We left Hangzhou in the morning to start the long drive back
to Shanghai. On the way we stopped in a small town called Wuzhen. Wuzhen is
home to only 60,000 people and has a history of over 1300 years. It’s a big
tourist attraction because it has one of the best preserved sites for people to
see how the village lived for hundreds of years until modern times.
There’s an
old medicine shop with pots on the wall. They explained when people were sick
they would go to the pharmacist who would check their pulse, eye color, tongue
then ask about their dreams and other symptoms and from that would be able to
diagnose the problem. We walked through an old winery shop and saw how
traditional rice wine was made. We even got to taste some though I wish we
hadn’t. It tasted like vomit, it was disgusting. Smelled bad too. They also had
a dye factory where they specialized in a local blue dye they would use for
clothing, quilts and just about everything. As we walked through the village
there were scenes of the ways of the old life, models showing a traditional
wedding scene, figurines depicting old legends, cases containing traditional
clothing and pictures of people celebrating holidays and working in the fields.
 |
| Barrels of rice wine |
Turns out China was a hard place to live in the last century
leading up to modernization. The country was always at war and the land was
controlled by warlords. The simple farmers were little more than slaves on the
lands that they worked. In the 1920’s the communist party under the direction
of Chairman Mao took over China. They unified the country and privatized the
land. Every farmer was given their own piece of land and resources to help them
create a better future. Women were given higher status, the homeless were given
homes, and children were sent to schools in greater numbers than ever before.
The old generation, still to this day, remember those great acts and still love
and give thanks to Mao for those deeds. However, the younger generation and
most other people around the world remember Mao for the destruction that he
caused. He persecuted the rich and the educated, millions of people were
executed or starved to death under his attempts to move the country forward,
and under the cultural revolution he destroyed countless artifacts the people
held dear. Mao passed in 1976, things calmed and in 1978 the movement to open
up China to the rest of the world began.
China is a very polarized country. In the big cities of
Shanghai and Beijing you can find towering sky scrapers and immense wealth. But
if you drive just a couple miles outside the city you find farmers working
their fields by hand just as it was done hundreds of years ago. It’s like the
country tried to jump straight from third world to first and much of it hasn’t
quite caught up yet.
When we returned to Shanghai that night we were treated to a
special dinner called Hot Pot. Each seat at the table had its own bowl of
boiling water and the food was brought out raw and uncooked so we got to pick
what we wanted and cook it right in front of us! The meat and everything was
thin so they would cook up in just two or three minutes and it was great
because every bite was hot and fresh. We were also given stylish bibs to wear
while we dined on our own creations. Clearly all foreigners are slobs and pigs
because no one else in the restaurant had the aprons on, but that’s okay
because we recognized the fact that we are slobs and pigs sometimes. It was a
fun evening.
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