Cuandixia, Beijing Municipality, China
I kept saying that I was going to find a ‘village’, but I never imagined I would end up somewhere quite so small as this. According to the signs, Cuandixia has 76 old courtyards. I can’t believe it’s that many, but I have not tried to count:
Cuandixia is located 90 km west of Beijing’s urban area and covers an area of 5,33 square kilometers. Conservative development and construction has been carried out here since 1995. Established 500 years ago in the Ming Dynasty, the village boasts the best-preserved historic folk dwellings. There new remain 76 courtyards and 656 houses built during the Ming or Qing Dynasty.
The village faces the south. It is established by the mountain, taking Longtou (dragon head) Mountain as its axis, and extending in a fan shape. The layout is compact in picturesque order looking like an ingot, and forms the hilly country courtyard dwellings which show unique features. The style is unrestrained, delicate, and exquisite with unique decorations which are rare cultural classics of historic villages in northern China attracting numerous domestic and foreign tourists. It has become a qualified shooting base for movies & TV programs, as well as a base for still-life painting. The tourism resources of Cuandixia are abundant. The green valley, clear spring, old roads, and divine ponds all add to the natural aura to the historic village. After fully enjoying the style and features of the historic vilalge, you can also stay in the old residences of the Ming and Qing Dynasties for some days, experiencing their richly tasteful charm. The four seasons of Cuandixia are beautiful. You can feel the spring charm of the historic residences in the spring, enjoy the mellowness, freshness and coolness in summer appreciate the red leaves in autumn and welcome the Spring Festival with auspicious snow in winter. The village is now a historical site under national protection, a national grade-A tourist attraction, the most valuable historic village of tourism, and one among the first group of famous villages of Chinese historical culture. [muy sic.]
I have been here for ten days and only plan two more. When I first set out to study somewhere smaller and less Anglophone than Dalian, I never really had a ‘village’ in mind, to tell the truth. I more had in mind a small city. Regardless, this village was recommended to me, so I decided I had to try. Its proximity to Beijing was a selling point – it is, in fact, still in the Beijing municipality. When I realized that this was listed in the Lonely Plant China guide (just barely a mention, but its there!) I worried that it would be too touristy. I’ve found that it is nothing but a tourist village. While many tourists do come, they are all coming from Beijing and all on the weekend. I’ve barely seen more than a handful here on each weekday. The most immediate benefit of this being a tourist town is that it is clean and beautiful. Really, very beautiful, which is something not to be said about most of well, all of North Eastern China. The other benefit is that, as far as lodging, these old courtyards have mostly all been turned into guesthouses. Within one minute of arriving in town, an old man was making head-on-hands-as-pillow motions at me, and beckoning. I followed him down an alley and found myself in a gorgeous little old courtyard. For 50RMB I got a room with a giant bed (intended for four people, in fact) and, of all things, a computer with DSL (on which I now write this). I told the mother and daughter who run the guesthouse that I was thinking about staying for a while if I could find a teacher. They told me no way, there are no teachers here, sorry. I went for a walk that afternoon and asked a few of the random old locals I saw the same thing. They all said no. I decided I would at least stay the night and then think about trying another town in this region.
The next morning, I slept in until ten-ish to hear a knocking on the door, “wake up, your teacher is here!”
Turns out, the mother and daughter had made some phone calls and found a friend of theirs in the bigger town about 5 miles away whom they thought up to the job, a woman of about 30 years of age. I, groggily, went out and met her. She said she’d never taught before, but if I wanted to, I could try a lesson that day. So I got out my books and spent a little while getting ready. The lesson went decently and I thought, whatthehell, I’ll give it two weeks.
And now its been two weeks and I’m ready to go.
I don’t dislike it here. The mother here made a deal with me that I can eat what they eat when they eat, rather than ordering food from the guesthouse’s menu, and I’m getting three meals for 35RMB per day. And it is absolutely some of the best food I’ve had in China. I honestly cannot remember the last time I’ve eaten regularly like this – my edges are softening by the hour. The room I’ve got is very comfortable, with the big desk to study and all the internet access I want for 5RMB a day. The studying has been very productive. While I’ve not added to the wixicon hardly at all, as I swear someday I’m gonna get doing, I have been practicing a fair amount, and I’ve been really hitting the characters hard. I must have stuffed a good few hundred more up there by now. Finally, the hiking around outside town is wonderful (and the only thing helping counteract all this the regular home cooking). Into the mountains that shoot up on every side, the stone-paved paths pass old temples as you leave town but then become windy foot paths that pass little caves and lead up – much scrambling later – to wide the views of the tops of enormous cliff faces.
All these great things aside, I can’t stay here. For one thing, I’m not really practicing much Mandarin outside of my 2 hour lessons each day. The ladies of the house are busy all day, and everyone else in town, well, I don’t really have anything to talk about with them. If they’re not workers busy with rebuilding ancient Qing courtyards with red bricks then painting those red bricks grey to look like stone, then they’re too old and so don’t speak proper Mandarin and I can’t understand a word they say.
If there’s anything these past few weeks of travel in Northeast China have shown me, it is that Dalian really is a very nice city, and I’m tempted very much to go back and study there. If I did that, I would be hard to do it right, but it could be done. In the meantime, I’m meeting my parents in Hong Kong in a month, and I don’t think I can resist taking the scenic route to get there. First I have to go back to Dalian to shuffle my snowboard and other associated crap to Beijing so it’s ready a month later to force upon my poor parents on their way home. After that, maybe I’ll go to Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, check it out to see if it’s a good place to study, and then I’ll start journeying south towards Hong Kong. So, if you enjoy reading me blag on and on, the good news is you should have a lot more to read than if I were to stay here in Cuandixia writing characters all day.