Actually, a bit of everything. Cordyceps is a fungus that attacks caterpillars and kills them. The fungus can live for 1000 years, some say, and is a tonic ingredient in tradtional Chinese medicine. It is also a huge industry in Tibet and surrounding areas and was selling for 900 yuan a small bunch in Yunnan. Inevitably, the industry attracts counterfeits and even up close it’s hard to tell the real from the fake. The ones made from coloured flour and water and stuck on sticks look just like the genuine article. That’s why you have to smell them – cordyceps has a seafood odor.
(The picture is from www.biobhutan.com. See them for all your cordyceps needs.)
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Carrefour is back in the specials game after calling off their annual May Day holiday discounts in response to the nationwide protests at its outlets. The protests followed disruption of the Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay on April 7 and French officials’ public support for pro-Tibetan activists. The cover says Go, China! There’s still time to pop down and get some barley toast, which seems familiar and unfamiliar enough to qualify for interestingly exotic. Also on special is the unfairly maligned 1999 Great Wall Cabernet Sauvignon going out for about $5 and a crate of 30 DQY ecological eggs, down to just 14.8 yuan (about $3 or half a puppy). Those looking for a little something sweet might like to consider the mini Magnums and the Walls tubs of icecream.
The Beijing Evening News ran a page of various newspaper covers about the national days of mourning for the quake victims. Most were specifically in black and white. Some websites also swicthed to black and white at one point.
The exact hour is lost to time but I looked up from the cubicle to watch the TV and who should be expressing his condolences in a second language but Kevin. I’m not qualified to comment on his turn of phrase but others in the room said his command of rhetoric made him sound like he had spent time at the Party School. Nevertheless, it was a simple act that undoubtedly carried weight.
Kevin also addressed students at Peking University last month and described Australia and China as “old friends” and refered to being “true friends”. These may seem minor points in a six-page speech but they were in the context of “offering unflinching advice” and counselling “restraint to engage in principled dialogue about matters of contention” ie. that restive autonomous region in the far west. Some say the true friend phrase has since come into popular diplomatic use in Beijing, with other countries using it to couch their own unflinching advice.
Kevin is not the only Australian politician to use Putonghua to reach out to people on the mainland. Who could forget Amanda Vanstone’s passion for the language and her speech to guests at a film festival launch about four years ago? It should have been nipped in the bud.
This was taken several years ago at the Wolong nature reserve about 30 kms from the epicentre of last week’s quake in Sichuan. Five staff were killed at the reserve and 47 people died in the surrounding area. Much of the infrastructure was damaged. Six pandas went missing and all but two have been recovered.
This is just a random snap from the roads around Aba, the centre of Monday’s earthquake. It’s just to show the precipitous landscape. From memory, this was along the Min River. Landslides were common even without tectonic shifts.
UPDATE: From the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-qiang21-2008may21,0,3109044.story
This is just to give a a bit of an idea of what one place was like at the epicentre before Monday’s earthquake. Taoping is about 20 minutes by car from Wenchuan and Xinhua has put it on the list of damaged communities. But there was no reference to the extent of the damage. This is from 2004:
A trip to the Taoping Qiang village in northwest Sichuan province is not for the weak of stomach. The 164 kilometres of sealed road between it and the provincial capital of Chengdu covers some spectacular mountain passes but the hairpin bends can leave you a little green around the gills. That said, even if you lose your lunch, it’s worth going there just for dinner.
The residents of Taoping belong to the Qiang nationality, a group that has clung to the hillsides of Sichuan’s Aba prefecture for about two millennia. Traces of their presence have been unearthed in the shape of 3000-year-old inscribed bones and tortoise shells. They number more than a hundred thousand and mainly live in three counties – Wenchuan, Li and Mao. Legend has it that they used to be a nomadic community of sheepherders before migrating from Gansu and Qinghai to the northwest part of Sichuan. Now they are riding the tourism wave.
The village sits in Li county and is one of the centrepieces of the region’s tourism push. It is described as a pueblo and does look like it could have been transplanted from New Mexico. It’s an elaborate network of flat-roofed houses and defensive towers built from layers of slate-like rock. Bunches of corn and chillies hang from every eave. The builders of each house appear to have used the wall of another home for their starting point, expanding outwards and upwards from there. The interlocking construction is designed to help the village withstand the region’s frequent earth tremors and confuse invaders. The result is a kind of architectural organism. Roofs become floors, doors become windows and the private becomes public.
Architecture aside, the real beauty of the place is its subterranean water supply. A spring of mountain snowmelt is channelled to each of the 98 homes for water, drainage and irrigation. It runs fast enough to stay potable and cool the houses in summer. It’s set up so enemies cannot cut off supplies in times of war.
The villagers started taking in visitors about seven years ago after the local tourism bureau was established. Businesses soon cropped up to cater to the outside interest but some of the new growth was believed to be undermining the community’s ancient assets. Xinhua newsagency reports that in the space of just a few months last year “some 70 business premises including hotels, restaurants and grocery stores have been moved out and six illegally built cement buildings demolished.” Only old-style houses can be built.
Some of the homes are open to guests. The cost of an overnight stay is about 50 renminbi and that includes two meals. Depending on the season, visitors can kill the time between meals by snacking on local grapes, figs and walnuts. In contrast to the usual approach, the walnuts are picked green and have to be peeled before eaten. When dinnertime does arrive, the food is likely to be a feast of sweet corn, cured meats, eggplant, radishes and tofu soup – with a little chilli and pepper sauce on the side.
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Work goes on around the clock on China Central Television’s new Beijing headquarters. Unreliable sources say the structure contains three times the amount of steel as the “Bird’s Nest” national stadium and engineers recently conducted US$1 million in safety checks to make sure it would stay up. It’s always good to be sure. When the two towers were first joined up, the connections could only be done just before dawn when temperatures were uniform throughout the structure.
New residential complexes continue to mushroom in Beijing and, apart from home fairs, developers use temporary sales centres on the block to sell off the plan. One I saw a few years ago had a full scale replica of a one-bedroom flat with all the free appliances that were part of the deal. They disappear pretty quickly once the project is finished but they often have more interesting designs than the buildings they promote.
