(HuangLongXi street scene)

Not that Chengdu is boring. It’s just that it is night here and I don’t know what to do but chill in the air-conditioned lobby of my hostel and surf the web. I spent today going outside of Chengdu to the small village of HuangLongXi (黄龙溪). It came highly recommended by my guidebook and I wanted to get out of the city. The town used to be the center of judicial control and a large trading area, it sits next to a river that flows through much of Sichuan, during the Qing dynasty and the Republic of China. It looks today much like it did a hundred years ago with wooden Qing style houses and cobble stoned streets. Many Kung-Fu films have been filmed there including Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and they display photos of the filming of every movie made in the town. Since it is a Friday the town was quiet and had few tourists. It was cool seeing what a prosperous Qing era town looked like and imagining the good ol’ days of China’s past, which is literally impossible in almost all of China’s cities.

Since I’m bored I want to point you folks towards some interesting reading on China that is presently online. I don’t pretend to add anything useful to China’s blogosphere by writing in this thing and truthfully you time is better spent checking out the blogs to the right.

Recently the Chinese government lifted its Internet censorship of Google’s English language blog hosting site Blogspot. This isn’t a change for those outside of China but is for me. I’d like to spotlight two blogs (there are more but I haven’t found them yet):

China Confidential – Harsh critcisms of the People’s Republic with interesting thoughts on China in the Middle East and US-China relations. I don’t always agree with the guy, but nevertheless interesting reading.

Asian Business Law Blog – As the site says this blog: “clarifies news of import for legal professionals in Asian business”. Some interesting thoughts on recent business news related to China and other more varied posts. Good stuff. Also, you can check out the great China Law Blog for more Chinese law tidbits.

Yesterday I took a late afternoon stroll through Chengdu’s DuFuCaoTang (DuFu’s Thatched Cottage), a park dedicated to Dufu (杜甫）one of China’s all-time greatest poets who lived during the Tang dynasty. I am a big fan of Dufu and have read a good deal about his history and his surviving poems. Seeing this park/shrine dedicated to his life and works was on my list of must see things in Chengdu. The park was beautifully landscaped with ponds, rivers, tropical plants, and calligraphy. I was really happy to see that so many Chinese appreciated their literary history and culture. Afterwards I was strolling around having absolutely no luck finding a taxi in the evening heat when I saw a string of bookstores. Now, I love Chinese bookstores….a lot. They are everywhere and always full of people and hold huge numbers of books. The Chinese seem utterly excited to learn everything, especially languages, and I respect them all the more for it. Bookstores are usually huge new department stores here but the neighborhood of bookstores I found in Chengdu was all small stores and almost entirely full of used books. These stores were like any good bookshop, or household, completely full of books. The floors were stacked with them, the walls filled to the ceiling and always that musty smell that made me want to carefully look through every pile and every shelf. I didn’t do that, but I did buy a book of DuFu’s poetry and an old propaganda poster of a young communist soldier reading Mao’s red book (perfect for any reading area!). Anyway, yesterday looking through the amazing Danwei Blog I found link to a post about finding Chinese used books online (here). The author mentions the book market near the DuFuCaoTang, which I thought was a cool coincidence.

I also recently found a cool blog about Shenzhen, the special economic zone that started it all, by a cultural anthropologist who has been living there for 12 years. Shenzhen Fieldnotes I discovered her blog from a Virtual China post (here)

So tomorrow I leave Chengdu and take a train back to Kunming. I will arrive on Sunday, just in time for my new semester of intensive Chinese, kungfu, brush calligraphy, and U.S.-China business relations. Should be a hoot!