The Village Near the Beach Near XiaPu

 The last post discussed the beach near XiaPu, in Fujian province.  It was a beautiful beach.  Our tour schedule allowed us about three hours to kill there.  Most of my Chinese colleagues were excited to strip down and do some swimming.  Me, not so much.  The sun was to harsh for pale skin.  Besides, the areas surrounding the beach were much more interesting.

I would guess that the beach area (I don't even know its name) is beautiful and unspoiled because it located in an extremely poor area.... so poor that no one has had  the wherewithal to spoil it yet.  To my jaded eyes, it looks like some investors are now trying to turn it into a tourist attraction and make a buck off of it.  Similar investments are legendary in China.  (An example being the beaches of TianYa HaiJiao in Sanya.)  Such schemes achieve success when the surroundings appear to be quaint and traditional and romantic, rather than just plain poor.  By that standard, the beach near XiaPu still has a ways to go.

 To get to the beach, our bus got off of the highway and drove for several miles through small cities and rural villages.  The roads were two-lanes only and bumpy and for most of the way the roads were lined with houses.  The closest descriptor that I know for these houses would be "row houses".  Typically, these buildings are two or three stories high, 20 to 30 feet deep, and a few hundred yards long.  Along this length, the buildings are subdivided into houses/apartments....each maybe 15 to 20 feet wide.   From the road, then, you see each building has four of five doorways, each doorway marking a separate family home.  Each doorway opening out onto the street.

It was hot on this morning, and most of the doorways were open.  As the bus moved along you could look into many of the homes as we passed.  They are "shotgun" homes, on the first floor at least....one large room in which a shotgun blast through the front door would go undisturbed through the back window.  Most of the floors looked to be bare concrete.  Inside, you could see tables and chairs and gas cylinders and e-bikes the other accouterments of life.

More homes than not had people sitting in the front doorways, trying to get a cooling breeze.  Or if there was shade, they were sitting on the sidewalks outside the front doors.  Mothers and daughters and grandmothers shelling beans.  Shirtless men playing cards and MahJong.  In one home we passed, I saw a mother sitting on a chair in the doorway breastfeeding her baby.   It was as if we were driving through discarded footage from The Grapes of Wrath.

As we got further from the highway it became more an more rural.  The houses continued to line the roadway, but the intervals between them became larger and larger.  The road became a ribbon of asphalt flanked by a single row of  houses which were then surrounded by rice paddies and gardens that, sooner or later, rose up to steep, tree-covered hillsides.

 At the end of the road was the beach.  And also a village.  In past times, it looked as if the village spilled out onto the beach.  Now, there was a wall and a gate which separated them.  The beach has been "developed".  At the point where the road ended, there was a parking lot for buses on one side and a row of food joints and beach shops on the the other and a gate at the end which led to the beach.  Most of my colleagues headed through the gate to the beach.  I went looking to see what was behind the food joints and the beach shops.

 The beach side village was small.  Behind the main road there were only three more streets, or blocks, of houses that made up the village.  Then the village gave way to gardens and rice paddies.  Behind the rice paddies rose the terraced hillsides.  The citizens appeared to sustain themselves on both the land and the sea.  In the streets you could see signs of the fishermen - the fish and shrimp drying on racks in the sun (two photos above) or the repairing of nets (one photo above.).  Throughout the village you could also see the signs of the dirt farmer - the squash and cucumber vines growing in open spaces between the buildings and the fields of rice and corn and beans in the surrounding valley.

 The village was...how shall we say..."rustic".    At the North and South ends of the village were public rest rooms.   Above is a photo of the one at the South-end.   You can see the brightly tiled stalls - six in all - that make up the men's side.  What you can't see, because of the partitions, is a trench that runs the length of the building through the center of each stall.  At the doorway, there is spigot with a hose that can be used to flush the trench or to wash your hands.  Plumbing at its most simple.

I do not know how many of the houses in the village have their own bathrooms and how many use this as a common outhouse.

 Though the streets are not crowded with chickens, there are chickens in the streets.  The photo above shows one feasting on discarded dumplings.  This shows the economic beauty of chickens....they convert waste (by eating bugs and garbage) into valuable food (by us eating them).  We tourists that come to the beach provide ample waste for the local chickens to feed upon.

 In past posts, I've gushed over the art that decorates the public spaces in Suzhou.  The beach-side village only had one instance of public art that I could find. as shown in the photo above.  It was a nice piece of ceramic tiled artwork that , I believe, dates back 10 years or more.  It has a beautiful folksiness, depicting mother and daughter in the foreground.  The background depicts the optimism of the new millennium.  You see the outline of China overlaid by "2000" in big block letters which are overlaid with industrial and space age images.

It took me a while to paint the strokes of the Chinese text into a character dictionary and to come up with a translation.  But best as I can tell, here is what this artwork says:" Population growth must be compatible with economic and social development.  Control the total population of the city at:  2000 - 558,000, 2005 - 580,000, 2010 - 600,000."