Charming Fuli

Having both been ill for our first two full days in Yangshuo we really wanted to get out and see this marvellous countryside we were surrounded by. Unfortunately, the weather was somewhat against us as we started out for Fuli, a place famous for its painted fans. A quaint old town, the Lonely Planet calls it. A village full of charm, according to the guidebook at the hostel.

Either we didn’t get to the right bit, or there’s another town somewhere called Fuli cos what we saw was about as charming as a small newtown outside Wolverhampton.

We arrived in the rain, trogged through the town in the rain and started asking locals for directions for something interesting to see in the rain. They kind of pointed us in the direction of the river and lo and behold, there was one sorry looking little street with a couple of stalls selling dirty antiques and – aha! – a fan shop. Once at the river, we thought things might improve, but this was just the launch pad for the omnipresent bamboo boats that take tourists up and down the river. We decided to walk around a little more and did manage to walk up a narrow street where an old lady stopped us to demand a Y3 entry fee, so we thought we might have cracked it.

We turned the corner to find…more of the same. There were supposed to be pretty houses and cobbled streets, but we just saw ordinary people’s homes on ordinary (if very old) streets. This in itself was interesting, of course – the front rooms nearly all had a small niche in the back wall where people burned incense and had photos of their ancestors, an old Confucian tradition. In stark contrast was a big picture of Mao in nearly every living room. During the early days of Communism, these villagers would have been in a heap of trouble for continuing to worship their ancestors rather than give absolute authority over their lives to Mao but, as with Christianity before it, Communism had to allow the Chinese to make it their own and accept it alongside their older traditions, rather than instead of it (it took a while but that does seem to be how it works now).

We came across an older lady making fans in her front room, but she didn’t want us to take her picture.

Punctuating our visit were bursts of mini-explosions as people lit fire crackers outside their homes – today is Moon Festival (also called mid-Autumn Festival). It’s a bit like Chinese New Year only slightly less important, but people light firecrackers (back to the whole “noise is good” maxim), burn incense both outside their homes and in the mini-alters for their ancestors and it’s generally a time for family. You’re supposed to get together with your family for a big meal (lots of people around with either chickens, ducks or geese ready to take home and cook). You also eat moon cakes – a small pastry cake filled with both sweet and savoury fillings ranging from beef to sticky bean paste. So it was interesting to see people preparing for that, but otherwise Fuli’s charms totally evaded us.

We decided to give in the constant shouts of “Bamboo! Bamboo!” and take a boat ride back to Yangshuo. The bamboo rafts are actually made of some kind of metal or fibre glass made to look like bamboo and on a sunny day it must be a lovely thing to do to float down the river. Whilst the boats do have canopies to keep the worst of the rain off, ours was an altogether more soggy experience. The landscape is incredibly either way though, rain or shine.