People of Nanjing

A Cultural Perspective on a Historic Chinese City

Ye Zhaoyan, David Charles East

• Publisher: Bridge 21 Publications
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781626430761
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nanjing has a prominent place in Chinese culture and history as having been a capital city for ten times throughout history. The city of Nanjing is a fine history textbook. If one pores over this city, one will evoke the history of China itself. Every historic site in Nanjing is saturated with the character of human affairs. Whichever ruins one might visit, they are all part of a deep historical dialogue. In terms of scenery, Nanjing has mountains and rivers, enough to match any city. But the city's strength is in its history, and its unique culture. This book is a collection of prose about the unique history, culture and atmosphere of the city as well as the temperament and customs of its people, by the renowned Nanjing-born writer, Ye Zhaoyan. "An elegant city with the European and American planning models adopted at the macro level, and the traditional Chinese style at the micro level – the most beautiful, clean and well-planned modern city in twentieth-century China." — Ye Zhaoyan, remarks on the modern Nanjing city

Drinking in Nanjing (Part I)

One

Many years ago, on a warm day, an American friend of mine came to visit Nanjing on vacation. I went to the train station to meet him. He was a tall, strapping fellow, and it was not particularly difficult for us to recognize each other in the crowd. He was an expert on China, and he had flown up from Hong Kong. He was staying in Nanjing for a day or two, and he knew the black market for currency like the back of his hand. When I asked him for his impression of Nanjing, he thought for a moment, then gestured to the can of Sprite he was drinking and laughed. “This stuff isn’t very popular in America.”

I was somewhat surprised. “But it’s an American soft drink, isn’t it?” I asked him. He didn’t deny that, but he insisted that he had never drunk it before, and that it was a new product in America, too. That year, Sprite had only just entered the Chinese market. “Crystal clear, ice cold"—many children knew the advertising slogan. The American food and drink industry is truly formidable. I have met many people like me—who do not care for KFC or McDonald’s but have had no choice but to sheepishly accompany their daughters there to spend frivolous sums of money. Similarly, I do not like Sprite. I did not like it at the time, and I still don’t. Many of my friends don’t, either. But there is nothing we can do to obstruct the unbridled American moneymaking machine. Perhaps the reason for this is joint venture companies in Nanjing. In any case, guileless Nanjingers are easily swindled, swallowing up advertising and moving crates upon crates of beverages back to their houses because work units seem to have gone mad in their pursuit of wholesale trade.

The term yinliao, meaning “beverage”, has in fact only become widely used in the past few years. It seems that almost anything can be termed yinliao. As long as it has some sort of a pull-top can, or some sort of nutritional value, or it can nourish yin and boost yang energy. Traditionally, Chinese people would only consider drinking tea or liquor. Nanjing is a city of consumers; not only does it pay attention to eating, but it also pays attention to drinking. Historically, Nanjingers drank tea and grain liquor. They were connoisseurs, with palates just as sophisticated as those in any other place. The Nanjing area does not produce tea, and nor does it brew wine. But Nanjingers still drank high-quality beverages.

As they say, tall mountains produce the best tea. There are a few mountains surrounding Nanjing, but they are all small hills, lacking the conditions to produce top-quality tea leaves (one thing that Nanjing produces a lot of is experts in tea). Tall mountains produce the best tea because they are sparsely populated and unpolluted. It is impossible for there not to be pollution in the area surrounding Nanjing, but Nanjing does in fact produce one famous variety of tea: the high-priced Yuhua tea. Twenty years ago, I was a factory worker, and a young colleague quietly informed me that Yuhua tea had been developed by his father. Once, I visited his house and sampled some genuine Yuhua tea. It was heavenly. Afterward, whenever I sampled tea that called itself Yuhua tea, I found that it was completely incomparable.

I am not sure whether what the young man said was true about Yuhua tea having been developed by his father. I have never seen any records that suggest so, and I have heard many different explanations. One book says that Yuhua tea was developed collectively, to commemorate revolutionary martyrs of the Yuhuatai district of Nanjing. It resembles pine needles in form, signifying the eternal steadfastness of the revolutionaries. This cannot help but arouse some suspicions. I do not believe that it was developed collectively. As a form of commemoration, it is rather insufficient, and feels something like sloganeering. Good tea is good tea. After my father was branded a rightist, many of the scripts he wrote were dubbed “collective works”. As his son, I knew that these collective works were written entirely by my father. From these two matters, I am justifiably convinced that that young worker’s father was just like mine; someone who could not sign his work with his own name. I remember that, at the time when I was sampling my colleague’s Yuhua tea, his father had been locked up for many years, and had just been released from prison.

Yuhua tea was just a little too good, finer than the average person could bear. The price of Yuhua tea has remained high from the start, rather lacking in the spirit of “Serving the People”. The common people rarely have the chance to sample true Yuhua tea. Yuhua tea has become a precious gift that people begrudgingly drink; it is sent back and forth before finally landing in the cup of someone who does not know how to appreciate tea. Someone once earnestly invited me to his house to drink Yuhua tea from the last year’s harvest. Good green tea must be fresh; how could he offer me last year’s crop? It was truly a waste of resources to make one sigh.

Two

Much like its food, tea in Nanjing has gone downhill, with each generation being worse than the last. Nanjing’s old teahouses are a thing of the past. According to historical records, one could once find a teahouse on almost every street in Nanjing. In 1935, there were nearly 300 teahouses in the city. At the time, there was no television, and fewer newspapers than there are today. News and information of all kinds was concentrated and circulated most quickly in the teahouses. When disputes arose between people, they would often go to teahouses to reconcile their differences with the aid of family and friends or intermediaries. Thus, teahouses became places to keep the peace. Zhang Henshui’s Great Changes in the Bottom of a Cup records the splendor of Nanjing’s mid-century teahouses:

No matter how early you go, the teahouse will be full of the chatter and laughter of people in good company. When I arrived, it was between seven and eight o’clock. A few groups of tea drinkers had already satisfied their craving and departed. Here there were public servants and merchants. They were not neglecting their jobs by being here; this was an accepted part of tea-drinking in Nanjing.

A tea server came by, clearing everything away like a strong breeze. He pulled a cleaning rag from over his shoulder and immediately wiped the table clean. In his left hand, he clutched lidded teacups with saucers. In his right, a large tin pot. Setting out the crockery in front of each person, he poured out the hot water with a rush of heated air, and added the tealeaves, immediately closing the lids on top of the cups; this was where the fun began. A number of wooden stools surrounded the square table and were sat upon casually; there were very few high-backed chairs and no couches at all. This was the proprietor’s way of making sure you could not get too comfortable and forget yourself. If you were a regular customer, the tea server would bring you your own personal teapot and teacup which were yours and yours alone. Whether it was a plain teapot, decorated with flowers, in the “gourd” or “horseshoe” style, or even copper, it would not be sold to another customer.

Nanjingers would drink any kind of tea, but that did not mean that they were not picky. Nanjingers want their choice of tea to embody their own individual mastery of the subject. Since their own region does not produce tea, they have no choice but to accept what they are given. A tea connoisseur can never fixate solely on one type of tea. Different seasons and different surroundings call for different teas. This is a fundamental principle of tea-drinking. When a new tea appears on the market, attention is paid to its freshness, and to which season it was harvested in. On a warm day, one might as well drink a smokier tea, such as Lu’an Melon Seed tea, to help beat the heat. In midwinter, Keemun black tea will warm the cockles. Some love Pi Lo Chun, grown in the Dongting Mountain region of Jiangsu, some love Longjing tea from Shifeng in Zhejiang, some love Huangshan Maofeng tea from Anhui, and some love Lushan Cloud tea from Jiangxi. There are also teas from Fujian, Yunnan, and Sichuan. Different teas have different tastes. When Nanjingers drink tea, they pay close attention to the taste. The wealthy drink high-quality teas. When they have drunk one or two famous teas, they will look down on any other kind. They are by no means aficionados of tea.

Modern manufacturing techniques have caused great steps to be taken in the production of tea. For example, tea no longer needs to be baked. During the manufacturing process, the liquor is kneaded from every leaf and it is dried. One merely needs to soak it in water, and it will overflow with fragrance. This revolution in production has made tea-drinking much more convenient but means that we have shed the elegance of the old process. Sometimes, the pleasure of tea-drinking is in sitting around a stove. Drinking tea should be a process, and there is no harm in having a sequence of steps for it—such inconvenience is a prelude to pleasure. A similar argument can be made regarding the invention of the thermos flask. In the past, one reason why people went to teahouses to drink tea was due to the unending supply of hot water. Nowadays, the thermos flask has taken the place of the tea-server. Tea-drinking is becoming more and more convenient, but the kind of joy that comes as a result of overcoming inconvenience will never return.

Three

Convenience is not necessarily a good thing. Nanjing’s tea shops are fewer and fewer, the prices higher and higher. True, genuine famous teas are becoming rarely-seen things. Nowadays, the kind of people with a sense of refinement—those who will go to a tea shop, buy one or two fine teas, and invite other tea connoisseur friends to drink tea for the sake of tea, sampling it for the sake of its flavor—are increasingly rare. No one treats tea-drinking as an end in itself. It is only a custom, an almost mechanical action. Over the past few years, when teas have entered the market, they are purchased wholesale, and this has been a disaster for tea-drinking. Many teas are produced by work units, then distributed, and thus this creates passive tea drinkers. Since they are not spending money on it, people have no choice but to drink what they have at hand. Merchants will pay bribes to those with the authority to use public money to buy tea, and poor-quality leaves stealthily make their way into countless houses. There are some high-quality leaves, but because people have forgotten how to carefully appreciate tea, they are overshadowed.

There are also some problems with the water used to boil tea. Nanjing’s water quality is better than that of many other big cities, but it is still incomparable to the past. Water pollution has ultimately become a common problem. As far back as 1937, the city government installed free drinking water taps in the Confucius Temple and Daxinggong areas, allowing the common people to quench their thirst. When I was in middle school in the early 70s, when summer came, at the very moment we finished class, boys and girls would rush to the water taps, clasping the copper faucets and taking big slurps. The water was cool and refreshing, and no one ever heard of experiencing an upset stomach as a result of it. At the time, the Qinhuai and Jinchuan rivers that flowed through Nanjing were crystal clear right down to the bottom, and when the Yangtze swelled its banks in spring, the waters were a wonderful blue. With such fine water as that, making good tea was not a problem. If Nanjing’s water had not been good, then the historical saying, “I would rather drink the water of Jianye than eat the fish of Wuchang,” would not exist.

When drinking tea, one absolutely cannot neglect the water, or the leaves, either. Historically, due to the favors bestowed upon them by nature, Nanjingers have rarely had to consider such issues. Over the past years, however, water quality has fallen, and people have begun to become aware of it, but they have no choice but to adopt a laissez-faire attitude. One cannot open one’s own water processing plant. I once heard people discussing this issue and saying that Nanjing’s water was better than Shanghai’s. It is said that Nanjing’s water quality is still higher than that of other major cities. An attitude of unconscientious tea drinking is spreading throughout Nanjing’s tea-drinkers.

To ensure they had good water, old Nanjingers would collect snow from the branches of plum blossom trees and store it in a jar, boiling it in summertime to make tea. Tea connoisseurs will not re-boil water. In those years, tea-drinkers would take their “purple sand” pots and wait patiently in front of an old-style kitchen stove, making tea with the water at the moment that it boiled. Because boiling water took a long time, the dissolution of oxygen and CO2 was greatly reduced. Using this sort of water to brew tea gave it a fresh taste. If the water had not been brought to a rolling boil when the tea was brewed, the tea’s effective components would not be released, and its flavor would suffer greatly. Nowadays, all this ceremony seems to have fallen by the wayside. Nanjingers are called “radishes” for so many reasons, and you might as well add tea to that list. The traditional stoves are rarely seen these days, but there are all kinds of water-heating implements and vacuum flasks of varying quality, all of them springing up suddenly in homes and offices. People reheat water over and over again like they do soup, and they use this water to brew tea. Good tea leaves are wasted.

Now, the current fad is to use expensive, stainless-steel, heat-preserving flasks. In meetings, everyone who is anyone has one. I have asked questions to many people in meetings who own these flasks, and many of them were given the flasks by their work units or sent them by other people. Some own multiple flasks. Unfortunately, using these to brew tea is also a great offense. Putting soft young tea leaves inside such a flask quickly makes for overly stewed teas. Drinking tea such as this is even worse than drinking the Americans’ beverages.

Drinking in Nanjing (Part II)

One

Good wine and good poetry are seemingly inseparable.

At Qingming Festival, the rains fall, and people wander the streets like lost souls.

“May I ask, where are the taverns?” The shepherd-boy points at distant Apricot Blossom Village.

Many scholars have argued over the exact location of Apricot Blossom Village (Xinghuacun) in this poem by late Tang poet Du Mu. Guichi in Anhui Province, Macheng in Hubei, and Fenyang in Shanxi all lay claim to Apricot Blossom Village as their own, and each has their own logic. The people of Shanxi brazenly advertise it on television, claiming Du Mu’s Apricot Blossom Village to be theirs.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Du Mu’s Apricot Blossom Village is in fact in Nanjing. So far, the earliest records of Du Mu buying wine in Apricot Blossom Village are from the Song dynasty’s Taiping Huanyu Ji, in a passage regarding the Jiangning area of Nanjing: “Apricot Blossom Village is in the west of the county, and it is said that Du Mu bought wine there.” The Sunchu Restaurant in Fenghuangtai, where Li Bai drank wine and composed poetry, is adjacent to Apricot Blossom Village. Records of the Historical Sites of Jinling, compiled during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor in the Qing dynasty, also confirms without doubt that the Apricot Blossom Village where Du Mu purchased wine is in Nanjing, and includes verse on the subject: “South of the Yangtze, spring rains fall and one’s dreams are vast, and wine is bought in the bannered pavilions by the gate of Baixia [Nanjing]/when mention is made of Fan Chuan [a sobriquet of Du Mu], people speak to this day of the Apricot Blossom Village.”

The poem suggests that when Du Mu was mentioned, people in Nanjing fell over each other in their eagerness to remind the speaker of the location of the village. In fact, the exact location of Apricot Blossom Village is not particularly important. It is only a celebrity making mischief. Du Mu was a celebrity, and he wrote famous poetry, which serves as the best advertisement. I am citing resources on the original location of Apricot Blossom Village in Nanjing simply because I wish to explain the long history of wine-drinking in Nanjing.

Nanjingers enjoy wine; there is nothing unusual about it. During the golden age of the Six Dynasties, wine was abundant. The area around the Qinhuai River was nicknamed the “Lake of Wine and Forest of Meat” (Jiuchi Roulin). “In Apricot Blossom Village, the tavern banners stand at an angle, and spring trees bloom within its walls.” A Taiwanese friend of mine came to Nanjing and was surprised to see so many restaurants calling themselves “wine houses” (jiujia). In Taiwan, he said, the term “wine-house” had erotic connotations. I found this quite amusing. Wine is a great sexual matchmaker; it is no surprise that such a connection is made. But there are many reasons behind the names of Nanjing’s taverns. The tavern in “‘May I ask, where are the taverns?’” and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Nostalgia Complex
• The History of Nanjing
• The Regal Aura of the Golden Hill
• The Sound of a Vanquished Nation
• Opportunities for the City
• A Strategic Town in the Southeast
• A Picture of Migration
• The Figures of the Six Dynasties and Nanjing Radishes
• South Nanjing
• North Nanjing
• Eating in Nanjing
• Drinking in Nanjing (Part I)
• Drinking in Nanjing (Part II)
• Leisure in Nanjing
• The Seasons of Nanjing
• Nanjingers
• The Outsiders of Nanjing
• Nanjing’s Authors
• The Salaried Classes of Nanjing
• The Men of Nanjing
• The Women of Nanjing (Part I)
• The Women of Nanjing (Part II)
• Nanjing, 100 Years Ago
• Nanjing, History, and Culture
• On the Qinhuai River
• Tianxia Wenshu (“The Literary Center of All-Under-Heaven”)
• Excursions on Donkeyback
• The Streets that Lu Xun Walked
• Zhu Xie
• Remembering Tiger Bridge Prison
• The Ballad of Nanjing
• Remembering the Dead
• Old Buildings Lost
• The Season for Love Songs
• Remembering the Willow
• Seeing the Willow Through the Mists
• The 480 Temples of the Southern Dynasties
• Autumn Cool and Summer Heat
• Cycling in Nanjing
• A Gathering at Anleyuan
• Nanjing in Culture
• Nanjing’s Character and its Authors
• Drinking Tea at the Vanguard Bookstore
• Repairing the City Walls
• Inscriptions on the Bricks of the City Wall
• The Ineffable Xuanwu Lake
• Nanjing, Nanjing
• Nanjing in the Xinhai Revolution