A Breath of Fresh Air

Before coming here, I watched a few documentaries on the people and places in China, and reverberating in my mind since watching those films was a majestic scene of mountains with ribbons of rice terraces that made the mountains look like luxurious green and gold staircases to heaven. Of course, this image is all I could remember. I had no idea where this terraces actually existed, only that they did exist somewhere in China. Give me a needle and a haystack any day! So, a few weeks here and I had already pushed this image to the back of my mind figuring that it would be some time before I figured out where to find these rice terraced mountains.

So you can imagine my delight when, after talking to some newly made British friends during my holiday in Yangshuo, I discovered that these same long lost rice terraces were only a three hour ride by bus from Yangshuo! My friends and I immediately booked a trip with a local travel agency for a day trip to a town called LongJi in Longsheng County northwest of Yangshuo and its neighbor Guilin. I know little about it besides the brief brochure I grabbed at the Yangshuo travel agency and a few barely comprehensible comments made by our Chinese tour guide making her best effort to speak in English while we bumped along in our bus to LongJi.

I do know from these two sources that the terraces were constructed during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1386), and that LongJi is home to the Yao ethnic people. From my tour guide I think I learned that the Yao women are famous for having a Guinness Record for the village people with the longest hair. Apparently once the women reach a certain age they never cut their hair again. Single women must wear their hair up and wrapped around their head; married women can wear it down if they wish, but most don’t because it would be impractical; and pregnant women wear their hair in a special square-shaped bun placed just above their foreheads. The women are also famous for their communal hair washing in the river. The strangest thing I think I learned from my tour guide is that pinching a Yao person’s back is a no-no for both sexes because for men it means that you intend to marry them and for women it means that you must stay and work for the men. I am not taking responsibility for the accuracy of this information since I had a hard time understanding my tour guide even when she tried communicating simple things such as “because of holiday traffic the bus ride may take five hours instead of three” because it came out more like “maybe boose wide fi houws beca hole-i-day cas an twaffic.” I can’t complain because her English is way better than my Chinese, but that didn’t make communication any less difficult.

The bus ride to LongJi was one of misery because it did take us five hours instead of three because of the holiday traffic, but it was worth all five of those hours. LongJi was a breath of fresh air from the sometimes kitschy Yanshuo with its crowded streets full of tourist shops and restaurants, and it was especially a breath of fresh air from the concrete, tile, and glass industrial feel of Shenzhen. Like everywhere else in China during the National holiday, Longji had its fair share of crowds, tourists, and tourist vendors; but once you walk past all of this chaos at the bottom of the mountain and climb the hundreds of stairs it takes to get to the top, you emerge in a peaceful, simple setting painted by the natural brown of the wood-framed houses, the gray of the stone-lined walkways, the yellow of drying corn, and especially the autumn-gold of the rice terraces. Every once in a while a red lantern or a red banner splashes into the scene and reminds you that you are in China and that Chinese people actually live in this natural painting, and then suddenly you actually see a Yao person walking down the street or standing in the doorway and the brilliant blues, reds, pinks, and purples of their clothes provides a shocking but satisfying contrast.

A painting would not do the place justice, however. I loved the camp-fire smell of the burning bamboo as the locals slowly roasted the hollowed plant, which they would later use to cook their famous bamboo chicken. The smell drifted easily in the high altitude’s light air and constant breeze. The silence seemed to be a sound itself after the constant noise of the city. The noise that did exist consisted of a few chickens walking around under the wood houses, some small streams running down the hills, and the occasional passerby. Finally, the feeling that no painting or photograph can ever capture no matter how hard artists try, is the breathtaking vastness when looking out from the top of a mountain over the scenery below. I found myself breathing more deeply; then came the dizziness as I tried to absorb the scope of the view in front of me; and finally the feeling of clarity arrived, and I felt like I was a part of the scene.

For the first time I felt like I was finally in the China of my imagination—the China that has formed over the years in my mind as I read books, watched movies, and heard stories. I was finally able to link a picture of China that existed only in my head to the actual sights, sounds, and feelings of something real. It is not that Shenzhen does not feel like China. It does with its street vendors selling food that only Chinese people would eat, its huge neon billboards with Chinese characters, and the millions of Chinese people chatting in Mandarin around me. But LongJi gave me a sense of history that finally grounded me in the Chinese culture in a more intimate way than any Chinese modern city could ever hope to do.