Guangzhou – Don't hold your breath

Buckle my shoe

Sometimes the universe spools into a vision of a pair in front of you. When it does, you have to be ready to capture it. If you miss the chance then you have a hard task ahead of you: you will have to create your own pairings. If you are lucky, then the pairing will strike you soon. Although nature is like the postman, in the sense that it always knocks twice, the second knock can come years later.

This pair took ten years to make. On a visit to Osaka years ago, I saw a lovely sweet shop which had orange custard inside an orange. I took two of them back to India with me so that The Family and I could have them. A decade later I met the appropriate pairing in a wonderfully crisp and buttery croissant which I found in a bakery in Tokyo. When you bite into it you encounter a filling of sweet red bean paste. Two surprise desserts from Japan, but the universe took a long time to bring me the pair.

The next pair is something I’ve remarked on for long: the people of China and the folks of India are very similar. In both countries I’ve met bus drivers who have a bus full of passengers wait while they halt in the middle of the road to talk to a friend who’s passing in the other direction driving a truck. Then there are the eternally curious people who will want to know how many children you have, whether all of them are married, and how many children they have had. When I meet Chinese tourists in India I like to ask them what they think of India. And all whom I’ve talked to have noticed the parallels.

Sometimes the universe presents you with a rhyming pair of couples. At a wedding photo shoot on Pearl Island in Guangzhou I came across this diptych in one shot. The soon-to-be-married couple were doing a very new partners kind of thing while down the road the phtographer and the makeup girl were having a very long-partnered kind of conversation. The universe does not repeat, but it rhymes.

Here is another rhyme. Early one morning on the waters outside Marseilles we passed a pair of lighthouses. A storm was coming up, and the pair drew my attention to the nearly invisible horizon. There was a sense of immense space conjured up by that scene. A few years later, walking out into the sea through a rising tide on Neil Island in the Andamans, I saw a heron come in to land on a rock far out in the waters. The sinhouette of the slowly sinking heron gave me the same sense of the hugeness of the space that I could see between the near rocks and the sky from which it came.

This last pairing that I bring here was odder than most. Somewhere in the middle of a long drive, my Uber driver stopped at a little repair shop to adjust the pressure in the tyres. I took a photo of a scene I found fascinating: three repairmen talking over a problem. When I looked at the photo later I was reminded of an old abandoned jeep I’d seen half a decade earlier, rusting away on the side of the road. How many repairmen would be required to think through the sequence of things needed to bring that rusting hulk back to life?

Specular Saturday

Night views of a city from atop a tower all tend to look the same. So after a few shots of Guangzhou’s showpiece, Pearl River New Town, from the viewing deck of the Canton Tower I realized that they all looked the same. Maybe a human element would improve matters, I thought. So I took this photo of reflections of people posing for selfies in front of the view. Is that a cityscape, or an ambush photo, or something else altogether?

Saturday sāncì

Wedding shoots are extremely popular in China and they always gave me an opportunity for ambush photography. I try to keep both the photographer and subject in the photo. The angle from which I shot made it simple here, although the bright white gown (pictured thrice, sāncì, 三次) makes you look twice to see the photographer. The location was Zaha Hadid’s stunning opera house in Guangzhou.

Bougainvillea and Baret

The Bougainvillea on our balcony has begun to flower. The west-facing balcony makes it very hard to photograph the delicately textured white bracts which surround the tiny flowers. In the morning the back-light presents a terrible contrast, and in the evening the setting sun glares into the lens. But I have time, so eventually I’ll find a way to solve this problem. While reading about Bougainvillea, one of the first interesting things I found was that it was initially described, as I expected, during Bougainvillea’s circumnavigation of the world which started in 1766 CE. What I had not known was the interesting story of the two botanists on board: Philibert Commerson, Royal botanist, and his long time assistant, Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the world.

Baret disguised herself as a man, since women were forbidden on French navy ships of that time by a royal ordinance. It is believed that the first samples of this thorny flowering vine were collected by her when the ships docked in Rio de Janeiro. Baret’s circumnavigation of the earth was interrupted after reaching Tahiti, when she was discovered to be a woman. Baret and Commerson were forced to disembark in Mauritius, where they lived until his death. Eventually Baret married and moved back to France in 1775, completing the circling of the globe. Commerson had, in the mean time, written about her as the first woman voyager around the world. On her return to France she was tried by a naval court, and, under the influence of Bougainvillea, was acquitted with honor, being described as `femme extraordinare’ and granted a pension of 200 livres a year.

An article by Londa Schiebinger in Endeavour and a book by Glynis Ridley have details of Jeanne Baret’s story.

Lingnan life

In Guangzhou you can’t help reading about the Lingnan style of architecture, without learning much. The old classical Lingnan style was built around the structure of life of those times. The high-rises of today are the same across all of China. When you try to find out more about the modern Lingnan style you are referred to examples: the Chen Clan Academy or the lobby of the White Swan Hotel in Shamian island. What I understood was that the Lingnan architectural style referred to adaptations to the warmer climate of southern China, including the materials used. As an example, the open verandahs of the Museum of Cantonese Opera that you see in the featured photo channel air over water to cool the surroundings.

I walked through the museum asking myself whether I could think of it as an example of the modern Lingnan style of architecture. The wood and clay tiles that are used in these roofs could possibly count. The clay tiles insulate against heat. The decorative fired black clay panels just below the roof are holdovers from older Lingnan architecture. So this combination would count as Lingnan.

The large pool and the cascading water from the rocks in the middle of it are definitely in the Lingnan style. Chinese gardens from across the country use water and rocks, but such a large open pool, not shaded by trees, is unlikely to be seen in Shanghai or Beijing. Pools there reflect the greenery of large overhanging trees. This one does not have the feel of the pools and streams in the Summer Palace of Beijing or in Shanghai’s Yu garden.

This part of the complex induced a sudden sharp burst of nostalgia. The banana trees and the coloured glass panels in windows reminded me of one of my childhood homes. The combination of hot-climate plant and glass designed to block out the sun would definitely make this part of the vocabulary of the Lingnan style. In fact, walking around the neighbourhood you can see many more examples of these glass panels on doors and windows.

A Bougainvillea flower floated on a stream full of carp. This was again typical of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. This plant does not grow well in the cold of China to the north of these provinces. In fact when we flew in to Guangzhou, the sight of Bougainvillea growing in the city made me think of the balcony of our flat in Mumbai where we have managed to get two of these plants to grow. The carp is common across China, so between the two, this is a Lingnan voice speaking.

The building above the museum has a tower with the upturned corners which some people say typifies this style. I also liked the adaptation of modernity in the simple rectangular glass windows. They would not be out of place transplanted to the Barcelona Pavilion. The building stands next to the pool whose photo you saw above. So, together, they take modernity and Lingnan’s old architectural vocabulary and merge them together.

Tranquility recalled

As a tourist, perpetually on a short time-budget, I don’t seek out tranquility. So I’m all the more appreciative of it, especially when it comes on you inside the crowded and noisy Six Banyan Tree temple in Guangzhou, where people are busy exchanging money for spiritual satisfaction. I paused inside a hall with vast statues of various Buddhas and saw this scene. The image of the world’s most famous ascetic juxtaposed with a priest waiting patiently for his next customer was something one could not pass up.

While I was sleeping

“What did you do while I slept?” I asked The Family when I finally gave up trying to sleep through my flu. “This and that. I went shopping and I took lots of photos,” she said. We went out together in the late afternoon, walking again through the Liwan district.

She showed me the photos when we sat down. She’d taken the trouble to stop in front of each of the bronze statues that the city has installed on Shangxiajiu pedestrian street and photographed it. We’d both admired these pieces of public art which celebrate the heydays of Guangzhou, the 1920s and 30s.These bronzes are evidence of China’s renewed fascination with the life of those times. I had very few photos of them, and, in fact, The Family had discovered ones that I’d not even seen. The plaques below the pedestals did not give us any information on the dates of installation or the names of artists, but, of course, we do not read Chinese. Later we searched on the web but couldn’t find any information either.

Chinese tees

I love the meaningless phrases that the Chinese put on their tees. That red tee (hong cha, to mistranslate a pun) in the featured photo was a word salad: full of the taste of English without too many of the calories.

When I took a photo of this jacket in a shop’s display the salesgirl was very annoyed with me. Photos of jackets? Seriously?

This shop window was visible from inside a metro station. Truly, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.

And you too. Thanks for all the fish, by the way.

Suit of Jade

The short-lived Qin empire, the first empire of China, fell by 206 BCE. Much was happening in India at the time: the Maurya empire was at its peak, the Gandhara kingdoms were rising in modern day Afghanistan, the first kingdoms of South India were being established. The Nanyue kingdom was one of the successor states of Qin, covering what is today Northern Vietnam, and the Chinese provinces of Guangxi, Guangdong, and Yunnan. Han, another of the successors of Qin, was in conflict with Nanyue and occassionally dominant. I found this background when I visited the massive museum built over the mausoleum of the Nanyue king Zhao Mo, discovered in 1983 CE in the Yuexiu district of Guangzhou.

The museum is very close to the Yuexiu Park metro station. We arrived an hour short of closing, enough time for the museum, as it turned out. The mausoleum is the usual mound over small burial chambers. We climbed down, and walked through these low stone-lined chambers. Zhao Mo died in 122 BCE. Since the first emperor’s tomb has never been excavated, this is possibly the oldest tomb of a Chinese king which has been examined properly in modern times. All the artifacts found here are in the museum above the digs.

The star of the show is undoubtedly the full-body jade suit in the featured photo. The Chinese belief that jade preserves the body is likely to be the reason it enclosed the king’s body inside his wooden coffin. The rest of the things (and people) in the mausoleum were meant to serve him in afterlife. There was a lot of jade in evidence (the bowl and the belt buckle in the photos caught my eye). Gold and silver were present, but in smaller quantities. The museum of full of beautiful items, but there is little explanation. That’s part of the reason why an hour here was more than enough.

Litchi Bay

On our last day in Guangzhou my flu was at its peak. I slept all day in our hotel room while The Family explored the parts of Liwan district that she’d wanted to go back to. At three in the afternoon I woke feeling better, and we decided to go have a small snack in the historic Panxi restaurant, and explore the Litchi Bay scenic area around it. This involved a walk down Enning Road, which was charming enough that we didn’t mind doing it again.

The “scenic area” was a sprawling garden between two canals connected to the Pearl river. A few days ago we’d spent our first evening in Guangzhou loitering by the Pearl River in Shamian Island. We sat down below the massive trees which you see in the featured photo and talked about how we’d been next to the water during every sunset in Guangzhou.

If we’d come here earlier we might have been able to take a boat through the canals, but right now they were coming in to moor. We stood near the jetty and saw little nuclear families of China disembarking, little children excitedly running around as soon they got off the boat. Streetlights were slowly coming on, and we had to begin thinking of our dinner. In China this was already past dinnertime, and most people were thinking of their post-dinner entertainment.

The Chinese middle class seems to have more leisure time than in India. A group of friends playing cards (or some other game) together in the evening is not uncommon at all. Not all the people in this group seem to be retirees. Also, Chinese cities, even vast cities like Guangzhou and Shanghai, have lots of gardens and open areas where young children can run around playing. This is so very different from the daily experience in a city like Mumbai. China, for all its different political system, has been building a comfortable lifestyle for its middle class. The disposable income of the middle class definitely exceeds twice that of their Indian counterparts, resulting in much better quality of goods and services in their cities. The public transport, and the entertainment areas are just two aspects of this difference.

This has been done without sacrificing a traditional lifestyle. We discovered basins of fruits drying in the sun by the roadside. It was such a wonderfully domestic sight on Enning Road. We stood there and watched locals wander by, probably talking to each other about the odd foreign couple looking at nothing in particular.

Earlier in the evening when we walked past this very ordinary door, I did a double take. There are really two ferocious dwarpalas guarding this house. The brickwork is common in this area. I never gave in to my great desire to scratch at the brick to find out whether this is just cement paint over red fired clay bricks (which we saw in the Yongqing Fang complex) or cinderblock bricks. If you happen to know, please let me into the secret in a comment.

This cannot be an everyday sight even in Guangzhou. The guy in the chicken costume was playing a little flute and saying something. I suppose the explanation is fairly mundane, perhaps an advertisement for a restaurtant, because in spite of this outlandish costume he didn’t seem to attract too much attention. It is common in China for people to stand outside shops and shout out to passersby to attract them; sometimes walking down a commercial street feels like a war on your ears. But this was pretty unique.

We briefly considered walking into that fancy looking restaurant across the square from Panxi. It seemed like a welcoming place. But I was too tired to cross the road. I stood at the corner and took a few photographs. There was a dinner-time quiet, very few cars on the road, and not too many people. Bicycles are not as common today as the iconic photos of Chinese roads from the 1960s and 70s could lead you to believe; but in the Liwan district I found many people on bicycles. Maybe I’m imagining things, and a quick look at statistics would prove me wrong, but it seemed to me that electric scooters are more of a thing in Shanghai. In Guangzhou bicycles are still preferred to these electric scooters.

Coffee is relatively expensive in China, but I like a shot of espresso in the late afternoon. We found a nice cafe next to a canal and sat down with a cup each and watched the restaurants across the canal slowly fill up. Since it was our last evening in Guangzhou we talked about what we’d missed (all the memorials and museums related to the Republic) and the wonderful unscheduled things that we had seen. When we chose to stay in Liwan district we had some inkling that we would see the China outside the guide books, but we had not expected to be so thoroughly charmed by it.