Shanghai Tan

Ancient style floating village is gaining big popularity in recent years as touristic attraction, since the unknown village of Zhou Zhuang [周庄] made popular within China by now deceased artist Chen Yifei [陈逸飞] and known to the world after the shooting of Mission Impossible 3 with Tom Cruise.

Wuzhen [乌镇]] is one of them, situated in the Zhejiang province [浙江省], midway between Shanghai and Hangzhou. One of the reason these villages are popular to local tourists is the accessibility from large cities which make them ideal for a one-day trip. You don’t need to prepare anything, just drive there (or train, bus), have one or two meals, walk around, and return home, no planning required. If you want to stay overnight, hotels are plenty available.

So far I’ve been to Zhou Zhuang, Zhu Jia Jiao and Wuzhen. They all have their unique history and heroes, but in terms of touristic attraction they’re all same. A tiny 2 to 4 square kilometers with a small canal and gondola as the main show. Restaurants and small craftman shops are all around, local snacks, a few mini-hotels and many tea houses, that’s about it. I think Lijiang in Yunnan falls into this category too. The difference is, as far as my observation goes, how much money have been invested to polish the site. I was at Zhu Jia Jiao [朱家角] just last month, it was ugly, dirty and badly maintained, although it was flooded by tourists that day. There were many red lanterns hanging around the businesses, but none of them were truely red or clean, the color have faded so much that it’s not even orange, it’s like grayish, all of them! I have taken 4 photos in total at that site, portrait snapshots mostly!

Wuzhen is the opposite, it’s well maintained, very accessible from highway, clean, newer, much larger, except there weren’t much people the day I was there, which is normally a very good thing for taking photo. However I can’t help wondering why there were so few tourists there while government have invested so much money to build a new west fence [西栅] recently. Most tourist bus still bring people to the older east fence. Compared to Zhou Zhuang, Wuzhen have very few western tourists, I guess it takes some big events for westerners to know it. Wuzhen is hometown of a communist intellect and an unknown Qing Dynasty army general, there’re not much story to tell to westerners so far!

So there I was with my friend Thuy Ni. We took the train from Shanghai the morning, stay a night there and returned early next morning by bus. Taken advantage of the rare tourists, I’ve shot many photos where there was no distraction, surprisingly.

See the full album here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Photo. 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.