Shanghai Tan

Last weekend I took a trip to Wuyuan [婺源] with the Quyou club [趣游俱乐部]. Wuyuan is a relatively large county that comprises several villages in northern Jiangxi [江西] province, about 500km from Shanghai. Every year from March to April, it attracts tourists from all over the places across China for its large and omnipresent rapeseed fields, and more interestingly the landscape dominated by yellow rapeseed flowers [油菜花].

Among the tour members there are campers and amateur photographers. The campers are supposed to walk all day long across mountains to admire more raw landscape, while the photographers, including myself and two colleagues, would take small bus to cross the mountains, thus leaving more time and energy to take photos. At night, the campers would — naturally — camp somewhere in the village while we’ll sleep in some farmers’ houses. We had breakfast and diner at the farmers’ houses as well. Wuyuan is usually very humid, especially during this period of the year. I rarely see a photo rapeseed flowers in sunny day here. Everybody literary brings umbrella or rain suit.

Ancien villages

Wuyuan is not only a unique place with huge rapeseed flowers landscape, but its beauty is greatly enhanced by the presence of many small villages embedded inside the rapeseed fields. This adds a great deal of punch when viewed from far away or from a high vantage. Most of those ancien villages were built amost a thousand years ago, based on the Hui architecture [徽派建筑]. While the bigger houses are now built on modern architecture (or the lack of one), they still maintain the grayish wall and black tiles, so viewed from far, they blended in quite nicely.

Life in those villages is generally very backward, no air conditioning, no hot water, no flushable toilet. If the electricity lines and TV antennas are taken away, those villages would look like how they were 500 hundreds years ago! Many villagers still wash their clothes at the small river, and wash their foods at the same river. I have no doubt that drinking water also comes from there directly. Some farmers still keep the toilet remains for using as fertilizer……. This is not my first time travelling to rural and poorer regions, but seeing it still make me feel uncomfortable, or maybe I don’t see it often enough.

Chinese tourists

The tourism industry in China is in booming period these days. Most of the white colar workers can now afford bus, train and flight tickets to the remotest region of China. Since those remote and backward regions are still very poor, the cost of staying there is very low and therefore making them very affordable at the same time very refreshing to citizen (people living in big cities). On one hand this is good for the poor regions, to have tourist business and bring new construction into the area. On the other hand, as soon as these places become popular, rapid development quickly destroys the authentic rural atmosphere while villagers also adopt modern lifestyle comfort and fashion. Suddenly you see electricity poles and lines everywhere, TV dishes and sun panel heater on roofs, snack garbages everywhere, and worst of all, a flood of Chinese tourists that destroy everything on their way, for their love of taking photos of themselves on or in the main attractions. Many of them won’t think for a second when stepping in the flower field or standing on the stone, if that’s the main attraction that they’re coming for.

For example, the village of Xiaoqi [晓起] has convenient highway and bus station, so now it’s packed with farmer-style restaurants as well as big commercial restaurants and hotels. The old village is so packed of tourists that you wouldn’t believe you’re in a remote village, you can’t see anything but heads when visiting the ancien houses (kinda like in Zhou Zhuang). 30km away, a small village called Qingyuan [庆源] still has no convenient road to reach it, so it still maintains part of its calm atmosphere and charm, but that’s about to end next year when they’ll complete the road that allow tour buses to flood it with thousands of tourists everyday! By that time, farmers will give away farming and get on the tourist business and this place’s fame will be over forever!

Sometime I wonder if we shouldn’t make a beautiful place popular as that certainly will destroy it…

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Photo, Scrapbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.