China Ethnographic Expedition II. Part IV. Tongren, Guiyang, Lijiang

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November 18, 2015

Tongren

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Tongren. Even inveterate travellers rarely make it to this arse end of nowhere.

This isn’t a funeral, it’s the opening of a new store. By the way, in China banners and signs featuring white text on a red background are not necessarily communist party slogans. For instance, here it says that such and such store has reopened and will be offering discounts on such and such dates in November.

Meat dumpling vendor. The Chinese are greedy when it comes to putting meat in meat dishes — there’s always little of it.

The ATM has a protective grille above the keypad. If you look at it from above the digits are visible through the slits. If you look at it from the side you can’t make anything out (so that swindlers won’t sneak a peek at your pin).

There are rubbish buckets in the aisles on intercity buses. It’s certainly preferable to just chucking everything on the floor.

We got off the bus and boarded a high- speed train. Asya painted a beautiful picture.

Guiyang

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In Russia, the Sapsan and Lastochka high-speed trains only run to five-odd cities, whereas in China it’s hundreds. We are in Guiyang, but we only came here to board a plane and fly to our next destination.

Yet another giant train station.

Yet another never-ending train station.

Hi Oleg!

Public service ads call on people to look after the elderly. There is no such thing as a pension in China, so everyone goes on working until his or her dying day. And rightly so, since this means that they don’t breed scroungers. However, if someone really is completely helpless, their relatives or fellow villagers are supposed to help them. Again, this is also exactly the way it should be.

Our cosy hostel for the night.

Sharp-witted Chinese driver.

Our breakfast is cooking. Thankfully, there’s no food safety authority in China — you can find a variety of tasty and cheap fare on every street corner. The wall there isn’t dirty, it’s just seen a lot of action. The wall at my grandma’s place looked exactly the same, and so what, we turned out OK.

Supermarket price ads.

Public toilets in China are different to the ones you get in Russia. On one side there’s a trough you piss in (in the men’s section). On the other side there’s a trough divided by partitions. You have to crouch with your side to the aisle, so that your shit drops into the trough and is flushed out by the general flow of water. That way, you don’t need to waste water on every single separate poo.

Lijiang

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We are in Lijiang. Its historical centre is on the Unesco world heritage list. As a rule of thumb, crappy places don’t make it onto the list, but I will write about this some other time (I’ve visited >250 listed sites). The rubbish bin is disguised as a billboard, all very refined.

Maccy D’s has been made to look ancient, all very refined.

This is the first time I’ve seen a real life monument to Mao. It turns out that they usually install him off to the side somewhere, instead of in central squares — it’s just not the done thing.

The old town is full of tourists. It’s worth noting that domestic tourism is unbelievably well developed in China (just like in the US, something we in Russia can only dream about for the time being).

Chinese antiquity. Although, to be fair, half of it was built yesterday, but Asians aren’t the least bit fussed about whether this specific brick has been sitting in this exact spot for a thousand years. A brick laid just yesterday, but made to look old, is fully in keeping with Asian ideas about how antiquity should be preserved.