Who wants to go to Guangzhou?!

(The title rhymes and makes more sense if you know that. “Guangzhou” is pronounced kind of like “gwan joe.”)

Minzhi (pronounced kind of like “Min ja”) Primary School, where I work, is always busy. If there’s not a festival or an event for the children, the teachers have a training or guest speaker or something. If I feel even the slightest bit bored, I know to wait a minute and something unforeseen will happen. Surprises (aka unplanned or un-communicated but scheduled festivals and assignments) are part of the Chinese way and we’re learning to roll with that.

What weekend?

One week in October, the other English teachers told me we had to come to school that Saturday.  It’s common to work on a Saturday to make up for time lost the following week for a national holiday, so working on a Saturday was not an unusual idea. But it’s always an unwelcome one. I like my weekends off. Who doesn’t? The Chinese, apparently. We’ve noticed as a whole, they don’t adhere to the same mindset of working five days a week with weekends off. We always see businessmen and women scurrying about on the weekends. I digress.

Before I could ask what holiday we were making up time for, my teachers told me we had an outing to Guangzhou. Every year, Minzhi sends all of its teachers out together to bond and learn stuff. Like many things here, I didn’t know what to expect so I tried to free my mind to be open to whatever came my way. It seemed like my Saturday would not be spent in the classroom so I was happy.

Day out

I reported to school for an 8 AM breakfast. If you’ve read my posts about my school lunches, you may be concerned about what I eat for breakfast. I am happy to report that my school breakfasts are much more identifiable. I have yet to find bones or blood for breakfast. It is usually loaded with carbohydrates, though. If you’ve seen recent pictures of us, you may agree that we – or I, at least – have been indulging in maybe a few too many carbs. I digress again.

The teachers gathered together for a school breakfast of wide rice noodles, steamed meat buns, corn on the cob, donuts and a pumpkin and rice soup. I ate everything but the soup. After breakfast we went to the school library to pick up our gift, which turned out to be a very nice thermos. This is the biggest thermos I’ve ever owned and while I have yet to use it, I’m happy to have it. Just in case we need to take two liters of coffee to a picnic.  Then we all loaded onto two tour buses and were off.

 

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to Guangzhou we go

During our day out we visited Huangpu Military Academy. Established in 1924,  Huangpu Military Academy was the first academy built in the Huangpu District. It’s on Huangzhou Island. We loaded our big buses on a ferry to get there! Old Jamie would have been a little nervous that the weight of our vehicles would cause the ferry to sink. Old Jamie might have wondered if her bus seat could also serve as a flotation device. New Jamie, who was going with the flow, knew that she was full of Chinese breakfast carbs and since fat floats, she would be fine.

We parked the buses and walked down a little road to enter the academy. I imagined soldiers marching down this road almost one hundred years ago, stiff legged with their arms swinging. A few solitary men in fatigues would walk by us as we made our way to the gate, but I would later learn those men were not real soldiers but employees of the academy. We also walked by vendors with goods displayed on tarps or rugs on the ground: plastic guns and children’s military clothes, tiny parasols made of delicate lace and a few wagons holding large green stalks of something, often tied to a big grinder.

It’s a sweet trip

I thought it was bamboo until I saw one of the stalks get shoved into a grinder, producing a green liquid. My teacher friends told me it was a very sweet drink – too sweet, they said – so I was immediately curious. Overall, the Chinese lack the sweet tooth many Americans – including me – are born with, so I bought a bottle for 2 RMB (30 cents, USD) As it turns out, it was too sweet! It was pure sugar cane in a bottle. It was so sweet, I couldn’t drink it. There’s 30 cents down the drain.

 

Campus tour

We listened to a tour guide talk about the academy just inside the campus.
Then we were free to guide ourselves through the rest of the academy. We saw recreated rooms where soldiers ate, slept and attended class.

I tried to imagine myself as a young Chinese soldier in the 1920s. Maybe my parents told me to join the military to escape a crude life of farming in the countryside. Maybe I yearned for the strict regulation of Communist military and left home on my own. What would it have been like to sleep here? My bed might have been made of wood, as pictured here, or I might have slept on bamboo. If I came from an underprivileged province, I may have slept in a shed made from  reed mats.

 

The picture to the right is a model of a self-study room, where soldiers could read on their own from 7-9 PM. Suggested reading included books on communism, socialism and Marxism but students could bring their own books in with proper authorization.

 

Look at that boat!

Here I am with my friends and fellow English teachers, Annie and Alice. We’re standing in front of the main gate. In front of us, not pictured and no, sir, I will never post the picture, is open water and a dock. At the dock floats a majestic war ship that I was immediately drawn to. I stood at the metal fence and thrust my arm through to get some pictures with my phone, completely ignorant of the signs that said “no pictures” in English and Chinese. It was only after a guard approached me, shaking his head, that I saw the signs. I deleted “all” of the pictures of the ship. Don’t ask any further questions.

Next stop, the Chen estate 

We also toured the ancestral temple of a wealthy Chinese family, the Chen family. We saw beautiful, intricate architecture with a lot of traditional Chinese shapes and influences. The picture to the right was taken on my way inside. Once inside, my senses were overloaded with shapes, colors and smells.

 

There were beautifully manicured trees and shrubs, some so intricately tended to, they seemed like artwork in and of themselves. It was in the Chen garden I learned the source of a fragrance that had turned my head more than once in the city: the osmanthus plant. The are tree and flower varieties and both drive me crazy, they smell so good. (A month after this trip I was able to find an osmanthus perfume in a store once and doused myself in it.)

We were free to walk around this place as well, doing self-guided tours. My tour group consisted of Annie and Alice, who kept a watchful eye on me to make sure I wasn’t left behind. I wandered around, taking pictures and reading the English descriptions when they were available.

These look pretty good for being 2000 years old… oh, wait.

We saw so many works of art ranging from ceramics and pottery to wood and stone carvings. At first I thought these were collections belonging to the Chen family, but they are actually pieces created by local artists. The estate is also known as the Guangdong Folk Art Museum. To the right is a spiny lobster trap carved out of a tree trunk. We also saw metal and paper cuttings. Annie told me that paper cuttings are a popular decoration during the spring festival, which happens in early February. Chinese families often make their own paper cuttings to adorn their houses.

Above is a really long piece of paper, cut by hand. I say it’s “really long” because I don’t have its exact specifications, but I guesstimated it was at least twice as long as I am tall, putting it at over 11′ long. I was first impressed by its sheer size and in trying to capture that, I lost much of the detail of the cutting in my photo.

But you can see the detail in my favorite piece in the entire estate, a metal cutting of a great ship. I love the detail in the ship itself: the separation of the sails, the movement in the flags and the boards of the hull. I also appreciate the environment the ship is in: water churning in waves, islands moored in the background underneath fluffy metal clouds.

 

Museum of Nanyue business

Then we went to the Museum of the Nanyue King of the Western Han Dynasty. Visibly disturbed by many of the displays here, Alice chose to stay away from a lot of the exhibits. Associated with wealth, death and sacrifice, these exhibits’ energy bothered her.  Instead of following me around to keep an eye on me here, she sat on a bench in the center of each room. And like a child wandering from her mother, I darted wherever I wanted, occasionally looking back to smile at her. When I was ready to move to another room, I’d circle back and we’d walk together.

The most uncomfortable pajamas

We walked down into a tomb and saw a display of the actual remains of a concubine. I actually saw bone dust. What remained of a  woman who belonged to this emperor over 2000 years ago laid instead of Plexiglas box. I paid a silent moment of respect to her soul as I stooped over this box inside the tomb, then I moved on.

In the entire museum, the jade burial shroud fascinated me the most. It’s a burial shroud made of 2291 jade pieces, sewn together with silk thread. This shroud is the only documented suit sewn together with just silk; other burial suits used gold, silver or copper. Like a car at an auto show, there is a mirror underneath to reveal other details. You can see large discs under the “body,” placed there to protect the deceased in the afterlife.

Oh, maybe THIS is why Alice was disturbed…

When a ruler or head of a household died, often his servants, spouse(s) or other people under his thumb were left behind, alive, but buried in the walls of his tomb. They were human sacrifices, buried with their master so they could follow him into the afterlife.

 

 

 

I don’t want to end the blog with thoughts of people buried alive, against their wills in the wall of a dusty tomb so please enjoy this beautiful dragon carved out of jade. Also as a public service announcement, you should know that there is money to be made over here…