A Tea Addict's Journal

One of the questions I get asked most often is — what do you actually do in Beijing besides drinking tea? What I do is really quite boring (historical research on some obscure topic that nobody cares about), but where I do it is perhaps slightly more interesting.

Since my work involves a lot of flipping through dirty, dusty, poorly catalogued and a few hundred years old documents, guarded by staff that are only rarely friendly, the work is not always pleasant. The trip to the archives, however, can be somewhat pleasant, if the weather’s nice.

I get off the subway at Tiananmen West, which is, as the name implies, on the West side of the Tiananmen Square. On the one side, it’s the Tiananmen.

But in the opposite corner, there’s the very out of place Eggshell

Which is going to be the new National Opera House.

It might be an interesting caveat here to say that the Tiananmen is NOT the entrance to the Forbidden Palace… to get in, you have to walk through the Duanmen (seen from Tiananmen)

And then you’ll see the entrance — the Wumen (Meridian Gate), as viewed from the Duanmen.

It all looks rather small, but if you look here, you can see the buliding actually cuts an imposing figure.

But I don’t get to walk through these places to go in to the archives. Instead, I go through the side — walking down a rather pleasant street

After a few minutes, I get to see the gate that I do get to walk through, the Xihuamen

Which is across the moat for the Forbidden City — it’s not that obvious when you go through the front

In the first picture — those tall buildings right behind the wall are the archives, where I go look at my dusty documents.

Inside… you can still see the old buildings, but parts that one doesn’t get to see when you pay the entrance fee.

The building on the left is the archives, and the wall on the right circles some of the quarters that are for palace workers…. not even people who are related to the Emperor in any way. To give you an idea of the scale of the thing… the grey part of the wall is about 2 meters high. The distance is, of course, quite far.

They are doing some serious renovations for the palace these days, partly to get ready for the flood of inevitable visitors during the 2008 Olympics. There are lots of building materials stacked up, and in the back — the draped over roof of the Hall of Great Harmony, which is the biggest building in the complex.

So that’s what I do everyday, until recently anyway. Now I’m sitting in a hotel room in Shenyang, the old Manchu capital, with very unreliable internet, having just dealt with even less friendly archivists here. Oh well.

I went to a few homes today. The first one I visited is that of the Weng family. They were easily the most prominent family in Changshu in the 19th century, with two members of their family earning the number one rank at the highest level exam in the land, and thus gaining the title of Zhuangyuan. There’s a gate to commemorate it.

Back in the way, these things were everywhere, especially in a town like Changshu, commemorating various things from high places in exams, to women who were chaste, to men who had fallen in battle, to…. you name it.

Since many members of this family reached high office, the family estate was obviously large. The main building is what is of the most interest, but it’s a house with 7 “jin”, which means 7 buildings on the central axis. A house would be considered large if it has 4 or 5 “jin”, so 7 is…. well, big. The main building was built in the Ming dynasty — sometime in the 16th century, if I remembered correctly. It’s very impressive.

(sorry for the shaky hand… it was very dark)

You can see the place is HUGE

With beautiful details

After spending a good hour there and actually lucked out on finding something useful for my work, I then went to the house where my grandfather grew up. It’s a very short walk from the Weng residence. Despite the fact that it’s supposedly a protected building for historical reasons:

The place is now occupied by at least a dozen families. After the communist took over most of these houses were given away to families that lacked a home, while the original family might’ve been kicked out or, at best, given a room in one corner of the house. Over time, it turned into this

You can see how the hall was built into — originally there was nothing obstructing the hall, but now they have put walls up on both sides, making it into a narrow alley while living in these concrete blocks. So much for conservation…

They do it in the courtyards too

You can see that inside… the primary structure is still pretty sturdy, but I think houses like this (which is the vast majority in the city) are a lost cause. It’ll be almost impossible to do anything about them, so any pretence of protection is really just a sham, I think. You can’t evict these people, who might’ve lived there for decades. It’s hard to tear down these walls — must be done carefully if you don’t want to destroy the old structure — and it’s simply too uneconomical.

Interestingly enough… every family had a well in their courtyard

And I think that was the primary source of water. They still use it — somebody was pulling up a bucket of water right before I took this picture. The nice thing was that they just let me walk in to take pictures. At least they didn’t try to kick me out.

I then went back to the Fangta park, where there’s a stone engraving garden — where they collected a lot of stone engravings from around the city and put them together, essentially saving them for posterity. It’s nice. Far too many of these are lost and some are very valuable historical documents. I was here for work, basically, as I wanted to see if I could find something useful here. This is what some of them look like

And then I ended the day with some tea, as that dull headache starts to set in. It’s called “Deyu Huocha”, or “Get Rain Living Tea”, literally. I suppose a better translation is “Tea that comes alive as it receives rain”. The selling point of this tea is that…. they are used for the national banquets at the Great Hall of the People, and also the leaves point UP. Meaning… the tip of the leaf, rather than pointing down as green tea often does, point up. You can see one of them in action.

The tea itself was just rather generic… nothing to write home about. A longjing is far better.

I went to see my ancestors’ tombs today to pay my respects. The ones I visited are both on Yushan:

It’s the only mountain in Changshu. It’s not very high. The structure you see is a city-wall gate — part of Yushan was within the city limits and was walled.

There are lots of things on Yushan. Tombs is probably the most numerous things though. There are lots of older tombs there, starting from this:

Supposedly the tomb of one of Confucius’ most famous students, Ziyou. This would date the tomb to something around 450 BC.

So I went and swept the tombs, as we Chinese call it. There are some nice views

You can see the Yangtze River in the top right corner.

It also involves some climbing

And for one of the tombs… the entrace is next to some tea farms where women are picking tea. This is not going to be good tea, methinks. It’s already rather hot…. the leaves aren’t going to be tender!

I did want to stay, but I wasn’t done yet, and so I had to move on from the tea farm. I don’t know if I’ll have time tomorrow…. but perhaps not.

I did, however, acquire three nasty mosquito bites on the way. They were rather swollen — those mountain mosquitos are powerful. Interestingly enough, when I came back to the room and drank some Qihong… they magically disappeared, very quickly too. Now they are reduced to mere small red dots. Is this another healing property of tea I’m discovering!?!?

Since this

is pretty much the entirety of my tea consumption today (guesses anybody?), it won’t make for a very interesting blog entry. Where I visited, however, might be of interest to some of you. It’s slightly off topic, I know, but indulge me.

After going to the library and reading a whole bunch of family genealogies (that’s my research here) I decided to take another stroll. I was told that there was a… house? mansion? I don’t know what the right word here is … that was owned by one of my ancestors about a few blocks away, so I decided to look for it among the narrow alleys of Changshu.

The place I was looking for was found after a little search. It’s called the Swallow Garden (Swallow as in the bird). It was, for a few decades at least, a property of my great-great-granduncle. If that’s confusing… he’s my grandfather’s granduncle, or my great-grandfather’s uncle. In late age he styled himself the “Old man from the Swallow Valley”, a reference to his residence (ah, this is the right word).

This is the gate to it:

It’s firmly shut.

The place was apparently under renovation, but after looking around, I saw that it was accessible by a side door, and after asking the workers there if I could go look… they let me in.

This is what you see after taking a few steps inside

It’s really quite a nice place. I never knew that a relative of mine owned this place. I do know that it was owned by another prominent local family, but whose fortunes waned. It was apparently a classic case of son gambling away the house, like in the movie To Live. My ancestor eventually bought it after it changed hands a few times.

Much of the house was relatively inaccessible, but it was rather large with a few different gardens. The most distinctive thing is that you can never see too far once you’re in it… you have to walk around and gradually discover the place, piece by piece. Something looks like it’s really close, but you can’t get there easily. It’s a maze.

So I turned right and walked through this corridor

Which eventually got me to the other side

I then walked into the back garden

There were more buildings further back, but the way was pretty much blocked by construction materials and that sort of thing. Oh well. But you can see, for example, a little gazebo overlooking another pond with some rocks. I would kill to drink tea there.

Apparently quite a few structures in this complex was destroyed after 1949, and so the current size is already reduced. It’s a pity, really, but at least they’re restoring it as much as they can.

The same thing cannot be said of our other family residence, this one being where my grandfather spent his first 20 years or so. The battery on my camera was running low so I was only able to grab a few pictures. If people are interested, I’ll post some tomorrow as I’m going back there, along with seeing other residences, pay my respects at some family tombs, and look at some more local sources. This is all work! 🙂