Fujian's Hakka Countryside

This update is about perhaps the most impressive area of China I've ever been to: the rural interior of Fujian province, a four-hour bus ride from Xiamen. I mean, Shanghai is a lot of fun, but the stepped slopes around Yongding can be breathtaking:



The part to notice is the large structures in the bottom left of the photograph. They're crazy! Gigantic earthen buildings that housed an entire clan, they were built by Hakka tribes trying to steer clear of bandits:



The insides are mostly wood structures, with some stone, and a shrine (and perhaps smaller buildings) located to the inside:



However it doesn't really seem like a pleasant place to live: the rooms are stacked against each other tightly, and there's no modern conveniences like electricity or water. I also imagine that fire is a constant danger. Here are the insides of another tulou:



It's possible to rent a room in a tulou for a few dollars per night, but I opted for a place with an electric light and a shower, nearby. I was still located right nearby to all of this, walking around it was surrealistically beautiful:



That's actually a classic shot of Yongding, and here's another one, which shows how extremely beautiful the surrounding areas can be:



It's all farmland, I heard that the wood used in chopsticks is a big local crop. It's very interesting, the villages are populated almost entirely by the very young and the very old - people of normal working age have almost all left to Xiamen, or to other big coastal cities. Really it's just an eerie feeling. It also leads to surprisingly old people, out working the fields. My friends told me I should have gone out and helped, rather than just snapping a picture:



These houses recently got added to UNESCO's list of the world's top tourist destinations. But when I went, a few months ago, there were basically no other tourists there, and it was obvious people weren't used to tourists - I was constantly asked if I was French, maybe the French equivalent to Lonely Planet highlights the area? I was also told I was tall constantly. On the other hand, people were very polite, and didn't even stare or yell "hello" at me.

But there's definite inconveniences: basically nobody speaks any English, and there's no English menus (or even proper restaurants). So while I would definitely recommend a tour of the area, it's probably best to arrange the tour through a travel agency, unless your Chinese is pretty good.

Old Chinese Movies (For Free!)

I've become a fan of old Chinese movies, and I'm trying to put my entire collection online. Unfortunately, this has proven problematic, for too many reasons to get into. However, here are a number of older Chinese movies that are freely available for download - Chinese movies become Public Domain the year following their 50th anniversary of creation.

For those who just want to try a new cinema out, I'll quickly recommend the toppermost of the poppermost. My favorite is probably Spring in a Small Town (1948), with English subtitles separately available. It's a minimalist melodrama and quite lovely, there's also a decent re-make from a few years back.

Other top movies include The Goddess (1934), which is a silent movie with English intertitles, and Scenes of City Life (1935). These are both set in a corrupt 30s Shanghai, and both have been talked about before on this blog. "Scenes of City Life" was followed up by the slightly more upbeat Street Angel (1937) which has English subtitles separately available.

I'll make a quick list of the movies I know are available. They're all taken from archive.org. Many of them are available on DVD in the US, and can be rented from, say, Netflix.

English Subtitled:
Spring in a Small Town (1948) (subtitles)
The Goddess (1934)
Scenes of City Life (1935)
Street Angel (1937) (subtitles)
Princess Iron Fan (1941)
This Life of Mine (1950)

Chinese Only:
The Big Road (1934)
New Women (1934)
Queen of Sports (1934)
Song of the Fishermen (1934)
Crossroads (1937)
The Spring River Flows East, Part 1: Eight War-Torn Years (1947)
The Spring River Flows East, Part 2: The Dawn (1947)

I personally view my videos using BSPlayer 1.37. Unlike newer versions of the program it's spyware-free, but it's starting to show its age. Additionally, most computers made in the last five years will have video-out, and can be easily plugged into a TV.

I'll try to write an update to this post soon, as I find more Chinese movies and get more posted online. I'd appreciate any tips if people know where to find more. Thanks a lot to archive.org for freely hosting these movies.

Kimura Japanese Kitchen & Some Katsu

In my somewhat limited experience, the best Japanese restaurant in Shanghai goes by the name Kimura Japanese Kitchen. Well...it's not easy to tell exactly what the name is, as the billboard seems a random mash of Chinese, Japanese, and English. It's located at 2255 Beijing Road, near Jiaozhou Road and a little north of Jing'an Si, and here's a picture of the sign:



As somebody who won't even go for a California Roll, thinking it's just too unauthentic, China's take at Japanese food is worlds beyond that. Sushi, for instance, will have mayonnaise piled on, sometimes it'll be pressed into the form of a sandwich, it'll have sweet things added to it, and maybe it'll get heated up in the microwave before serving.

So there's plenty of Japanese restaurants, but many of them are either extremely un-authentic, or are targeted at the Japanese expat community. That makes it way out of the price I prefer to pay for a meal, particularly as I'm not a huge fan of Japanese food. Kimura Japanese Kitchen is a favorite for the way it breaks out of this pattern. It's authentic, the owner is Japanese, there's Japanese signboards, and most of the customers can be heard speaking Japanese. But it's also cheap, as far as Shanghai's foreign food goes. Consequently, the place is usually pretty packed, even if you can't tell that here:



The simple interior reminds me of a basic restaurant from the times I've been to Japan, and the menus and signs are in both Japanese and in Chinese. They also have an English menu.



My favorite thing to get is the katsu, maybe because I like it in a Hawaiian plate lunch, ha ha. Here's the katsu curry, it costs about $4:



And my friend quite liked her ramen, which is more photogenic, anyway:



For katsu fans, there's also a very good, very Japanese-style place around the corner on 176 Jiazhou Lu, near Beijing Lu. Forgive me if I make a Japanese mistake, but I think the name would transliterate to Shi-chan's Tonkatsu? Get the fatty tonkatsu, it's better than the lean. It is a little expensive though, at about $10 for a not-large order. Here's a picture of the storefront:



The Japanese chain Curry House, which is also in Honolulu and pretty much exactly the same (they don't offer "The Challenge"), has a rapidly-expanding number of stores in Shanghai. They're casual, and always crowded. Somehow it inspired a Japanese video game as well, wow. The katsu and curry rice is about the same price as Kimura's, if not as good. It's still decent and there's a lot of different varieties, and I think the place is worth going to. The food is, uhh, better than it looks:

Shanghai, 1980

There's not much to say in this post. In 1980, right after China was opened to foreign tourists, my grandparents took a guided tour to Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, Guilin, and other top tourist spots in China. My grandfather shot a number of pictures to Kodachrome, which have preserved pretty much perfectly. Here's some of the most interesting pictures.

There's not as many picture of Shanghai as I would have liked, but the pictures do show a wildly different look to them. Here's the former French Concession, I believe. Only there's no cars, and everybody's wearing blue or grey pajama-suits:



Here's another shot of the cool clothes. Sometimes maintenance workers dress a bit like this, but you don't see it much anymore:



While people aren't staring at the camera in that one, there's plenty of other photographs that demonstrate a foreigner was a big novelty. I at first thought this was some kind of fight, but really the crowd is just gathered around the foreigner with a camera:



Here's a young lady, I guess she's having her picture taken.



They still had the old boats in the Shanghai-area rivers, and they looked even more beat up then than they do now:



And here's a nice picture of Guilin. I was never much interested in visiting Guilin until I saw his shots. This is just one of many amazing pictures:

Gulang Yu & Xiamen

I'll have a few posts about a trip I made to Fujian Province a few months ago. Fujian Province is along the southern coast of China, directly across from Taiwan. I had been to Fujian Province before, on a company field trip to Wuyi Mountain. I had considered a trip back ever since then, and so I was delighted that the return trip was also excellent. Some places more than others, but it was generally a sustained high point.

My first stop on the trip was to Xiamen & Gulang Yu. Xiamen is one of the major cities of Fujian, I've also heard it referred to by the name Amoy, which comes from the local dialect. It's a large, sprawling city, although the downtown area was fun to wander around. The city is built on an island, with the Eastern Coast being the downtown of the city:



The picture was taken from the small Gulang Yu island, which was an interesting if heavily-touristed area. More than a century ago, Xiamen was the center of foreign operations in China, and Gulang Yu was where the foreigners lived. A lot of their houses remain, in various states of repair:



And the streets have a charming randomness to them, with a lot of thin alleys leading every which-way:



It's all very beautiful, and with a strong foreign feel. There were a number of small and relatively inexpensive hotels and hostels, dramatically sticking up in the air, to the left of the ferry peir. It was all very beautiful, and I've never seen so many cameras in my life - and in China, that's really saying something! There were plenty of old film cameras or Holgas in use, and also a large number of couples getting their marriage photos taken - it's a big Chinese custom, done a few weeks before the actual wedding:



But while Gulang Yu is beautiful, it's not the most exciting place. There's a cheap five-minute ferry to downtown Xiamen, and the shopping street of Zhongshan Lu. It's a large pedestrian street that's pretty similar to the other large shopping streets in any large Chinese city. However it did have plenty snack foods, some interesting side streets, and a few activities, like these people performing traditional Chinese music:



And there's also Nan Pu Tuo temple, a large active Buddhist temple with an interesting series of hills to the rear of the temple ground:



All-in-all, I don't know if Xiamen and Gulang Yu merit a special trip on their own, but they're relaxed and beautiful and generally interesting places to be.

Taikang Lu - stuffwhitepeoplelike

I've become a big fan of the website Stuff White People Like. It catalogs the interests and concerns of the Caucasian hipster set, and I like to think that it "keeps me real," as it were, after living years in Shanghai. For better or for worse, a lot of people in Shanghai just don't share the hipster aesthetic.

Taikang Lu is the best place to immerse myself in a hipster setting. A semi-converted shikumen full of cafes and boutique stores, I think it's the stuffwhitepeoplelike center to Shanghai. You could look over the updated list from their website, compare it to what's available on Taikang Lu, and probably check off 90% of it. You couldn't do much better even in the US, unless you were in the Mission District, Brooklyn, or downtown Portland.

Taikang Lu is not particularly convenient to get to. It's south of the uncool foreigner hub Xintiandi, which is itself South of the Huangpi Nan Lu Station. The walk from the station is about twenty or twenty five minutes. It's a short street, and really what people care about when they say "Taikang Lu" is the shikumen and buildings starting around Alley #210. However, the street has an interesting mix of down-market restaurants, up-market bars, and a local-style vegetable market:



These shikumen are a really interesting setting. I've talked about them before. It's a brick building structure, with shops on the outside street, and on the inside a series of narrow alleys, common courtrooms, and small apartments. It's really quite beautiful, and these shikumen are well preserved:



However what was formerly people's apartments has often been converted into trendy shops, such as this store selling ethnic chotchkies, scarves, and handbags:



Or a very, very large number of cafes, of all kinds: small little nooks, to larger chains - Maui Coffee has a couple branches:



And similarly, there's a large number of art galleries of all different sizes, here's a small one:



I don't want to continue along these lines too long. What else is there? A large amount of foreign restaurants (including a burrito stall, but it's not good), a number of boutique fashion joints, a Tibetan jewelry stall where the jewelry was owned by famous Tibetan lamas and now goes for thousands of dollars, and small cocktail bars. There's English speakers and English menus to everything, and most places have outside seating.

A couple favorites includes an eclectic Chinese antique store, which has things like 60s sewing machines, and Projection 216, a fashion design studio that cheaply shows art movies on their projection TV, during the weekend, in a very small room. Unfortunately, they're taking a break for the summer.

Anyway, the area is also interesting because it's only been half-converted into a retail space. It's still very much in use as a residential space, especially towards the back, and it's a fun way to check out what a real shikumen looks like, while being ignored by the residents. They're going about their lives oblivious to the tourists wandering around, and often snapping pictures of everything in site:



And there's the ubiquitous laundry, getting hanged up on a sunny day:



So I hope I give a good impression of the area. Taikang Lu's shikumen is definitely one of the best places for a foreigner to go in Shanghai. And don't get me wrong, I recommend my Chinese friends to go, and they enjoy it too.