Tons of Thai Textiles From Chiang Mai

It’s easy to love northern Thailand and Chiang Mai in particular and many people do. It’s easy to relax and start feeling that you could stay a few months and maybe even join the many ex pats who have made their temporary or permanent home here.

Start to think about finding a way to make some money and getting a work permit (and you don’t need to earn much to live here) or getting a retirement visa if you’re old enough (and I am, hooray!) or even just joining the queues at the Burmese or Laos border every two weeks to renew your tourist visa. And of course getting yourself a Thai girlfriend which is what just about every middle aged single man is doing here. In the interests of sexual equality I must report that of course as a middle aged single woman you could come here for a Thai boyfriend too, but it’s just that you don’t see that in every bar or café and on every street.

Yes, Chiang Mai seems to have mastered the art of pandering to the needs of the farang (the foreigners) in every way. There are umpteen cafes selling cheap and delicious Thai food or huge English breakfasts or mango and bee pollen smoothies – whatever your particular penchant happens to be. And on top of that don’t forget the yoga sessions, the thai massage schools, the cooking classes, the trekking, rafting, elephant rides, meditation retreats, mountain biking, and what have you. And the Thai language courses  - which is how I’m spending my weekday mornings. Sitting in a classroom being given vocab lists and practicing the five tones and the long and short vowels may not be every one’s idea of a good time, but I am enjoying it very much, thank you.

But it’s not all sweetness and light – most of the “farang” here are polite and cheerful but still the Thais must get fed up of us. My guesthouse landlord confided in a private rant to me the other evening – he began by expressing his amazement that we would come here on holiday and then pay good money to spend a day COOKING?! And then proceeded to a general rage at having to smile constantly and answer the same questions over and over from dumbass tourists. In the end I wrote a big sign for him and told him to just point!

So what am I doing here? Between my morning Thai class, my evening yoga sessions and regular Thai massage in my local temple, I am very busy whizzing around the alleyways and back streets on a bright orange rented pushbike. I have settled into a regular routine – usually first down to the “H’mong village” at Warorot market. This is the section of the market where the H’mong tribal people have set up homes, where they watch TV, play with their kids, make clothes and stitch and embroider and sleep amidst their huge piles of somewhat tatty hilltribe embroideries and pleated skirts. This has all been developing in the past 5 years or so into a full on neighbourhood, and now I join the other traders (Thai, Japanese, other westerners) who are there most days riffling through the piles to see if anything catches our eye.

After that I visit the market shops, to buy indigo and hemp fabrics and buttons or beads or just to see what’s in. Once I’ve bought about as much as I can stick onto the wobbling handlebars of my bike I’m off to Poo’s. place. Poo has a shop selling clothes like me and she has usually already been down to the H’mong village that morning. By the afternoon she is flaked out on her settee at the back of the shop watching day time soaps – which are frankly appalling but quite mesmerising (and good for Thai practice – they speak slowly and dramatically – you don’t love me – you left me alone – you killed my father etc! )

Poo’s tailors make clothes for me, so most days I am there with my fabrics and my bits of hilltribe embroidered scraps and my patterns and samples, working things out and ordering or collecting. We can compare notes on what we paid for stuff, how the price of cotton is going up and the quality of hemp weaving down, have a laugh at the soaps and my crap Thai and share some mangosteens or other exotic fruits.

At the weekends the shopping doesn’t end, it just changes location – at the end of the road where I’m staying, the famous Sunday “Walking Market” sets up. From 4pm onwards the traffic is stopped, the roads are lined with stalls, the temple courtyards are full of food stalls and the road is thronged with people enjoying the atmosphere and the shopping. If it all gets too much you can stop and get a foot or shoulder massage at one of the massage “parlours” which get set up on every corner.

So that’s my particular version of Chiang Mai – but there are so many others… girly bars and pool tables, reggae bands and beer, meditation and massage, sausage and chips and Premier league football at the Irish pub, cocktails and candlelit dinners, ancient temples and golden Buddhas, tennis or a round of golf at the Gymkhana Club. You name it, Chiang mai has it all!

A Pair of Embroidered Trousers from Vietnam

I’m not sure what it was but it took me a long time to start enjoying Vietnam. Maybe it was just a bit of an anti-climax after the never ending variety and daily surprises of China, maybe it was the feeling of being  constantly on my guard or maybe it was just the weather – mostly grey skies with hazy indistinct views and surprisingly cold! Herrumph …I was hoping we’d finally left that behind.

In the mountainous north where I just know the scenery would have been amazing if only we could see it, the temperature was bone chilling. The titchy electric blanket was very welcome but it did mean the only warm place was in bed.

So we swiftly headed for the coast and were looking forward to enjoying the world Heritage karst islands of Ha Long Bay. We had two tempting days of sunshine to enjoy the kayaking and the seaside before a still becalmed grey chilliness set in.

 

The floating town of over 4,000 people who make their living from the sea around here is an impressive sight but it does mean that there’s hardly any marine life to look at. Snorkelling? Not much point.

As we went inland we had more tantalising glimpses of magnificent karst mountains rising up from rice fields, rivers and fishing villages. The people there again make their living from the water – ducks, fish and rice, but we couldn’t see a lot of it. But I should stop moaning about the weather – what about Vietnam itself?

Well I can only speak for what we saw (northern parts) but it was … just a bit boring. The countryside is despoiled with industry and half-finished road and building schemes, the towns are scruffy with piles of rubbish and construction materials, and ugly great shop signs everywhere.

The people look just a bit boring too – no glitter and glam like in Uzbekistan, no embroidery and polished indigo like the hill tribe people, no exotic robes like the Tibetans, not even any goths or punks or daft emo haircuts like in China. Almost everyone wears an anorak (puffa jackets by the thousand!) and jeans, and drives a scooter and wears a face mask. The most exotic it gets is the occasional woman wearing one of those archetypal bamboo “coolie” hats.

So I have to admit I was feeling just a bit disappointed by it all until we got to Hanoi. Finally I was charmed. The old part of the city is full of slightly dilapidated colonial architecture – tall yellowish buildings with green shutters and little balconies, old neighbourhood temples, markets and street cafes where you sit on a mat or a tiny plastic stool at best. Hanoi manages to retain the charm of old Asian city street life which used to exist all over Asia, and which China in particular has been assiduously demolishing as fast as it can.

So there it is – Hanoi, city of a million motorbikes and every one of them seems to be coming towards you at the same time!

So now I have to choose a textile to represent Vietnam. Most of the population here is Vietnamese but the problem is they don’t really go in for handmade textiles – unlike everywhere else we’ve been. Yes, there’s a bit of hand embroidery and some silk production but it doesn’t compare to the countries around it.

There is another population living in Vietnam though – around 55 different ethnic minorities, mostly living in the north, and they are a very different matter. Just like in China, they wear and make stunning costumes.

So my chosen textile is a pair of embroidered trousers which I bought from a red Yao woman in Sapa. She may live in Vietnam but she probably doesn’t speak much Vietnamese or feel that she belongs to this country, and as a minority she and her family are not treated the same as the Vietnamese.

Sapa was the first place we went to. We crossed the border from China over the Red River and climbed a steep 38 kilometres to Sapa, which was used as a hill station by the French back in those pre Vietnam War days. We stepped out of the minibus into thick drizzly fog and it was freezing cold – well everyone told us it would be.

There’s a lake, a church, a market, and lots of hotels, cafes, restaurants, and French bakeries for all the tourists. Most strikingly there are hordes of extremely colourful hill tribe women.

They waste no time in letting us know what they are here for and what we should be here for. “Buy my blanket, cushion, very cheap, look mister, very beautiful, why you not buy one from me?”  

The women here are mostly Black H’mong who wear pleated skirts, black turbans and polished indigo jackets or Red Yao with fantastic embroidered trousers, big hoop earrings and huge red headscarves. What they all have in common is that they are tiny, undernourished and they are not wearing enough warm clothes. On their feet they’ve got cheap wellies at best or plastic bags and flimsy plastic sandals at worst.

Some of them can speak pretty good English, and for me this is the first time I have been able to have a conversation with a hill tribe woman. So I start to get involved.  “For goodness sake go and get warm.” “You buy something from me!” “OK then, lets see what you’ve got?”

That’s it! As soon as you show any interest they’re all on top of you.

If there’s anything I can buy I will, but with the best will in the world I cannot buy something from the whole lot of you and I absolutely will not buy any of those hideous bright yellow and green over dyed cushion covers you keep waving in my face.

So I buy a few embroidered bags – but this only leads to “You buy from her, you buy from me”.

Finally somebody has something that makes me stop and look – a pair of traditional embroidered trousers. A bit dirty and patched but the embroidery is very fine and oh joy! they have escaped embellishment with bright pink or fluorescent green wool.

So now our protracted relationship begins.  “How much for the trousers?” – a ridiculously high price from her, a ridiculously low price from me – gasps and laughter from the crowd. Can I really be bothered with this?

As I walk around town she’s still trailing me, hanging around while I get my lunch in a lovely warm cafe. Another slightly lower price from her and a slightly higher price from me. “They make by my mother – she at home, long time to make, she angry with me if I sell too cheap. I been here three days, not sell anything. You buy from me and I go home.”  Talk about emotional blackmail! But look at her, she’s cold, it’s cold, and maybe if I buy them it will make her day.

Finally a mutually acceptable price is found. I hand over the money and wait for a smile. “You happy now? Good – now go back home and get warm for goodness sake”.

Half an hour later, I go into a shop selling ethnic costume and see a pile of embroidered hill tribe trousers, very much like the ones…. How much are they?

Exactly the same amount I have just paid – all without the haggling and the bargaining, all without being trailed and hassled and all without feeling extremely guilty. But also I suppose without getting some insight into the life of a dirt poor hill tribe woman trying to make a bit of money on a cold and foggy winter’s day.

Five things we love and don’t love about China

Five Things We Love About China

1. THE FOOD! Whether it cost 30p or £3 just about every meal has been delicious, healthy and great value. The delights which can be cooked up in a single wok or the ingenuity of a restaurant on the back of a motorbike trailer can only be marvelled at. Never forgetting those who cook it – the millions of generally friendly men and women who work long and hard providing great food. Just brilliant!

2. COMMUNITY LIFE. In the park, in town and city squares, and on the streets it all goes on. Karaoke, orchestra practice, aerobics, ballroom dancing, line dancing, tai chi, games of cards, and mah jong (at any given moment, there must be at least one million games of mah jong happening in China!)

3. PUBLIC TRANSPORT. A huge network of cheap and efficient long distance coaches, city buses and village minibuses mean that you can get around this vast country cheaply and you almost always get a seat. Not to mention the trains. I will especially sorely miss the “bottom bunk hard sleeper”. First a decent China Railways meal, then a soothing politically correct lullaby before lights out at 10 pm, a comfy bed with sheets and duvet and when you wake up, you’re in another part of the country altogether.

4. RURAL LIFE. Anywhere there’s some land, there are small scale, neat and productive fields. The country people have a well developed self -sufficient lifestyle with piglets on the porch, chickens in the garden, and lovingly tended veg patches. Outside are stacks of wood for the winter, feed for the animals, pickles and preserves. The country people know their environment intimately and how to make the most of it.

5. Jim says NATURE. The physical geography of the place, the desert, the Tibetan plateau, the mountains of Guizhou, the lakes and rivers and the man-made beauty of astonishing rice terraces and lovely villages. Di says THE MINORITIES – the exotic Tibetans, friendly Uyghurs, busy and sociable Dong, chatty Bai, tough and resourceful Miao, hardworking Hani and especially those gay Tibetan line-dancers!

And then there’s also the fantastic MARKETS – Kashgar Animal Market, Kaili Bird Market, and all the other wonderful country markets – colourful, sociable, and endlessly fascinating where we have spent so many happy hours! And Jim wants to put in a word for big bottles of TsingTao beer at less than 50p…

And Five Things we will not be sorry to leave

1. The Noise. Conversations and instructions all delivered at top volume and usually in a scolding tone, the peculiarly Chinese sound of loud hawking followed by the inevitable gob, furious mobile phone calls shouted at full volume, blaring car and bus horns, dreary pop music and loud martial-arts fantasy films on the buses.

2. The ugly mess. The rubbish, the litter, the urban scene mostly an eyesore with falling down buildings which no one can be bothered with any more, so they build another one. Beauty spots covered in crap, litter tossed out of the bus and on to the ground, gutters blocked with rubbish and plastic bags. Piles of sand, gravel, bricks, cement, routinely blocking roads, pavements and shop fronts.

3. The tourist biz. The regions have obviously all been instructed to come up with some sites of touristic interest – whether they be an ancient irrigation system, a mosque, a big fishpond folk art village or a sunset on the rice fields. Huge inappropriate viewing platforms, coach parks and steel gates where ticket offices are then constructed to extract at least £3 but probably much more from every one. Legions of Chinese tourists dutifully worship at these shrines to consumerist tourism, complete with the obligatory trappings, the enormous telephoto lenses, tripods and various other leisure-related totems supplied by the camera industry.

4. The bad driving. The meaningless gridlocks on village streets, at bus stations and city road junctions, which occur for no other reason than selfish and/or stupid driving, and a certain cretinous type of bus driver who prefers any activity -smoking, gobbing, talking on his mobile, yelling out of the window, whatever- to actually driving the flipping bus to its destination. Being blasted out of the way on a pedestrian street or on a zebra crossing (don’t make me laugh!) by a car or scooter quite possibly going the wrong way.

5. The construction boom (enough said about that one) and the relentless pursuit of wealth which seems to have gripped the nation – or a certain sector of it.

Not to mention…strange sugary milky stuff masquerading as coffee, strange sugary airy stuff masquerading as bread, going into a supermarket and not knowing what 90% of the items on sale are, being reduced to a state of total non-communication through a mixture of cultural and linguistic barriers and total illiteracy, the OCP (the spoilt self-obsessed twenty-something Little Princesses and Little Emperors – products of the urban One Child Policy), that heavy metal guitarist with his soaring rock guitar solos who seems to feature on 75% of Chinese pop songs, cold hotel rooms with rock hard beds, being shouted at, oh that’s enough… roll on Vietnam!

P.S. I know you will have noticed a startling omission from this list – the toilets. They ranged from luxurious tourist toilets to the village communal shit-pits (sorry, but there is no other word). But in general, they are plentiful and not as bad as I thought they would be – and, anyway, anyone can get used to squatting over a stinking trough with a load of other women.

Bottom bunk hard sleeper

HERE ARE A FEW OF OUR FAVOURITE THINGS!

Wonderful veg plots

Lovely fresh food

Park Life

Great minority markets

Line Dancing with the Gay Tibetan troupe

China and the End of the World – more words of wisdom from Jim Gaffney

As many of you know, I’ve been a committed Green Party member and campaigner since 1985. As environmental problems have become more pressing I’ve often had China thrown at me as an anti-Green debating point. Something along the lines of “ What’s the point in us cleaning up our act when the Chinese are building 100 coal fired power stations a year”, accompanied by crushing statistics about the resources it takes to bring 1.3 billion people from an almost pre-industrial way of life to full-on American style consumerism in 30 years.

The damage this is doing to planet Earth, the argument goes, is so horrendous that there’s no point imposing any restrictions on our own consumption. China is the ultimate example deployed in the” General Theory of Why the Green Party is a Waste of Time” which states “ Yes, you’re right, but we’re all doomed anyway so please shut up and stop depressing everybody (and anyway we can’t give up our consumption.)”

I have more than a few counter arguments for this. You might have a few of your own, and some of you will be fed up of hearing mine. On China, specifically, I’ve tended to an optimistic view. “The Chinese are very pragmatic and highly organised. They know all about the threat to the environment and human society. They’ve announced that they will build 30 new green cities, with a zero carbon footprint. They, above all nations are uniquely able to deliver what’s required: development that is extremely high-tech and rigorously planned. If anyone can show the world the sustainable way forward, it is surely the Chinese”.

Whatever the truth of this, it also dawned on me, like anyone else who reads the papers or the internet, that the story of our time is unfolding in China. The experiment in “opening up China” has been conducted with increasing speed and unbelievable success (if success is measured in the growth of GDP) since about 1982. Whatever they’re using for history books in 200 years’ time will all have chapters headed: ” 1990 to 2020, The Rise of China”.

“So why not take a look for yourself, Jim?” I thought. See what you see, and draw your own conclusions.

Construction Boom (Part One)

Our entry into China was a first-hand study of the Chinese construction boom. The main road to Kashgar had no surface. Several carriageways, slip roads and service roads for construction vehicles were in various stages of completion. For about 150 kilometres, we couldn’t go more than 40 kilometres per hour, mostly not even that.

On either side, the stony barren mountains drifted in and out of view. Mostly, we were looking at gravel pits, heaps of sand, huge areas of the mess left behind where the raw materials for the road building were being gouged out of the land. Our dust joined the dust from these extraction sites and the dust of the passing trucks as we jolted along. Whenever the dust cleared for a while, the driver and the other passenger opened the windows to smoke fags. There was a tourist moment, when we stopped to take pictures of some enormous, stately Bactrian camels near a Uyghur village. They and their owners had to put up with the havoc being wreaked around them, and so did we for a few hours.

We arrived late in the evening at the Chini Bagh Hotel in Kashgar. It’s in the former British Consulate, is recommended by Lonely Planet and by a seasoned traveller friend. Apparently there is a branch of “the popular traveller hang-out, John’s Café” in the grounds. We woke in the morning to the screech of metal cutting tools and the flare of an oxy-acetylene torch operated on the scaffolding outside our window. A youth was making a section of metal façade to be stuck across the front of the crescent shaped old building. When finished this would no doubt be lit up, creating a sort of Central Asian Khan’s Palace effect in neon, obliterating the original frontage. Lovely.

To one side of the former grounds, now a car park cum builder’s yard stood a 15 storey hotel, the more modern section of the Chini Bagh. On the other side, wrapped in scaffolding, was a 35 storey monster, which will soon be the 5-star 21st century version. If I had entertained visions of an elegant old-world colonial hangout, I would have to think again. John’s Café was round the back, neglected, empty and closed.

Kashgar’s famed old city has not been entirely reduced to rubble. There did appear to be an incredible amount of rubble, to be sure, and large areas have been demolished. Most of the rebuilding is in traditional Uighur style and there is some restoration. Once we’d got over the shock at the sheer scale of the upheaval and chaos, we perceived some merit in the process going on. Maybe these new bits will look OK in another 10 years, when they’ve weathered a bit, we thought, and those old mud brick houses look amazing, but I expect people will be glad to move into modern ones with better plumbing.

Er, yeah, so why does the government keep having to quell riots here?

Construction Boom (Part Two)

12 days and 2,500 kilometres after crossing the border, we were at last approaching our first experience of the “real” China. Well, Chinese life as experienced in the big cities, which is where most of the people now live, the urban population having overtaken the rural (for ever, I suppose) a few years ago. The train slowed down as smokestacks and massive industrial structures firstly increased in frequency and then mingled with the high rise residential stuff.

The older blocks looked terrible, some truly collapsing, but many only apparently derelict. On closer inspection, there were curtains, pot plants and washing visible around the filthy old concrete and metal. So who could grumble at the hope of much better living conditions in the brand new, bigger, cleaner, 21st century behemoths under construction all around?

We got ready to leave the train. But the train accelerated again and nobody got up. Through the window we watched more massive construction sites looming through the fog…. and more and more, as the train rattled along. We checked the map, another city before Lanzhou? No, this must be it. We both looked out at mile after mile after mile of huge new buildings going up amongst, sometimes more or less on top of, the old stuff. The older housing was 6 to 12 storeys. The new stuff towered over it all, every building at least 30 storeys. It must have taken the train another 40 minutes to get to the station from the edge of the city, and all was one enormous construction site.

This is not untypical of China today. Everywhere we visited we saw similar scenes. Many of the villages are going through their own mini Lanzhou. Here’s a quote from “China Emerging”, written in 2008 by business journalist Wu Xiaobo : “All of China is a massive construction site. The following statistics give some idea of what kind of place the country has become. The area under construction every day in China equals roughly the total new construction underway on any given day in the rest of the world. Only one year’s worth of construction in China is roughly equivalent to the total amount of existing construction in Russia. The result of only ten days of construction in the city of Chongqing is equivalent to the building of fifteen new Chrysler Buildings in New York. To repeat, fifteen new Chrysler Buildings in just ten days, in just one city.”

Fog or Smog?

We spent one day in Lanzhou, and later 5 days in Chengdu. At no time did the sun come out. Chengdu is in Central Sichuan, known for fog. I did start to wonder about this “fog”. Every night on the news, there’s an air quality report, often accompanied by a fair bit of discussion. Nationally, Beijing is the focus of most of this, but the regional channels carry similar items for their local cities.

The English language China Daily carried a front page item. The politician responsible for air quality was quoted. “Why is there a fuss? We’ve monitored a record number of officially sunny days in Beijing this year. Anyway, we Chinese have always associated fog and mist with romantic countryside. It’s just fog, like in our beautiful landscape paintings”. Some confusion, then about whether it’s getting sunnier or foggier. China Daily opted not to take these two statements to pieces, as any UK paper would have, but it really didn’t need to.

There are plenty of newspaper and tv images of people wearing protective masks, especially in Beijing. Obviously no-one has pointed out to them the reassuring words of the minister.For 6 months before the 2008 Olympics, factories in the Beijing area had their operating times severely reduced and vehicle use in the city was drastically curtailed. The world’s media reported lots of nice-ish weather for the Games, at least compared to the dire predictions. Funny that, the Chinese government seemed to find ways to prevent “fog”.

I started a bit of unscientific investigation, asking fellow travellers if they’d been in big cities, and whether they had seen the sun. Half a dozen conversations later, mostly with people who’d visited several cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, no sighting of the sun in a large Chinese city was reported. In the interests of balanced reporting, however, we later saw it poking through in Kunming and we met a Dutch couple who said Chengdu really was very foggy 20 years ago.

It’s interesting that this fierce debate is so public. I would have expected more official quashing. It shows the value of extracting public commitments from Governments, in this case to monitoring pollution levels and publishing the results. Then, no matter how much they squirm and wriggle and obfuscate, it’s difficult for them to ignore reality completely. Perhaps it’s more difficult for the Government in China to do so than the UK. The Chinese “face saving” culture can, sometimes, work to make the authorities slightly more accountable. Our lot, of course, are well versed in the art of forgetting any commitments made longer ago than last week.

Even Lanzhou had its good points. We had a good laugh in a tiny back street restaurant with our fellow diners and the family running it. Just ordering something to eat and drink has often been a collective effort with even passers- by anxious to help. We’ve improved a lot but it’s still a challenge. Lanzhou was early days, and everyone’s friendliness was an encouragement not to lose heart and go hungry in places way beyond the range of “The English Menu”.

By the way, the picture captures the sunniest moment of our stay in Chengdu, a city which in many other ways I found quite lovable. Its markets, parks, temples, the Chinese Opera and the wonderful Szechuan shadow puppets are a glimpse of how it might just be possible to enjoy living in a great big Chinese city. But not if you don’t get to see the sun!

Anyway on the question of fog or smog, my totally non-authoritative opinion is: it’s smog…mostly. It seems to come from a combination of 1) enormous dust clouds caused by desertification and the massive extraction activity in the north and west 2) dirty old smokestack industry concentrated close to the cities 3) too many vehicles, ineffectively regulated for polluting exhaust.

The Chinese Government is mainly concerned to be seen to be “green”, whatever the reality (just like at home, then). Telling its people and the rest of the world that black is white and white is black is a habit of the Chinese leadership that goes back a long, long way, much further than Mao.

They even claim that the country is Communist! But that’s another story. And their claim, to be Green in other, non-smog related fields, may well be dealt with in another blog!

An Old Lady’s Waistcoat from Yuanyang

Well, I have seen some rice terraces in my time, but the ones at Yuanyang take the biscuit!

I think I can safely say that this is one of the most beautiful manmade landscapes in the world.

The trick is to get here when the weather is clear and the view unobscured by clouds – which can descend at a moment’s notice. We arrived in swirling mist and we left in thick freezing fog but in between we had two beautiful days.

The Hani people have lived in these mountains for at least 2,000 years and they still continue to maintain and work the rice fields which their ancestors built. The result is a sublime landscape which people like us travel to see (much to the rice farmers’ bemusement I should imagine)

These fields are probably lovely at almost any part of the growing year; bright green with fresh new rice, golden with mature rice ready to harvest but right now they may be at their best, flooded with water for a few months before planting begins in March.

There is not much point saying anything as the photos say it all (sorry but you’ll have to see just a few of the dozens I took) Our “Sunny” guesthouse had a sublime view and we spent hours gazing out at the beautiful patterns the sky, clouds and light make.

Oh yes, and the hill tribe women in these parts wear a wide variety of lovely garments too – some pink with lots of embroidered embellishment and others dark and subtle.

The old ladies and the old chaps still wear real indigo jackets and waistcoats in layers but the younger ones go for the ready-made ones they can buy at the market.

Nevertheless lots of women are still busy making textiles – indigo dyeing, stitching and embroidering, knitting, spinning yarn and braiding – the first I’ve come across so far.

They are making very fine thin braids which are sewn onto the ends of traditional indigo head scarves. The hundreds of metres of braid hang down like thin dreadlocks.

We managed to buy one of the lovely indigo waistcoats the old ladies wear – it was on a stall we didn’t just wrestle it off someone’s back. The local market was one of the best, the rice fields are better than they were cracked up to be. So what’s the catch?

Only the Chinese Tourist Board’s insistence on building viewing platforms in the best spots. Then they can charge you to watch the sunrise or the sunset! But luckily there are usually a few friendly locals around to show you the way to get a great view for free!

(Building rice terraces like this takes generations of dedication and they start young. Photo at the bottom shows a little rice farmer practising to take on the job )

A Bike Ride from Dali to Lake Erhai (and back)

A great place for bird watching! I’m not an expert but here are a few of the birds we saw…

An atmospheric (i.e. dull!) day for photographs was quickly enlivened by a Ruddy Shelduck.

The people-watching is just as fascinating as the wildlife.

It’s very hard to do justice to the beauty of a kingfisher without all the tripods and telephoto lenses, but somehow the image of the bird itself creates the thrill.

Looking great in the reeds, atmospheric posing by this……er ….buntingy warblery job?

Lake Erhai supports several fishing communities as well as all the birds.

A grebe in the reeds

A Black-crowned Night Heron… and a juvenile keeping it company, which I only noticed was there after taking the photograph.

And then it took off, but Diane still got the shot!

This spectacular character hung about on the edge of a village near the fields.

A couple of blue guinea fowl type things were paddling about in the reeds. You can’t see their long red legs in the water. They were sharing this pond with no fewer than 11 night herons.

The Bai people farm labour-intensively, neatly and productively. As we made our way back from the lake towards Dali …

… we noticed how very many birds were feeding and hunting in their fields, including a hoopoe!

Beautiful Blue Shibori From Dali

Dali – long-time hippie paradise– more Japanese organic cafes and groovy backpacker hostels than you can shake a stick at. It’s not hard to see why people have come here and kind of forgotten to go home again.

There’s a few of them in our guest house. The owner himself is one – a quiet Australian (yes they do exist!) who has managed to find a way of making a living here by organising dumpling parties and pool tournaments while playing his favourite rock videos. It’s just like “The Vaults” away from home!

This very pleasant little town is just a 15 minute bike ride from the lake shore. In between there are small scale, extremely productive fields. These supply veg to Dali’s seemingly hundreds of eating establishments

Behind the town are the Cang Shan mountains with extremely impressive cable cars, and an amazing paved walk all along the top – we did at least 11 kms of it, and there’s plenty more. Is there nothing the Chinese can’t do? An Expressway method of hill walking!

In spite of the endless coffee and cocktail drinking opportunities, the beautiful surroundings and the very congenial guesthouse company, we are here to work – honestly!

We have come to Dali because this is the area where some of the wonderful deep indigo blue tie dye fabric we sell in our shop is made, and we have come to track it down. We are directed to a village about half an hour away. The population is Bai – another of those 55 Chinese minority groups. The women wear bright pink scarves or disconcertingly flowery headdresses.

If we had any doubts that we would have trouble tracking down the fabric, they don’t last long. No sooner have we stepped off the bus than we are “taken in hand” by two Bai ladies who beckon us to follow them down small alleyways. Either they make a living kidnapping tourists, or they want to sell us something.

They take us to a couple of houses with big yards where the fabric is made. Inside the smell of indigo tells us we have found the right place and we are confronted by the largest indigo vats I have EVER seen!

At these small household factories the designs are marked on to the white cotton in a disappearing yellow dye. This is then farmed out to the locals who stitch and tie thread around the designs. This makes a resist against the dye.

Once the design is completely sewn up, it is dyed and then the thread is pulled out to reveal the pattern. The cloth is washed and dried and ready to sell. The Bai seem to have a monopoly on this technique, and the older women sometimes wear bits of it. But mostly it gets made into very nice tablecloths.

Back in Dali we spend a pleasant day negotiating for the very best tablecloths on sale.

   So you see it’s not all swanning about! Hard research has to be done, and even harder haggling, and then what do you think we did? Yes another trip to our old friend China Post.

Banners, Baby Carriers and Printed Batik?

When we went to the Miao New Year Festival in Guizhou this year, I was surprised to see that the famous pleated batik skirts worn by many Miao girls were not in fact batik at all, just printed imitations. I wondered if this meant that batik is becoming a dying art and decided to try and find out if fine batik is still being made in this part of Guizhou.

I thought I would start with the best. Lots of Miao groups use batik in their costumes but the absolute mistresses of batik are Gejia women. The indigo and white batik they make is fantastically fine and precise, with delicate lines, beautiful shapes and spirals. We have bought many pieces in Thailand over the years and I would love to watch a real expert at work.

The Gejia don’t think of themselves as Miao but the Chinese “Minorities” administration has lumped them all together so they are classified as a Miao for the time being. The women are very recognisable in their sweet little milkmaid caps and blue pinnies.

My heart sinks somewhat when we reach the first village – the tell-tale signs of the Chinese Tourist Board are there. The coach park, the face-lifted facades, the cobbled lanes, the signs in English. In the “Batik home workshop” there’s a woman making what looks like a scarf that a tourist might buy – but it’s not the fine work the Gejia are known for. To tell you the truth, she is much more interested in selling us some batik than making it.

And indeed there is some lovely stuff for sale but it’s all old. There’s a lovely pleated skirt, but they don’t make those anymore, a batik apron but now the ones they wear are just plain blue. And on close inspection of my batiking lady’s cap I can see… oh horror! It’s a print too!

We leave for our next stop, the local market. It’s a colourful sight with lots of Gejia ladies and they are all wearing the self-same printed batik cap. But worse than that they are flocking to buy their “batik” from the printed batik stall! Oh dear! Am I witnessing the end of Gejia batik?

There is some consolation in the beautiful baby carriers which all look like genuine batik to me, and the very nice duffel bags a lot of the women use (but aren’t on sale).

My next stop is another Gejia village well away from the tourist trail. It’s quite a hike to get there and the views are stunning. There are not many people around, most are in their fields. Two men are sawing wood into planks with a hand saw and an old woman and her granddaughter are embroidering. No they’re not doing batik anymore, no nobody in the village is – no they stopped a year or so ago… Oh dear, this does not look too good.

A week later we get to a Miao village called Wuji. The old village is tucked into a steep mountainside, so steep that a road couldn’t be built to it. So in line with government policy a new village has been built next to the road. Except it doesn’t exactly look like a village.

Also because a super expressway has recently opened which by-passes this area, no buses now want to go this way. And who can blame them, the road is pretty dreadful and only local minibuses make the bumpy journey. Why two westerners would want to get off here is obviously a mystery to our driver who needs some persuading that we will be able to make our way back from here to civilisation.

We’re here because I’ve been told this is where the wonderful batik banners I’ve read about are made. These long, indigo dyed batik flags featuring phoenixes, dragons and other fantastical creatures are used in special ceremonies to honour the village’s ancestors. These are conducted every twelve years or so. Obviously apart from this rather limited market, they are also very attractive and can be sold to tourists.

The batik work is fine and beautifully expressive and I am so impressed I end up buying more than I intended (What a surprise!)

So after a very unscientific survey I would conclude that very fine batik may become a harder to find in these parts. Perhaps it is inevitable. Times are changing and not everyone wants to spend so much time waxing and dyeing – especially when you can buy a print from the market for a fraction of the price and it looks almost as good.

Oh and by the way, we managed to hitch our way back and found a very comfy bed for the night without a problem!

Indigo Central!

Polished Indigo from Zhaoxing

Zhaoxing is about the size of Bishop’s Castle – half way between a big village and a small town. The people here belong to a clan called the Dong and are famous for their beautiful textiles, lovely architecture and great singing. It’s almost unbelievably picturesque but also unbelievably for China – it seems real. Money has been spent on preserving it but it hasn’t been tarted up to resemble a Disneyesque version of rural China – it just is one.

Getting here was a strange and rather surreal journey. From Kaili the bus goes straight out onto the toll way – a smooth and fast road with hardly any traffic on it for 3 hours.

This expressway soars high above deep valleys on long, long flyovers – incredible feats of civil engineering. Any one of them would be something to marvel at in the UK – only this is China so we drive over at least twenty of them. Far, far below are rice fields and rivers and villages – looking down is not a good idea for anyone who doesn’t like heights.

Interspersed with the flyovers are tunnels burying into the mountainsides – again at least twenty tunnels of between 1 and 3 kilometres each. It seems as if the Chinese road planners just drew a straight line on the map and built the road there, no matter what stood in its way.

If the expressway is surreal, getting off it is even more so. Suddenly within a few yards, we are on an un-tarmacked dirt track, rutted with potholes, rocks, and stones. What I imagined could only be a temporary diversion is in fact the road. What on earth is going on? It would cost a tiny fraction of the cost of one of those bridges to tarmac this road but instead we are treated to a couple of hours of wild rocking and bumping along. At the wheel of the bus is a madman who drives as if he’s at the rodeo, with one hand on the wheel and the other lighting a fag or opening the window to spit out of it – preceded by copious amounts of “hawking” (I’m sitting right behind so I can see and hear it all!)

After one night in a crummy small town hotel we get on a country bus through villages and the expressway once again appears, but this time we are the ones below. We walk the last 7 kms with beautiful rice fields on either side of us but the detritus of the construction industry is never far away. Big apartment blocks stand on the horizon, and there are sand and gravel extraction quarries, tunnels and huge concrete flyover pillars waiting for the next road to join them up.

A group of women have set up their indigo vats and drying racks near a stream. Judging by the blue dyed pathway, it’s a place which they have always used. It’s a charming timeless scene (sorry to get a little sentimental) if you ignore the cement factory, flyover, and construction work in the background. Their surroundings are resolutely 21st century.

It comes as quite a surprise then to walk into Zhaoxing and find that it is not full of high rise 5*hotels, and nor is it being ripped apart and put back together again only “better”. Tourism is important here (it just couldn’t get away with being this ridiculously pretty without it) but there is a real thriving community too.

In fact it’s all so interesting that it’s hard to tear yourself away from gazing out from our balcony and just watching all the stuff going on. Old chaps play cards together or sit and smoke on the covered bridges, kids make mud pies and little girls play “elastic” (and to the same rules as the playground in Cov I played in the 1960s) Clothes and veggies are washed in the river and hung up to dry, bamboo is split and stripped and baskets woven, cement is mixed for building, and wood is sawn into planks, rice is threshed, you name it, it’s all going on in this incredibly industrious little place!

And one thing you notice immediately in the village is the amazing amount of deep dark blue cotton lengths hanging down from almost every house. Outside almost every home there’s a wooden vat or two of indigo.

Wherever you look its Indigo Central!

The weather is good and the rice has been harvested so the women are mostly engaged in dyeing and hammering their indigo. The sound of the big wooden hammers beating down on the folded indigo is the first sound I hear in the morning and the last at night.

I love indigo as much as the next textile freak, but even I have to say “That’s enough ladies, thank you”.

So here’s something about indigo for those you may be interested…

The freshly cut leaves and stalks of plants which contain indigo are steeped in a big barrel of water for a day or two. When the  water turns a dirty yellowish colour, the leaves are taken out of the vat. The water is aerated by repeatedly stirring and pouring and it gradually changes to a deep blue colour and develops a nice light blue froth.

The sediment from this vat makes a lovely sludgy deep blue paste which can be sold at market or kept to make a vat of dye when you need it. So indigo dyeing can be done throughout the year, not just when the leaves are fresh. An indigo vat is usually kept on the go pretty permanently and can be revived with more paste and wood ash. That distinctively pungent whiff is everywhere and almost every house in Zhaoxing has a vat or two of indigo outside.

If the weather is fine, each cloth will get about 3 dips a day – and this may be repeated for up to 7 days. Each time the cloth comes out of the dye, it gets beaten with a stick to allow the dye to really penetrate into the cloth. It’s then hung out to dry in between each dip and that is how you get the really deep, deep blue colour. There’s a tree root which may also be added to make the dye almost black and I’ve heard they add bull’s blood too, but cannot confirm!

But all this is not enough for the good ladies of Zhaoxing – they want their indigo cloth to shine! So next they coat it with a sticky gluey stuff made from what looks like dried fish eggs. They do this three times and after each coat they hammer it with their incredibly heavy wooden mallets. I had a go at it – those mallets weigh about 3kgs!

This lovely polished cloth is finally ready to be made up into jackets or the lovely finely pleated skirts the Dong and Miao women wear at festival times.

What a wonderful place and what an incredible textile tradition! The Dong people have been living in villages like this for something like 2,000 years. Their terraced fields cut into the mountainsides, their irrigation systems and their self-sufficient community life is beautifully adapted for this part of the world.

But this is 21st century China and what will happen to them in the next twenty is anybody’s guess!

P.S.

I had heard that coats of egg white are also used to waterproof the indigo but could never catch anyone actually doing it – until we went to another village where everyone was at it!

A father and young son on their way to a ceremony in the early morning mountain mists.

Jim’s Wildlife Blog

You’ll Be Surprised

Not much in China turns out the way you think it will. The other day, for example, we arrived at a grim little bus station first thing in the morning full of foreboding, expecting a) horrible jolting bus rides, b) visits to villages in which nothing much is happening and nobody wants to be bothered by a pair of gesticulating Westerner textile freaks, finishing up with c) a night in another redneck town staying in the flea pit by the bus station. The bus we intended to get on was cancelled. We very nearly changed our plan and jumped on a high speed coach back to the big city. Luckily, a kindly Taiwanese, Mr Wu, took charge of us. Sussing out we were heading the same way as he was, he found us a country bus and off we went. And against all expectation, the day just took off from there. The sun came out, we found a M’iao village where terrific traditional batik was being made by friendly and helpful people and the buses worked out fine. Even the bone rattling road surface improved by the end. We made it all the way to the relaxed but lively town of Leishan, which is actually quite pretty, something of a rarity for a Chinese town.

This day was typical of our time in China- never what you expect. It works both ways, of course. If you’re eagerly anticipating your visit to a village in the hills which every guide book has promised is an unspoilt haven of traditional textile creativity, don’t hold your breath. More than likely you’ll be dumped in a huge coach park and expected to produce 6 quid to pass through the village gate. It’s all downhill from there, but only metaphorically.

So we left Lanzhou’s smog, traffic, noise, chaos and 3 1⁄2 million people with no great hope that our attempt to get away from it all in the wilds of western Szechuan would deliver. Deliver it did, however. We walked and climbed in the mountains around Xiahe (actually in the province of Gansu, north of the Szechuan border), Langmusi and Songpan. Our experience of this sort of thing is a bit limited. Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland, mostly. We did climb a pretty fierce mountain called Phu Kradung in Thailand a couple of years ago, but until we started this overland across Asia journey, the highest we’d ever been was 2, 800m (Doi Inthanon in Thailand) , nearly all of which was achieved in a Thai friend’s Datsun.

We set some new personal altitude records in Kyrgyzstan. On the way to Lake Songkul, itself over 3,000m, we went over a pass at 3,600m. Time and again in Kyrgyzstan I felt that I was looking at scenery more romantic and inspiring than any I’d seen before. Certainly it was all on a grander scale, the air fresher and the stars closer, than I’d known, but, to be honest, it’s not exactly teeming with wildlife up there. There are thousands of animals, but it’s all about the herds of horses and cattle, the flocks of sheep and goats. It’s wonderful to see great numbers of semi-wild horses, and we caught our first glimpse of that inestimable species, the yak. But out there on the mighty pastureland they call the jailoo the most interesting wild sightings were of some lark-like species which seems to hunt insects in and around the dung, and very low flying large birds of prey, a sort of Harrier, I would say, hunting, perhaps, the aforesaid larks.

All in all, the most thrilling wildlife moments in Kyrgyzstan were provided by red squirrels. I know this shows up my incredibly low excitement threshold when it comes to wildlife, but there you go. I was brought up on ‘60s animal picture books which were swarming with the things…BUT I’D NEVER SEEN ONE. Not for the want of trying, in Scotland, France (where I caught a distant red flash, I think) and everywhere I’ve been where they’re supposed to be found. Three separate sightings, close up and just photographable, was a big deal for me. Another fab Kyrgyz photo op came courtesy of a stone creeper in the Karakol valley.

In the magnificent uplands of western Szechuan came the best of all China’s surprises. Winter was now chasing us. October was coming to its end and we were at 3,100m in our homestay. We were the only westerners around, nearly all the cafes and hostels were closed for the season From the village of Langmusi, home to 2 Tibetan monasteries and 1 Hui mosque, we had three fantastic walks. The first one included the moment when pair of vultures (or eagles, still not sure which) soared out beneath us as we stood exhausted on a mountain top. I think this picture has already featured in one of Diane’s blogs, but here it is again. Next day, while Di bought a Tibetan robe, I got chased down the White Dragon River Valley by an incoming snowstorm.

Then, as the sun shone on the third day, we set our new altitude record….not sure exactly how high, but the best trekking map available shows we were certainly over 4,000m. On the way back down, I saw a fox. It was lighter in colour, probably a bit bigger than the European version, with a huge gold and white tail. It was a classic fox encounter: we caught sight of each other at the same moment, about 100m away, we both stopped still. He gave me a long cool look, and then set off, not seeming to hurry but actually moving quickly in a fast straight-backed trot. Diane came up just in time to get a good look at him before he was gone.

As we carried on down towards the village, exultant about how the day had gone, another treat! This time a hare, incredibly fast, shot out from behind a clump of grass and headed off up the mountain. This too looked big, the size of a small deer, almost, and again very light in colour. I wonder now if the species there would go white in winter. It seemed so quick it was as if it were flying. Neither of these animals gave us time to take a photo, but sightings like these seem to hardwire themselves immediately into the memory.

The next day was October 29th, my birthday, and the cold was beating us and the hotel’s heating system. The only bus south left at 7.00a.m. in the icy darkness. No heat emerged from the engine to thaw us out for an hour or so. It was a tough and forbidding start, the day was not shaping up that well. We made our way through immense grasslands. At close to 4,000m, the great Yak herds were still out there, but more and more of them were being brought in by the mounted Tibetan herdsmen and women to their winter quarters. These were wind-shielded corrals, where the animals would survive on gathered fodder and shared body heat as they were crowded close together. I was cheered up by watching from the bus the antics of the Pikas. These rodents had dug burrows in the plateau, forming a huge colony some miles in length. They scurried back into their holes as the bus passed.

Then both driver and conductor shouted in unison, the bus juddered under the brakes and a collective gasp of excitement went round the passengers. We all jerked our heads for a glimpse of big running dogs with white faces, dark backs, light under parts, the fur very dense and gleaming. Not dogs. Wolves! There were six of them, and in common with the fox and the hare they seemed to move incredibly quickly. The sense that they were moving at great speed was heightened by their size, because they were big, as big as German Shepherds, but bounding along much quicker, lighter over the ground than the dog. I’d read that there was “no chance of seeing large wild animals in China without a professional guide”. On the other hand, the author of a blog I saw said “Wolves are very, very hard to see. The only time I’ve come across them is when it’s cold and they’re hunting for Pika.” So thank you, cute little rodents. You may be seen as a pest by the Chinese Government, but I’m truly grateful. How many times in my life will I see proper wild wolves on my birthday? How many times in anyone’s life might such a thing happen? Awesome.

Er, no photo again. Sorry. Here are some lovely polite
yaks…

And some horny sheep.