Shall we have some Chinese today?

Life can be simplified in India. Either you busy yourself with the details of the food you want to eat: which vegetables, made in which style, with what, and who makes it best. Or, you just eat Chinese, where the choices are simple. Should the wonton be fried or steamed? Do you want Hakka noodle or chop suey? I’m glad I don’t have to eat Chinese food in China every day.

Should you happen to be in Guangdong province (Canton, for those of us Indians who have only run into Chinese food made by Bengali speaking third-generation Chinese) you might be forgiven for thinking you know the food. Real Cantonese food is different: full of fresh seafood. You don’t need to know what each thing is called. There are huge ranks of aquariums in each restaurant, and you just go ahead and point at everything you want to eat. Fresh seafood is absolutely my favourite.

But if you happen to be in Central China, you the food is completely different. The chefs excel in presentation. You will find fish presented on the table looking like a porcupine, or, as here, like a bird. Even the tofu will be presented like flowers unfurling. I liked the Szechuan pepper infused broth that the fish came in, and the goji berries that flavoured the tofu. I love this food; must be my favourite.

What if you are far up north, near the Mongolian border, where the old trade routes passed? Pork and fish are not their speciality. Beef noodles from this part are known throughout China, and Chinese visitors to this part will definitely tell you to try it out. But the favourite local dish is lamb. Here you see a whole roasted lamb; its ribs were removed before roasting. This is superb food. Easily my favourite.

And we haven’t even touched on the food of Beijing or the far northeast. I think I cannot have so many favourites. It’s so much easier to have Chinese food in India, with the comfort of Indian style Hakka style noodles.

A roadside game of cards

A crisp autumn day was perfect for a walk around the neighbourhood. I skipped out of a meeting and went looking for an espresso. On the way I met a small group of men sitting down for a game of cards. I stopped as they dealt the cards out, and watched for a while to figure out the rules. It was a version of rummy. I decided to take a photo before walking on. Behind me I could hear speculation about what I was up to. Whether cards were invented in ancient Iran or in China is a controversy I will not enter. But whatever the origin, the designs and games travelled along the silk route.

Just us, only ancient

A stunning piece is the centrepiece of a gallery devoted to neolithic pottery in Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou. This jar with its mouth shaped as a human head was found in the deepest layer of an archaeological dig in Dadiwan in Gansu. The accepted dating is between 4000 and 3500 years BCE. Six thousand years ago people were making pottery as a form of art, just as we do today. When you see something like this you understand that people then were the same as people today, moved by the same impulses.

Two thousand years later, there were settlements of neolithic farmers along the valley of the Yellow River. Many beautiful pieces of pottery have been dug up from there. The pieces that you see here belong to the Majiayao culture. There seems to be a consensus that there were workshops producing decorated pottery in bulk. Commerce had started by then. Even in a world without metals, the organizations that people created were similar to ours. How could their minds have been different? Only by the absence of thousands of years of accumulated knowledge that we use all the time. But the people of that time started us on this path, by domesticating plants.

Conversation piece

Conversations which you cannot avoid while you are in China include those about electric vehicles. I’ve been gobsmacked by the rapid transition of Chinese cities from having highly polluted air to becoming rather good places for brisk walks. A large part of the reason is that they invested early and heavily in electric vehicles.

Already, when I first visited the country fifteen years ago, the famous bicycles had been replaced by electric motorbikes. Apparently those small batteries (a young man opened up his scooter to show me one, less than 15 cms long) can take about 4 to 5 hours to charge up, but then you are good for the day. Crossing an university on foot, I saw lots of these motorbikes standing in the rain outside buildings. They are quite weatherproof. One could drive up a pretty steep ramp, at an angle that I estimated as about 35 degrees. Impressive, I thought.

Electric cars have green plates, making them easy to count when you are stuck in the back of a taxi at a red light. About one in four or one in three could be electric at the lights that I stopped and counted at. On our way to the Temple of Bright Spirits (Bingling Si) from Lanzhou I wondered whether the taxi could do a return trip without charging. The distance was more than 250 Kms, and we’d got a taxi off the road about 4 or 5 hours after he’d started work. He couldn’t. So he stopped at a charging station on the road for thirty minutes. He would have taken 90 minutes for a full charge, but this was enough to get him home after dropping us. The driver asked me, “Do you have lots of charging stations in India?” “No,” I replied, “but they are beginning to be found in cities.”

Bright spirit

Gateways in Chinese temples can be very decorative. This looked like a recent addition to the narrow path up to one of the higher grottos in Bingling Si (Temple of the Bright Spirit). A large dam, the Liujiaxia Dam, was built across the Yellow River in the 1950s, flooding part of the backwaters. A wide walkway was tacked on to the cliffs here, wending past several of the caves which remain above the level of the water. I stopped on the path, unsure of which way to go, but happy to take in the first changes of leaf colours in this part of the world. The temple is at almost the same latitude as Palermo in Sicily, but the winds across the Asian steppes make it feel colder.

Autumn! Does the lady coming down the stairs count?

Near the Yellow River

Follow the course of the Huang he (Yellow river) upstream from Lanzhou, and in two hours you should be at the Thousand Buddha Grotto (Bǐnglíng Sì, 炳靈寺). The concierge in my hotel just walked out into the road and flagged down a taxi to take us there, and wait to bring us back. It was a shockingly cheap trip; in India a similar trip would have cost substantially more. The setting was incredible. It would be peak birding country in spring and summer. I could only spot Eurasian tree sparrows (Passer montanus) and Black-rumped magpies (Pica bottanensis) now, even in this warm autumn.

Since I’m back home for a very short period now, I will just show the setting for now. I hope that some time in the next two months of intense travelling I will be able to blog as I travel. Please bear with me if I miss a few days or am unable to look at your posts daily. I will continue to try to catch up.