Team JiDa prepares for takeoff

Hoo boy.

A few months ago, my son told me he was going to visit me in China, so I advised him to come in through Beijing. Shortly afterward, I learned that Max, Karen and daughter Haley would be coming to Jishou U. So, I suggested they could arrive about the time my son would leave from Beijing, so I could drop him off and pick them up. Instead, ticket prices rose, and James couldn’t come this year, but I decided to stick to the second part of the plan and visit Beijing anyway.

While I was riding around in a car in Anhui province the week before, I was chatting on QQ. The foreign affairs office at JiDa wants us to fly in and out of Changde now, instead of Changsha, since the Changde airport (though small) is two hours closer to Jishou than Changsha’s. Sally Liu (a student I blogged about a while ago) lives near Changde and was on QQ one day. It occurred to me I could meet her in Changde and see the town before flying to Beijing.

Then I thought, “What the heck? I might as well ask if she wants to go with me.” A translator would make navigating Beijing a lot easier, so on the spur of the moment I asked Sally to come along. Of course, she said yes, since I offered to pay for her airfare and hotel room. This would have been money I had already budgeted for James’ visit, so it was not a big deal. But, her parents said (understandably) that she could only go if another girl went along.

This part was not easy as you might expect, since most of the students at JiDa were working and thus not free to leave with us. In the end, Vanilla (yes, that’s her English name) sent me a text and asked if she could go. Of course, this meant I would have to pay for her airfare, as well. I hesitated, but only briefly. Both of them have good English speaking skills, and are both very personable. I figured we’d make a good hospitality team.

My foreign affairs officers were a little surprised I was dragging two students with me, and even more surprised when I said I was paying their way. But, no one said I couldn’t take them, so on the 16th, Sally, Vanilla and I boarded an Airbus A321 for Beijing.

A few quick words about the Changde airport. It’s so small that people in Changde don’t realize they even have an airport. Changde has a population of about 2 million, but the airport is about the size of an airport in a US city of about 60,000. Until China Southern Airways started flying out of Changde, the only planes using the airport were light planes, like Cessnas.

More surprisingly, China Southern apparently manages to fill the 125-seat Airbus on the Beijing run five times a week. (Only one afternoon flight in or out per day, though.) When I lived in Casper, Wyoming, and Owensboro, Kentucky, the planes I flew in were much smaller prop-jets. Scale matters — more people in China by far.

Sally and Vanilla had never flown before, and in fact had never been to Beijing, so this was a big adventure for them. Both said they were so excited the night before that they couldn’t fall asleep until 2 am, then woke up at 6 am for a 10 am flight.

I had booked two rooms online at a hotel I have used before. It’s close to a subway station, so we could tour Beijing easily until the Americans arrived late Wednesday night. My companions were keen to see Beijing University, Qinghua University and Tian’anmen Square, and we also were to have lunch with a former JiDa student of mine in her home on Tuesday. The three of us nearly wore ourselves out walking around two huge campuses, the Square (in the rain) and Beijing’s subway stations. The Beijing subway is logically laid out and easy to navigate, but there are many long walks, especially at transfer stations.

My master plan was to spend our free time touring, but also to find a comfortable and inexpensive hotel in a Beijing hutong. Beijing’s mass transit shuts down and taxi fares skyrocket after 10:30 (as I found out to my dismay on previous visits), so it was imperative the hotel also offer an airport shuttle service.

After some online research, we settled on visiting the Beijing Hutong Inn near the Bell and Drum Towers and Houhai, north of the Forbidden City. Though the staff there speaks English, Sally and Vanilla arranged for three rooms — including a family room — and the airport shuttle ride far more efficiently than I could have managed. Everything was in place by noontime, so Team JiDa was able to visit Tian’anmen and have a carefree celebratory dinner before meeting the voluble Mr Xiao and his cushy Mercedes airport shuttle van.

(I hesitated a bit at the 300 yuan ($45) price tag for the 40-minute airport run, but after seeing the van and meeting Mr Xiao, I realized it was money well spent. Xiao was really helpful, giving my students clear directions into the airport arrivals hall. Besides, hosts are not supposed to be cheapskates.)

Team JiDa, now doubled in size, stumbled into bed around 2:30 am on Thursday. The following days would include hitting some tourist sites, shopping and arranging our trip back to Changde and Jishou. I’ll blog about all that later on.
 

The karst spire was once known as “South Pillar of the Heaven” (南天一柱), or “Pillar between Heaven and Earth” (乾坤柱). It lies within the National Forest Park, a world heritage site visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists — mostly Chinese, Korean and Japanese so far — each year.

And yes, when I saw the movie I said to myself, “Damn. It looks like Zhangjiajie!” You can see my photos on Picasaweb to see what I mean.

So, Avatar fans here’s the lowdown on the National Forest Park in Zhangjiajie. The quickest way to get there is by air from Beijing — one-way airfares are about 900 RMB (about $130) but sometimes you can get cheaper fares. Entry to the park itself is 248 RMB ($36) for a two-day pass. You will need both days, because the park is both big and worth a leisurely visit. Bring water to drink and food to snack on, but DO NOT carry it in a white plastic grocery bag. The local monkeys will literally try to steal the food from the bags. Use a backpack instead. The monkeys aren’t good with zippers … yet.

You can find accommodations just outside the park for very reasonable prices. There are lower priced hotels in the city, but you have to factor in the hour-long bus or taxi ride between downtown and the park. Being just outside the gate is much more convenient.

Meanwhile, some theaters in China have pulled the 2D version of Avatar to make way for Confucius, starring Chow Yun Fat, prompting allegations that the state media authority is railroading the foreign-made movie out of theaters in favor of the domestic variety. Officials, however, say the 2D version is drawing less at the box office than the 3D flick, which justifies the switch.

Sounds like protectionism to me.

Predictably, the outage happened while I was out of town and for the most part away from the World Wide Web. So, I had no idea anything was wrong until my buddy notified me by email. I sent a message to Planet Earth Hosting, and 24 hours later, the site was up, good as new.

The occasion for my trip out of town was the big car show in Changsha. Two of my former students were going — one to shop and one to wish — and asked me to join them.

So, Saturday morning I took the coach to Changsha. Also on board was a postgrad friend of mine and her friend. They were going to Changsha to shop and (for one of them) to sit for a qualifications exam. To my delight, the bus company has changed its normal stop — next to a swanky hotel — to a place practically next door to my usual — non-swanky — hotel. It makes catching the return bus a breeze now.

That Saturday, I shopping for some wee Christmas gifties with Tina, one of my former students from Jishou U. Her boyfriend was busy at work, and she was bored, so she squired me around the shopping district to find what I wanted. Meanwhile, she bought some stuff, too.

Maybe this kind of thing is available in the States. If it is, I missed it. So, excuse my ignorance. Here, there are shops where cell phone users can bling their phones with glitter, rhinestones and other such sparkly whatnot. After I got what I needed, we went to a little shop where a woman painstakingly glues bling on cell phones, computers and anything else with a hard, shiny surface. It took her about 45 minutes to customize Tina’s phone around the camera lens.

And yes, I waited patiently in the shop until it was finished. It’s too easy to get lost in some of those shopping malls in Changsha. And, by the way, they have Christmas shopping sales in China, too.

Tina then had to join her boyfriend for dinner, so I dumped my purchases in my room and headed for Carrefour (two blocks east) to buy some badly needed Western food items: spaghetti sauce, tomato paste and pasta, plus some snacks for the weekend.

Sunday morning, my other former student in Changsha, Isabella, called me. We met at her school, Hunan Normal U, and with her cousin took a circuitous bus ride to the car show north of the downtown.

Pretty girls and cars = car show

The last time I was a car show — or at least one that I can remember — was the 1971 International Car Show in Manhattan. My dad and I went, to ogle at the beautiful …. um … cars … yeah, that was it. That show had some concept cars as spice up the pantheon of production models. The Changsha event, while somewhat less glamorous, had Honda’s robot, Asimo, to add some pizzazz.

(I did not actually see Asimo there. The Honda exhibit was surrounded by a crowd at least eight people deep. I could only see the big TV screen showing a movie about Asimo.)

We have read about China’s new wealthy class of citizens, but seeing shiny new Jaguars, Porsches, Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and Ferraris — some with “Sold” signs in the windows — brings the point home more distinctly. No car dealer is going to haul prize merchandise to an exposition center for five days without the expectation of selling at least some of them.

I did not drive it home.

Isabella, her cuz and I stayed just a couple of hours. We were all just window shopping and I had a bus to catch at 3. Tina and her beau stayed to consider which auto they might eventually buy, perhaps with their wedding money next year. Isabella’s cousin wanted to eat Western food, so I suggested Houcaller — a steak place — which I knew was somewhere near my hotel. They got T-bones and I got sirloin plates, for about ¥40 apiece (about $6 — yeah, Americans, cry your eyes out).

Fortified with this filling meal, I boarded the bus for a mercifully uneventful five-hour ride home. The on-board movies were (a pirated copy of) of 2012 and a (probably also pirated) copycat film from Thailand, 2022: The Great Tsunami. These two completed a weekend of disaster movies for me. I’ll blog about that later.

I have a friend here, and originally I was going to come for a visit in July for the solar eclipse. But, I was invited at the last minute to visit someone else in Liuyang (in Hunan) the weekend following the eclipse, making visiting Chongqing a little impractical. So I postponed the trip indefinitely.

My options this holiday week were to stay in Jishou and hang out with the many folks who did not go home, or splurge and take this trip. I did both, as it turns out.

Since Moon (my friend here) had to work overtime Oct. 1-3, I stayed in Jishou and observed China’s 60th National Day and the traditional Mid-Autumn Moon Day with my Jishou friends. Nearly everyone on campus was glued to the new flat-screen TVs installed in the campus dining hall to watch the National Day festivities in Beijing Oct. 1. I watched it on and off in my apartment.

The ceremonies included displays of China’s military personnel and hardware, and a sort of creepy review of the troops by President Hu Jintao. With his Mao-jacket-bedecked torso sticking out of the sunroof of an enormous, black Chinese-made limo (similar to the one Mao once had), Hu repeated the same phrases over and over again as he greeted the troops. I swear he never moved a muscle other than the ones operating his mouth.

The non-military parade floats were colorful and lively, but five decades of watching parades has left me a little jaded when it come to parade floats. Needless to say, there were no helium-inflated cartoon characters joining in this parade.

Criticism of the ceremonies aside, the day is one of great national pride for the Chinese. After six decades — half of which were under the unyielding domination of Mao and hardline Maoists — China has a lot to be proud of, considering its position in the world economy now. China still has a dismal human rights record and it tightly controls the information its people receive, so it’s not a rosy picture in all respects, but the China of 2009 is worlds apart from the backward, impoverished country of 1949.

The next day, I had lunch and dinner with friends. And on Oct. 3, the Mid-Autumn Moon Day, I had nine people over to my tiny apartment to cook dinner and enjoy mooncakes together. This day is a family holiday, when families share big meals together then go out (weather permitting) to eat mooncakes under the light of the full moon. We sat on the soccer field to try to find the Lady (Chang’e) on the Moon.

(Incidentally, I got three boxes of mooncakes this year: one each from the university, my college and one of my private students. So I had plenty to share!)

Chongqing is (as the crow flies) relatively close to Jishou, but since it is on the other side of the Wuling mountain range it might as well be on the other side of the country. I could have taken a train there (about a 10-hour trip), or a bus (along twisty and very bouncy mountain roads for about the same amount of time), or fly. Round-trip tickets between Changsha and Chongqing were 1300 RMB, just a little more than the money I had recently received for my tutoring gigs, so flying was the best choice.

The shuttle bus between Jishou and Changsha takes about 4 hours on the new expressways in Hunan — the superhighway linking Chongqing and Changsha is still under construction — so I set out Sunday morning for Changsha. (Cost is 100 RMB.) On the airport shuttle bus in Changsha, I met Titi, a young woman Chinese woman studying for her MBA in Bangkok, Thailand, and later in Sydney, Australia, and Dick, a 60-ish Australian from Perth enjoying a three-month tramp around Southeast Asia and China.

Dick and I had a chance to talk in the terminal as we waited for our 5 pm flights to Chongqing and Kunming. He’s been retired for some time now, and about 18 months ago came to the startling realization that he did not want to be married to his wife of 34 years anymore. They divorced, and a few months ago, Dick decided to tour Thailand and Vietnam, places he had visited years before. Along the way, he met a Chinese woman from Changsha, who invited him to come to her relative’s wedding in Hengyang, Hunan. Footloose and fancy-free, Dick came up from Vietnam largely on his own.

He was heading back to Bangkok (where he has a significant other, apparently) by way of Kunming, the Spring City, where the climate is spring-like year round. (A new entry on my wanna-visit list)

As for me, my flight took just an hour. I was met by Moon and her brother-in-law at the terminal, and we zipped into town to enjoy hotpot with her daughter, her sister and her niece. The food was indescribably delicious — we ate at one of the premier hotpot restaurants in Chongqing — and predictably spicy.

But it was a different kind of spicy from Hunan cuisine, which relies heavily on chili peppers for its fire. Our hotpot used different peppers I couldn’t identify, including one legendary kind that numbs your mouth temporarily. I ate one by chance, and my tongue tingled for about five minutes — the same kind of feeling you get when your foot falls asleep. Weird, but strangely refreshing. (I also ate slices of cow’s stomach – crunchy, but rather bland tasting.)

Right now, I am chilling in my spacious hotel room on the 16th floor of an apartment building in downtown Chongqing. It’s a bargain at 138 RMB (or $20) a night. You couldn’t touch such a room with less than $100 in the States. After lunch, we’ll tour some places and have homemade dumplings at Moon’s sister’s home.

Chongqing’s monorail commuter train runs near my hotel, which is in the Yangjiaping pedestrians-only shopping area. The monorail bisects the shopping district. (Check this link to see the Google map of it. Marker “B” is roughly where my hotel is.)

Later!

We had an ambitious plan: visit Wuhan University, Hubei Provincial Museum, Huang He Lou (Yellow Crane Tower), Wuhan Botanical Gardens, Mo Shan, maybe go shopping …

We did about half those things, partly because we chose to go to the museum first (it’s really big!) and partly because we took the right bus, going the wrong direction, to visit the tower. We got a cheap (2 yuan) hour’s long tour of Wuhan by taking the long way to Yellow Crane Tower.

The provincial museum is fairly new, and showcases a huge collection of 2200-year-old artifacts unearthed in the late 1970s from sites in the northern part of Hubei. There is also a section highlighting the prehistory of Hubei — including fossils of Homo erectus (Yunxian Man) and contemporary animals.

[Note to creationists: those animals did not include dinosaurs. Dinosaurs did NOT co-exist with humans in China, or anywhere else for that matter. This sign makes that concept very clear.]

Homo erectus and fellow animals

And yeah, not to state the obvious, it is somewhat awe-inspiring to realize that China has a recorded history that spans 5,000 years, and that Marquis Yi ancestors (mind you) were undertaking large-scale water conservation projects, building huge bronze smelting and forging factories, mastering astronomy, commerce, art, music, war and probably government bureaucracy long before Europeans did.

(On the other hand, that long history means Chinese students have that much more to learn for their interminable examinations to enter middle school, high school, university and postgraduate school. We Americans complain about 300 years of history — 1/16 that of China’s.)

Not all of the museum’s exhibits are as fascinating, and we actually skipped the less appealing ones. There is a hall of famous people from Hubei, consisting of a photo and short bio (only in Chinese) of each one. The history of writing (we zipped through it) had some interesting displays, but you would need some patience to visit all the displays. [NOTE: Mainland China simplified the character system decades ago, so most modern Chinese cannot easily read traditional characters. Thus, a modern Chinese person has as much difficulty reading 2200-year-old characters written on bamboo splits as a modern American has in reading Beowulf in the original language.]

After the museum, we decided to visit Huang He Lou (Yellow Crane Tower), which is not far away by bus IF you take the bus going in the right direction. Which we didn’t. Armed with a city map (in Chinese), my companion found the correct bus route to take, but both of us failed to realize that boarding the bus directly in front of the museum meant we would be heading west across the Yangtze River on the New Changjiang Bridge, looping through the Hankou district of Wuhan, crossing the Greater Changjiang Bridge heading east, and reaching the Tower a full hour later. Oops!

Yellow Crane Tower

We were not alone. A mom and her two daughters, who kept running into us in museum, and two college students from Shenzhen also made the same wrong choice. The girls, I think, were as fascinated with me as they were with the museum, as the younger of the two greeted me with a bubbly, “Hello, pleased to meet you!” every time she saw me. We entered the tower park separately from them, but met up with the mom and girls at the big bell outside to take some photos of each other.

Yellow Crane Tower is one of the three “great towers” of Chinese history, with the Yueyang Tower and the Nanchang tower in Jiangxi. Each tower now, of course, has been reconstructed in modern times, but the locations have remained constant for at least a thousand years each. Each tower has rich legends about it. Yellow Crane Tower, for example, got its name because a Taoist Immortal living at the site drew a picture of a yellow crane, which came to life. He later flew away on the back of the yellow crane.

Huang He Lou now is a reproduction (built with traditional wood joinery techniques — no nails or other metal fasteners) of the 7-story Qing Dynasty tower built in the 1880s. The Qing era tower was built just a kilometer away from the original third-century tower, which had burned down in 1884. The current tower and park were developed in the 1990s. From the top one can have a commanding view (the original towers had a military purpose) of sprawling modern Wuhan, the Yangtze River (Chiangjiang) to the west and the lakes in Wuchang to the north and east.

Me and the girls from Guangzhou

A short distance from the tower is a huge ceremonial bronze bell. Visitors can ring the bell for 1 yuan each strike, and the pit under the bell was full of 1-yuan coins. We elected just to take photos in front of it.

At this point, it was around closing time, so we went our separate ways. Elektra and I took the right bus going the right way back to our hotel (no ’round the town tours this time!) for dinner and good rest. The next day we planned to visit the Wuhan Botanical Gardens before catching the afternoon train to Changsha.

Rush hour in Beijing is like rush hour in any big city. As an experienced New Yorker, I knew what I was in for: commuters packed like sardines in a rolling tin can. It was either brave the commuting hordes, or sit in Starbucks for another hour to wait rush hour out. I decided to brave the crowds.

Onve you have experienced the arcane, century-old NYC subway system, any newly designed (aka modern) system is a piece of cake. Beijing’s subway is no exception. Pardon me while I bore you with details.

My hotel, part of the 7 Days Inn chain, is in Sihui, near my friend Katrina’s Beijing home. It is neat, no frills place, a bit like a Super 8 or a Motel 6. You get cable TV, a nice bathroom, a kingsize bed, free Internet, a smallish room, and free breakfast for 169 RMB a night. My stay here was a total of 1014 RMB for six nights, or about $150. [You can add that to the cost of renewing my passport. That, and another 900 RMB for train fare.]

I realized earlier in the week, while riding the subway with Katrina, that the 495 bus line two blocks from the hotel connects to the Sihui (四惠) subway stop on Line 1. Since she was leaving with her mom later in the week, using the bus would make my getting around on my own a lot easier.

So, here’s my routine for the last few days here. Walk to the bus stop. Pay 1 RMB. Walk two blocks to the subway stop. Pay 2 RMB for a single-use fare. Press the fare card against the turnstile sensor. Walk down to the platform. Zip to the intended destination (facing crowds at rush hour). Insert the subway fare card in the exit turnstile. Proceed to destination. Repeat as necessary. Each one-way trip cost me the equivalent of 44 cents — a lot cheaper than a cab. Given Beijing’s traffic, it’s also a lot faster.

Both the bus stops and the subway stops are announced en route in Chinese and English. The bus signs are mostly in Chinese, but 495 is a loop and the stop I needed was the bus terminal near the Sihui subway station. The subway system, like Hong Kong’s, is clearly laid out, with bilingual signage and maps. Very modern and efficient.

To get to the embassy, I had to transfer at the Guomao station onto line 10. To reach Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City, I had to stay on line 1 and get off at the Tian’anmen Dong stop. The subway also runs (obviously) to the Olympics park, the airport, Beijing rail station and a ton of other places.

My tour books say that Beijing will not give a visitor a true sense of China, and in that I concur. China’s capital is in so many ways yet another big city. It sprawls across the flatlands here, like Denver or Los Angeles, or like the Boston-Washington, DC, megalopolis. The ancient character of the city is all but gone, victim to first the Maoists’ desire to obliterate the pre-communist past, then to the Chinese capitalists’ desire to make Beijing a world-class city.

Aside from the Forbidden City, other ancient parts of Beijing are little specks compared to the rapid modernization here. Ring roads (expressways) encircle the central district like an archer’s target, with the Forbidden City and Tian’anmen Square at the bullseye. Cars are everywhere; I read a few days ago that 1,500 cars are added to Beijing’s streets each day.

Katrina and I managed (almost by accident) to find the home of famed Chinese author Lao She. It is now a museum in the hutong (old neighborhood) where he lived, Dong Cheng Qu. Lao wrote, among other works, Rickshaw Boy (Luotuo Xiangzi 骆驼祥子), which I remember seeing on my parents’ bookshelves years ago. Lao’s is a sad story. World renowned as an author, in the mid-1960s Cultural Revolution zealots humiliated Lao publicly and forced him to admit that his literature was counter-revolutionary and thus worthless. Broken, the gentle author “disappeared” on August 24, 1966, either by committing by drowning himself in Taiping Lake near his home or (it is alleged) by being murdered by the Red Guard.

Some hutongs still exist, but now it seems like they are being preserved partly to attract tourists. South of Qianmen, one of the few existing relics of the old walls surrounding the Imperial Palace, is a shopping street that resembles old Beijing. An imitation trolley carries tourists along the reconstructed buildings. I walked about two blocks into this glimpse into the past, then gave it up. The architecture is pretty, but the whole experience is rather dull and cold.

Beijing in February is not really hospitable to tourism. When I arrived Tuesday morning, it was snowing. It snowed again overnight, inducing Katrina and me to cancel visiting the Forbidden City in favor of computer shopping (and eating at Pizza Hut, where I showed her that the proper way to eat pizza is with one’s hands, not with a knife and fork). Yesterday was a little dreary, but the sun poked through the clouds enough for a walk around Tian’anmen Square. Today it was cold, but sunny, and tomorrow promises to offer the same. So I will spend most of the day in the Forbidden City — in between rush hours, of course.

Now, I had the impression it would be a participatory event: a group of people gathered around a big bonfire having a party. Seems reasonable, right?

Way wrong. The Bonfire Party is a performance in an amphitheatre near to the Golden Phoenix International Hotel, featuring local dancers, drummers and musicians. Included in the festivities were an auction of three pieces of art, the local tourist gimmick of “put on the Miao girl’s costume” on stage, and a long conga line at the end.

Don’t get the idea I disliked the experience. On the contrary, the dancing and music were wonderful, although it would have helped if I had had the libretto, and costumes dazzling. The photos I took unfortunately do the colors no justice. The girls did a good job explaining to me what was happening on stage — depictions of various aspects of Miao history and customs — but the details eluded me.

Kentuckians are probably familiar with “The Stephen Foster Story,” that perennial outdoor dramatization of the musician’s life and work in Bardstown. It uses Foster’s music to highlight Foster’s life, taking license with the chronology to make a good story. The movie “Mamma Mia” uses ABBA’s music to similiar effect, although of course that story is entirely fictional.

So, take that premise and merge it with an American Indian pow-wow, the kind they open to the public. At those events, you see native Americans in their elaborate ceremonial dress dancing presumably authentic dances, but with the suggestion that maybe it’s not all real. It’s more for show, than for an authentic expression of their own unique culture. That expression they probably save for more private affairs, I suspect.

Ultimately, then, the Bonfire Party is a tourist event, with little resemblance to a “real” Miao gathering. It’s cool, but not really authentic.

So it is with the shops in the ancient quarter. In between our restaurant meals and event attendance, we walked around the old part of town, which is jam packed with shops selling everything from silver jewelry to dried fruit. For the most part, these shops carry pretty much the same merchandise, which I have good reason to believe mostly does not originate locally.

For example, would locally woven textiles be wrapped in the plastic packaging seen in department stores? Would all silver vendors carry identical baubles, if they were all handmade? I’d say, no, that these shops are all probably ordering their stuff from the same wholesalers, hoping to sell it to an unwary tourist as “authentic” Miao artifacts.

Not all the shops are peddling knock-offs, though. We walked around enough, and the girls were savvy enough, for me to find a few vendors of genuinely unique items. I bought an elaborate papercut piece of art after my student Sheila pointed it out. It depicts the 12 animals of Chinese astrology in the shape of the characters “chu fu,” or luck. It looked handmade, and for 100 yuan, a bargain even if it wasn’t.

There are also tourist gimmicks in Fenghuang. For example, for a nominal sum you can have someone photograph you wearing Miao clothes, or Ming dynasty armor, or a princess’ robes. Street hawkers push photos of these get-ups in your general direction, while associates armed with expensive DSLR cameras loom nearby. I took the girls’ lead, and avoided eye contact while waving them away with a vague “I’m not interested” gesture.

We were lucky enough to happen upon a real Miao wedding ceremony, which includes singing by the local aunties bedecked in their best clothes and silver jewelry, drumming and flute playing. Fenghuang also has legitimate tourist attractions, the homes of the author Shen Congwen and artist-poet Huang Yongyu [I plan to write posts about both these men sometime soon], a geological museum, and examples of the original Ming dynasty architecture.

And no tacky tourist trappage can detract from the beauty of old Fenghuang as it hugs the Tuojiang River like a place out of time. At night, they light up the buildings along the river like it was Christmas in a US suburb. If you ignore the cookie-cutter merchandise and street hawkers, Fenghuang is well worth a trip — or a second or third, even. There aren’t too many 700-year-old towns around, after all.