These are some diary entries that I made when traveling in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province and Chongqing in the summer of 2004. On this three-week trip, I mainly traveled by bus over dirt roads or by boat on the Yangzi River to a dozen remote ancient villages, the oldest of which was 1400 years old. The simplicity, practicality and elegance of the architecture that I saw on this trip was one of the reasons that I decided to pursue an advanced degree in architectural history.
Pianyan Village. Sunday, August 29. Rained all day.
We stayed in the village all day walking around. We walked outside on the cobblestone street of the old town about fifteen times! We even walked to the little hill outside of the town to look around, feeling lazy and a little tired in the end. Was it also because we had to change three buses to get here yesterday?
Mahjong has to be the main form of people’s entertainment here. Inside every open door is a mahjong table. I bet there are more people playing today, because of the rain.
The houses on the old street all look dilapidated – no one is keeping them up. Many of them look abandoned, and like they’re going to fall apart at any second. I looked into the houses through open doors, at the floors, and what was in the rooms, wondering if people here ever cared about the sanitation conditions and comfort of their living space. It seems that working takes up all of their time – except for playing Mahjong perhaps.
Tanghe Village and Baisha Town, Thursday, September 2.
The first half of this day was completely wasted.
At first we wanted to go see the Ancestral Home of the Sun Family. But it sounded quite far away, and the road wasn’t very good. We then decided on a rafting trip on the river to get a better look at the village. The few people in the raft rental store seemed unprofessional, not quite matching their 60RMB per person charge. They did not even have their own car – we would have had to rent one from one of the other villagers. So on and so forth; in the end, it was a waste of a precious half an hour. We eventually decided against our impulse, since it was obvious that it was more trouble than it was worth.
So after wasting away our morning like that, we got on a bus at around 11am to Baisha, hoping to catch a boat from there to Songgai, as we heard there were boats.
Riding on the tiny little bus with us was a small funeral party. A woman had a white strap of cloth on her head, the tip of which hung all the way down to the back of her knees; she also had a linen rope wrapped around her waist. Written on her bag was a memorial to her mother. I thought about how I didn’t see this anymore, since I moved to the city.
After an hour over dirt roads, we arrived at the Baisha bus station around noon. We hired a rickshaw that took us to the wrong dock – which turned out not to matter, because the boat for Zhuduo through Songgai had already left Baisha 45 minutes earlier.
Missing the boat actually turned out to be a great turn of luck! Standing there on the dock, we saw row after row of old houses stretching out before us along the banks of the Yangzi River. We decided to go and have a closer look.
A quick five minute look and we decided to spend the entire afternoon at this place that twenty minutes before we had thought was just a transfer point. We found a guesthouse, dropped our bags, had a shower and went out for a bowl of noodles. This place was just like Tanghe – we couldn’t find anything else to eat!
We started our exploration from a roughly east-west street called Donghua Street that runs parallel to the Yangzi River. Later we found out that there were a few more major old streets in this small section of the city, including Fengming and Minsheng streets. We tried to ask about the name of the old town, but were told only names of these streets. It seems that after the new city of Baisha was constructed, the names that the old town had left were those few old streets.
It was so much better here than in Tanghe! Most of the houses were lived in, although the majority of the occupants were elderly. The expression on their faces and the way they talked about the old town went something like, “well, they are just some old rickety houses, what’s there to see?” If people that have lived in these houses their entire lives think this way, what will happen to the structures when a younger generation take them over? If ancient alleyways and courtyard houses in Beijing – the capital of China - were torn down and people didn’t do anything about it, what chance do a few streets of houses have in rural China to escape the wrecking ball?
What impressed me most was a peculiar little two-story house at the corner of Fengming and Minsheng streets, labeled as #1 Fengming Street. It was peculiar not only because its height far exceeded its width from the façade, but also because of its gracefully overhanging awnings. The most interesting thing about this house was that one of its side walls was constructed along an inclined “road” (about one meter wide). Of all the places I’ve seen in China, this might be the coolest.
