Nanjing

This past week-end Theresa and I took the train to Nanjing.  The next several postings will share some of the sights and experiences we found in the city.  This one is just to set the stage.

Nanjing is 130 miles or so to the West and North of Suzhou.  It is the capitol of Jiangsu province and the seat of the provincial government bureaucracy.  In that way, it is similar to the capitol of any state in the U.S.  Suzhou is also located in Jiangsu province, and so folks have to go up to Nanjing from time-to-time for regulatory discussions.  It is about 2.5 hours away by car.  By fast train, it is 1.5 hours.  It would be quicker but for the stops in other cities along the way.  Still, by train it is an easy week-end trip.  We left from Suzhou at 7:30 on Saturday and were back by 8:00 pm on Sunday.

With time, I'm beginning to realize there is a logic to the names of Chinese cities.  If you survived the previous post, then you may remember that Beijing (北京  in Chinese) means Northern capitol city.  Nanjing (南京 in Chinese) means Southern capitol city.  The "jing" part (京) specifically refers to a capitol city at the national level.  During China's history, Nanjing has been the seat of power for several emperors and the capitol for the Republic of China from 1912 until 1949.  It was the the birthplace of the Ming Dynasty, and served as it's capitol for a while until the emperors built the Forbidden City in Beijing.  There is no shortage of history in Nanjing.

As a side note, there are very few cities with "jing" or 京 as part of their name.  Beijing and Nanjing are the only that come to mind.  You will, however, find a ton of cities with "zhou" or 州 as part of their name....like Suzhou or Hangzhou or Guangzhou.  The "zhou" part signifies the center of a vassal kingdom, or the capitol of a state or prefecture.

The population of Nanjing is in the ballpark of 8 or 10 million people, which is comparable to Suzhou.  But the cities feel very different.  Fifty years ago, the population of Nanjing was probably 5 or 6 million where Suzhou's was probably 1 million or less.  Suzhou has grown by building skyscrapers and housing in the surrounding countryside while preserving the historic look and feel of the city center.  Suzhou is 18th century architecture surrounded by 21st century architecture.  Nanjing has grown by knocking down old buildings in the city center and replacing them with sky-scrapers and high-rise apartments.  Nanjing is 21st century architecture dropped onto an 18th century city plan.  It's a bit like a Boston or a Philadelphia in that way. 

On the Saturday when we arrived, it was misting rain.  The city was shrouded in a cloud of fog or pollution or both.  I wouldn't call Nanjing a "pretty" city and the grayness of Saturday did nothing to flatter it.  The top photo was taken on Saturday night from our 47th floor hotel room.  At this point, visibility was still poor....so there is not much skyline to see beyond the nearby towers.  Like every Chinese city, the buildings at night are like a Christmas light display.  That was the first bit of color we'd seen all day.  Sunday morning dawned without the rain, and eventually the sun burned off the gray shroud and gave us a nice day.

Anyway, stay tuned for more Nanjing stories in the next few posts.

When did the Chinese Change Peking to Beijing?

Back in the dark ages of my grade school years we were taught that Peking was the capital of China.  TV advertised canned Chinese food named after the city of Chungking.  The maps showed the little town of Soochow just west of Shanghai.

Then, when I was in college, I remember hearing Walter Cronkite talking about Beijing as the capital of China.  "Why had China moved its capital?",  I wondered.  Months later, I finally realized that nothing had moved.  They had just renamed Peking to Beijing.  I just chalked it up to some strange decision on the part of the Chinese government.

Now I realize that the Chinese have never changed the name.  The name is now and has always been 北京.  The tricky part is figuring out how 北京 is pronounced by the Chinese people.

Written Chinese, you see, is not phonetic.  The characters don't represent sounds, but rather represent ideas.  北 represents the concept of North.  京 represents the concept of a capital city.  So taken together, 北京  represents the concept of the Northern Capital.  

This idea-based written language seems strange, until you consider that the country of China did not have a single language until very recently.  Even today, many people learn the official language - Mandarin - as a second language after their regional dialect.  So, historically, people from 5 different places would pronounce 北京  in 5 different ways.  But the beauty was that they would all write it the same.  So even if they could not speak to one another and be understood, they could all communicate in writing.

This was all well and good until the Westerners came along and wanted to represent the Chinese language.  We do phonetics.  So the simple approach was to use the phonetic rules of our Roman alphabet to represent the sound of the Chinese words....Romanized spellings of Chinese.   This great idea has two big problems though.  First, whose pronunciation do you use?  (Remember, every region of the country has a different dialect.)  Second, how to you represent the sounds that don't exist in English?  (A problem similar to written French and German, which have all those pesky accent marks and umlauts for their weird pronunciations.)

Different solutions evolved until, around 1900, a system called Wade-Giles romanization won out over the rest.  Wade-Giles was a scholarly thing with all kinds of accent marks and rules for precise pronunciation.  Though great for scholars, it was a bit tricky for the Post Office.  So a simplified version of Wade-Giles was adopted under the poetic name "Chinese Postal Map Romanization Spelling System". 

In the CPMRSS 北京  was Peking.  The English speaking world was happy with that.  And the newly established Republic of China was OK with it too.  Maps were printed.  Textbooks were written.  Everyone was happy and got along.

Well, actually, folks did not get along.  The Republic of China chafed against Western colonialism and struggled with internal revolutions.  There was also this thing called World War II.  In 1949 the mainland passed over to the control of the People's Republic of China.  The first half of the 20th century had bigger arguments than the ones over spelling.

In the 1950s, after the PRC was consolidated under Mao Tse-tung, almost everything about Chinese culture was debated and changed. The centuries-old traditional written characters were simplified to promote literacy.   Traditional Chinese Opera was labeled as bourgeois and discouraged.  And an effort was initiated to replace the Wade-Giles romanized spelling system with a new and improved system.  (In other words, an effort to replace a British-created solution with a native Chinese-created solution.)

The new and improved solution was a system called Pinyin.  Pinyin was published as the new standard by the Chinese government in 1958.  Well, at least by the People's Republic.  There were folks from the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan who had differing opinions.  (Actually, when I was in grade school they called the island Formosa.  But that is another story.)  The status quo remained for a few more years.  Then Nixon visited the mainland in 1972 and the PRC gradually started winning the political stand-off.  The U.N. adopted Pinyin as its official spelling system in 1977.  The International Standards Organization, or ISO, adopted Pinyin in 1981 or 1982.

And so the maps were changed, the geography textbooks revised, and a million globes became obsolete in schools around the world.  Peking became the pinyin Beijing.  Mao Tse-tung became Mao Ze Dong.  Chungking became Chongqing.  Soochow became Suzhou. All was finally settled.

Settled for Westerners, that is.  To the Chinese people there was never any question. 北京  is still 北京 just as it has been always and forever.

The Opera

 Theresa went to the Opera last week.  A group of performers were passing through town for a series of shows.  The Suzhou Expats Association arranged for a special presentation one afternoon, with English language explanation and a chance to meet the players afterwards.  It wasn't a full performance, but only about a 30 minute sampling.  That is more than enough for first time Westerner viewers.  A visitor from Spain once went to a baseball game in Indianapolis and said that the first 15 minutes were really exciting because of the novelty, but the last 2 hours were deadly boring because he didn't know the rules of the game.  By all accounts, Chinese Opera and baseball have that aspect in common. 

 This special performance focused on the novelty.  A short history was given and some of the traditions were explained.  As you would expect, Chinese Opera is chock-full of tradition and regional variations.  The pronunciation, pitch, and singing cadence are all governed by strict rules, as are also the highly choreographed movements of the hands and feet.  I've heard some describe it as a beautiful combination of opera and ballet.  I've heard others describe it as an imitation of screaming robot cats in heat.  Evidently, you either like it or you don't.

Everyone loves the colorful silk costumes, though.  That much seems to have agreement.

 The top two photos show some of the standard, traditional characters - the chaste and honorable young girl, the wise old woman, and the love-seeking young man.  Every plot needs a bad guy in a mask, and our opera's bad guy appears in the third photo.  This one happens to be a specialist in the art of fast-face-changing...a skill developed and made famous by the performers from ChengDu.   The villain is able to change his face instantaneously, as if by magic.  This one ripped through 10 different masks in the course of a few minutes.

 

 

 

 

 After the demonstrations, the players invited some of the audience to the stage for some quick lessons.  The photo below shows a couple of expats learning the steps and finger movements.  The costumed lady, we were told, is a long-famous actress who, now in her 60s, has become an equally famous teacher.

Rugby

 Forget the baseball playoffs and the World Series.  All through the months of September and October, the only sport in Suzhou was rugby.  The Rugby World Cup, like the Olympics or the Soccer World Cup, is held every 4 years.   This was a tournament year and this year the host was New Zealand.  TV prime time in New Zealand works out to be mid-after noon in China.  So for the past 6 weeks or so, all the expat rugby fans have been gathering on week-ends to watch the matches. 

As playoffs turned to quarter-finals and then to semi-finals, the crowds grew in number and in partisanship.  The Irish, the Australians, the British (rooting for Wales)...all took their turns in the thrill of victory and then the agony of defeat.  The finals came down to France and New Zealand.  New Zealand was heavily favored on both technical and emotional merits.

I followed the last few rounds with a group of French fans.   I'd learned to sing La Marseillaise when in Strasbourg, and that was enough to gain me honorary admission to the clique.  (Truth told, I also had to buy a few rounds of beer.  My singing is not that good.)  These photos show the group gathered at Zapata's, where the games were projected on a big screen on the porch.

In the end, the French played the better game...but lost by a score of 8 to 7 in a heartbreaker.  It would have been less disappointing for them to have lost 80 to 7.   Close but no cigar.  C'est la guerre.

The U.S.A. fielded a team for the tournament, by the way.  They didn't make it out of the round-robin play.. winning just one game while losing three.  The win was against Russia, which is not exactly a rugby powerhouse.  Australia, which is a powerhouse, beat the U.S.A with a score of 67 to 5.

No General Tsao's Chicken Here

This is going to be the story about a typical Chinese restaurant experience.  Many of these points we've covered before...I know.  But this is also an excuse to share some pictures of food.  And I totally lose what little discipline I have when thinking of food.

The typical Chinese restaurant is different to a Western restaurant.  Western retaurants are geared toward providing tables for couples and foursomes and the occasional larger party.  In China, the restaurants are geared toward 8, 15, 20 or 30 people at a time.  There is a tradition of celebrating both business and family events at restaurants. And the tradition includes inviting a lot of people.  So restaurants invest in private rooms for seating of large groups.  You can get a table for two at a Chinese restaurant.  But you will be an exception and not the rule.

So, within a restaurant a typical private room has a round table or maybe two.  Each table can seat 12 people...plus or minus.  Seating is important.  The seat facing the door is for the host.  The host has two duties, the first being to order the food for the entire group and the second being to pay the bill for everyone.  Traditionally, the seats to right and left of the host are for honored guests.  In truth, though, as long as your not the one paying it doesn't much matter where you sit.

The hosts orders the meal for all the guests.  There is an art to this that I do not completely understand.  The rule of thumb is that you should order a number of dishes that equals the number of guests plus two.  So with twelve people at the table you would order about fourteen dishes.  You've got to mix them up...about half being cold dishes (e.g. appetizers) and the other half being main courses.  Within the appetizers and main courses you need to assure variety.  Avoid ordering the same type of meat in two dishes.  Assure both seafood and landfood meats. Balance the spicy with the not-so-spicy.  Make sure there are some vegatables.  And the truly sophisticated know how to balance the Yin foods and the Yang foods.

Each table has a round, glass lazy susan at its center.  As each dish arrives it is placed by the waiter/waitress on the perimeter of the lazy susan.  The lazy susan spins and each person removes a small portion from the common dish to their own plate to eat.  The cold dishes come first.  As more and more dishes are added to the lazy susan, the more variety there is to choose from.  You have to spin the lazy susan so that the food you want is in reachable distance. You also must take care not commit the faux pas of spinning the food while someone else is trying to serve themselves.

You use your chopsticks to transfer food from the common dish (on the lazy susan) to your own plate.  You normally use the same chopsticks that you are eating with.  This is the part that surprises some westerners and totally freaks out the more fastidious ones.  It's like the double-dipping episode of Seinfeld.  The chopsticks go from peoples' mouths to a common, central dish.  You share your food and you share your bacteria.  It's a communal eating style that harkens back to a time before the microbe theory of diseases was understood.  And you know, it's fine by me.  The modern world is too germophobic.  There's probably fewer germs transferred by chopsticks than by shaking hands.
The cold dishes come out first and then the simple, hot dishes and soups.  As the meal progresses, the more complex and expensive dishes come out toward the end.  The lazy susan becomes crowded and the waitress/waiter must be creative.  Dishes with small amounts remaining are transferred to smaller bowls.  Plates are stacked. if necessary.  A few dishes are completely consumed, but not many.  If you go to a Chinese dinner, then do not feel obligated to eat everything.  You can't eat everything.  And if you did everything, then the host would order more.  The mark of a great feast is that some food will go to waste.

The last dish to come is the fruit dish....always containing watermelon and sometimes containing cantelope or pumpkin or other fruits.  The host does not need to order this....it is implied and required for every meal.   Once the fruit is finished then the bill can be paid.  But the host must call for the bill....it is not brought out automatically as in a U.S. restaurant.  It is impolite to leave the table until the host calls for the bill and the bill is paid.

Following are photos of some typical dishes.  The text below always refers to the photo above.

A dish of steamed, spicy marinated chicken feet.  China loves chicken feet.  There is not much to them but skin and bone...but Asian cooking prizes the gelatinous and chewy texture of skin.  Urban folklore says that shiploads of chicken feet arrive everyday from the U.S.

Deep fried whitebait fish.  I don't eat the heads, though some folks do.  These are deep fried and crunchy and have a strong taste of burnt canola oil.  I normally go lightly on them, because the taste tends to linger in your mouth until the next day.

Salty duck eggs.  I suppose this comes from traditional method of preserving eggs.  They are definitely salty.  One slice from the plate above is tastey.  Two slices makes you thirsty.  Three slices will cause you to drink from a firehose.

Soft shelled turtle sauteed with onions and radish.  This is one turtle.  The green oval on the top of the pile is the turtle's head.  (Heads are important to include in the serving for the restaurant to prove that you got the whole animal that you ordered.)  Turtle is actually very good.  The soft shell is covered in gelatinous skin.  (China loves gelatinous.)  The meat of the feet and the ribs is very tasty when prepared with the right spices.

Steamed split fish.  This is a simple dish, but yet delicious.  You pull the flesh from the fish with your chopsticks.  With luck, you leave the bones behind.

Fish in gravy sauce.  If done well, it can be as good or better than the steamed fish.  But it is easy for the restaurant to screw up the gravy or the spices.  But even at it's worst, it is very good.  The biggest surprise, to me, is the quality and variety of freshwater fish dishes in Suzhou.

Fish heads in gravy with radish.  Fish heads are great because the bring a lot of flavor and a surprising amount of meat (if you don't mind fighting through the bones for it).  The radish is the Diakon, or large white Asian radish.  It doesn't have the strong flavor or heat of a globe radish.  In dishes like this, the radish fills the role normally filled by a potato or some other bland starch.

Finally, this is just a photo of the moon shining over YangCheng lake.

YangCheng Lake Island

 After the crab feast, we needed a walk to allow the Yin and Yang within us to achieve balance.  Our island in YangCheng Lake was, conveniently, laid out with paved walking paths that wound their way through traditional farms and fishing docks.  I say "conveniently" because it appears to be very much a thing for the visitors.  The farms were a little too picturesque.  None of the plots looked like someone's next meal was depending upon it. 

The top photo shows a couple selling fresh sugar cane and other refreshments.  (The sugar cane is good - you strip off the outer stalk and then eat it like a candy bar.)  These folks are old enough, I suspect, to have truly lived off of the land and the lake.  Their faces look to have seen a lot of sun and wind.  They are not thick around the middle from a lifetime of overeating.

 Despite the Disney-like feeling of fakery, it was a nice enough stroll.  The photo above shows set of windmills used to pump water from the lake into irrigation ditches.  The photo below shows one of the garden plots, with sections planted with sweet corn and beans and greens of all kinds.

 Below is a coopful of chickens.  I suspect they are happy that crab season is in full swing and that they are dreading the day when they become, by default, the most popular item on the menu.

 Photo below shows an irrigation mechanism that is on display.  On the lower right of the photo, you can see the belt of paddles that lifts the water through a trough from the lake below.  At center, you can see Ni Jun working the drive mechanism.  Normally, this is a job done by water buffalo.  Ni Jun decided to try it with pure manpower.  He found that it is easy enough at first, but then it becomes steadily harder as the water is lifted and you have to fight against its weight on the paddles.  (Remember high school physics?  W=F*d, F=M*A, A=Gc W=M*Gc*d)

 Below are the water buffalo that normally do the work.  They probably didn't study physics in high school.  They just know it's hard work.  And they are just bemused to watch the humans do the work while they gnaw on the grass.

Feasting on Hairy Crab

When we arrived at the crab restaurant on YangCheng Lake there were about 24 of us.  Chinese restaurant logistics are such that we were seated in two tables of 12.  The budget allowed everyone to have two crabs per person.  Appetizers and other main dishes came first.  It was all good food....but it was all just a warm-up act.  Everyone was waiting for the crab.

According to the MSN travel pages, YangCheng Lake Crab is one of the "25 Things to Eat Before You Die".  I don't know that I'd agree, but there is no doubt many of my Chinese colleagues would.  They had looks of rapture on their faces when the waitress brought out the basket of steamed hairy crabs.  You can see them below, piled in the basket, still bound with twine from the cooking.

Now for a little crab lesson.  The top-most photo shows the cooked crab with twine removed.  If you look closely at the claws you will see what looks like a layer of dark green moss.  This is the "hairy" part of the hairy crab.  Their claws appear to be wrapped in a layer of dark fuzz, like a little crab hand-warmer for the winter time.  (They are also called "mitten" crabs because of this.)  Steaming has caused the hair to become a bit matted.  It has also turned the shell from dark green to the pink color that every lobster lover dreams of.

The photo below shows the working ends of a male and a female.  The female in on the left and the male on the right.  It's important to be able to tell the difference because gender (dare I say "sex") is central to dining experience.  You see, the crabs don't have a lot of meat.  What they do have are body cavities filled up with all the stuff required to make baby crabs.  The September/October harvest intercepts the crabs as they begin their journey back to their mating grounds in the Yangtze River.  They've spent all summer in YangCheng lake preparing to make sweet crab love...only to end up on the plates of people who love crabs. 

The secret to eating the hairy crab is to work from the outside toward the center.  First you rip off the legs and crush them in your teeth, sucking and slurping what little meat you can from the shells.   The crushed bits of shell you spit on your plate.  You save the claws for last.  With luck you will extract a small chunk - about half a teaspoon - of crab meat from each.

With the legs and claws removed, the hairy crab looks like a small UFO.  The photo above shows the corpse at this stage.  There is a trick to opening the body.....you have to find the seam between the top and bottom shells to rip it open.  And once open, you need to be careful the remove the bad parts...the lungs, the stomach, and other bad pieces.  Luckily, I had an experienced crab lover to help me.  (Good thing too.  Last year while visiting Suzhou I had my first taste of hairy crab.  I spent the next three days in the bathroom after, I suspect, eating one of the bad parts.)

With shell split and nasty parts removed, we've reached the journey's end.  The yellow and brown patches shown in the photo above are the creamy goodness that crab lovers dream about.  The taste is different between males and females.  (Overall, the females are preferred.)  But in general the taste is a little fishy, a little sweet, a little salty, and very earthy (or musky or some other adjective like that.)  It requires a lot of slurping and sucking and licking to get all that goodness out of the shell and into your mouth.  Thankfully, table manners are much more forgiving in China. 

According to traditional Chinese medicine, crab is a "Yin" food...which means it has a cooling effect on your internal organs.   It is required to balance this with a "Yang", or hot, food of some type.  It is the imbalance of Yin and Yang, you see, that causes sickness and discomfort.  For our table, we fortified our "Yang" with hot yellow wine steeped with fresh ginger.  Normally,  the Chinese yellow rice wine is not my favorite....it is similar to Japanese sake but not nearly as subtle.  With YangCheng Hairy Crab, however, the rice wine paired perfectly.  The bitter tones of the wine were balanced by the sweetness of the crab.  The ginger added a nice flavor and also added some spicy heat.  I'm starting to think they've got something with this Yin and Yang thing.

That's it...crabs devoured.  I felt like I needed a shower afterwards to wash the crab juices off of may hands and face.  Feasting on the Hairy Crab is messy business.

In Search of the Hairy Crab

YangCheng Lake lies just outside the North Eastern fringes of the Suzhou Industrial park.  It's a fairly big lake in terms of surface area....covering about 8 square miles or so.  But it's shallow.  In many ways, it is simply a low spot in the flood plain of the Yangtze.  You could probably walk across most sections of the lake.  It's not a spot for water skiers.

But as August gives way to September, YangCheng Lake becomes the focus of the Chinese foodies from the mainland to Hong Kong to Taipei to Singapore.  September is the start of the harvest season for Hairy Crab.  And YangCheng Lake is to Hairy Crab what Champagne is to sparkling wine.  YangCheng has become a Name.  A very valuable name.  A million other lakes produce the same crab but YangCheng Lake is considered to produce the best of the best of these scurrying crustaceans.

In fact, these crabs are so prized that they provide, arguably, the largest opportunity for counterfeit marketing in China.  If you want to make a quick buck you can sell fake Rolex watches or fake Louis Vuitton purses.  But the entrepreneurs who really want to rake in the cash are selling fake YangCheng Lake Hairy Crab.  You see, the crabs from YangCheng lake fetch a far better price than the same crab from 100 miles away.  Five to ten times the price.  For the same doggone crab.

In a typical year, some 10 to 15 thousand tons of YangCheng Lake crab are sold in China or exported to foreign Chinese communities.  However, the lake only produces about 1 to 2 thousand tons.  So in a perfectly statistical world, the odds are 9 out of 10 that your so-called YangCheng crab is really a fake.  The vast majority are outright fakes with cleverly forged authentication documents.  Another fraction can legally be called YangCheng crab even though they were raised somewhere else....and then introduced into the lake only for the last month or so.  (The locals call this "showering the crab in YangCheng Lake".)   

The best way to improve your odds of getting the real YangCheng crab is to go to the lake itself.  The lake is surrounded by hotels that are only occupied during the crab harvest season.  A group of us from work went in early October.  We booked a meeting room at a hotel for a working session in the morning.  Then we took a long lunch. 

There are restaurants that specialize in "authentic" crab.  These restaurants are located on an island/peninsula that juts into the middle of the lake.  From the hotel, we took speedboats out to the island.  The photo at top shows the boats pulling up the the hotel quay.  Then there's  a photo of the dock leading up the island restaurant.  The restaurant had several outdoor tanks filled with live crabs...crabs purportedly coming directly from the lake.  The third and fourth photos show the little fellas in the tanks awaiting their impending doom.  The last photo, above, shows the restaurant workers preparing the live crabs for cooking.  They are wrapping the legs of the crabs with long strings...which is to prevent them from jumping out of the boiling water while cooking and/or doing damage to another crab in the pot.

Oddly enough, at about the same time as our visit there were several English language newspaper stories written about the counterfeit crabs of YangCheng lake.  If you're interested, you can read the one HERE or the one HERE or the one HERE.

In our next episode, we will capture and eat the Hairy Crab.  Cue the music of impending doom.

Construction

 You see them everywhere....the construction sites.  You can tell them by the cocoon of scaffolding and green windbreak.  Also the cranes.  They are all over the place. 

 I have never seen a city outside of China with so much construction going on all at the same time.   We used to joke that Madrid was the city of cranes.  And back in the early 2000s Madrid was growing rapidly.  But in Suzhou it seems that every other block has a major construction site rising up into the sky.

 If you ask someone how many people live in Suzhou, the answer usually comes in two parts....registered residents and migrants.  The residents...some 6 or 7 million people...have their principal home in the Suzhou area.  The migrants come from all over, mainly from the rural country side, to work on the construction projects.  No one knows how many migrants there are.  Maybe 1 million.  Maybe 7 million.

 The migrants appear to live in temporary housing and out of the backs of vans.  You can find the temporary housing hidden away in corners of the city.  It is usually pre-fab modules fitted out as bunk houses...each cramming in as many people as possible.  The workers go home on holidays and occasional week-ends.  All aother times they work.  And it looks like they work very hard.

The photos on this page are a collection of construction sites within walking distance of our apartment.  In Indianapolis, I think any one of these would be considered a major project.  In Suzhou, they are run of the mill.  On the drive to Hangzhou, towards the South edge of the city, there are developments that look like they cover 20 acres or more....forests of cranes and scaffolding and green windbreak.  In Shanghai, they put up 90 story skyscrapers like the morning paper.  Whether it's sustainable or not, I have no idea.  But I do know that it's mindboggling.  So much...so fast.

The Bridal Industry in BaiTang Arboretum

 I was walking through BaiTang park, and noticed what looked like a Christian church on the North side of the lake.  This struck me as odd.  (Not because there are no churches in China....there are several around Suzhou.  They are not common, but yet not unheard of either.)  It was unexpected to see a church in a public park.

 On closer investigation I found that it was not truly a church.  It was merely the facade of a church.  It was a prop for the bridal industry in BaiTang Arboretum.  It was part of a cinematic studio set that also included an Italian-style arcade, a French-looking village home-front, and a Venetian bridge with gondolas. 

Other locales - like Moon Harbor or the JinjiHu Lakeside - passively attract newlyweds because of their natural scenery.  BaiTang park, it seems, is actively going after that business with scenery both natural and artificial.

 The North side of the lake was crawling with wedding parties.  They were taking advantage of both the natural scenery and the phony backdrops.  Behind the doors of the church and underneath the Italian archways there were dressing rooms and make-up salons.  I'm guessing that, as part of a package deal, the couples get the photos, the costumes, and all the grooming done on-site.  To them it is probably a great deal.  Much more convenient to have your make-up done in a faux church than in the back of a mini-van.

 I didn't play the bride counting game, but I'm sure the number would have been in the twenties.  In closing, I need to point out two photos.  The photo below is one of the park people movers decorated to look like a bridal limo.  Three cheers for capitalism.  The very top photo is a young couple that kindly agreed to pose for me.  They are dressed in costume...the costume of People's Liberation Army circa 1949.  There are many popular movies set the 1949 time period and all of them are part political history, part love story.  All feature a handsome young man in love with a beautiful, pure young woman.  The couple at top might have come straight off of the movie posters.