Early last week, Emma told Hugo and me that we were coming along on a trip to rural Guangdong Province. Dr. Yue wanted us to see a different side of China. I’m glad she did; the four-day trip was a fantastic opportunity to visit places too remote for us to manage on our own.
Travel
We took a taxi from UPDIS to Shenhzen Bei railway station, a bullet train from Shenzhen Bei to Chenzhou West railway station, and a chartered bus from the station to pretty much every other destination for the next few days. The same laconic bus driver stayed with us for the whole trip, and he had a pop song playlist that took a few hours to play through, then started over from the beginning. I know some of those melodies by heart now.
After six weeks living in the noise and concrete of a megacity, our trip to the mountains came as a huge relief. As soon as our train left Shenzhen, we started to see rolling green mountains through the window. The bus took us through a part of the province called Qingyuan that is known for its gorgeous scenery. I loved passing through rural villages and catching glimpses of life on the main street: children and old people sitting in open-front stores, families swimming in the river, chickens wandering wherever they pleased, small dogs nosing through gardens, farmers stooping in fields. They grow lots of different things here: rice, corn, greens, beans, melons, squash, bananas, and other produce I didn’t recognize. When we finally got out of the bus, the first thing that struck me was how nice the air smelled: like hay and insects and soil. The air felt cooler and less humid than in Shenzhen, and instead of construction noise we were surrounded by chirring cicadas.
Our first destination was a newly-built guesthouse in Tianxin Village. I think it’s only a few years old, possibly even a year old, and it is very nice. It has all the comforts you’d expect in a hotel, like hot running water, an electric kettle, a comfortable bed, and air-conditioning. It’s run by the village leader (laoban) and his family, which includes several lively and social little girls.
The laoban cooked dinner on our first night, using a giant wok fitted over a wood-burning oven. The meal included cold beer; chicken; steamed greens with garlic; a spicy dish with tiny fish, beans, and peppers; soup; rice; and rat, which apparently is a rural meat you can’t get in the city.
The guesthouse has a common room with two neat features: an automated mahjongg table, and a tea table with built-in water boiler. These became centers of post-dinner activity the two nights our group spent there. It’s also outfitted with a powerful speaker system that the laoban turned on at 8 AM to start the day off with some nice music, and a TV, which stayed off except when the toddler was watching PAW Patrol dubbed into Chinese.
Tianxin Village
Friday morning the group walked to their first appointment, a meeting with three leaders of Tianxin Village. This is actually a collection of four villages; our meeting was held in the biggest one. Emma and the village leaders held an hourlong conversation, with occasional input from other UPDIS staff. Hugo and I couldn’t follow the conversation, but Dr. Yue sent us occasional WeChat messages summarizing the content. After this meeting, UPDIS staff toured all four villages, with Hugo and me trailing along admiring the views and asking occasional questions.
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Tianxin wants to develop its tourism potential. Hotels in the countryside are very popular with urban Chinese tourists right now, so Tianxin has an opportunity to capitalize on its clean water, fresh air, and tasty, natural foods. It’s apparently doing some beautification work at the moment, although I didn’t catch what that work entails exactly.
Emma suggested they work on identifying more special things in Tianxin – maybe its healthy frog population. Nature education is popular in Chinese cities, but lacking in villages. Taiwan has some instructive case studies. It may also be helpful that residents are members of the Yao ethnic minority. There are food specialities, dance traditions, and other cultural features that could potentially draw tourists.
And then there are other industries that could provide a future for Tianxin. This region has lost many of its men to jobs in the city, so they’re looking at building up the bamboo industry and planting tea as two ways to attract workers back to the countryside.
Dr. Yue said that Tianxin needs considerable engineering work to fulfill its ambitions, and it needs an implementation plan. I have no idea how all this work will happen, who will do it, and how they will be paid. I know that UPDIS will be paying another visit next year and that they’ve made progress since Emma’s last visit – the group admired a paved common area, a brick path through the fields and forest, and other new construction.
Daying Village
Friday afternoon, we visited a much larger village called Daying. According to its informational signboard, it has a population of about 1,138 people – making it ten times the size of a village in Tianxin. It’s also a little less remote. It is a government-designated administrative center, so it houses the school, healthcare facilities, and other services. When we visited, the ground floor of the school was busy with preparations for an upcoming local festival.
I did not get any information on what UPDIS had done in this village or what they were learning about it now. So I have no sense of its future, but I did learn a little about its past. Some of the stone houses in this village are hundreds of years old. The ancestral temple is particularly ancient, and looks it. Another house, I’m told, is so nice it has to have belonged to the local lord/landowner. The streets in this part of the village are too narrow for cars, but a perfect width for people and bikes. I imagine that it would be mildly interesting for tourists interested in local history, but it’s hard to see it turning into a major tourist attraction.
That evening, everyone participated in supplying dinner. The laoban and his wife showed us how to make bamboo rice, a dish that is popular with the Yao ethnic minority. You stuff rice and raw meat into a hollow bamboo joint, pour in water and seal the container, then place it in a fire until the bamboo is blackened and the food inside is cooked.
While the bamboo rice did its thing in the fire, we went down to the fishing pond to catch another dish for dinner. They trap fish in a little side pond so that they’re easy to catch with a pole and net – at least, easy if you know what you’re doing. We actually found it quite difficult! Emma caught the first fish, but the laoban’s wife had to catch the second one after maybe an hour of attempts.
This was a taste of the kind of fun that urban tourists could have here, I think. While stuffing the bamboo, Hugo asked one of the UPDIS staff whether children learn food traditions; she said that country children do, but city children do not. I could see this being a popular destination for urban parents who want their kids to experience a little culture.
It is also a good place to relax and have the long, slow conversations that you’re too busy to have in Shenzhen. That’s what the UPDIS staff told me: back in the office, they’re always too busy to talk, but on trips like this they get to experience rural time. I brought this up afterward with some of the interns, and they agreed: small towns and even other cities may have a center where people gather to drink tea and talk and play mahjongg, but Shenzhen just has shopping malls and Starbucks. The parks also serve a social purpose, but they’re considered old-fashioned by young people. Then again, it’s possible such a space would be underused if it did exist here, since work is such a big part of people’s lives.
Tourism
We spent Saturday and Sunday checking out existing tourist destinations. I think it was just a break for the UPDIS staff, but for Hugo and me it was an opportunity to find out what they meant when they talked about using ecological and cultural resources as tourist attractions.
Our first stop was a boat tour of the Lianzhou Underground River, which runs through the biggest karst cave system in China. I have never been inside a cave before, so I really enjoyed getting to admire the diverse and inhuman shapes of the stalactites created by water trickling through limestone. The setup was too artificial and irreverent for my taste: rainbow-colored lights, fake flowers, signs describing what various parts of the cave resembled. It was also teeming with tourists led by loudspeaker-toting guides.
That afternoon, we visited the Yao Millennium Village, an ancient village of the Yao minority that became a tourist attraction some time ago. It was so popular on a summer Saturday that people were parking along the road and walking uphill to the gate.
This village is a dense, steep cluster of stone houses terraced into a hill and surrounded by farm fields. The views are absolutely spectacular. It’s hard to imagine living in this landscape without loving it.
But I wonder if you can really love living in a village that crawls with tourists. I didn’t see anything that looked like normal life – just souvenir shops, casual eateries, and people urging us to buy five-yuan bundles of incense for the temple. One old woman wouldn’t take no for an answer: she kept pushing her bundles at us until we walked away.
I wonder the same thing about the big open areas for dance performances and other communal events. Do villagers use them when tourists aren’t around? Do they dance for each other, or is just a tourist thing? Can you say that an authentic Yao community has been successfully preserved through tourism if it exists for the purpose of tourism?
The third, final tourism experience we tried out was a hot spring resort called Jiulong Town. As I said to Hugo, this is why we travel – because while I could have imagined various versions of a Chinese hot spring resort in my head, the reality of Jiulong Town definitely wouldn’t have occurred to me.
There are three sorts of accommodation: 1. Squirrel Wood Houses, which on the outside resemble suburban American houses right down to the house numbers, and on the inside are kind of like American vacation cabins. 2. Container Houses, which are literally shipping containers on stilts on a slope.
And 3. Boat Houses, which are indeed boathouse-shaped and sit directly on a giant lotus pond. Hugo and I had imagined a communal hot spring, but what actually happens is that each house has an outdoor hot tub, and the staff will pipe spring water to your tub on request. The whole setup feels remarkably private, especially for China, and it is quite relaxing. I woke up at 6 AM and spent a delicious hour doing nothing but sitting in my boathouse, drinking tea and writing postcards.
The daytime activities: You can wander around shaded or unshaded walking paths admiring the lotus pond and the surrounding karst landscape. You can practice archery and take a paddleboat around a tiny lake. People who enjoy heart attacks can do a short but steep hike that culminates in a glass platform below their feet. There are giant drums near the entrance that are surprisingly satisfying to play. There are playgrounds for the kids. There are fields of agricultural produce. There are bike rentals. There’s a restaurant with a summer camp cafeteria feel to it, and a line of snack and traditional medicine vendors outside. And finally, and this really is the weirdest thing for me personally, there is a stunt performance by two acrobats on a cable strung between two hills. It looked very dangerous. Riveting, but dangerous.
I tried to imagine how this resort was developed, and I’m guessing it went something like this: We have a natural resource (hot springs). We have a struggling agricultural industry, and a burgeoning tourist industry. So we build a resort around the hot springs that draws on our existing resources, i.e. farm fields, fresh air, and nature views, but we also need to entertain people, but also we have limited space… so this is what we got!
None of these three tourist destinations are something I can imagine Tianxin or Daying turning into. There may be better existing models for them somewhere else (Taiwan??), or maybe they’ll have to innovate. I hope they’re successful, and I hope they manage to keep the best of the lifestyle they have now.
In the United States, many urban renewal efforts have been criticized for their lack of equity and their disruption of communities. In Shenzhen this appears to be equally true, because there’s not a clear answer to what happens to low-income residents after redevelopment. I’ve heard from several people that they have the “chance to stay, if they want,” but I don’t really understand the details. I do know that tenants don’t really have rights or protections here, which leaves them extremely vulnerable.
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