Special tea purchase in Jinghong and the temples of Kunming

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(written in Chongqing, 17 Oct 2011)

We are on our way back northward and a few days behind in blog posts. All of a sudden the weather is truly October-like in contrast to the tropical heat that characterized our entire stay in Xishuangbanna.

We stayed three days in Jinghong with an air conditioned room to deal with the continuing heat. On the last day, before boarding our evening sleeper bus of Kunming, Kathy, Jacob and I went back to one of our favorite tea shops to search for a special pu'er Jacob and Lynn. The shop was piled high with bags of leaves, newly-pressed cakes, and the stones used to press the cakes. The proprietor pressed those cakes with tea from areas we had visited in throughout the region. We tasted three different kinds of pu'er, all newly pressed from this year's spring pick.

Jacob chose one from a tea mountain on Mengla county, near the one we had visited a few days before. He wanted a tong, or set of seven 357g cakes, wrapped together in bamboo bark and tied together with bamboo string, the way these were traditionally carried on the Tea Horse Road. Jacob and Lynn are getting these from this year's crop to commemorate their wedding. Their plan is to open one cake every ten years on their anniversary. The tea, and their marriage, will mature over the years. This a very meaningful thing for them to do as they think about their future together.

Because the cakes were new, they hadn't been wrapped yet. We watched as the proprietor wrapped each cake in special paper with hand-done calligraphy identifying the source of the the tea. Then he carefully stamped the back of each cake with the date of pressing. Finally, he created the tong by carefully wrapping the stack of seven cakes in strips of dried bamboo bark, tied together with strings made from bamboo leaves. He did all of this very methodically, precisely, and slowly, much like the process of making and serving tea.

We arrived in Kunming early Saturday morning after an overnight sleeper bus ride. Chinese sleeper buses are basically three rows of bunk beds, which could be a moderately comfortable way to travel overnight, as long as the road is relatively decent (ours was) and you are not repeatedly woken up by police (we were, unfortunately). The police presence seems to have something to do with being so close to the SE Asia border and is either related to drugs or immigration or both. Either way, we foreigners have to show passports at each of these stops and every Chinese citizen has to show their national identity card. They apparently have the capability to scan these into some kind of database, which could give them the capability of tracking everyone's movements should they want to. This is something for US national id card advocates to think very seriously about. At one stop we all had to get out of the bus so that the cops could do a thorough search.

Back in Kunming, and just north of the tropics, the weather was significantly colder than in Xishuangbanna. We had a day to explore before our train to Chongqing the next morning. We visited the Yuantong Temple, a big Chinese Buddhist temple within walking distance of our hostel. The street outside was full of beggars, like cathedrals in some Latin American cities. This temple was rebuilt during the Qing dynasty and is very reminiscent of the Summer Palace in Beijing. Inside the temple grounds was packed with visitors, and, in the main temple building a group of maybe 100 nuns and others were involved in some kind of group chanting. Afterwards, all the nuns paraded through the grounds, continuing to chant one of the mantras. At one point they were each given one apple (from a box marked "New Zealand apples"). We had no idea what this ceremony was about.

Later, I rented a bicycle from the hostel and headed for the Bamboo Temple, up a hill, about 12 km west of the city. It is always fun to join the crowd of cyclists and (mainly) motor scooter riders on Chinese city streets. In Kunming this is actually not bad as the bike paths are generally well marked and often set off from the car traffic with a small fence. The last 6 km to the temple was a steep climb. There were a number of young Chinese recreational cyclists climbing the hill with me. Recreational cycling is a new phenomenon in China. As elsewhere, you can tell the recreational cyclists by their spandex outfits, but in China the sure sign is that they wear bike helmets while no other cyclist does.

The Bamboo Temple is very peaceful with well maintained buildings and gardens and green trees (including Yunnan pines, one of my favorites) all around in the surrounding hills. It features 500 statues of arhats and several demon statues, which i really like.

Back in the neighborhood of our hostel, we discovered what we thought was a small street vegetable market that led to a large covered daily market. In there, besides fresh fruit and vegetables form all over the province we found an incredibly array of mushrooms and live turtles and frogs (presumably for human consumption) among other cool stuff.

Kit

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