Food street, not for tourists

I love walking through the food streets of China. There is always something interesting to see and taste. That’s why I was looking forward to the food street near the Confucius Temple of Nanjing. But I was in for a rude shock. It seems that they took payment only through your phone app: Alipay or WeChat. As far as I can tell, these are connected to your Chinese salary accounts, and therefore closed to tourists. The Chinese are great business-people and hate to lose customers, but either the crowds or the language barrier prevented the shopkeepers from telling me how to pay.

Disappointing in one way, of course. But the sight of a food street always perks me up. So I had great fun walking around, examining things, looking at people, and taking photos. You can see the results in the gallery above. As always, click on any image to get to a slide show.

Just outside the street was a booth with a robot waiting for someone to pay for an ice cream. There was a crowd pressed up against the glass of the booth clicking away as avidly as me. Eventually one lady decided that she wanted a frozen yogurt and paid for it, so that I could take the video I’d wanted to take.

I wasn’t left hungry, of course. I walked into a lane full of sit-down restaurants and one of them had both the Duck’s blood and vermicelli soup and the pot stickers which are some of the specialties of the Nanjing style of food. For those of you who are sitting on the edge of your bar stool, no the liquid in the soup is not blood. The duck’s blood is used to make blood sausages pieces of which you can see floating in the soup in the photo above. Having had blood sausages half way across the world, I found this rather less than exciting.

Nanjing notes

An old China hand put the thought of visiting Nanjing into my head. I’d never thought seriously about it. The first thing to decide is when to go. Nanjing’s municipal corporation gives some help in deciding. They also have a page with suggestions for what to do if you visit for three days. I guess I’ll have only a short weekend in this town, between meetings, so I’ll have to be even more selective. Another website for travel to China which I’ve found useful over the years calls itself Travel China Guide. Its page on Nanjing is informative and deep, and roughly agrees with what the city suggests.

Nanjing seemed to drop out of history after the Ming Yongle emperor moved the capital to Beijing in 1420 CE. But it has played an important role in the rebuilding of modern China. One may trace the beginning of the end of Imperial China to the very unequal Treaty of Nanjing imposed on China by Britain in 1842 CE. The end of Imperial China came with the Wuchang uprising in 1911, and Nanjing became the capital of Republican China. It was captured by Japan, and over 6 weeks in 1937, between 40,000 and 300,000 civilians were massacred. During the Civil War, Communist forces captured Nanjing in 1949, since when it has been the capital of Jiangsu province.

Jiangnan, land of excellence and beauty; Jinling, province of both emperors and kings!
In graceful curves are its surrounding jade-green waters
Gleaming in the distance, its ascending crimson towers.
Soaring gables flank the Causeway;
Drooping willows shade the Imperial Moat.

Xie Tiao (466-499 CE) “Air on entering the court”

Places to see

• Weekend in Nanjing
• Some information
• General information
• Xuanwu lake
• Massacre memorial
• Linggu scenic area
• Dolphin protection
• Art Deco in Nanjing

It’s hard to make a core list of things that I don’t want to miss in a short trip to Nanjing. After some consideration of how much I can walk at a stretch, and how often I need to look for food, I decided to break up my trip into a series of walks. I can be flexible about how many of these I do. One walk would take me from the Zhonghua Gate to the Confucius Temple. Another walk would take me to the ruins of the Ming Imperial palace and the Nanjing Museum. A third walk would be to the Purple mountain area where the tomb of the first Ming emperor is. Walk number four is would be around the Gulou area (the Drum Tower) and the Xuanwu lake, and the fifth would be in the downtown area of Xinjiekou.

Eating

• Tangbao: soup dumplings
• Nanjing Impressions
• Nanjing Impressions 2
• Exploring Chinese cuisine

I’m quite sure that in my walk around the temple area I’ll get to taste some of the sesame buns that Nanjing is famous for. I guess I’ll just mark some popular Tangbao places on my map, so that when I walk around I can pop into one or two to taste this specialty. I really want to compare it with Shanghai’s Xiaolongbao. Duck in brine (Yánshuǐ yā, 盐水鸭) and Duck’s blood vermicelli soup (Yā xiě fěnsī tāng, 鸭血粉丝汤) are definitely on the menu, and the web sites that I’ve browsed give me some idea of where to go looking for them. The seasonal delicacy at this time is hairy crab, and I guess I’ll just have to figure where to look for them.