Last time, our heroes toured the VIP lounge of Master Yang’s thousand year-old tea temple on Mengdingshan, laid a treasured relic to rest and were rewarded with a new porcelain gaiwan (covered cup).

Downstairs, the main hall of the temple has statues of Cha Gong and Cha Xian (the tea god and the tea immortal), racks for drying tea, and an ancient well that draws its water from the heart of the mountain.  Its water is sweet and clean, and Master Yang’s reverence for it is such that he won’t draw water from it without first offering water to the carved stone dragons that adorn the well.  This deeply rooted spirituality is what sets Master Yang apart from the many commercial tea farmers on Mengdingshan, and it is his passion for traditional cultivation and processing that sets his tea apart – Master Yang is one of only a few Mengdingshan tea growers who still roasts his tea by hand.

We had the opportunity to sample the fruits of this labor-intensive process during a leisurely gong-fu cha (kung-fu tea) session.  We started with an exquisite, heavily-roasted red (black) tea, the only red tea currently produced on Mengdingshan – Master Yang studied the technique from an ancient manual in his temple.  It had a rich smoky fragrance and a deep, pumpkiny sweetness.

Next we tried something I’d never seen before – and I’ve seen a lot of tea in my time.  Master Yang presented a gaiwan full of tiny fuzzy buds that strongly resembled bamboo shoots.  The tea, appropriately named “Bamboo Shoot Tea,” is not made of bamboo at all but comes from the buds of a 200-year-old tea tree growing on the mountain.  It brewed crystal clear, with a crisp flavor and a slightly medicinal fragrance.

Next was a tea actually made of bamboo leaves; “Immortal Bamboo Tea,” from a breed of dwarf bamboo that grows in rocky crevices.  It had a grassy flavor and yielded a vibrant green brew.  The highlight of the tea tasting had to be the Huang Ya, Mendingshan’s famous yellow tea.  Master Yang’s Huang Ya is the finest I’ve ever had, with a mellow, dry flavor and a complex fragrance of sweet hay and autumn leaves.  Yellow tea requires the longest fermentation time of any fresh tea, and Master Yang ages his in the traditional way, wrapped in bamboo paper to achieve a slow oxidation.

The following is the first article in a 3-part series I wrote for Chengdu Weekly about my recent trip to Mengdingshan.

Tea is a huge part of my life – I worked in a teahouse for more than a year and my love of tea culture is one of the main reasons I moved to China. Imagine my dismay, then, to come home from Dujiangyan last week to find my favorite gaiwan (lidded cup) broken on the floor for no apparent reason. Luckily, capricious fate had another, more favorable surprise in store for me: the next day I got a call from a friend of mine inviting me to joint her on a visit to a teagarden on Mengdingshan, one of Sichuan’s legendary tea mountains. She had received the invitation from an acquaintance of hers, one Master Yang, a traditional tea master with his own working tea plantation, complete with teahouse.

I’ll spare you Mengdingshan’s formidable history and suffice to say that it’s one of the oldest tea cultivation centers in the world – like thousands and thousands of years. Master Yang’s teagarden is one of hundreds in the area, but it boasts a few unique features, not the least of which is an ancient wooden temple dedicated to tea. The temple itself dominates the sunny, bamboo-filled courtyard of his teahouse, and while the building itself is probably only 40-50 years old, the site has remained in continuous use as a sacred tea space for more than a thousand years.

First we went up to what I like to call the “VIP lounge” – the second storey of the temple, closed to the general public, that houses Master Yang’s most precious artifacts. These include priceless antique teapots and gaiwans, a 200-year-old Tibetan tea brick, and a Qing-dynasty hand-cranked tea roaster, all displayed in glass cases and lit by a bizarre pink light that gives the whole place a surreal, Twin Peaksish feeling. Elegant tea tables, set with lacquered wooden chairs, fill every nook, and some of the walls, upon closer inspection, are actually made of tea. That’s right – the black bricks in the corners and over the doorway are, in fact, tea bricks, aging quietly in the temple. I had the foresight to bring the fragments of my broken gaiwan with me, and was able to give my old friend a proper burial amongst Master Yang’s treasures; an eternity of extravagant tea luxury beyond my wildest imagination. To replace it, Master Yang gifted me a new gaiwan, incidentally from the same kiln that my old one came from, and the circle of life was complete.

Next time: The Main Hall of the Tea Temple, an ancient well, and Tea Tasting!

新疆人 Uighurs - some look Chinese, some Caucasian, some Middle Eastern, and every combination thereof.

As the gateway to the West, Xinjiang’s culture was heavily influenced by the Silk Road.  We think of Eastern and Western culture as having existed in isolation until the modern, global era, but the culture of Xinjiang is evidence of an ancient and intriguing synthesis of the two.  Naturally, my favorite way to experience this is through their food.  The ancient association of China and the Uighurs (and the Hui, another Muslim Chinese minority group) has led the the inclusion of some distinctly Islamic dishes – namely grilled kebabs (烧烤）and hand-pulled noodles (拉面) – in the mainstream Chinese diet.

烧烤, the ubiquitous Chinese kebab

刀削面，or knife-cut noodles, a close relative of 拉面 pulled noodles

There’s a Uighur bakery next door to my office, which specializes in the Central Asian flatbread called nang 馕 (like Indian naan).  The Han Chinese have bread but they don’t generally bake it; even finding an oven in China is rare.  Trying to find decent Western (Euro-American) bread is equally hopeless.  This Uighur bakery represents a delightful domestic alternative to foreign bread dependency.  They bake their breads daily in a huge metal oven on wheels, filled with charcoal.

土炉 (tulu) or "earth oven". Even though it is metal, it is still called an earth oven. Kind of like how paper plates made of plastic are still paper plates.

In addition to regular flat nang, they have a swirly variety filled with roasted bits of fatty lamb and onions, called 肉馕, which I am fond of to the point of addiction.

Imagine, if you will, a cinnamon roll having a baby with a big pretzel. And they feed their baby nothing but roast lamb. That's what this is.

But the most intriguing baked good is the bei nang, which is, essentially, a bagel.  Naturally it differs slightly from the bagel I’m used to: the hole doesn’t go all the way through, and the dough is slightly saltier than a New York bagel.  For some reason, I find this Muslim Chinese bagel unduly fascinating.

Beinang and Rounang: Mighty deities of the Panthenang

I suppose that as an American, I find pale imitations of American foodstuffs all over the world: burgers, hot dogs, coffee, etc.  So to see something that so closely resembles a bagel, and yet is not descended from the ubiquitous American bagel, makes one of the most mundane and familiar foods of my homeland exotic and exciting.  It also puts the bagel into a global context:  this bei nang represents the Easternmost distribution of the bagel’s natural habitat, while the American bagel is the Westernmost.  The bagel was brought to America by the Jews, who picked it up while in Eastern Europe – The West’s border with Central Asia.  The bei nang is like the bizarro, alternate-reality version of the bagel:  Muslim rather than Jewish, conspicuously lacking the hole that characterizes the Western bagel, and having traveled East rather than West, it is nonetheless nearly identical in appearance, similar in taste, and even the name  ”bei nang” sounds uncomfortably like “bagel”.  And yet, if you were to introduce a bagel and a bei nang, they would have little to talk about.  They may not even recognize each other, because they diverged probably hundreds of years ago.  Rich in both flavor and history, bei nang are a prime example of how tasty foods can serve as an elegant analogy for the complex and obscure relationships between ancient civilizations.

It took me a while, but I eventually learned to embrace beinang's Muslim faith and lack of a complete hole.

scratching the itch to leave that rises,

like mosquitoes, from ditches,

to whisper at my sleeping brain

and suckle my unconscious blood

and leave me reaching, blindly, sleeping,

reaching for that unknown itch

sighing, staring from the train

the window fogged with smoke and rain

and wondering why I vainly leave

to leave the place that I have come:

The clamor of the metal wheels,

the rutted roads and flooded fields,

the hawkers, who, from car to car

sell chicken wings and paddy eels.

I finally made it out of Guangxi, several weeks later than I had intended, after many serendipitous delays as well as a few stupid ones that were my own fault.  Chinese train tickets come in four flavors:  Soft sleepers, hard sleepers, soft seats, and hard seats.  “Sleeper” indicates a bed, while “soft” actually means private (all Chinese beds are hard).  By the time I bought my ticket, all they had left were hard seats.  What followed was a 26-hour train ride through the countryside of Southwest China, sitting on a hard bench around a small table with 5 other people, facing backwards, with the lights on.  During this time I wrote the above poem, consumed (with the help of my neighbors) two bottles of Chinese liquor, read a book about the Vietnam War, ate some train food consisting mostly of fruit and cut up hot dogs, smoked five cigarettes and two spliffs, drank two cans of warm beer, and slept little.  The car was filled with more than a dozen 6-person-table-clusters identical to my own, with no partitions.

Chinese phones can apparently all play MP3’s and several amateur DJ’s vied for supremacy throughout the night.  The official smoking ban in the passenger area of the train is apparently more of an official suggestion, and discouraged no one.  Desperate to recline in any sense of the word, I resorted to sitting on the ground and resting my head on my seat.  This proved to be an ineffective sleeping position.

A generous dumpling meal followed our arrival; a celebration with my new train buddies, a foreign couple, marking the survival of the ordeal.  I purchased a Chinese SIM card and after a labyrinthine series of domestic phone calls I made contact with one Isaac, a friend of a friend of a friend, who rents an apartment in Chengdu and has a spare room.  A confusing motorcycle taxi ride over earned me my first Sichuanese friend, a Mr. Jiang Yong 江涌.  He spent a half hour driving me around trying to find my destination, with my small backpack between his feet and my huge one threatening to topple the bike with its weight at every turn.  He taught me some Sichuanese, gave me cigarettes, and even called me later to make sure I’d met up with Isaac.

Isaac is from Seattle, and has been living in Chengdu for four months, studying Chinese at Sichuan University and teaching English (and English drama) to Chinese children.  I felt an overwhelming sense of relief upon entering his apartment, so much so that it puzzled me at first.  Something about his apartment seemed intimately familiar.              As we became acquainted over tea (my Guangxi local green tea brewed in his porcelain teapot) I began to realize that I was sitting in an actual home for the first time in months.  Not a dormitory, or a hostel, or a hotel room, not a communal apartment complex shared by transient English teachers or the home of somebody’s parents.  For the first time in months I was sitting on a sofa, drinking tea made with water boiled on a stove, not dispensed from a water cooler, and brewed in a teapot, rather than the blue glass bottle I’ve been stuffing leaves into for the past month.

My blue tea bottle, from Vermont. It once held ginger cider.

I was gradually able to unravel the sense of recognition I got from the small apartment:  it reminds me strongly of one of my favorite places in America, the apartment of my good friend Scott Norton.  Some of the similarities are built into the architecture: Scott lives in an old San Francisco house which he shares with 2 other roommates, and it shares with this Chengdu apartment a characteristic thick, uneven paint job, a mild interior chill from windows with no weather-stripping, a tiled kitchen and bathroom with harsh fluorescent lights, water that is slow to heat and a blond wood floor.  The high ceilings of both dwellings create a similar acoustic atmosphere.  Even the wrought metal window boxes of the apartment remind me of the burglar bars of the old San Francisco house.  But the similarity goes deeper; both have the austere refinement of the young, educated, middle-class American bachelor.  The bookshelf is sparse but orderly, the sofas modest with right angles and clean lines, the wood chairs are old enough to have character but not old enough to be valuable.  Conspicuously absent are a television, a stereo of any kind, or posters on the walls.  There are cut flowers on the coffee table and live plants by the windows, and the tiny kitchen is equipped with a cast iron pan and ceramic knives.  I know for absolute fact that a jar of Sichuan pepper paste in the kitchen can also be found thousands of miles away, in Scott’s pantry.

I’m not sure why I feel compelled to compare, at such length, two apartments that have, at the end of the day, nothing to do with each other.  Maybe it’s a combination of tea and homesickness, or just a pressing need to have my own space again, a private space, after months of traveling.  Arriving in Chengdu, ostensibly my home base in China, my thoughts turn towards settling and furnishing, cooking and decorating, the domestic joys of having a space to call one’s own.  It’s an inherent human tendency, or at least one that is inherent to me, to try to spin a cocoon of familiarity in an unfamiliar place.  Even though I know it is futile for me; that in a few months, I’ll pack it all up and leave again, I can’t help but grasp at the illusion of a still and stable place in my ever-shifting reality.

I tried to offer some to my innkeeper and her mother but they refused because they say they’re too sour.  The light berries actually are pleasantly tart, kind of like a cranberry turned way down, and have a fragrant hint of spice that tastes more like green peppercorn than anything else.  The dark ones, almost black, are sweet and juicy.  They have a soft fleshy texture and a big seed in the middle.  They’re the kind of fruit that you spend half an hour munching on mindlessly instead of doing something more productive, in this case, taking a shower.

An unknown specimen of the genus Crunchbericus

Whilst on my way back from the restaurant, before I bought the Crunchberries, I was approached by a woman asking if I wanted to meet her 小姐 （xiao jie, “little older sister”), a term which sort of means “miss” but usually refers to a prostitute.  I told her I wasn’t interested but that never, ever seems to work in China, so I told her I already had a 小姐 and she said that hers was prettier.  I told her I had a girlfriend and she said “Where’s your girlfriend right now?”  I was tempted to say “Bitch I got 4 hoes waiting for me back at the hotel, how many you got?”  but I don’t want to get into a street war with a Guangxi pimp for muscling in on his turf.  Not tonight.

My shower has plenty of hot water; the downside is that the whole bathroom is one big shower and it all drains to a big central hole which is, in fact, a toilet. The bathroom is small so you pretty much have to stand inside of the toilet in order to bathe comfortably (Chinese toilets, like Japanese toilets, are holes in the ground).  Additionally, the toilet doesn’t flush.   It’s not that it’s clogged and can’t flush, there just doesn’t seem to be any flushing mechanism.  It hasn’t backed up yet but I am wary of it.  I made a point of bathing before trying to use the toilet as a toilet rather than a drain.

There’s a tv in my room so I decided to give some  Chinese television a whirl.  I watched Sagua in Chinese, which was a trip, because it’s an American  show about a Chinese cat.   I saw a bunch of ads for milk and one for some kind of alcohol that has apparently been around since 1573.  It’s strange to think there are brands of liquor that predate my country by more than two centuries.  There was also an infomercial, which can come on at any time in China and are incredibly fast and repetitive, not unlike our own infomercials but somewhat clumsier.  This one was for some kind of necklace with a bunch of different kinds of metal which is supposed to do something good for your spine, and pressure points, and it comes with three different digital appliances at no extra cost.  I was unable to identify any of these appliances but they all had large LCD displays with different numbers on them.

what they lack in resolution, they make up for in deliciousness

I’m now watching some kind of Chinese classic tv show, possibly from the 1950’s.  It’s in black and white and seems to be filmed at an archaic frame rate.  It follows the adventures of a young soldier as he roams the Chinese countryside with the fledgling Communist Party, living, loving, and killing Japanese soldiers with a  big shit-eating grin his face.  I also saw some of a cartoon featuring a sheep and a wolf which was most diverting indeed.

Update:  Woke up.  Left hostel.  Ate horsemeat noodles (video).  Caught my train.

Yeah.

So I’m pretty backed up with regards to blogging – I’ve been busy teaching and doing stuff, much of it in caves.  So I’m going to try to mow through my audio, video, and pictoral documentation gradually, by throwing up a small post every day or so.

These are pictures of the Lantern Festival in Yangshuo Park.  The Lantern Festival is the tail end of the Chinese New Year celebration – they usually call it Spring Festival here – and falls 15 calendar days after the Lunar New Year itself.

The lanterns came in dozens of different shapes and appeared to be made of silk (read: nylon), my pictures represent only a small sampling of all the different varieties.  There was one huge lantern in the shape of a dragon (two, actually) which I videotaped but didn’t photograph (video forthcoming).  Most of the lanterns had images on them – warriors, flowers, calligraphy, people playing Go, mythical creatures, etc. – but, as usual, my crappy camera was inadequate to capture them.  However, my camera survived a scooter accident and being dropped in the Yulong river, so I can forgive it  night vision.

It did manage to capture the beautiful, somewhat eerie spectacle of dozens of lanterns glowing in the otherwise dark park, bobbing gently on their wires like swarms of bioluminescent jellyfish.

Yangshuo has a lot of wood houses, clustered close together, so unfortunately we didn’t get to see the famous floating Fire Lanterns – basically  hot air balloons made of paper.  Max, however, did get to attend the Pingshi Fire Lantern Festival in Taiwan and you can see pictures of this on his blog.  I did see one lonely fire lantern float off of the side of one of Yangshuo’s karsts; someone apparently had the gumption to hike more than halfway up a tall, steep mountain, possibly in the dark, to celebrate Lantern Festival outlaw-style.  It didn’t have quite the impact of hundreds of flaming balloons ascending into the night sky but you can bet that guy got whatever he wished for.

The gods notice the intrepid.

What I saw, approaching the alley

I was taking a shower in my dorm room in Yangshuo when I heard a high-pitched drone pierce the white noise of the water bouncing off the tiles.  I figured someone must be playing a CD really, really loud inside the building, although it didn’t sound much like anything any of the predominately-Chinese student body would listen to.  It really didn’t sound like something anyone would listen to; it consisted of a twangy, alien, reedy whine that didn’t seem to follow any particular melody, and after turning off the showerhead I could make out odd, syncopated bursts of percussion, like a spastic kick-drum.  As soon as I got out of the shower it stopped, and I didn’t give it much more thought.  I dried myself off, shaved, got dressed and was about to leave when I started hearing it again.  I grabbed my video camera and ran out of my room trying to determine the source of the sound before it stopped  I could tell from the sound of the drums that it must be live music.

At first I thought it was coming from upstairs, but eventually I realized it was actually coming from outside the building.  I turned on my camera and headed for the source of the sound, going left down the alley in front of my dorm.  Groups of older Chinese people were sitting around at tables with snacks on them, and at the end of the alley in front of a small house were four Chinese musicians.  Two of them were playing long metal horns, slightly different sizes but both shaped like a Bugle (the corn chip, not the instrument).  For those of you who don’t remember the snack, that means they were conical and flared out at the tip.  The other two men were playing percussion, one of them a large pair of cymbals, the other an assemblage of bell-shaped metal drums that sat on the table as well as a skin drum and a gong that hung from the table.  The tune was strange and meandering, the horns sometimes in unison and sometimes slightly dissonant, the crashing drums oddly-timed without any apparent pattern.  Sometimes the percussion would cut out entirely, leaving the two horns to drone on like dueling snake charmers.  The overall effect was deafening and hypnotic.

I made eye contact with the performers while they were playing and they seemed generally entertained that I was there.  They played without any kind of sheet music or timekeeper (the drums seemed completely arbitrary and trying to follow them would be more confusing than helpful).  The second percussionist, the one with the drums and gong, seemed especially deep in concentration, a trance-like expression on his face and a long-ashed cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

While approaching I had noticed the smell of incense and some colorful decorations around the house, but when I saw a woman standing inside wearing white mourning clothes I realized I was at someone’s funeral, listening to a funeral dirge.  It was then that I noticed the white death couplets pasted on either side of the door, and saw the edge of a paper-wrapped coffin standing inside the building.   I got a chill and was going to stop taping, but I decided to just feign ignorance and wait for the song to end.

When they finally finished the musicians started laughing at me and we had the standard introductory exchange: where I’m from, how long I’ve been here, how long I’m staying, where my parents are from.  I told them I liked their music and they seemed surprised.  They seemed grateful for the company – I was the only one sitting anywhere near them – and they offered me a banana and told me to hang around for a while.  I felt self-conscious and slightly disrespectful about video-taping a funeral, and I also wanted to get my laptop to record the music in high fidelity, so I told them I’d get my computer and be right back.

While I was in the dorm I grabbed a plastic bag that had some old incense I’d taken from an abandoned farmhouse in the countryside, as well as some longan twigs from the longans I was eating a few days ago (The Chinese are always making fires so I figured I’d have an opportunity to burn them).  I have no clue what Chinese funerary protocol is but I’m sure its sensitive and complex, so I thought it best to check with the musicians before setting anything on fire.  They told me I could put the incense inside, and when I showed them the longan twigs they knew what they were immediately.  I asked them if I could offer them and they said yes, you can.  I vaguely remember hearing about using longan wood to smoke things, maybe tea.  I brought the incense inside, placed it alongside the other incense and lit three sticks,  kneeling on an elaborate bundle of hay and placing them with both hands into the ashes.  I gave the woman in white the longan branches and she thanked me quietly with lots of bowing.  I took that as a sign that I had successfully navigated the situation and that it would be okay for me to proceed with recording, having properly shown my respects.

Table drums

Hanging drum and gong

Cymbals

I opened up my laptop and loaded up Garage Band as I questioned the musicians to the best of my:  What is this instrument called? what are the drums called? what is this style of music called? how long will you be playing? (all day, it turns out)  I recorded a track and  named it 阳朔唢呐队 “Yangshuo Suo Na Dui,” per the musicians’ instructions (Suo na is the trumpet, dui refers to the drums, and they insisted I add Yangshuo to the beginning, indicating that the style varies regionally).  I also wrote down the name of the deceased, an elderly woman called 何秀英 He Xiu Yin.  The woman in white, presumably her daughter, helped me to determine the proper Chinese characters.  After recording the first track I was talking to the musicians when they suddenly started playing without any warning at all, one of the players gesturing to me to step back.  I wasn’t sure if I was being asked to leave or not, but then I realized they have to play at regular intervals – something in the neighborhood of every half hour.  I quickly added another track and caught the song in the middle.  After the second track I had to go meet my friends Maureen and Anna, and I asked the musicians if it would be okay if I brought some foreign friends.  They said “Sure, bring the whole village,” so I quickly fetched them from the park, asking them “ever been to a Chinese funeral? Want to?”  They were keen so I led them back to the alley, stopping briefly to purchase an orange each, which we offered to the deceased when we arrived.  We hung out for about 40 minutes, and I recorded another track from the beginning this time.  The musicians and the mourners periodically offered us bananas, apples, cigarettes, and tiny oranges.

唢呐 Suo Na

I would have stayed longer and recorded more but a young woman, presumably a relative, asked me in English if I was recording.  I said yes, and she said “why?”  She seemed genuinely confused and maybe slightly annoyed.  I told her that I like it, and she said “Why?  It is very sad…”.  I told her “I record all music I hear.  She looked me in the eye for an uncomfortably long amount of time without speaking, and finally I said “is it ok?” to which she said “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”  I told her I’d stop after this last recording and she left, appeased if not satisfied.  At first I thought I’d offended her, but neither the musicians nor the immediate relatives seemed upset or annoyed with me.  But I realize now, after trying to show the footage and recordings to some of the Chinese students at the school, that funeral music is somehow frightening or abhorrent to Chinese people.  Most of the people I’ve played it for have quickly demanded that I turn it off, not in the way someone asks you to turn off music that they don’t like, but more like someone who smells a gas leak tells you not to light a match.  This is also why nobody was sitting near the musicians at the funeral, and probably one of the reasons the musicians were so entertained that I liked to listen to it.

Suo Na Dui 唢呐队, with its harsh intervals, arrhythmic clanging and piercing metal instruments, is not for public consumption.  It is not intended to be enjoyed at any level; its dark, sacred intensity and volume are meant to frighten away demons who gather, vulture-like, around a fresh corpse.  This is why they have to play at regular intervals; until the soul has reached its final destination, wherever that is, the living must vigilantly protect the body from malevolent forces.  The metallic horns and the booming drums remind me of a New Orleans funeral dirge, with its wailing brass and marching band percussion.

That said, I have gotten into the habit of sitting in my room listening to the abrasive music.  It has the same dark appeal as listening to really loud, cacophonous hardcore punk or heavy metal.  The fact that it is, literally, death music, and that even the playback scares the shit out of Chinese people, adds to its sinister charm.  I’ve posted four songs from this recording session, I only request that those downloading them remember that these are songs played for the dead and to enjoy the music respectfully.

yangshuo suo na1

Yangshuo suo na 2

yangshuo suo na 3

Yangshuo Suo Na Dui4

The defining characteristic of Yangshuo is the karst mountains.

They are imposing and dramatic, and capture the classical essence of China better than any other natural feature.  The landscape of Yangshuo and the surrounding areas is dominated by them in every direction, and give the whole area the feeling of being in a Chinese landscape painting (or a Dr. Seuss book).  One particularly picturesque karst landscape, near Xing Ping village, is featured on the back of the 20 RMB note.

My first glimpse of karsts was from a moving bus in the middle of the night.  I traveled from Guangzhou, Guangdong to Yangshuo as the sun was setting, trying unsuccessfully to sleep in the tiny seat.  Between bouts of semi-consciousness I would look outside the window at the passing scenery, lit only by headlights on the country highway.  I watched as the squat earth houses and flat farmland of Guangdong passed by, my eyes straining through the darkness and the speed of the bus.  At some point I woke from my half-sleep and glanced casually out the window, expecting nothing in particular, and there they were:  Jagged, steep karst formations towering in the gloom, right off the edge of the highway.

My first impression was of awe and a mild form of terror, the sensation that these huge structures could begin moving of their own accord at any moment.  I had a similar experience the first time I visited Joshua Tree State Park in southern California.  We had pulled into the park late at night, uneasy at the sight of the alien-looking trees with their spiky wild branches which seemed to be swinging like the many arms of an angry deity.

Joshua Tree (not a karst)

Karst (not a Joshua Tree)

Whenever I arrive at night I always wake up disoriented.  I had checked into a hotel at 5 AM and had been traveling for the past few days anyways, so I had literally no clue where I was.  I looked out the window and saw some Chinese tiled roofs, clothes hanging on a line, and a smoggy sky.

view from my hotel bed

 But as my eyes adjusted I realized that what I thought was a smoggy sky was actually the mottled rock face of an enormous karst mountain, right outside my window, not more than 100 feet away.   When I got up to the window and looked outside I realized the mountains were all around, surrounding the city and within it, rising starkly from the flat ground.

As we pan up, the peak emerges.

Yangshuo’s natural beauty has made it a popular tourist destination; the government apparently closed 15 industrial factories in the area to keep the Lijiang river clean, in order to support the tourist industry.  Recently, the karst mountains have become one of Asia’s premier rock climbing areas.  The abundance of foreigners has in turn spawned a thriving English-teaching economy, with Chinese coming from neighboring provinces to study at one of Yanghshuo’s dozen or so ESL schools.  The result is a weird mix of foreigners and Chinese with foreign aspirations; the city itself has some old architecture remaining but all the new buildings are designed to resemble traditional architecture and maintain the aesthetic integrity of the city. 

Western food – pizza, meat pies, bangers and mash, spaghetti – is widely available, and you’re more likely to hear English in the tourist districts, such as “West Street”, than you are Chinese.  I have mixed feelings about this arrangement.  On the one hand I’m glad that I don’t have to look at square, concrete housing monoliths like I did in Guangzhou, but there is a distinct tackiness to the pseudo-traditional architecture which is made with nails instead of the classical Chinese joined carpentry.  I am glad that the government has invested in the long-term preservation of the areas natural and cultural beauty, but I hate dealing with fucking Westerners all the time.  I enjoy punting down the Yulong river on a bamboo raft, but I hate having to refuse postcards and photographs at every bend.  But the karsts themselves are undeniably gorgeous, immune to the materialism of the tourist economy.  They stand untouched and untainted, too numerous and too ancient to be exploited, too beautiful to be ignored and too exquisite to be imitated.

Some of the more unusual formations have names, usually based on what they resemble (“Drinking Camel Mountain,” “Nine Horse Mountain,” “Half Moon Hill”) but most are anonymous.  These are the jagged misty hills of classical Chinese art; these are the grotesque sculptures of Chinese gardens and the polished scholar’s stones of the Chinese studio.  As an icon of China’s natural scenery, they have immortalized themselves, and as tangible, living features they have secured their long-term preservation by sheer power of their own beauty. 

Those fluffy plants are clusters of giant bamboo

my innkeeper colorfully referred to this natural opening as "Pussy Rock". Charming.

Most of these pictures were taken using my tour-guide’s crappy camera-phone (I dropped my own camera in the Yulong river and it took a few days to dry out), but the mountains, as always it seems, speak for themselves.