Just this past weekend my homegirl and I were down in Ningbo kickin it for the Dragon Boat Festival. Known around these parts as Duanwu jie, everyone gets the Monday off to watch the dragon boat races, naval battles, or whatever the hell they do with them. If you live someplace where the utility of a dragon boat might be limited due to lack of a body of water, don’t fret, because the other big tradition is to spend the whole weekend munching away on rice balls. As for myself, I’m not huge fan of munching on balls, rice or otherwise, so my friend and I decided to commandeer a company car so we could go on a road trip.

This time, the destination was the ancient village of Qiantong (前童古镇). It’s an easy place to get to, because there’s a highway that runs directly from downtown Ningbo with an off ramp right at the village. For those who are unfamiliar with Chinese highways, be thankful. The infrastructure itself isn’t so bad, but the users are worse than a bunch of fucking hobos. And I mean that in the most literal sense. With a speed limit between 100 and 110, you’ll have semis meandering along at 60km/h, with other semis struggling to get by them at 65km/h in the only passing lane, with inevitable shitdicks in their Benzes flying right up everyone’s ass at 150km/h+ only to overtake on the shoulder. Another strike against the highways here are that they’re all tolled. The two-hour drive there and back rang up $14.25 or 2,126 Tenges for my Kazakhstani readers.

Once we reached the parking lot we were greeted by this huge info centre that was entirely empty except for a few random people napping. I woke one of them up, bought our entrance tickets for like 6 bucks, then woke up another one who chauffeured us down to the village in a large golf cart. That was the most thrilling part of the visit. In fact, if they were smart, they’d just bulldoze the whole town and set up a wacky obstacle course for the sleepy dudes to drive you around in the golf carts.

We spent the next couple of hours exploring the town. There’s a bunch of peculiar things about it. First, it was settled about 900 some odd years ago, by the likes of a man named Tong. Now our man Tong was indeed the man, because over the centuries, with a little help from the Galton-Watson process, the name Tong muscled damn near every other family name out of the town. These days, something like 80% of the 10000 residents all have the same last name! I had a talk with some old geezer to get the lowdown, but through his thick Zhejiang accent I could only understand there were measures in place to make sure they didn’t “cross the streams” as Dr. Egon would say.

Despite the possibility of being amongst a bunch of inbred hicks, the locals were friendly enough. In fact, that was one of the nicest things about this place, that it had locals. I mean, in other tourist towns, all the locals are moved out to make way for endless kitsch shops and consuming hordes. I have this feeling that eventually that will be this town’s fate, but right now it’s still pretty much as it was at any other time in history, other than the fact that they have electricity and cable TV.

You wouldn’t be so wrong in insinuating that my dislike of turning these places into disneyesque tourist traps is a little hypocritical considering that I am in fact visiting these places as a tourist. However I am genuinely interested in the history, architecture, urban design, and the town’s way of life. So why oh why do you always have to be such a hater?

The townsfolk seemed to specialize in woodcarving. Examples of meticulously crafted wooden objects were abundant throughout the village. There was even one courtyard home that was the studio of a famous woodworking artisan. There was a lone girl watching TV in this residence. When I asked her if she was said artisan, she drew the spoon from her yogurt bowl, pointed it at me with conviction, and told me to fuck off. At that exact moment I drew my bow and arrow, and with the shot of a toxophilite, I struck her dead. Qiantong was indeed a great village.

 

Filed under: tourist shit