Chengdon't

You could say that romantics in China are spoilt for choice.  Not only is there the traditional western celebration of St. Valentines Day coming up this month, but the Chinese also have a day devoted to love.  Qi Xi (七夕), or the seventh eve, is often referred to as Chinese Valentine’s Day, but also known as the Seven Sisters Festival, the Festival of the Double Sevens or the Magpie Festival.

The Qi Xi Festival is celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh month in the Chinese lunar calendar (August 26th this year), and while the annual gift frenzy synonymous with February the 14^th does not take place, there are many stories to tell and customs associated with this day of romance that lovers can partake in.

There are many versions of the ancient tale of Qi Xi, but the most popular sees the seven daughters of the Goddess of Heaven catching the eye of a Cowherd during one of their visits to earth. The daughters were bathing in a river and the Cowherd, Niu Lang, decided to have a bit of fun by hiding their clothes. It fell upon the prettiest daughter, Zhi Nu, (who happened to be the seventh born), to ask him to return their garments.

Since the Cowherd had seen Zhi Nu naked they had to marry, and the couple soon fell in love.  However, after a few years the Goddess of Heaven discovered her daughter’s absence, and furiously ordered her home.  The mother took pity on the couple though, and allowed them to be reunited once a year, and legend has it that on the seventh night of the seventh moon, magpies form a bridge with their wings for Zhi Nu to cross to meet her husband.  Apparently, this is also the reason why, on the day of Qi Xi, it is difficult to find any magpies in China!

On the day of the festival itself, lovers go to their local temples to pray for love and happiness.  Some singles also do the same thing to make them lucky in love for the year to come.  Traditionally on this day young girls demonstrate their skills in the domestic arts – especially melon carving – and make wishes for a good husband, and many also repeatedly wash their hair until it shines.

However, if the prospect of a second Valentine’s Day fills you with dread, then November in China has just the thing.  For groups of young western (and increasingly large numbers of Chinese) singles, it has also become customary to organise a sort of “anti-Valentine’s” get-together on the same day, but the Chinese go one better, and have a dedicated ‘singles day’ on November the eleventh.

The idea originated from the early 1990s, when college students in Nanjing first put forward the idea of choosing the day as a festival for single people.  The date was chosen because the date “11/11″ consists of four 1′s.  It first became a hit on university campuses, and then spread throughout the whole country.  As it is no longer such a massive taboo for an adult to be single in Chinese society, singles’ day is seen as a chance by young people to shake off parental pressure to marry and simply have a good time, and man go out to bars or karaoke, send text messages to their single friends and colleagues or sometimes organise matchmaking events…

So, however you decide to celebrate the upcoming festivals of romance this, make sure you have a good time, good luck and good tasty – zaijian!  (Ah.  Before I forget, photo of the week.  I’m sorry I missed it, I promise it’ll be back next week…)

BOOM!  KAPOW!  BLAM!  Can’t hear yourself think amidst the noise of the neighbourhood firework display?  Semi-blind from the abundant sparkling red and gold decorations?  Feeling a little queasy after eating your own body weight in dumplings?  It must be that time of year again – Spring Festival is here!

Perfectly normal

Yep, it’s the time of year when the scent of gunpowder fills the air, sausages hang from balconies next to the washing and train tickets become as scarce as unicorn-riding dodos.  It’s a special time for all from the middle kingdom, but how can a slightly confused laowai make the most of the biggest festival in the world’s most populous nation?  Here are a couple of handy hints to help China’s foreign friends usher in the year of the Ox on January the 26^th in style:

• Get yourself down to the local shop and buy a stylish ‘door decoration’. Traditionally, pasting the Chinese character fu (福) – meaning blessing or happiness – on your front door brings good luck for the coming year.

• If you are lucky enough to be invited to spend New Year’s Eve with Chinese friends or family, go!  You can look forward to the tuan nian fan or new year’s eve feast, watch the biggest and brightest stars from the Chinese entertainment world performing on CCTV’s Spring Festival extravaganza, and after midnight bid farewell to the old and usher in the new by eating dumplings, or Chengdu local favourite tang yuan or glutinous rice balls.
• If you’re in China (or live near a ‘Chinatown’), just before midnight get outside onto the street and enjoy the fireworks.  You won’t be able to sleep so you may as well enjoy the show!
• On New Year’s Day itself in China, locals flock to their nearest or best Temple Fair.  Although they were traditionally respectful, solemn affairs, modern temple fairs here are bustling, exciting and very crowded.  In Chengdu Wuhou temple fair is one of the most popular in the city.  Apart from the temple itself where traditionally people go to pray for good luck, there are many other things for visitors to enjoy, including food-stands, dragon dances, fortune-telling, face changing and countless other crazy activities.
• The more sedate Chengdu locals prefer to travel to the small mountain town of Laojunshan (老君山).  After climbing the many steps up the Taoist temple, people burn incense and light candles to remember their ancestors and bring good fortune for the coming year.

So, however you decide to celebrate this year’s Spring Festival, have a great time, and remember that even if you’re not a local, taking part in the festivities is as easy as wishing someone a happy New Year – xin nian kuai le!

Number 7 – Top brand footwear at low low prices…

By the way, I think a Frenchman invented this particular type of shoe – Mr. Phillipe Felop…

Most westerners living in Chinese cities today do so in a bubble, insulated from the outside world and the harsher sides of life that the other 1.3 billion people in this country have to face.  Unless you take extreme measures to remove yourself from this cotton wool like moving to the countryside or stubbornly refusing to interact with anything western, you experience comparatively little of the random red tape and ritual that affects the daily lives of the locals here.

Foreigners have their own schools, hospitals, living areas and business zones, and you sometimes catch yourself wondering why the authorities go to these great lengths to help us.  Obviously foreign investment and technical expertise are important for the development of a country’s economy and the skills of it’s people, but as I mentioned before, the concept of face and the importance of being a good host are also fundamental.

Many efforts are made to ensure that China’s foreign guests are made to feel welcome and are happy with their lives in the middle kingdom, and this can sometimes manifest itself in some pretty bizarre ways.  However, there are very few occasions that you actually catch a glimpse of the man pulling the strings Wizard of Oz style behind the curtain, who makes our lives that little bit easier – but last night just happened to be one of those nights…

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Last night Iz and I attended the 2009 Sichuan Provincial G0v$rnm$nt Foreign Investor Friendship New Years Eve Party (try saying that after a few glasses of baijiu!).  It was a lavish networking event held at the 5 star Crown Plaza Hotel, where all guests received a free goodie bag containing (among other things) a large and rather ornate teapot.  Over the course of the evening we were treated to a full-on Chinese banquet, lion-dancing, lute playing, singing, face-changing and of course plenty of long speeches about harmonious living.

Then the time came for the prize draw, and the mainly Chinese crowd were buzzing with excitement.  All attendees had put their name cards in box and Iz – with her British Chamber of Commerce hat on – was asked to draw out the cards.

Given that around 90% of the four hundred or so guests were Chinese, the three third prizes (hospital VIP cards) all rather curiously went to foreign managers of foreign-owned enterprises.  Two Chinese won the two second prizes (mobile phones) and then, most bizarrely, the first prize went to one of the most important foreign dignitaries in the room, the Chairman of the European Chamber of Commerce.  It just so happened that the first prize was life insurance specifically for foreigners allegedly worth 6 million RMB!!! He stood on the stage looking rather sheepish with his oversized insurance certificate, while photographers hired by the company snapped away.

If this strange set of events seemed to be too strange to be a coincidence, that’s because it wasn’t… It transpired that inside the big box of name cards from where the lucky winners cards were drawn was a smaller compartment, from where the drawer (Iz) should pick the pre-determined winners. In the eyes of the officials this made the result of the draw ‘fair’ and meant that ensured that everyone went home happy in the knowledge that the right result had been achieved.

Although fixing the prize draw was I’m sure meant as a token of respect and a very generous gesture to the foreign guests, at the same time it seemed to make the foreign winners involved extremely uncomfortable for being singled out from everyone else just for being foreign – in my opinion having precisely the opposite effect to that which was intended.  Ah cultural differences…

My apologies for missing photo of the week, I promise it’ll be back with a bang on Wednesday, so be sure to tune in for that.  Until then blogwatchers, good luck and good tasty – zaijian!

Welcome back blogwatchers!

After a hectic and chilly festive period in Britain, Chengdon’t is back on the airwaves!  I’ll spare you the clichés about things at home being the same and yet somehow completely different, but there were a few noticeable changes from previous visits home.

The relative price of things is one of them.  In recent years, returning to Britain from China has been a bit of a shock to the system cost-wise.  If someone gave me a price in a shop or the pub, I would generally repeat the price back to them in a slightly higher tone of voice, “two pounds fifty…” By my own admission it was a pretty annoying habit, and I was soon banned from starting sentences with “in China that would cost…”

To be fair, when I started working in Beijing I was being paid about three hundred pounds a month, so if things hadn’t been cheaper in China I would have been in serious financial difficulty!

However, this year the economic gap between the two countries – at least to my untrained eye – seems to have narrowed.  One of the biggest factors in this is the relative strength of the two currencies.  When I started in Beijing almost 4 years ago now, 1 pound was worth around 16 RMB.  Now – according to yesterday’s figures – 1 pound is worth 9.91 RMB.  An eye-watering drop if ever there was one…

Our friend Mr. Mao

It could be argued that another reason for the worldwide financial crisis being less keenly felt here is that the Chinese are generally pretty careful with their money, and so are less likely to have racked up enormous bills on their credit cards or mortgages than their western counterparts.  This is changing with time as modern world temptations like shopping malls and Internet purchasing catch up with China’s youth, but on the whole the occupants of the middle kingdom are still relatively prudent.

That’s not to say that the ‘crunch’ hasn’t affected China – it certainly has – but its effects have so far been fairly industry specific (manufacturing goods for export has been hit especially hard).  Perhaps there will be a kind of trickle-down effect from these industries onto the rest of the economy, and this year will see the crisis hit the country in full.

We’ve already seen hundreds of thousands of migrant workers returning rather meekly to their hometowns from the cities after being laid off or not finding work, and some experts are predicting 2009 to be the year that the Chinese economic bubble bursts.  For the moment though, it’s business as usual here in Chengdu, albeit with the occasional furtive glance over the shoulder…Until next time blogwatchers, good luck and good tasty, zaijian!

Number 6 – The Crash Breast Dummies

I’m so sorry, I just couldn’t think of a better caption…