We were up early and standing around looking a bit awkward in the park. Tai chi is an ancient Chinese mind-body practice that combines slow, continuous movements, deep breathing, and meditation. Google tells me: Originally developed as a martial art for self-defence, it is now widely practiced for health, stress relief, and physical rehabilitation. We had been marched out in public with a Tai Chi Master for our first lesson. Despite the early hour, the park was packed with people. Some were singing. Really, there was a small choir standing under some trees. A few others were getting on with their Tai Chi and some more were just wandering around taking it all in. There was also a robot. We have seen quite a few robots in hotels. This one was a park cleaning robot. It had several spinning brushes to collect leaves and rubbish. Armed with these it was happily and quietly pottering around.
I have noticed people doing Tai Chi before. Without any real understanding on my part, it just seemed like some aimless wafting around of hands and legs. Now, after an intense hour with a Chinese Tai Chi Master, in China, it still seems a lot like aimless wafting. How this has its origins in self-defence completely eludes me unless you can scare an attacker off by standing on one leg and waving at them. I mean, it is a nice gentle movement. Slightly better than just standing still in the early morning park. I can also see that it might improve your balance. That is the standing on one leg part. Other than that, I was left with a deep and profound sense of “why?”.
We cultivated our inner life energy to flow smoothly and powerfully. We balanced our yin and yang. We meditated and nurtured a state of mental quietness. I had my second coffee of the day and, at last, we were ready to visit a farm. The coach drove us out into the countryside an d dropped us off by a narrow track through some fields. We had a local guide with us and he started coming out with some remarkable nonsense about farmers. Along with his commentary, we walked past a smart new building with a BMW parked outside. Apparently, the farmers are all rich and happy.
The Great Leap Forward was an industrialisation campaign in China. It began in 1958 as commanded by Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (the guy in the mausoleum at Tiananmen Square). The goal was to transform the country from an agrarian society to an industrialized society through the formation of people’s communes. It all went terribly wrong and led to the Great Chinese Famine. Somewhere between 30 to 46 million people starved to death making it the worst famine in human history. Mao came up with some amazing ideas and had the power to make the happen. The Four Pests campaign was part of the Great Leap Forward. This set out to eliminate rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. You may not like all or any of these creatures but we need them. The damage this campaign did was immense. In many ways the ecology of China has never recovered. The agricultural system is similarly still feeling the echoes of the Great Famine.
What we saw was a pleasant rural scene. The karst scenery makes a great setting. There were fields of rice and other crops. A wide variety of fruits and vegetables including bananas and sesame seeds. We stopped to talk to a local farmer who was there with a buffalo and a calf. People lined up to be photographed with the calf. They were then encouraged to tip the farmer a few yuan. Just like your average BMW driver making a bit of cash on the side.
It was a one-way trip. We walked a kilometre or two and eventually arrived back at the main road where the coach was waiting. Just as we were leaving, the next coach of tourists eager to learn about farming arrived. Quite a pleasant walk but I am not sure we learned much about real farming.
The next morning was all about tea. We got taken to a Tea Research Plantation. This was, of course, a thinly disguised carpet shop selling tea and tea related products. We began in a field of tea bushes where we picked tea. Then we were shown how tea is processed. At least, how it used to be processed. I imagine it all goes into a factory these days. There was a rather unnecessarily drawn-out tea tasting. We tried three different types of tea. All hand made and fresh from the fields. As good as tea gets. This confirmed my understanding that I don’t like tea very much. Finally, we got to the shop. Many people walked out of here with boxes of overpriced tea. In the tea accessories section, I found a teapot priced at around £3,500. This must make the most amazing tea.
In the afternoon we went up a cable car. For some reason there was an old tank parked at the bottom cable car station. Gun barrel pointing out towards the car park. After the obligatory queuing, we clambered into a small gondola. Properly speaking, this was not a cable car (single car going up and down a cable) but a gondola lift or a continuous loop ropeway where multiple cabins run along a cable loop. This sort of lift is remarkably familiar to us from all the times we have been skiing. They are used extensively in the European Alps for getting people up the mountains. It looked so familiar that were it not for a label stating “Made in Beijing”, I would have thought it was from Europe. Every last detail looked familiar. We are in a country where copying is not merely tolerated but it is actively encouraged. Legal bastions such as copyright and patent law are not understood. Copying is considered a good thing. We have seen coffee machines that don’t say Nespresso and hair dryers that are not labelled Dyson. I regularly spot cars that look like a Porche, or a Jaguar or even a Rolls Royce. But they are not, they are copies. I think much of it arrives through this technology transfer notion. A company is attracted to China to manufacture their product cost effectively. The government may even offer inducements. Tesla are here. So are BMW, Dyson and many others. They can build their products here to sell them profitably to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the copies start selling to the domestic market which, because China is so vast, may be larger than many world markets.
The views from the top of the gondola were excellent. There were many photography stations. Places you could pose with the mountain landscape behind you. This was full on professional stuff with props including stone ledges, an infinity pool, a wind machine, a smoke machine, a swing and so on. Each place came with a photographer all ready to go. We ignored all of these and wandered around the top for a while. There was a café where we enjoyed a cup of coffee. There was also an area stuffed with radio equipment and surrounded by a military grey steel fence topped with razor wire.
Eventually we came back down and rode the coach back to Guilin. In the evening was the standard sort of meal. We sat, in three groups, round a table with a lazy Susan in the middle. Food was delivered to the centre of the carrousel and we helped ourselves. No concession was given at all to the vegetarians. Seven of the eleven dishes contained either meat or fish. The remainder included plain white rice and some vegetables. On this particular occasion, we left after ten minutes and picked up some bean curd based street food, nuts and chocolate on the way back to the hotel.
