February brought Chinese New Year to Beijing. As you would expect from “Chinese” (or lunar) New Year, this is the holiday in China. The country gridlocks for a week as the entire population flees wherever they are for the family home, often somewhere out in the provinces.
Chinese New Years is one of China’s three “Golden Week” holidays. The others are Labor Day, in the first week of May, and National Day, in the first week of October. Chinese New Year is the only one that is traditional, in any sense. National Day and Labor Day are both post-1949 communist creations.
In a spectacular example of communist central planning, it is only recently that the Chinese government has mandated weeklong breaks for these holidays, which were once just a couple of days each. The idea was to spur economic growth by creating an incentive to travel and shop. The actual result has been complete immobilization of the domestic rail and air networks. There is also a wicked trade-off as the government mandates a “working weekend” either just before or after the golden week. This results in brutal, nine-day slogs that reduce you to jelly for the first two or three days of any vacation. This year we had our company meeting over one weekend, the working weekend the following weekend, and a completely comatose office for three days before the start of the holiday as people stared blankly at their computers.
The unintended consequences of the golden weeks are now encouraging a rethink as the Chinese government toys with spreading the holidays out again, or a new, centrally mandated system of paid leave to reintroduce some flexibility.
Nevertheless, the weeklong break is nice, and Beijing was quite cheery as it welcomed the year of the rooster. The Chinese name for the holiday is “Spring Festival”, which is optimistic as it usually falls in late January or early February, in the depths of Beijing’s blustery winter. This morning, on the final day of the holiday, we awoke to the heaviest snowfall this year.
During Spring Festival all the major temples in town have temple fairs. Olivia and I went to the one at Dìtán (the Temple of Earth), one of Beijing’s compass-rose of four big temples that also includes the temples of the moon, sun and heaven.
The temple fair was like any large carnival. Every lane and pathway was lined with stalls selling food, toys, noisemakers, pinweels and, interestingly, many small, furry animals like bunny rabbits and hamsters. Jammed into every conceivable space amongst these attractions was the entire population of Beijing, ex those who had fled to the provinces to see their families. The Chinese have a saying invented, apparently, to describe the situation inside the Temple of the Earth: rén hai, rén shan. Roughly, “seas and mountains of people”. Chinese is expressive for crowded situations in a way that you would expect in a country of 1.3 billion people.
Alongside the typical carnival treats, like cotton candy and honeycomb, were things that only the Chinese would think of as “festive” foods: pig organ soup, lung on a stick, and locusts. I had honeycomb. Olivia had pig organ soup. Even marriage cannot bridge some cultural gulfs. The central pavilion of the temple had temporarily surrendered its religious functions to a ring of carny games familiar to anyone who has been to an American country fair. There were ring tosses, shooting galleries, basketball throws with absurdly small hoops, bottle pyramids, and so on, supervised by a succession of cheerless, burly men in green People’s Liberation Army overcoats. Prizes were stuffed animals and distinctly un-stuffed animals, including the same hamsters and bunnies, along with budgies, mynah birds and, yes, a live cat. Dead center, at the front of a pavilion that must have seen countless solemn, religious ceremonies over the years, was an enormous karaoke stage. Welcome to the Asian county fair.
But the temple fair was only a warm-up for the main event of our spring festival. For this, some background is necessary.
Six hundred miles north of Beijing is Harbin, the provincial capital of Heilongjiang. Once a Russian outpost, Harbin is now famous for murderous, Siberian winters. -20 to 30 °C, depending upon the wind, I am told. Cold enough to freeze the balls off a black dragon. My boss is from Harbin. I once asked her what people did there during the winter. “Drink,” she immediately replied. Then, after a moment’s consideration, “And fight!” My boss does not fight, but she can drink the rest of the staff under the table. At our recent company retreat, in Lijiang, she accompanied us in closing-out a bar at three in the morning. On the way out, I asked if she was joining a company excursion to the nearby mountain the next morning. “No,” she said, with no discernible irony. “I have the flu. I feel pretty bad. I think I’ll stay here.” Alcohol clearly holds no secrets for this woman. That is what the Harbin winter does to people.
To brighten its otherwise cheerless and lethal winters, Harbin holds a festival at which you can go see enormous ice statues lit from within by multicolored lights. That is, if your eyeballs don’t freeze solid. Essentially, the town builds an amusement park out of ice. What fun. Olivia and I were thinking of going to Harbin for a weekend to look at the ice lanterns and so we could tell people that we’d been there in Winter. My friend Hamilton, who went to Harbin last summer, was opinionated about this plan. “Fuck off,” he said, when we asked him if he wanted to come along.
Our regular driver, Mr. Jing, was equally horrified, when, on a trip back from the airport, we mentioned this idea to him. “There’s no reason to go to Harbin,” he said. “Too cold! You can see ice lanterns a hundred kilometers from Beijing. I’ll take you.”
Well, of course he would, for a modest fee. But it was cheaper to hire Jing for an evening than to go to Harbin, so we decided to take his suggestion to go see the ice lanterns at the Beijing suburb of Lóngqìngxía. With our good friends, Hans and Ginger, aboard we set out from Beijing at four in the afternoon with no idea what to expect. Lóngqìngxía might be Beijing’s “little Guilin” (according to Jing) but I was mentally prepared for a row of cheesy ice swans lifted from the champagne buffet of local hotel. Would there be anyone else there? Would it just be us? How mortifying.
It wasn’t just us. As we came to the entrance of the narrow valley in which Lóngqìngxía is located, we ran into a line of cars waiting to enter. Typically, it turned out a provincial governor was there, so non-resident vehicles were barred. Jing immediately phoned up his local contact, who rushed out to meet us in his car and drove us the rest of the way in, along a road following a wide riverbed. As we moved deeper in, a glow emerged from the depths of the valley. And then Lóngqìngxía was revealed in its splendor.
There wasn’t a town, as such, just a row of restaurants and what appeared to be three large hotels arranged in a horseshoe shape at the end of the valley. The central hotel had four blazing floodlights on the roof, casting beams hundreds of meters back down the valley. Encircling the valley along the ridgeline was an enormous replica of the Great Wall constructed in strands of lights. The complex, traditional characters for “Lóngqìngxía” blazed a hundred feet high in carpets of red lights on the steep hillside. Fireworks boomed behind the central hotel, and a canopy of red lanterns stretched overhead. Hans summed it up. “The Chinese must think this is gorgeous,” he said.
A short wander past stalls selling fragrant sausages, cold drinks, hot drinks, mutton skewers and lots and lots of film, and we were in the festival. Like the temple fair, it was a very family scene. A stage had been set up and pop acts were performing, hundreds of people were milling about with small children in tow, fireworks were being lit, and there were two small rows of ice sculptures and a thirty foot high rooster done up in Christmas-tree lights. An extremely dodgy looking cable-car clawed up the steep side of the valley to an even dodgier looking “slideway”, a kind of wrought-iron roller-coaster picked out in Christmas lights along which small cars laden with screaming (and presumably frozen) children periodically rattled by.
OK, we reasoned, there must be more. We walked through the pavilion, past the enormous rooster and through a tunnel that had been sprayed with a snow machine. Ah ha! A three-story slide made from blocks of ice and lit from within by fluorescent lights. A merry line of children was sloshing down the slide with parents in tow. Better, although none of us wanted to stump up ten yuan to ride the slide. My ass felt damp just looking at it. Also, the mass of electric wiring behind the slide was enough to quench any guttering curiosity.
We were still a ways short of Harbinesque grandeur. We followed a path leading from the ice slide under the rumbling slideway, past a section of the valley wall covered with blinking, Christmas-light roosters, through a gaudy temple gate. Suddenly, we had arrived in our winter fantasyland.
I now know what you would get if you went to Greenland, got a bunch of Eskimos high on acid, and forced them at gunpoint to build Epcott Center with locally available materials and fluorescent lights. The good folk of Lóngqìngxía had canopied over a large area of the valley floor and constructed scale models of the great monuments of the world with clear ice blocks lit from withing by reen, red and white fluorescent tubes. There was a Greco-Roman temple, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Neuschwanstein Castle, and several more of the architectural world’s greatest hits, two or three stories tall. Families and children scrambled among the ice columns and over the sculptures. If it had been in the USA, you would have needed to rope-off an area for salivating personal injury lawyers. I had to suppress the urge to put my tongue on everything.
We strolled through two pavilions of ice sculptures until we emerged out the back of the tents. Suddenly it became clear why the valley was so sheer. The entire icy circus backed against the foot of an enormous dam picked out in more Christmas lights. A five hundred foot covered stairway in the shape of a dragon wound its way up the side of the valley in switchbacks towards the head of the slideway. Well, who wouldn’t want to replace their local river with such a spectacle?
Our toes slowly turning black, we wandered back out the valley, pausing in the main pavilion to warm ourselves by an enormous fire that had been set in a giant, bronze cauldron. A nearby fireworks stand was selling bushels full of sparklers, handheld strands of firecrackers and enormous, window-rattling skyrockets that detonated far too close to the ground for comfort. The Chinese, who have no natural fear of fireworks, were allowing children to hold lit sparklers in one hand, and fistfuls of unlit ones in the other hand. Hans kept his camera ready, but no one went up in flames while we were watching.
It had been a good evening, as usual in China, the crowd had been loud, thick, cordial and very family oriented. Satisfied that we had found the tackiest valley in China, we went for dinner at Jing’s friend’s restaurant, just beyond the horseshoe of hotels. We had seen no other Caucasians the entire evening. As we waited for our food the waitress asked if we were all Americans. “We are,” I said, pointing to myself, Hans and Ginger. “She’s Singaporean,” I gestured at Olivia. The waitress nodded thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, “Why do you keep on attacking Iraq?”
Happy New Year.
Photos of the temple fair and Longqingxia are in the Feb 05 image gallery.