I’ve looked forward to posting these pics from the pristine ancient towns of Luxu and Lili. In fact this is probably the first ever trip report in English on these two near-anonymous destinations, just a couple hours from Shanghai.
In this fifth article of a series on our town-hopping journey among the waterfront towns of Eastern China, right at the centre of the Shanghai-Suzhou-Hangzhou triangle, we found ourselves asking a question any perceptive traveler would be bound to ask ...
What did Wuzhen / Xitang / Tongli / Zhouzhuang look like, before the arrival of mass tourism?
Venice of the Orient these quaint little towns may be, but they’re also disappearing way faster than the sinking of the Venetian Lagoons. And those that have survived the ruthless urbanization of their ancestral landscape of marshes and canals have mostly been reinvented into entire communities of inns, eateries and souvenir shops. Wuzhen and Xitang were no longer the unspoiled traveler’s paradise that my father once described to me, back in the mid 1990’s. Some 20 years later I also found myself in this ancient land, and I had to discover the Wuzhen of my generation, before it’s all too late.
One morning in late 2012 we journeyed across this landscape of marshlands, with no expectations on what we might encounter. As public transportation options remained scarce, we negotiated a full day of transport with a private driver, introduced to us by our kind hostess at the 500-year-old Shendetang guesthouse. The plan was simple: start from Xitang in the morning, deliver us to Tongli by sunset, and explore the untouched canal towns along this 50 km route.
That was how we came across the unpolished beauty of Luxu and Lili, two prototypical peasant towns that had remained under the tourist radar for decades. But the two towns will soon be heading in completely opposite directions: one will be forever changed by a grandiose government scheme to be ... ahem ... preserved as the next Wuzhen, while the other seems to turtle along in this new millennium as it had for the past one.
We arrived first at the tiny and intimate town center of Luxu, a small community carved up by a sprawling network of canals somewhat comparable to our latter and better-known destination of Tongli. Along the sides of the canals stood two-storey brick rowhouses dating to late Qing Dynasty or early Republican era, a time when Luxu was practically one of the many islands in the midst of a 200-km-wide swamp, connected to neighboring towns only by boats. Even if it wasn’t Venice, it’s at least Bruges.
It was as off-the-beaten-tracks as could be -- even our trusty driver Mr. Gao, who lived his entire life barely 15 km away in Xitang, couldn’t locate the Qing Dynasty section of the town without asking the townsfolk for directions. While Luxu’s new town had been busy integrating its brand new roads and drab modern apartment complexes as a distant suburb of Suzhou, the ancient core of the town had been brushed aside as an enclave of antiquity among 21st Century urbanization. There were no hordes of international tourists or the loudspeakers of local guides, only the flow of water through the timeless canals, and curious glances from the elderly neighbors at these rare guests from the outside world.
While the likes of Wuzhen and Xitang raced towards the promise of tourist dollars, Luxu remained the same overlooked waterfront town that it had been for centuries, free from any commercialization and embellishments catered towards the domestic tourism industry. Still occupying the Qing Dynasty peasant houses were real descendants of the ancient clans who had dwelled here for generations, a far cry from the picture-perfect but soulless souvenir shops and restaurants of the gentrified Wuzhen West.
The absence of a prominent and promotable tourist attraction became the saving grace that rescued Luxu from commercial redevelopment. For most of the past 1000 years this had traditionally been a blue-collar community of kiln-workers and rice farmers, content with playing its small part in the region’s canal-based trade routes. Instead of the flamboyance of a brand new pagoda reconstructed in Ming Dynasty fashion, you’re more likely to encounter authentic scenes of everyday life such as the street-side haggling for electronic junk that you once thought was worthless.
Arguably the most distinguishable sight in town was a series of tunnel-like arcades known as Kuajielou, or Street-Spanning Mansions (my translation). A remnant of medieval town plans, the 2nd floor of waterfront houses were extended to the edge of the canal to provide living spaces upstairs as well as a crude indoor mall to shield shoppers during the region’s infamous Plum Rain season. All kinds of miscellaneous shops still occupied the interiors of the arcades, making for some interesting window shopping.
But the best moment of the day was stumbling upon vestiges of life from a bygone era. What’s this man doing with his ballistic-looking cast iron device? I honestly had no idea until our driver Mr. Gao gleamed in excitement and told us to prepare covering our ears. I then realized that I was witnessing something that belonged to the collective childhood memory of the Chinese ... it’s China’s famous Popcorn Cannon!
I thought this old trade was extinct, and even our local Mr. Gao hadn’t seen this for years. I had only previously seen this on a Taiwanese TV programme, way before that 2013 episode of MythBusters in which the hosts donned bomb suits, read the instructions wrong and launched a meteor shower of popcorn into the low-earth orbit. Here our explosion expert simply added a pinch of sugar for flavor as well as a tiny amount oil just to melt the sugar, creating a popcorn with much less fat and calories than its western counterpart. As great tension built with every blast of the bellows into the miniature furnace, we all stood behind the cannon man covering our ears.
With a deafening boom our explosion expert set off the cannon, blasting its contents into something that looked like a giant laundry bag. It turned out that he wasn’t making popcorn on this day, but even better ... fresh rice crispies! For RMB 6 each we purchased one order for ourselves and one for Mr. Gao to bring home to his son, and it turned out a real bargain. The rice crispies were deliciously sweetened, thunderously crunchy and came in such a massive bag that we couldn’t even finish in two days and ended up sharing with our Chinese neighbors at our next Kezhan guesthouse.
This was precisely what we came for: a glimpse into the real China, and into the lives of its peasant families and fascinating local characters beyond the glitzy metropolises of the Yangtze Delta. Wuzhen and Xitang were nice and photogenic, but Luxu was much more authentic as a travel experience.
We had such an awesome time watching the Popcorn Cannon guy that we almost missed lunch when we left Luxu for our next destination of Lili. Upon arrival we wasted no time rushing into the first roadside eatery we saw, a small mom-and-pop operation with the slogan of "Home Cooking and Traditional Taste" posted at the storefront. It was time for a little adventure in the local dishes.
We ordered the most famous -- and likely most expensive -- of all dishes in the restaurant, the local favorite of Steamed Baishuiyu Fish. This is one of those time-tested recipes that works as simply as it looks -- half the fish lengthwise, sprinkle with ginger, scallions and a light-colored soy sauce, and put into the steamer. Freshness of the fish is the ultimate determinant of quality -- there's nothing to mask the stink of a stale fish, only the soy sauce to enhance the flavor of a fresh one. I left the verdict up to the local tastebuds of our driver Mr. Gao.
"Kengding Shi Yesheng De!" proclaimed our driver that this was definitely a wild-caught fish, as the meat was much sweeter than the Baishuiyu fish that he grew used to in his own town. While the small bones of the fish required quite a bit of work, the soft white flesh was extremely tender and went very well with the mild flavoring.
Our next dish of Pork Uterus with Pickled Cabbages was nowhere as good though. I don't know why they even have this dish on the menu -- to me they clearly haven't learned how to cleanse the strong gamey smell from the uterus. I don't think we even finished this dish.
Bill for Two Persons + Driver
| Steamed Baishuiyu Fish | RMB 50 |
| Pork Uterus with Pickled Cabbages | RMB 25 |
| Stir-Fried Snow Peas | RMB 10 |
| Tofu Soup | RMB 8 |
| Rice x 3 | RMB 3 |
| TOTAL | RMB 96 (CAD$15.2) |
Our exploration of Lili started with some bad news in the form of a giant public notice: the town was to be preserved and developed, just like Wuzhen and Xitang in the last decade, into the next great tourist attraction by the local government. This was our last chance to see Lili as a genuine, undeveloped ancient township complete with its original inhabitants and close-knit neighborhoods, before it gets turned into the next Wuzhen.
The first thing that impressed us was the sheer size of the old town -- the total length of its canal frontage was probably as long as those of Wuzhen West and Wuzhen East combined! One could imagine the gigantic theme park that would be constructed out of this heritage town within the next 10 years, satisfying the government’s ambition for yet another golden goose in the grand scheme of its planned economy.
With sadness I realized the meaning of my photos -- these would become some of the last images of this ancient community of Wu-dialect speakers, before the ruthless eviction of many of the townsfolk out of their ancestral homes, all in the name of progress.
This was as close as I’ll ever get to the untouched ancient towns described by my father 20 years back, when these enclosed waterside communities existed in near isolation except for the infrequent boat connections. Every mansion came with its own private mooring on the canal, complete with stone gargoyles protruding out of the canal’s sidewalls to serve as anchors for the flat-bottom boats. Today’s townsfolk still cross the same canal by the same myriad of medieval stone bridges, the oldest dating from time of the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty 700 years in the past.
Officially the top tourist draw in Lili was the stately mansion of a Qing Dynasty scholar-bureaucrat, now converted into a museum and polished as the centerpiece of the town’s numerous heritage sights. As the mansion was also the former residence of a nationally renowned poet and political activist, much of the exhibits could be skipped you aren’t particularly interested in Chinese literature.
A better exhibit was the mansion itself with its grandiose 6-layered halls and courtyards, complete with curious furnishings and artwork from the era of the Imperial dynasties. Admission was amazingly free-of-charge (I couldn’t even recall the last time I found a free museum anywhere in China), though we knew everything would change at the completion of the town’s redevelopment.
But the best attraction by far was something entirely unadvertised, something mysterious and completely unknown to outsiders like myself. Our local driver guided us into the town’s labyrinth of dark, narrow tunnels known as Anlong, or Hidden Alleys. Originally designed as medieval defensive structures by the town’s wealthy clans, the living spaces along these semi-private passageways had been passed down through countless generations, transforming gradually from the original usage as commercial arcades to become the living rooms and bedrooms of the less affluent modern descendants. I would never have dared to venture in on my own.
My focus of the day was in recording the distinctive character and spirit of this ancient town, on the eve of its dismantlement and reassembly into yet another tourist destination in the model of Wuzhen / Xitang / Zhouzhuang. Just look at the unpretentious charm of this slightly slanted Jiuzhou Barber Shop and compare it to the ubiquitous wooden storefronts at Wuzhen West. Here was something nostalgically enchanting and irreplaceable, and soon it will be forever gone.
Across the canal stood another neighbor that surely would not survive the town’s reincarnation. Any Protestant Church would be a rare sight in conservative rural China, let alone one housed in indigenous Qing Dynasty architecture and adorned with these intricately carved window panes. How did Christianity even reach this secluded corner of Eastern China in the first place? That’s something I’ll likely never find out, unless this somehow gets miraculously preserved as a museum.
The old Mahjong parlour seemed to have already closed down, and would soon be followed by its neighboring merchants amidst a massive infrastructure project to bury the entire town’s electric lines underground. To be demolished next would be all buildings not conforming to old-new theme of a Qing Dynasty town, again following the footsteps of the highly profitable Wuzhen. Will the transformed town of Lili receive the same level of financial success? Somehow I’m not quite so optimistic.
On our way out I pondered the future of hundreds of similar historic towns across this ancient land of 1.3 billion citizens, at a time of crossroads between a proud past and a promising future. While I thought I had found the Wuzhen of my generation in the unembellished town of Lili, I also witnessed the beginning of the end of its innocence. Only time will tell how Luxu and Lili will stand against the onslaught of 21st Century mass tourism in the next 20 years, but I guess that's for the next generation to find out.
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