Zhaoxing

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It was a long drive through the countryside to Zhaoxing, a Dong village. This is where the food to feed some of the millions of people comes from. The area we drove through was mainly pine forest and then fields with rice and other crops. The rice sometimes looks like a ladder climbing the hillside because the strips are so narrow. At this time of year there is not too much to do in the fields. It is a little too early to harvest the rice. We stopped to visit the market in Longshen. It had the range of unusual food, live ducks and chickens and frogs. Something new for me was a kind of honeycomb that included live white insects of some kind (it seemed to big to be for bees). We also briefly stooped in Sanjian to walk over the modern wind and rain bridge. A wind and rain bridge traditionally was made without nails. From the VIP section of the Zhaoxing hotel there was an excellent view looking out over terraced rice fields. Zhaoxing has five drum towers and three wind and rain bridges. These towers and bridges are crafted from wood by the local carpenters. They are replacements for earlier bridges and towers that were damaged or destroyed. It is common at this time of year for the men to lie on the bridges smoking or doing nothing. The women seem to be more busy, either working on handicrafts, trying to sell their handicrafts or working on dying cloth. The Dong cloth is dyed indigo. There are wooden stones outside the houses. The women place the dyed cloth on the stones and beat it repeatedly with a stone. Hard work.

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