Mike

Journey to the East
2010-07-02 16:01:20 (UTC)

June 27


Today I travelled to a few more shopping districts of
Beijing, guided by Jane and Robert. The first was Maliando
where most shops sell tea. The largest stores are
wholesalers that supply to retail outlets all over China.
We went to one of the larger retail stores, reasoning that
the larger stores are less likely to cheat you. This store
was the size of a small market, with hundreds of varieties
of tea. We were given a thirty minute lecture on tea
varieties and cultivation, but it was in Chinese so I just
nodded and drank the sample tea. The backroom of the store
was full of tea-sets and traditional clay pots. The most
expensive teapot here costs $22,000.

Our next stop was a giant six story department store that
sold only traditional arts and crafts. The store has many
reasonably priced art sold by hundreds and hundreds of
booths all over the store. But the number of expensive
things shocked me. Thousands of jade bracelets worth tens
of thousands each, hundreds of Ming vases, as tall as I am,
priced at $40,000. Entire floors of sculptures and
antiques, sometimes locked behind glass but often sitting
on open shelves. I tried not to think too much about the
cost but it was impossible to ignore. Even some smaller
booths that sold traditional medicine seemed full of
thousand dollar swallows’ nests, and jars of powdered
pearls you sniff to strengthen your immune system. A carved
elephant tusk on the top floor was priced at $400,000.

We had lunch at a spicy Szechuan style restaurant: hot
vermicelli, carrots pickled with hot peppers, sour egg
soup, a chilled peanut noodle dish, mushroom dishes, tofu
dishes, watermelon. Half the food must have been left after
we finished.

Next was Liulichang street. This translates as Glazed Tile
Street and has been a commercial street since the Yuan
dynasty in the 1300s. It feels strange to walk on streets
that Marco Polo walked. This street has dozens and dozens
of stores all dedicated to calligraphy. People from all
over China come to get the finest brushes, papers, and inks
for traditional style writing. I will not go on and on
again about the price, but a nice brush will cost several
thousand, a sleek black stone hollowed out to hold ink can
cost ten thousand. Unlike the other stores, as a foreigner
I am ignored here, as they rightly assume I will not spend
my entire years salary on a ream of paper. But these stores
are busy.

The basements below the stores have many artists renting
space, sometimes as many as 12 artists in each building.
They each have a small glass-enclosed studio and specialize
in one type of picture. Some paint ancient landscapes, some
paint tigers, some paint medieval aristocracy. And every
one of the artists looks tired and crumpled by the late
afternoon. Robert tells me that most artists expect to sell
only one painting every few months, although the one sale
will sustain them financially for that time. No wonder they
all have such hopeless looking stares.

Only one artist had a studio with a door opening onto the
main street. He has a curious sign painted on the
window “Among the best painters of camels in the world”.
This sentence seemed strangely humble, so I really wanted
to go inside. Unfortunately he was away so I could only
peek through the window. The camels did look quite good.

Dinner was huge once again. This time the food was from
Hunan province: sautéed eggplant, “torn nest” peasant
bread, hawthorn berries in a thick tart sauce, black
mushrooms in a sweet sauce, tofu on zoon, sweet Buddha
rolls. We met Jane and Robert’s friends, the same film
professor who had helped me understand the show at Great
Hall of the people and his wife, and chatted for a while
about Chinese politics. We also enjoyed a bottle of local
Chinese wine - The Great Wall brand with the slogan “A
Name You Can Trust”. It wasn’t terrible. I am too full to
sleep tonight.




Ad: