Most of our China travels have been about the food, but I did have one magical musical experience here. It was 2:00 in the afternoon on Wednesday and after our one somewhat disappointing lunch in Chengdu (of course it was the most expensive one), we headed for Renmin Park (The People's Park) for a spell at a tea house we'd been told about. Now Chengdu's reputation is as a city of leisure and of many retirees, but I had no way to imagine what we'd see. Across half the park, thousands of older Chinese were gathered in clusters and groups around myriad musicians. Some were playing and singing old traditional instruments. Some were doing a kind of theatrical karaoke in makeup and costumes that seemed to be from stages in the 1960s. One guy in a Mao hat and black boots was singing what seemed to be military anthems, while a bunch of folks old and young sang along lustily and flapped plastic clappers in approval. But the most charming site was a sizeable brass band that drew a crowd of hundreds. Folks passed out song books while another guy stirred up the crowd with cheers and chants. The band started up and the crowd sang along merrily and loudly to what a guy I met said were standard folk songs. Sometimes he said they do American songs like Oh Suzanna and Christmas songs, irrespective of the season. After a bit, most of the crowd took to dancing to the band's well played waltzes, including scores of ladies wearing period outfits and hair, dancing with each other. I'd never seen such down-to-earth, participatory music making in a public place like that. So wouldn't you know that the government here finds it just a little dangerous. When we sat down to tea, we encountered a guide that we'd been told was easy to find at this tea-house, the famous Mr. Lee. He would lead us to all kinds of finds, but the thing he told us that afternoon was that the mayor had posted notices at the gates of the park outlawing the public performances. The People were having none of it, and they danced on anyway.
After the jump, more personal journal and food tales from Beijing and Chengdu...
Sunday was a big one. We started the day relatively early at the vast weekend market in south Beijing. Antiques, real and fake, furniture, crafts, beads, Buddhas and bric-a-brac lined every stall, every foot of ground and four huge sheds that rumbled with buying and selling. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen, though we wish we were PhD level experts in Asian antiques, because that’s what it would take to find the real bargains here. We bought a few gifts and Taylor haggled effectively for a porcelain dragon plate that will look good back at the house.
Then we made plans to see the Great Wall – but in our own damn way. While millions of folks bus out of town for the Badaling access point (the one you see in all the Presidential visit photos) to the ancient edifice, Taylor learned about a super-exclusive hotel where folks rent villas designed by leading modern architects of Asia – a showcase of contemporary homes called Commune By The Great Wall. The place also has a restaurant that’s said to have some of the best Peking duck in the world, and not having had our duck fix in the Chinese capital, we thought we’d combine a splurgy meal with a groovy site visit and views of the Wall as icing on the cake. Turned out great. The “clubhouse” was a series of steel encased boxes allowed to rust into an earthy shade of ochre, with serene landscaping and glass walls thrusting in all directions. The dinging room did have a Wall view, but you had to sort of crane your neck at one end of the room or from the deck outside. Happily we had time to enjoy a bottle of wine and nosh on mushroom with crab roe and good dumplings and stroll a bit while we waited an hour for our duck. It was spectacular, served with pancakes, plum sauce, cucumber spears and spring onion. We paired that with a stir fried asparagus and pumpkin that came with a seared pearl onion or leek-like thing we’d never had before. A luxurious and languorous experience. Sadly, we didn’t get as good a look at the villas as we’d hoped. We were too late for a prepared tour (expensive anyway) but after some haggling, they let us drive via our English-impaired cab driver up the main road for exterior views of the 11 main houses. Definitely cool, but no match for a building we’d see in Chengdu…
Chungdu would be the mystery city. The only impressions I could form were based on Taylor’s food research, which suggested there’d be lots of mouth scorching eats, and our friend Abigail Washburn’s suggestions about tea houses. The airport ride in looked pretty much like the other cities we’d seen – veritable forests of construction cranes and half-finished pillars of concrete cloaked in green construction mesh and scaffolding. The main avenue leading to our hotel by the river was a construction zone itself – a wide boulevard with a huge trench dug in down the middle for a subway. The air was gray and thick with exhaust. Could there be charm in this metropolis of 13 million?
We figured since we’d need to eat hotpot more than once, we should get going and start with the gold standard from all the guides and books, Huangchenlaoma. I fully expected a standard issue setting with the pagoda entrance and lots of red dragons. Instead, we were dropped in front of a façade that looked like a slick modern hotel, an exploded cube of several floors with gestures of not just traditional Chinese architecture, but the suggestion that a major national ruin had been found on the site and the glass and concrete box built within it and in honor of it. It was a shocking and wondrous first impression that was only heightened by a small army of staff who spoke almost no English but who whisked us up an elevator to a fourth floor tea palace with a skylight ceiling, bamboo gardens, and plunging views to diners one floor below. So while we were confused about how long we’d be waiting or whether they’d be able to find a table for us, we were able to see from above what this hotpot thing was about. Every table had a gas-fired vat built into it, and in the vats were bubbling pools of blood-red oil with red peppers floating on top. The place was suffused with the smell, or rather the vapors, of Sichuan peppercorns. It was all kind of intoxicating and bewildering, up to and including ordering.
The majority of the menu was full of animal substances we’re not exactly used to eating – duck kidneys and ox “wand” which I think is what you’re thinking (another hotpot menu we saw was less decorous, announcing “bull’s penis” and no we didn’t try it). But there we ordered some nice cuts of beef, some meatballs, a few kinds of mushrooms (which ROCK in China) a dish of pasta-like ribbon tofu, cabbage and a few other things. A team, nay and army, of servers who all looked and acted like nervous 16 year olds, brought dish after dish and helped us plunge them into our pit of fire. The verdict? Well, it varied wildly from thing to thing. The beef just came out boring. The meatballs were great. The mushrooms were the best. The cabbage just came out so saturated with chili oil that it was like eating a ball of fire. The Sichuan peppercorns did their number on our tongues, numbing them against the raw heat of the chilis. It was an interesting meal, made more so by the increasingly boisterous dining room. One group especially had about ten men determined to out-drink and out-eat each other. They drained a bottle of rice liquor each while taking turns standing up and making loud, crazy toasts and wild sermons to various members of the group.
I was afraid my meal would wreck my G.I. tract the next day but happily we both handled it fine and were back to eating our way around Chengdu. Our first stop was a nationally known cooking academy that Taylor had learned about. We met the man in charge of international relations and his sweet wife who taught English to students at the school. We got to sit in on a class in which a Chinese chef, through an interpreter, taught a dozen French students how to make classic Sichuan Dan Dan noodles, plus two dishes with a gnocchi-like dumpling that was made into a soup and a beef stir-fry. We got to sample all and it made a great pre-lunch. But nothing could compare to lunch-lunch. Chengdu has a tradition called “xiao chu” or “small bites” that are like counters where you order plates for about a buck or two each that range across Chinese cooking. Our five dishes made one of the most amazing eats ever. The tea-smoked duck was packed with flavor. The sweet and spicy dumplings were delicate and garlicky. The chicken in chilis reminded me of our own Prince’s Hot Chicken, except pulled off the bone. Some pickled veggies rounded out an amazing mid-day meal.
We also spent part of that day at the exotic gardens that were once the home of famous Chinese poet Du Fu. Despite or because of a little rain, they were the prettiest and most calming gardens we saw in China, a real respite from the busy city outside.
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