text messaging and his network of media friends to promote all kinds of 'genuine' musicians, be they into traditional Xinjiang music, Beijing-style rock, or something no-one's heard of. He's keyed in to all kinds of music scenes and cultural trends, and is the one who turned me on to Arlo Guthrie and the American folk scene. In short, he's a cool guy, if a bit bu kaopu sometimes.
True to his style, he gave up more than half of his stagetime to introduce a long line of smalltime bands and singers. The scene was much more subdued than the night before - we actually had tables to sit at - but the whole audience was made up of old friends and hardcore music lovers. A good time as always.

No night at Star Live - even the roots concert - is complete without a late nite visit to Jin Ding Xuan. A Beijing institution of sorts, the Xuan, as we call it, is an enormous 24 hour southern style dim-sum restaurant with an old-school Beijing style that sits right next to star live. The place serves great food, and the giant food halls on each of four floors are always packed. I actually had to wait in line for a table at two in the morning once.
This time Old Men had reserved tables for 30 people to celebrate his birthday after the show. Men Xinxi can trace his family line back to the Manchu invasion of Beijing which established the Qing Dynasty. He was an influential artist in the mid eighties, and picked up filmmaking sometime around then. He now works on a semi-independent basis as a documentary filmmaker for CCTV, where his claim to fame is the seminal film series "Twenty Years of Popular Music", in which he somehow managed to get the likes of Deng Lijun, China's first pop star, and Cui Jian, the godfather of Chinese rock and a political timebomb, onto the national tv network for the first time. A Beijinger to the core, Old Men has let me catch a glimpse of Beijing's older generation of street intellectuals, the generation who lived on cabbage and rice in their youth, hit the countryside during the cultural revolution, and whose poetry, art and writings captivated the nation and terrified the state during the eighties.
On the night of the party, these old men traded old stories and debated the fate of the nation between gulps of erguotou, Beijing's jet-fuel firewater, and broke out in duets of Beijing Opera while us young'uns sat there dumbstruck.

So now it's Friday, and I think I'm going to take it easy for a change. I have the whole summer ahead of me in this undefinable city, and I'd like to keep my liver with me for another couple of decades. Hopefully I'll be able to get around to making more blog posts while I'm at it.

Kunming Mafia at it Again...

2007-03-30T11:42:00.000+08:00

Thanks to Kris Ariel at Salvador's, you can see one of our acting gigs on Youtube. Back in my days of freedom, I did some acting in locally produced tv shows for some free travel and extra cahs. There are a lot of stories there, and maybe I'll get around to posting a few one of these days.

I appeared in about 10 tv shows between 2002 and 2005, but most of them either never aired or never got a good spot. Two of my bigger roles are still floating around in censor limbo, something that's a real risk in the industry in China. Scripts are first approved by various govt bodies according to their content, but then the approval process has to start all over again once the final cut is made. The whole process can take years sometimes and leave the finished product choppy and impossible to follow. I guess it comes with the territory.

"Operation Without Borders" was my last film (for now?), and was filmed in Kunming during summer 2005. The CCTV film crew was the most professional that I had worked with, though that's not saying much, and we managed to knock out my scenes in three days. Though I was disappointed that I wouldn't be able to show off my Chinese, I have to say it was an interesting role, and I made some decent cash for a few days' work.

Most of my previous roles revolved around my being a foreigner in China. I have played the part of 1930's explorer, evil imperialist swine, and general lost foreigner in China. This one was different. All of my scenes 'took place in' New York, and I didn't have a single line in Chinese. I can't remember what my name was, but I was a dentist by day and demented drug mafia hitman by night. I tortured people, drove around in a cadillac, and took a bullet in the head, all firsts for my so-called acting career.

I hadn't put much thought to the gig back when we did it, either because most of my films never made it to mainstream tv, and when they did, no-one ever bothered to tell me. I was doing it for some extra cash and as a favor to a friend in the crew, and I was already pretty sure I didn't want to do this anymore. I was already preparing for the Yunnan Revealed tour (see earlier postings), and knew that my easygoing freelance lifestyle was coming to its end.

I never thought that this film would come back to me, but lo and behold, it ended up airing a few times on a primetime spot on CCTV. Nearly two years after filming, it just up and popped out of the woodwork. A lot of my colleagues and friends got a real kick out of it, especially watching me die. I remember one friend's story: "hey ma, Jeff's on TV! Come check it out." His mother walked out just in time to see me lying on the ground with a bullet in my forehead. Classic.

Every acting gig I did was a real learning experience. The Chinese, just like everyone else in the world, are loathe to breach the topic of death, and have a lot of customs to get around that. When I did my death scene, the producer handed me a red envelope with some cash in it. "Put this in your pocket when you die, and go out and spend the cash tonight to ward off bad luck".

Safety is another big issue, but from what I've heard about Bollywood, it could be much worse. I've done a lot of scenes with guns in my day, and it can be a bit disconcerting. First off, no one sees the point in paying for replica guns. A special detail from the People's Armed Police or the army shows up with a crate of real guns, and not just pistols, but semis and assault rifles. Then the prop guy goes to work on the bullets. Why buy blanks when you can have some underpaid minion pry the bullets out and bend the casing around the charge. On more than one occasion I have felt metal fragments scraping across my face.

All in all, I have to say that I've really enjoyed the experience, despite the long hours, imminent danger and horrible food. I've gotten free vacations to interesting places, met beautiful women, and will have a pile of stories to tell the kids one day

Bang, Continued

2007-03-04T20:44:00.000+08:00

In China, today is Yuanxiao Jie, the fifteenth day of the New Lunar Year. This is the first full moon of the year, and the official end of New Year's festivities. It is also known as the Lantern Festival, as people in many areas make paper lanterns to hang tonight.

In other news, I finally got around to uploading footage I shot with my phone on Chinese New Year's. Words just don't do justice...

Happy Pig Year, everybody.

Luo Xu and the Earth Nest

2007-02-26T10:11:00.000+08:00

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while is introduce you to Luo Xu, an old Kunming friend. Sometimes referred to as “Savant Genius”, or even “that crazy guy with the house”, Luo Xu is a sort of fixture on the Kunming mindscape. He is an artist and the proprietor of the Earth Nest, a place that defies a half sentence description.

Luo Xu has been making sculptures with no formal training for the past few decades. After a rough and tumble time in and around Yunnan, he stumbled onto a plot of land outside of Kunming and began work on his Magnum Opus, the Earth Nest, which serves as a sort of museum for his myriad sculptures and a playground for his friends, among other things.

I first noticed the place when I had just arrived in Kunming and was on my way to the Stone Forest, a popular tourist sight east of the city. My teacher brushed it off, saying “maybe it’s a brick factory or something”. I wasn’t satisfied with that, but I couldn’t quite figure out what those shapes, resembling something like a giant ant hill, could mean.

Over a year later I began to get to know Kunming’s vibrant art scene, and stumbled across Luo Xu through a mutual acquaintance. A nice, scruffy looking old guy, we got along pretty well. He said that I should come to his house some time. I didn’t put a lot of thought to it, as plenty of small time artists had dragged me into their studios trying to sell paintings before. It would be another few months before I was dragged there by some friends.

I stood at the gate stupefied, with my first memories of the place coming out of the cellar. Words don’t do a whole lot of justice to this place. He’s created an entire fantasy world out of mounds, warped lines and piles of giant sculptures. He’s always changing it around or adding to it, and there are always plenty more sculptures to squeeze in.

He and Luo Hui, an aging donkey, preside over the sprawling compound. Cool Kunmingers who’ve been around long enough all know the place, and it has served as a sort of social center for us over the years. We’ve thrown some excellent parties there, and would do it more often if that didn’t mean renting a few buses. It’s quite far from town. He’s had several bonfire/barbecues, and even once hosted a Nepalese band that was passing through.

It’s been a bit less active in recent years, but I try my best to have dinner there at least once each time I’m in town. A lot of his friends bring important clients there to impress them, and sometimes we just go there to hang out. His artistic skills are rivaled only by his skills in the kitchen, and we know he’s always good for a homestyle Yunnan dinner and buckets of home-brewed barley wine.

Many people are frightened by the place and by Luo’s artworks, but if you get to know the guy, you start to see a whimsical intent in his pieces, like with the golfing terracotta soldier that sits on my desk. One of his favorite elements is legs, and they can be found behind every corner. Sometimes he stacks them up to make odd things like windmills, scorpions and dragonflies.

He’s probably one of the most renowned and least known artists in China. His work is rarely shown in any big international Chinese art book, but almost every successful Chinese artist I know collects him, and he has been featured in many international exhibitions. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have an exclusive agent, or maybe it’s because the international critics can’t find any overt social critique inside, which is what the western market wants (it’s actually there if you really look).

A few years ago I had the honor of accompanying him to Paris and Barcelona for his solo exhibition during the “Year of China in France”. That was a crazy story that I should probably save for another blog. The Parisian gallery-goers went wild over his stuff, but he decided not to establish a beachhead there. Maybe he likes being on the sidelines. Either way, I think that artistic accomplishment is what’s most important for such a life, not fame or money.

Home is Where...

2007-02-25T15:34:00.000+08:00

The concept of home has become a difficult notion for me over the past few years. I love my family, and there’s still a soft spot in my heart for the suburban wasteland outside of DC that I grew up in, but I’ve been away for a long time, and my loyalties are conflicting. Since coming to China, the place I identify with most has always been Yunnan, and my most familiar and comfortable roost has been its capital, Kunming.

So naturally that’s where I went for my week vacation during the Chinese New Year. Though I’ve been in Beijing for close to a year now, I never had time to sort out my old Kunming apartment and all the stuff I had left there. My main goal last week (actually number 2 after relaxing and soaking up sun) was to empty out my old apartment for good and move a few things into an apartment that I share with a couple of friends.

My week in Kunming was an excellent one. Every day was warm and sunny, and I had plenty of time to track down my old friends and check up on my old haunts. But though a lot of Kunming’s essence remains the same, it dawned on me this time just how much has changed since I first got here.

When I first came to Kunming in 2000, the city had just stuttered through its first wave of modernization. The first cluster of skyscrapers had just emerged from a sea of low soviet concrete housing blocks and mud-brick traditional homes. Rush hour traffic was a mass of bicycles and pedestrians in the middle of the road. Much of the street life in Kunming took place in a maze of winding patchwork alleys lined with organic clusters of old buildings and lean-tos. Every night the streets filled with shao-kao tables, Kunming’s famous do-it-yourself barbecue style.

The Kunming of the time was a laid back city filled with old men in Mao suits, horse carts and street markets. Orchids and cacti sprouted from cracks in the mud-brick walls, and hemp plants shot up from cracks in the sidewalk. Old ladies sat in the shade of ancient gingko or eucalyptus trees playing endless games of Mah-jongg while young couples hid in the shade of the willows at Green Lake Park and the city was constantly bathed in a mellow golden sunshine as old men on the rooftops guided fleets of pigeons across the skyline.

Those were much simpler days for our tiny foreigner community too. We all knew each other then as we zipped around the city on our mountain bikes, meeting up for a smoke after class, sipping cheap beers on a friend’s balcony overlooking the peasant slums of Kunming’s west side. The locals were still curious and enamored of us strange pilgrims, welcoming us into their homes, offices and disco tables, and shouting “hello” at every corner. The only things I had to juggle with my bicycle journeys were Chinese and Taichi classes, and though we knew a bit about the dark underside to society and politics around us, we were rarely confronted with it.
Our main difficulty was making life a little more comfortable in a city with poor plumbing, erratic electricity, and almost no western food. In the days before the western franchises flooded the landscape, the most exciting topic of conversation was often the arrival of a new amenity like passable wine or edible cheese or maybe even a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner.

This is the environment where I fell in love with China, and learned how to function in this otherworldly society. In fact, most foreigners who were there at the time came out fluent in the language and culture. We have since fanned out across the continent, and flourish in situations that frazzle many self-proclaimed China hands. Unlike a lot of foreign communities in larger cities, we didn’t come out here just to make a buck. There was something about Kunming that attracted the eccentric romantics. We were there for a way of life.

The Kunming I saw last week was much different, as was I. I haven’t left the city for very long, and I go back a lot. Maybe it was that I spent the whole week sifting through nearly seven years of accumulated mementos and reminders of my time here.

Most of the old city is gone now, the wreckers having yielded, if only temporarily, to a mere three neighborhoods. Gone is Meat Street, the sprawling old Muslim Quarter downtown that was lined with drying beef and lamb. Nearly gone is the famed bird and flower market. The shaokao tables have been relegated to a few shoddy neighborhoods on the outskirts of town. The bicycle traffic has given way to auto-gridlock interlaced with the muffled drone of electric scooters. In place of all this are an ever-growing number of high rise apartment complexes with names like MoMa, Norwegian Wood and Green Card (ISYN!), touting their mastery of the foreign lifestyle, offering modernity and civilization priced by the square meter.

I have changed with the city, as well as apart from it. Each time I go back, I juggle my nights between various banquets and meetings with local businessmen, officials and friends, and every move is carefully calculated to maintain my social networks and not slight anyone, a very important aspect to business in China.

When I’m burning the midnight oil in the Beijing office or negotiating my way across this concrete monstrosity in the haze and flying dust, my mind wanders back to the old Kunming, basking in the warm February sun, downing a horrible cup of coffee at Journey to the East.
Kunming seems a bit boring in comparison to its previous incarnation. But it’s still a laid back city, and the golden highland sun still penetrates every corner. I wish there was still a place like the one I first knew, but I’ll settle for the one I can take. We’ve sold out and moved into a luxury high rise, but we can watch over our beloved city from the balcony, and the pigeons still zip between the solar water heaters on the rooftops. Progress is not always absolute or in a straight line. I can’t help feeling that the people of Kunming have paid a dear price for their new digs. But I’ll still keep going back at the drop of a hat, and I’ll still wear my time in Kunming as a badge of pride.

But I still haven’t settled the real question at hand, what is home?

Bang

2007-02-25T14:34:00.000+08:00

As usual, Chinese New Year was not ushered in with a bang, but with an ever-growing apocalyptic crescendo of fire, sulfur and smoke. The New Year as it fits the lunar calendar happens at a slightly different time each year, but no matter where it lands, it’s a huge disruption in the ‘normal’ flow of things. Think Thanksgiving on steroids; during this year’s holiday, transportation authorities are expecting somewhere near three-billion person/trips as the entire country skips off work, goes home to see a few sets of relatives scattered in various provinces, and maybe finds the time to squeeze in a vacation sometime during the week. And this is on an infrastructure that’s already bursting at the seams.

This is without a doubt China’s most important holiday. Everyone has to go home if at all possible, and all work (except for some retail) grinds to a total halt. This is when the big year end bonuses come out, and this is when the perennial calendars, gifts, red envelopes and greeting cards are tossed around in hopes of improving one’s standing with his superiors. Last year China’s infrastructure was hit with 2.5 billion person/trips, and twenty billion SMS text messages were sent across China’s cell towers.

On the last day of the lunar year, it is customary to spend the evening with family, eating a giant meal over the course of several hours. There are several dishes tied to the holiday, but the two most important are fish and dumplings. The word for fish rhymes with surplus, so you have to ‘have a surplus every year’. There’s probably some kind of similar reasoning behind the dumplings, but I don’t know it. Everyone stays up until midnight, when the year officially begins.

This is where the holiday becomes so utterly and uniquely Chinese. The changing of the year is a time when spirits of good fortune and calamity have a chance to influence your whole year, so it’s only natural that you should chose this time to play with fire.

Apparently ghosts and evil spirits are terrified of firecrackers, and if you let off enough of them, you can scare all your coming misfortune away. From what I saw last night, Beijing’s got a good year ahead of it. Last year was the first time that the firework ban was lifted from central Beijing, and the people have been wasting no time getting back to their old ways.

If you haven’t taken part in this festival, you’re probably sitting there imagining a lion dance and little kids running around with firecrackers. That happens all right, but you have to remember that the Chinese invented gunpowder. They look at firecrackers, cherry bombs, roman candles and rockets as a nice little afterthought for the kids. The big guys play with mortars. Mortars. The big ones, some of them big enough to be part of a large professional fire show. This is what was selling on streetcorners all over Beijing for the past several weeks.

For the past several nights, the lights and sounds of the pyromaniacs echoed across the night sky like an indecisive thunderstorm, not sure whether or not to enter the city. Then, on the day of New Year’s Eve, the sounds got louder, closer and more frequent. This is nice, we thought. Being quite at home in China, I had an inkling that we were in for a good show on our 18^thfloor balcony, but I had never done New Year’s in Beijing before, and I had no idea how cool it was going to be. As the sky grew dark, the rumbling got louder and louder, with each explosion bouncing around between the buildings and setting off car alarms left and right. We could see mortars exploding in the foreground, behind the first rows of buildings, and way off on the edges of town. The ones we couldn’t see hinted at their presence with flashes lighting up buildings and patches of sky in each direction.

We sat down for dinner at about eight, interrupted frequently by a rush outside to watch a particularly large burst. By the time we finished around ten, it had grown to a constant barrage. We set off a few roman candles and a mortar series from the balcony for good measure. When it was twelve, the city was bright as day, as thousands upon thousands of mortars were lit off repeatedly and passionately from every non-flammable patch of land in the capital.

Normally at this point in the cliché, the next sentence would start with “when the smoke cleared”, but it didn’t. The barrage slowed down a little bit, but didn’t die down. An hour later, there were still explosions in every corner of the sky, and smoke hanging over everything.

We decided it was as good a time as any to go for a drive through town, so we did. As we made our way through, much of the city was oddly quiet while the bombs burst overhead. Every streetcorner was covered in the debris, ash and paper, which at some points was piled several feet high.

Judging by the trash everywhere, the real place to do up Chinese New Year is in the hutongs, the old streets of inner Beijing. The one running along the Yonghegong Temple was paved in red debris, and crowds were massing in front of the temple gate, offering incense to Buddha and other spirits in hopes of a good year. In a few hours the gates would open to the masses, and a bonanza of well-wishing, incense smoke and Buddhist chants would begin, in one of Beijing’s most famous folk traditions, the Miao Hui, or temple fair.

We went to a party, which was deserted. It doesn’t really matter anyway. Last night I found out a few things. First, this holiday is becoming more important to me than I thought it would. Second, Beijing, and the rest of China, will probably never run out of fascinating little surprises for me. Third and most importantly, I need to buy some more fireworks.

Happy New Year!

Kicker Closeup

2007-01-24T11:19:00.001+08:00

Kicker Closeup
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Swoosh

2007-01-24T11:12:00.001+08:00

Swoosh
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Kicker Flip1

2007-01-24T11:11:00.005+08:00

Kicker Flip1
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Kicker Flip2

2007-01-24T11:11:00.003+08:00

Kicker Flip2
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Kicker Flip3

2007-01-24T11:11:00.001+08:00

Kicker Flip3
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Green Hat Gang

2007-01-24T11:10:00.001+08:00

Green Hat Gang
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Eli and Kro, my Beijing laowai buddies. Eli represents a lot of snowsportt and skating brands here in China, including Forum, who's main color is green. To 'wear a green hat' in China means that you're a cuckold. There are countless stories out there of dumb foreign companies ruining their image by passing out green hats, but this time it's intentional, and with the young, alternative set that's into snowboarding, it's starting to catch on. People are starting to line up for their cuckold hats...

Nanshan Open 07

2007-01-24T10:38:00.000+08:00

Thank the Christmas Pacific earthquake, which severed the Pacific-US communications cable, for my delays in posting. Believe it or not, we over here in China are still suffering from slower internet access almost a month later.

A few weeks ago I went with some of my laowai buddies to Nanshan, a small ski resort outside of Beijing, to watch the Nanshan Open, a snowboard competition at their bitchin new snowboard park. Chinese and international boarders duked it out on the enormous kickers for a chance at 10,000 euros for first place.

I didn't stick around to watch who won, but the Chinese boarders, most notably Wang Lei (China's top rider) put on a good show, with international pros hailing from Norway, Canada and a few other really cold places.

The event was sponsored by Red Bull (thx for the free drinks!) with some punk bands performing right in the park thanks to Gibson. Cheers to Beijing's local snowboard scene for being a lot hotter than most folks on the outside would imagine. Also cheers to all the people, foreigner and Chinese alike, who are working to build this market and scene. You guys really have your sh** together.

Pics should be appearing above shortly...

Donation

2007-01-15T14:00:00.001+08:00

Donation
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Gansu Women

2007-01-15T13:58:00.003+08:00

Gansu Women
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Huining Landscape

2007-01-15T13:58:00.001+08:00

Huining Landscape
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Morning over Huining

2007-01-15T13:54:00.001+08:00

Morning over Huining
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Zhongchuan Locals

2007-01-15T13:53:00.001+08:00

Zhongchuan Locals
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Mud Wall

2007-01-15T13:51:00.001+08:00

Mud Wall
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Huishi

2007-01-15T13:37:00.001+08:00

Huishi
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

The Team

2007-01-15T13:36:00.001+08:00

The Team
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

My Long March

2007-01-15T12:55:00.000+08:00

Part I

Though still in its infancy, the new year has proven to be an eventful one. After spending the holidays among old friends in Kunming, I started out on this year’s first project, taking part in the final days of CCTV’s My Long March Event.

My Long March is a television event devised by Cui Yongyuan, a famous talkshow host on CCTV (China Central Television). It commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the Long March, which if you don’t know about, you’re just going to have to google it on your own. For the event, 26 hand-selected participants retraced the main Long March route across China, who crossed eight provinces, 6,100 kilometers, eight months and four snow mountains without anything resembling a brake. Each participant had to carry their own water, clothing, toiletries and sleeping bag on their backs, along with, lo and behold, two cakes of our Dayi Classic 66 tea (one raw, one ripe).

Back before the event began, we at Dayi agreed to sponsor the My Long March Event, as did Aigo, Chery, Kingcamp and a few others. What we did differently is that on top of that, we also became their charity partner. The Long March passed through much of China’s poorest, most remote regions, which is what they still are today. Through auctions of special collector’s teas, we have already raised over 10 million RMB (1.2 million USD) for charity projects along the Long March Route, and in cooperation with Cui Yongyuan and the China Youth Development Foundation, we have built a series of charity schools, installed water management facilities, donated disaster relief supplies, restored tombs of fallen soldiers and handed out jackets, blankets and other supplies to the old surviving soldiers who had been left behind 70 years ago.

The My Long March Team was scheduled to march into Huining, a county in Gansu Province, on January 5, ending their eight month ordeal. Huining is the county where the three divisions of the Red Army reunited and founded their first Soviet base region, and it is the official end point of the Long March. My job was to put together a team of seven people from our company to walk the last two days of the march with them.

I chose to have four workers sent from the factory, and for Yao Tianlai, one of our dealers, Zhang Wei, one of our marketing guys, and myself to come out for the hike. The four workers were all local Menghai youths, representing the Hani, Dai, Bulang and Han Chinese ethnic groups. Some of them had never left the comfy environs of southern Yunnan, let alone set foot on a plane, so I had my work cut out for me buying them hiking gear and coordinating our work together.

Part II – Journey to the Mud Kingdom

Our flight into Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province, was one of the toughest two hour flights I’ve ever taken. I was already exhausted from a day running around Kunming handling last minute details, and our plane was scheduled for a stopover in Chengdu. We slowly approached the Sichuan basin in the evening, and the plane began to skip across the basin’s moist, cold air like a stone on water. It was the worst turbulence I’d ever seen.

We were all about ready to pass out as we finally pulled into the tarmac at Lanzhou’s airport. My view out of the window was obscured by a heavy fog, and the strange thing was that my view of the indoor baggage claim area was as well. Later that night, our gracious hosts from the Gansu Rural Credit Cooperative, who provided us with a van and a late-night meal of suckling lamb, explained to me that air pollution levels in the city of Lanzhou stand at five hundred times the accepted normal levels.

We came in late at night so we didn’t see much, but the next day I found that we didn’t miss much. Lanzhou is a poor, filthy city surrounded by a desolate landscape. Luckily, we immediately set off for more rural environs.

Gansu, at least the parts of it that I saw, is a very poor, bleak environment. Just North and East of the Tibetan Plateau, it is home to the headwaters of the Yellow River. The entire province seems to be made of yellow mud, and trees are exceedingly rare. It was ridiculously cold, and a recent snow had packed ice on the roads, impeding our progress to Huining County.

We got up before dawn the next day to catch up with the Long March team in Maying, roughly 60 kilometers from the Huining County Seat. As we slid our way through the mud hills in the darkness, our headlights occasionally illuminated crowds of children walking for miles in the sub-zero darkness to get to school. It was definitely uphill both ways for these impoverished children.

The sun rose over a Martian landscape. The blinding white of the snow contrasted with spots of yellow where it had blown away on the rolling mud hills. The villages scattered about were almost completely made of mud, the only thing in abundance here, and old disused structures were left to slowly melt away into the earth.

We caught up with the Long March team just outside of Maying. These were not the people I had met eight months before. They all looked five years older, darker and leaner. The main group walked in a close formation, bearing red flags at the front and flanked by CCTV support vehicles. Behind them stretched a motley collection of stragglers, volunteers, reporters and others who had been following the team all along.

True to the communist spirit of the event, we pulled out our team’s red flag and lined up along the road to greet and salute the Long March team. They were happy to see some familiar faces and welcomed us right in. We started marching immediately, climbing our way up the mountain.

We walked, and then we climbed, and then we walked some more, and then we walked some more. All told, we covered 37 kilometers that day, only stopping for five minutes every hour or so. All through the endless frozen hills, the local peasants dropped what they were doing to gawk at us. The women in their tattered bandannas, and the old men in rough, filthy sweaters just stood there staring. Who were these crazy people marching by with their flags, backpacks and entourage? What were they looking for in this land of melting mud and frozen ice?

And then we walked some more. My face was numb from the biting wind. And then we walked some more. My feet began to holler as they tore apart. And then we walked some more. My knees began to bitch and moan. And then we walked some more. The roads and dirt tracks were packed with hard snow and ice broken only by the chains on the support cars.

At midday, we spent an hour climbing to high ground and after a brief rest descended along a winding road into another treeless mud valley. The round, bald mountains stretched out endlessly on all sides. Everyone from the edges to the depths of the valley came down to greet us as we walked into the village to pay our respects to a mass grave. This was Zhongchuan Township, where over a thousand red army troops died in a gruesome battle with KMT forces. From the gravesite we continued down into the depths of the valley on a seemingly endless road. This is where the pain grew insistent and demanding. Downhill is much harder on the body than any incline could ever hope to be. As we winced our way down, the locals spirited effortlessly past us, hoping to get a good spot to watch the coming spectacle.

At around three o’clock we walked into the Dadunliang Project Hope Elementary school. The only school for several miles around, it was one of our recent charity projects. We were building eight new buildings to house the overflow of poor students who made this walk every day just to learn how to read. They made us a simple lunch, which I needed more than I had thought, and then we struggled like ancient men to stand for the coming ceremony.

We gathered with the children and local officials at the gate of the school to dedicate it and give out backpacks, books and sports equipment to the some 200 students served here. We were made to stand (owwwww!) as the local officials, one by one, read long speeches carefully calculated to mean nothing. Then it was my turn. I made a short motivational speech directly to the kids. I told them that I admired their spirit, trudging through the pre-dawn cold to learn how to read, and I told them that if they could make something of themselves, to remember where they came from and help the ones they left behind. I got a strong applause from the team members and audience alike, though I’m not sure if it was for a good speech or for the mercy of my brevity.

To give a sense of the poverty in the region, you can take note that the most common propaganda statement on the walls of the village huts was one naming a cash bonus for women who elect for vasectomies. The bonus when two women in a family get the operation is 3400 RMB, about 400 dollars. The people have to struggle for half a year to raise meager yields of grains and potatoes from the lifeless mud, and the rest of their time is a struggle to stay warm in their mud huts and give fodder to their flocks of sheep. The whole north of China is perilously short on water and vegetation, and desertification is becoming an ever greater menace as these people struggle to make their lives a little better.

And then we walked some more…

We climbed our way, bodies in agony, out of the valley, and when we finally reached the top, we faced a long descent into the next one. Don’t worry, just another ten kilometers to go! After a few more eons had passed, my numbed mind slowly came to the realization that we had stopped walking. It was time for the team to find a place to sleep.

Going corporate has its perks. I gratefully poured what remained of my body into our luxury van (thanks credit co-op!) and watched dazed as the mud houses whizzed past. My mind started to come back later as liquor was poured down my throat in the hotel restaurant. Apparently it was a nice dinner, and my belly was very happy. I floated upstairs and passed out with a faint notion that I could sleep for five hours, if lucky, before it was time to walk again.

And then we walked some more…

Part III

The road was a lot better and a bit shorter the next day, but my body was not happy. I really thought I had injured myself, but I couldn’t let my team down. We followed a flat road for about 25 kilometers into Huining, where we were greeted by a massive crowd who clapped, shook our hands and stuffed potatoes into our pockets. There was a huge celebration at reunion square on the site of the Red Army reunion seventy years ago.

My team hobbled out of the square sometime later. We were all proud of ourselves, but a little sheepish feeling so tortured after sixty kilometers when the Long March team had walked for 6,100. They’re really a great bunch of folks.

What had moved me the most, beyond the poverty and desolation of the area, beyond the physical challenges of the march, was the spirit of the Long March team, and how warmly they had welcomed us. Other sponsors had basically thrown a bunch of money at them for pure advertising. We had worked with the team throughout the trip to organize charity work all along the way. Several of them came over and thanked me (though I was just a part of a team myself) for our efforts. They all said basically the same thing: “If we didn’t have this work, we would be just plain walking, and what would be the point of that? We all feel that we’ve done something meaningful over the past months, and you are the guys who made that possible.” Sheepishly, which is the only proper adverb for this situation in China, I replied, “thanks for leading the way.” This became our mantra as we got rip-roaring drunk that night at the final banquet together.

Though My Long March was less than the runaway television hit that we were expecting, I still find myself baffled at what just transpired. The team members had been strangers less than a year ago, and somehow they came together and went through this enormous, incomprehensible ordeal together. Only people who have shared a life-changing experience together with a bunch of strangers would be able to comprehend what was going on in their minds, and such people are rare. As we downed case after case of local wine on the government’s tab, I could see a mix of emotions in their eyes. They were elated to be at the end of their journey, but just at the edge you could see a touch of terror at the prospect of splitting up and trying to rejoin the normal world. Nothing will ever be the same for them.

Glossary:

Long March - 长征 Chang2 Zheng1

Charity - 公益 Gong1 Yi2, 慈善 Ci2 Shan4

Donation 捐款 Juan1 Kuan3

Gansu Province 甘肃省 Gan1 Su4 Sheng3

Poverty Stricken Region 贫困地区 Pin2 Kun4 Di4 Qu1

Valley, Bada

2007-01-15T11:59:00.001+08:00

Valley, Bada
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

A Tea Farming Family at Bada

2007-01-15T11:58:00.001+08:00

A Tea Farming Family at Bada
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Akha Village, Bada

2007-01-15T11:57:00.001+08:00

Akha Village, Bada
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Cherry Blossoms at the Bada Plantation

2007-01-15T11:37:00.001+08:00

Cherry Blossoms at the Bada Plantation
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

The Tree

2007-01-15T11:36:00.001+08:00

The Tree
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

The Bada Plantation

2007-01-15T11:34:00.001+08:00

The Bada Plantation
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

A Tea Flower

2007-01-15T11:33:00.001+08:00

A Tea Flower
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

Menghai Tea Factory

2007-01-15T11:32:00.001+08:00

Menghai Tea Factory
Originally uploaded by xiefeilaga.

A Pilgrimage, of Sorts

2007-01-07T20:27:00.000+08:00

I recently got a break from the cold Beijing weather and made my way to Menghai County, in Yunnan's Xishuangbanna Prefecture, right next to the Burmese border. It's home to our tea factory, and a cultural/bio-diversity hotspot.

The county, in the southwest part of Xishuangbanna, lies well into the tropics, but at an average altitude of 1200 meters. It is one of the powerhouses of puer tea cultivation, and one of tea's original natural habitats. The rolling mountains around Menghai valley are interspersed with vast tracts of tea plantations and old growth jungle, dotted here and there with Akha (ch- Hani, Aini), Bulang and Jinuo villages. Most of the inhabitants of the valleys are Buddhist and Muslim Dai (Northern Thais).

Having finished my company business at the factory, I requisitioned a jeep and headed out with some coworkers to Bada, about a three hour drive up into the mountains. As we set out on Saturday morning, the entire region was enshrouded in a heavy fog. At some points the visibility was less than ten meters; temples, bamboo stands, people and villages would emerge from the nothingness as we worked our way up.

This is the famous mist of southern Yunnan that descends on the region every morning for much of the year. It immerses the forests and plants in a soggy mist before burning off in the afternoon, when the the canopy is bathed by intense tropical sunlight. The phenomenon is caused by the confluence of water-bearing Typhoon and Monsoon winds from the Pacific and Indian Oceans. This, plus the combination of altitude and low latitude, is what endows Yunnan with such a rich and complex natural environment, and it's also what nourishes some of the world's best tea.

We first stopped off at Menghai Tea Factory's Bada plantation. This is a massive plantation consisting of older tea plants that are prized for their unique flavor and aging properties. The plantation takes full advantage of the winter fog, and is surrounded by rich forests that provide abundant spring water for the trees. When we got there, wild cherry trees were in bloom all over the farm, as were the tea plants themselves.

This is the time of year to prune the trees to induce branching and new leaves for the spring. Most of this was done by hand, with the farmers opting for machetes over clippers.

We spent some time with a farmer family, sampling their crop and chatting about their lives there. We sampled some summer tea, somewhat mature leaves that were picked after the first summer rains. Though pretty fresh, they weren't at all bitter, and gave off a rich, smooth flavor that stuck to the chest like molasses. These leaves had caught a smokey flavor from the hearth in the middle of the house, but the right amount of that can add character to a well aged tea. They gave me a big bag of the stuff to take home.

After lunch, we set back out for our real goal, the 1700 year old King of Wild Tea Trees, deep in the cloud forest atop the mountain. The abundance of ancient wild and cultivated tea trees in the region has led many experts to believe that southern Yunnan is tea's ancestral home. Sure enough, we came across a lot of younger wild tea trees in the forest along the way.

Our car could only go so far, so we met up with a local friend at the end of the road, and hiked in. The forest was so dense that it grew dark as soon as we stepped inside. Living in Beijing, it had been a long time since I'd heard so many birds calling. Ancient trees were everywhere, covered in orchids, vines, mosses and other stuff that I don't know the name for. This is definitely one of the most biologically diverse places I've ever been to.

We had just missed a rare bamboo bloom. Bamboo blooms are extremely rare, occurring in a given variety only once every few decades. When a variety of bamboo blooms, it all does so at the same time and promptly dies out. The forest was littered in bamboo carcasses. Who knows when I'll get my next chance to see this rare spectacle. If I had only shown up a week ago...

I must admit that it felt a little anti-climactic when we reached the King of Wild Tea Trees. When it was discovered in the seventies (our driver was part of the first expedition), the tree was over thirty meters tall. As is all too often the case with the world's cultural heritage treasures, the tree's first modern custodians didn't know much about how to protect ancient beings, and took various measures to 'protect' this tree. They tried things like cutting down nearby plants to let in sunlight and erecting a fence around the tree. The best way to take care of an ancient tree like this is to leave it alone. Many of the things they did disrupted the delicate balance that this tree flourished in for almost two millenia. The fence posts around the tree have surely causes a lot of root damage, and some assholes even carved their names into the tree's trunk. The tree has now lost almost half its height, and from the looks of it, may not last the century.

A little bit of silent contemplation next to the tree allowed me to see the tree in a different light. It was host to a thriving community of mosses and creepers, and ancient holes in the tree have probably been home to countless generations of critters. Though the tree was tiny compared to its neighbors in the forest, there was no mistaking that this was an ancient being.

The real depth of what I saw is still sinking in. This plant slowly evolved in this back corner of the world and was discovered and nurtured by an obscure and forgotten people. Somehow (check out the caravan entry) this little plant sired millions of offspring who went on to become one of the most economically, socially and politically important plants in the world, shaping cultures and markets, playing decisive roles in massive historic events from the Opium Wars to imperialism, the American Revolution and Indian Independence. Now a newfound interest in the most traditional of teas is reviving local traditional cultures, whose men can now earn as much money at home than they did when they traveled to far off cities as migrant laborers. These little leaves are also at the forefront of worldwide trends to return to traditional, natural and healthy ways of life. And it all started with an unpretentious little bush growing slowly and quietly among the clouds...

Glossary:

Pilgrimage - 朝圣 Chao2 Sheng4
Tea - 茶 Cha2
Ancient Tea Tree - 古茶树 Gu3 Cha2 Shu4
Primeval Forest - 原始森林 Yuan2 Shi3 Sen1 Lin2
Akha People (a branch of the Hani Nationality) 埃尼人 Ai1 Ni2 Ren2
Hani Nationality - 哈尼族 Ha1 Ni2 Zu2
Menghai Tea Factory - 勐海茶厂 Meng3 Hai3 Cha2 Chang3
Tea Plantation - 茶园 Cha2 Yuan2

The Wa

2007-01-07T20:11:00.001+08:00

I happen to have some time on my hands this morning, so I'm posting about something that I did a long time ago.
Last May, I travelled to Yunnan's far southwest corner on the border with Burma at Cangyuan County to act in a film project. Cangyuan is poor, remote, tropical and absolutely gorgeous. It is home to the Wa, or Ava people, who possibly migrated here from Southeast Asia several thousand years ago.
Linguistically, their closest relatives are the Mon-Khmer, the dominant ethnic group of Cambodia, though they are very different from each other. For one, the Wa practice animism and sorcery (though there are some Buddhists out there) while the Cambodians are mostly Buddhist. Secondly, and more importantly, the Wa used to be headhunters, right up until their 'liberation' by Communist China, and by some accounts, much later than that.

Traditionally, the Wa lived in bamboo and thatch huts, though most have moved on to brick and corrugated steel. Some villages, like Engding, pictured here, have kept their old ways. This one was given government funding to stay traditional and there isn't a scrap of corrugated steel in the whole village. It was almost 100 degrees when we got there, but the houses were amazingly cool inside. Chalk up another point for local knowledge.
Much of the surrounding area is covered in thick jungle, which, I found out only after a few romps, is infested with cobras. There are also bugs everywhere, and their incessant hum would become a cacophany of screams and wails as storms approached. That happened a lot because we were right on the cusp of the monsoon.
We did a lot of filming in the forests, and it is a huge biodiversity hotspot. I saw wild orchids, ginger, and even what looked like a wild ficus tree (ficus for congress!). We would sit around between takes picking wild raspberries until I thought I'd be sick. There are much worse ways to make a living.
We did a lot of filming with the locals. Many of my Han Chinese counterparts looked down on them as poor and illiterate, which they were, but anyone who's seen a bit of the world knows that it rarely translates into stupid. These people know everything about the world around them and how to use it and take care of it. We got caught in a downpour during a take and I took shelter in a nearby cave with a few local village elders. In a half hour of rain they had pointed out five types of plants that could be used for food or medicine, and dug some bugs out of the ground that they mash up for a healing poultice. One of them was even quoting Jimmy Carter to me. I've got another friend among the Wa, an elder of another region, who can play 46 musical instruments. Sure these guys don't know how to use an escalator, but you try making a house with nothing but an axe.

The Party
While we were out there, the county threw a massive party for International Labor Day (May1). I know it wasn't a traditional Wa festival, but it was great stuff anyway. Every township in the county sent out their best and brightest all dolled up in their ethnic finery with at least a truckload of their own homemade barley moonshine. They set up right in the local bazaar, which is already a big trading zone for Burmese and Yunnanese swapping cross border goods. Each town had a booth showing off their local produce and tourism resources, and being one of the only foreingers in town, I had to drink at each one.

The highlight of the festivities was the "monihei" party, which translates from Chinese into "rub you black". This was held at the local soccer stadium with a hughe stage for music, dancing, rituals, and a buffalo sacrifice. They have a medicinal goo made of mud and honey and they made up a huge vat of it, passing it around to everyone, so that when the fun really started we could smear it all over each other.
But first, they had to bless the festivities. Several high priests from the local clans were brought out to bless the people. They led out the largest water buffalo I've ever seen in my life, and tied it to a stake in front of the stage. As the priests called out commands, young men danced around it in circles, stabbing it several times with a spear and finally lopping its head off with a machete. In deference to more sensitive readers, I'll leave the photos of that in the galllery.
Once the bull had been slaughtered, the real fun began. We all whipped out our mud and began smearing each other head to toe. It was a real mud riot. Just as we thought it would die out, they brought out the wood drum. This is made of an ancient hollowed out tree. They had it on wheels and struck it with a jungle rhythm while others pulled it down the street with dried vines. We all followed, mud in hand, and turned the city into a mud riot. There were people rushing shops, dousing police officers and blocking cars to give them all a serious mudding. I gotta say, these guys know how to party.

Chinese Banquets

2006-05-23T12:03:00.000+08:00

Chinese Banquets

I was recently featured in China New Weekly's issue on Chinese banquets. China New Weekly is China's largest private newsmag and is equivalent to Time or Newsweek, though it spends a bit more time delving into cultural currents than either of the former.
They wanted to interview me and get a foreigner's perspective on that phenomenon which is Chinese banquet culture. The uninitiated may have never heard of this, but banquets are a huge thing. The wheels of commerce and social interaction are greased with hotpot sauce and cheap rice liquor. I attend on average 4 banquets a week and I have some friends who have to eat two or three dinners a night sometimes.
Why do they do this? I'm not going to pretend that I know why food is so damn important in this country, but I can try and lay out some of the functions these banquets perform.
First and foremost is as a media and platform for social interaction. In China's teeming megacities, though the streets are literally boiling with people, they generally don't randomly engage strangers on the sidewalk or even at the bar. People hang out in close groups and generally cavort in private. The best way to extend your network is to invite some friends to dinner and have them bring some of their friends and so on.
Second is for informality. Banquets are a key tool for business negotiations and political lobbying. People become candid at the dinner table, especially after a few toasts of rice wine. Something about eating off of the same plate also brings about a feeling of camaraderie, and this is an opportunity for potential clients or government officials to candidly tell you the real reason why negotiations are at a standstill or what you have to do to gain official approval for your project. Also, if you can win these people over with your personality, they'll be much more likely to go that extra mile for you.
There are actually so many different types and uses for banquets out here that it's hard to give a comprehensive view, but there are a few things worth mentioning. Restaurants can be really cheap here, so people eat out a lot more than they do in the states. Also, people order food collectively. The typical chinese meal is served as a bunch of common plates on a rotating tray. The more people present, the more dishes, so the dinner naturally gets better as the table gets more crowded.
--protocol--
When compared to other Asian countries, Chinese banquet customs are rather simple. Having said that, there are a few things that one should keep in mind:
- Drinking: never drink alone. Any time you drink, you should toast somebody. The first toast is with everyone together and is lead by the host, usually with a short speech. When this happens, down the whole glass. When clinking glasses, show respect for an elder or higher-up by holding your glass lower than his. Finally, as the dinner winds down, make sure you keep at least a sip of beer in your glass for that final toast.
- Eating: generally, don't start eating until after the first toast, and then only when everyone else starts. The mayhem usually begins when the host asks an honored guest to grab the first bite. Also, it is a common courtesy to leave the last piece of each dish on the plate. No one wants to be the asshole who finishes off all the dumplings. Try to eat at least a bite of each dish, no matter how bad it may be.
- Service: if a waiter or friend pours your glass while you're in conversation, show thanks by tapping your right index and middle finger on the table twice. This is the equivalent of a Kowtow but doesn't break the flow of conversation.

--Vocabulary--
I'll try to add Chinese vocabulary to future rants if the friendster server can support it.
饭局: Fanju, n. Banquet
饭托儿: Fantuo'er, n. One who organizes lots of banquets
干杯: Gan Bei, v. drink, usually the entire glass in one gulp
随意: Sui'yi, adv. as you please, used after ganbei to denote that you don't have to finish your glass
做东: Zuodong, v. to host a banquet
请客: Qingke, v. to invite (and pay for) people at dinner or elsewhere
应酬: Yingchou, n. social appointments and dinner parties, usually used in reference to government officials and bigshots getting schmoozed

Tibet Caravan

2006-05-23T12:00:00.000+08:00

I recently returned to Yunnan to check in on the caravan I helped create. My timing couldn't have been better. I left Beijing just before it's worst sandstorm in a decade, and there was good old Kunming, bathed in its golden sun and just perfect at about 85 degrees.
That was not the case when I flew up to the northwest corner of the province, Zhongdian, or as the tourism authority would have it, Shangri-La. Right up on the Tibetan plateau at just over 10,000 feet, it was cloudy and mighty cold. I travelled there with an associate to catch up with our caravan, which had just left in the general direction of the Tibetan border a few days before.
First, I guess a short introduction of the caravan is in order. Late last year, a caravan of 99 horses set out from our tea factory in Menghai County, Xishuangbanna, a Thai region of southern Yunnan. They loaded up their horsepacks with our tea, which would then travel across the Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan Trail (aka Southern Silk Road) through Yunnan and Tibet to its destination at Gyatse and the Thasilunpo Monastery (home of the Panchen Lama).
I will make no attempt to mask our marketing intentions here, but please don't let that keep you from seeing it as we do: an earnest attempt to revive the ancient highway that brought the many cultures of southwest China together and introduced tea to the world several millenia ago. Our horsemen (and women) hail from several of the many tribes that are found in this part of the world, and they document the cultures and throw rocking parties everywhere they go. The value it creates for those involved far surpasses any marketing or tea markups involved. Through auctions of collector's teas we have already managed to raise more than 100,000 USD for the construction of schoolhouses in the impoverished mountains of the region.
Our caravan reached Shangri-La shortly after Christmas last year, and after joining in the Gedong festivities at the Songzanlim Monastery (see caravan photos), we had to take a break. Winter conditions made the mountains unpassable.
We took a second go at the passage to Tibet on April 10. The caravan set out again, this time with an imbedded reporter from Phoenix TV, among others, and worked their way to Baima Mountain, a majestic chain of glacier capped mountains that hinders all entry into Tibet Proper.
We caught up with them just as they were attempting the pass. Remember what I said about winter conditions? We had spent many late hours trying to calculate our passage across the Hengduan Mountain Range. This is easier said than done for as soon as the snows begin to recede, the monsoons are close behind, eager to shower our horsemen with torrential rains and mudslides. Obviously we figured wrong; the caravan was breaking camp at the base of the mountain as we caught up in our Jeep. Though cold and muddy, their campsite was in an idyllic setting of moss-covered old growth pine forest interspersed with several varieties of wild rhodedendron in full bloom. But just a few dozen feet up the slope was fresh snow cover, and we could feel a blizzard brewing.
The original plan was to hike to the base of the first of two mountain passes, and camp there the first night. One look at the sky told us that this would be almost certain death. Giant thunderheads were rolling past us at warp speed, and we were getting slapped in the face by snowflakes the size of a baby's fist. We heard over our CB's that the cops were already closing the road. After lots of yelling, the lead horseman, Zhao Baochang, chose to take both passes and get everyone down the other side. Anything else would have led to weeks in delays, leaving us stuck in the Tibetan badlands during the coming monsoon. To beat the mountain, our caravan would have to trudge some 40 miles through deep wet snow (in canvas shoes no less), almost double our usual daily limit.
After hours of nail-biting (and pushing stranded buses out of the snowbanks), we made it across the first pass. Everyone was running around and shouting, but the only sounds heard were the howling winds and the violent flapping of prayer flags.
Somehow we managed to make it down the mountain, despite the fact that every landmark was masked by the clouds and the sun was long gone.
Two days later, Zhao turned his dirty, ragged horse team into a first-class parade. Everyone broke out their best ethnic finery to march into the welcoming arms of Deqin county's entire government and best dancing troupes. If you've never been to a party hosted by the government of a poor, remote ethnic county in the Chinese hinterland, you've never really been to a party.
Top officials from almost every branch of the county government gathered us into the largest restaurant in town where we commenced stuffing our faces with yak meat and downing copious amounts of barley liquor (80 proof) by the glass. Local cultural workers began to dance around the restaurant trading songs and whiskey with the horsemen. By about 8:00 everyone was rip-roaring drunk and we decided to hit the town square, where everyone in town was dancing. Somehow we eneded up with a huge entourage working our way across the few saloons in town. I don't quite remember how I got home that night, but I was assured by witnesses that I had a great time.
Deqin County Seat is a ramshackle pile of houses gathered in a tiny pocket surrounded by half a dozen giant mountains. It is reminiscent of an appalachian coal-mining town. Having said that, it is a great place to meet Tibetan culture face to face. The roads and accomodations are bad enough to discourage most of the tour groups from invading, and most of the local Tibetan men still sport their swords everywhere they go. Walking down the main street, one often has to dodge the occasional Yak who decides to browse the garbage cans.
Lacking a Tibetan travel permit, in dour need of a shower and mindful of the growing pile of work on my desk back in Beijing, I headed back to Shangri-La for a hot bath and tickets to Kunming. Our caravan made it safely to Yanjing (salt well) on the Tibet-Yunnan border a few days later, and should have passed Markang by now. I hope to catch up with them again somewhere on the approach to Lhasa, which they should be reaching in mid-June. I'll keep you posted.

Yunnan Revealed

2006-05-23T11:42:00.000+08:00

For those of you who missed it, Yunnan Revealed is a tour of the US that we did last year.
I'll start with Yunnan so you can better understand what we were revealing. Yunnan is China's southwesternmost province, and it borders Tibet, Burma, Laos and Vietnam. With an altitude ranging from 50 meters to 6,000 meters, it is China's most biologically and culturally diverse province and in my opinion one of the coolest places on earth. It is home to more than half of continental Asia's plant and animal species and twenty six ethnic groups that posess their own distinct languages, histories and cultures.
Yunnan Revealed was a joint effort between Connecticut College, Flynn Theatre, Dartmouth University, China Yunnan International Cultural Exchange Center and Yuansheng Indigenous Music and Dance Studio. It brought fifteen traditional artists from the Yi, Wa, Naxi and Dai ethnic groups to seven cities in the US to sing, dance and teach people about their cultures. More than half of the artists are non-professionals who make their living in agricultural activities in their home villages, and all of them are deeply dedicated to protecting their traditional cultures from the onslaught of globalization.

I was blessed by the opportunity to accompany these amazing people as their translator and tour manager. It was extremely exhausting but very rewarding.
Below is a brief description of the ethnic groups represented:

Yi: there are roughly six million Yi living in Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou with scattered communities in Laos and Vietnam. Their language belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, and they are descended from the ancient Qiang, an ancient group from Western China/Tibet who are also the ancestors of the Tibetans and Naxi. Spread across a very large region, there are believed to be over one hundred sub groups of the Yi with many dialect groups and distinct customs. They generally practice a form of animism that entails the worship of dragons and fire, and are often lead by a sorceror known as the Bimaw. The Yi of the Liangshan region which straddles Yunnan and Sichuan are notorious as warriors and for the complex slavery system that the royalty maintained until they were incorporated in modern China in the mid 1950's

Naxi: the naxi are also descended from the ancient Qiang and speak a language that is related to Yi. There are roughly half a million of them, mostly concentrated in Lijiang prefecture in northwest Yunnan, though they can also be found in western sichuan and the Kam region of Tibet. They practice a shamanistic religion known as Dongba. Dongba means "person of knowledge", and the dongba priests are carriers of the history, religion, medicine and indigenous knowledge, which they carry and pass on through a pictographic script which is the only pictographic script in use today. According to Dongba texts, man and the spirits of nature are siblings, and they lived peacefully until the spirits of nature were angered by man's destructive ways. The Dongba must placate these spirits and others which can control them to prevent natural disasters such as earthquakes and killer storms. The naxi are most famous for their ancient city of Lijiang, which in 1997 was the world's largest wholly traditionally constructed city. It was put on the map by a massive earthquake that year. It is now a UNESCO world heritage sight, and is visited by upwards of ten million tourists each year. The Mosuo, considered by China (but not by themselves) to be a subgroup of the Naxi are famous for their matrilineal society which has no marriage custom.

Dai: the Dai are basically Thais who live in Yunnan. Their language is very similar to the Northern Thai dialect. They live in southern and southwestern Yunnan, and are culturally identical to Thais in neighboring Laos and Burma, also called the Shan. In the two main areas where they live in Yunnan, Xishuangbanna and Dehong, they use two alphabetic writing systems that are derived from sanskrit. These they use to inscribe buddhist sutras on palm leaves. They mostly practice Hinayana Buddhism, though there are Muslim and Animist Dais to be found in some parts of Yunnan as well.

Wa: the Wa speak a language from the Mon-Khmer branch of Austro-Indonesian. There are half a million of them in Yunnan, and another 300,000 across the border in neighboring Burma. They are notorious for their (now abandoned) practice of ritual headhunting. Lacking a writing system, the Wa traditionally used music and the sending of symbolic objects as a means of communication. Our Wa performer, Yan Bing, can play and make 47 different musical instruments. The Wa, though overwhelmingly impoverished, fare relatively well in China. Their brothers in Burma are in the middle of the golden triangle where they are plagued by aids, opium and warfare. The United Wa Army has thousands of troops and frequently battles the central Burmese government.

Beijing Rant

2006-05-23T11:28:00.000+08:00

Though I have trouble sometimes warming up to this enormous concrete monstrosity, Beijing does have its good sides. There are a whole lot of really interesting, engaging, bright young people to play with, and there are always plenty of good eats and fun things to do. But living in a place like this, no matter how fun and interesting, extracts a heavy toll on mind and body. The ridiculous traffic (there are six beltways out here), the masses of people (well over ten million of them) are bad enough, but what really gets to me is the weather.

Maybe I'm a bit spoiled from living in Yunnan for so long. With its clean air and year-round, springlike weather, I have a right to complain anywhere I go. But Beijing is especially horrible in this respect. In the spring, the east wind begins to blow. This is basically the jet stream coming out of the vast western expanse. It's a lovely idea and has made for wonderful Chinese poems through the centuries. But now there's a problem: the west is now a giant, fast-growing desert, and this romantic east wind picks up millions of tons of fine sand on its way here, dumping it all over this already filthy city. Walking down the street, you can feel the grit in your teeth, and a gentle breeze is enough sometimes to temporarily blind you and drive you to tears.
The dust is so fine that once it's blown in, it just kind of stays and floats around, slowly creeping through the tiniest cracks, into every gadget, and deep into the pores of your skin. I'm no longer surprised these days to wake up and see a thick layer of the stuff that has been so unceremoniously dropped off over night. It is like a diabolical snow. "Look mommy, It's dusting!" Blast.
Then you have another phenomenon that really does look like snow. In an effort to greenify the city and try to create a filter against the dust, Beijing authorities a decade ago undertook a massive "campaign" to plant trees. Problem is, biodiversity wasn't a buzzword back then, and authorities almost exclusively planted clones of the cottonwood tree. I read somewhere that they make up for nearly two thirds of all plant life in Beijing. These trees release seeds that are surrounded by what looks like tufts of cotton which evolved to maximise their time floating in the air so they could find a farther place to take root. When they go into bloom, it really does look like snow. "Look mommy, it's cottoning!" Being from sterile clones, these tufts have no seed and can float around much longer and farther, though they prefer to stay in Beijing and deposit themselves in my eyes as I walk to my bus. They keep floating around getting slightly greyer as they accumulate the dust, until they are finally too heavy to fly anymore and just clump on the ground in a filthy mess. This is the modern megacity's answer to yellow snow.
But one morning I was really surprised by what I saw. I looked outside and I could see clearly across the street. In fact, from an office tower I was able to see clearly all the way to the summer palace and the western hills behind it. Everything glowed with a soft gold color. I really couldn't believe my eyes. The air here is so bad at times that you can look directly at the sun without burning your retina. What happened was that we got a good rain that washed all of the dust and coal particles right out of the sky. The city had been miraculously transformed. It made me miss Yunnan so much, where the sky looks like this every day. Of course it only took us a few days to foul everything up again. I swear in 2008, the olympians are going to be huffing down cigarrettes just to get a taste of clean air.
Now we get to my favorite weather phenomenon: mudding. It doesn't just rain or snow here, it also muds. Seriously. I just explained how the rain washed all of the dust out of the sky. The aftereffect is spectacular, but you do not, under any circumstances, want to be caught in a spring rain here, especially during the first few hours. As the rain falls through the sky, it picks up all of the dust that's been floating around, and by the time it reaches street level, there are literally drops of mud coming down at you. That, my friends, is pure torture.