Chinese New Year by Nick Maes
Featured Hotel in Shanghai
Mansion Hotel
See all hotels in Shanghai >
This won’t make me popular north of the border, but here goes anyway: Hogmanay is for wimps. There, I’ve said it. If you want to play with the big-boys during New Year celebrations, you’ll have to travel a lot further afield than Caledonia – and you can forget the end of December too. 6000 miles and February will do the trick.
There’s nothing quite as full-on as the Chinese New Year celebration. Rather than cram the festivity into a frenzied and be-kilted piss-up over one night, it lasts for two, glorious weeks, from New Moon to Full Moon, starting 18th February this year. Tradition dictates a rigorous pattern of family orientated events: a big feast on New Year’s Eve, dealing with the ancestors and in-laws on other days, schmoozing the God of Wealth on day five and eventually hanging out with your mates on day ten. It’s topped off with a lantern ceremony on the last night. But, like the rest of China, the traditions are changing fast and are only strictly observed now in remote, rural areas.
I joined in the tasselled (rather than tinselled) revelry in Pingyao, Shan Xi province – a beautiful and ancient walled city built in the Ming and Qing dynasties. It’s a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon kinda place; picturesque tiled rooftops sweep down into lanes and courtyards, ruinous mansions and willow-pattern pagodas appear mysteriously out of the icy mist and extraordinary, cantilevered gate-houses loom on the horizon.
Western tourists are something of a novelty in Pingyao (it’s geared to the domestic market which makes it all the more interesting). After dodging a local TV crew who viewed me as exotic and topical foreign colour, I was invited to the New Year preparations in a local hotel. A fierce fire raged in the courtyard to entice good fortune and prosperity, bright red and gold couplets were pasted around the doors and complicated paper cut-outs (like fanciful doilies) were stuck onto windows. Dumplings were being made and I was expected to join in and demonstrate my culinary skills. About thirty clapping and snapping people surrounded me (cheering and photographing every last misshaped dumpling I produced) and I began to feel like the Queen at a garden fete – or a novice on the Generation Game.
My New Year’s feast was held in a small private dining room at the top of a local restaurant with a group of sophisticates from Beijing. Private dining is de-rigueur in China and feels decadent. Huge amounts of food (read noodles and pork – the only porcine dish I didn’t scoff during my stay in Shan Xi was the one made with his squeak) were washed down with the local hooch. Chinese white wine is a misnomer, also known as Green Bamboo it’s 45% proof and lethal. We toasted prosperity at least 10 times – it rapidly became a leitmotif – and got more than a little shaky.
If Chinese New Year is famous for anything, then it’s fireworks. The street outside was like a war-zone. Red fire-cracker ammo belts three metres long were thrown into the roadside, enormous Roman Candles, teeny rockets and extra-large double bangers went off constantly. The noise was incredible. I stood on the pavement and loved every second. The city was thrown in and out of silhouette by distant incendiaries. A gaudily lit pagoda outlined in strings of green lights hung above boys nonchalantly lighting small rockets and launching them from gloved hands. It’s a pyromaniacs dream.
But change is apace and the lantern ceremony began on the first day as opposed to the last. A garish tunnel of fairy lights fed revellers into a large courtyard where they warmed themselves by a huge fire. Surreal and enormous articulated models filled an adjacent compound. Gargantuan babies clutching fish, rats getting chummy with pandas, helicopters, spaceships, galleons, a trio of gods and other assorted creatures were constructed in super-lurid materials over cane frames. They were automated and moved jerkily like fabric fairground attractions. Lion and dragon dancing was promised, except the lights failed. The crowd (now chilled to the bone) did an immediate turnaround and stampeded for the exit.
I opted for a Confucian ceremony instead, only to discover there was nothing doing – so I nipped into the building next door. A tiered auditorium hung with red lanterns and full of people at tables smoking, drinking and chatting was the setting for a series of revue acts put on for Chinese tourists; it was a wonderful amateur hash. The director, obviously enamoured with a bubble making machine, featured it prominently throughout. Highly stylised and vaguely raucous, it’s like an oriental pantomime.
Back to the relit lantern ceremony and the dragon eventually entered – a wonderful beast with satanic red eyes and a swirling, sinuous body. The crowds were pushed back as the fantastic creature whooshed past spitting fire. OK, it was a Roman Candle, but who’s complaining? The whole shambolic gig came away at the seams but made up for it with charm. It’s heartfelt entertainment.
On the way back to my hotel, I checked out the neighbourhood’s only funky bar. It felt like a beach bar except the weather was arctic. The place (like many others) uses thick strips of clear plastic at its doors, like those you’d see in an industrial freezer company.
Pingyao International Financier Club is a peculiar name for a hotel. The yuppie tag derives from the area it’s to be found in, the city was the birthplace of modern banking and known as the Wall Street of the East until the end of the Qing dynasty. The hotel is like a miniscule Shraeger set-up; i.e. it revolves around the reception area. The outside doors are insulated with padded purple satin curtains like eiderdowns; the interiors are chicly designed. It’s strangely hip; but think coats-on-indoors because, like the rest of Pingyao, temperatures never quite get above freezing.
On day two, cheap plaster Buddha’s and Prosperity Gods were arranged on the ground outside the city walls. A crowd threw cane hoops at them in a bid to bag a deity. Nearby a bizarre backcloth painted with devil-like children and a notice priced at 2 Yuan (about seven pence) heralded a freak show. Trestle tables piled up with desiccated road-kill and pickling jars filled with unrecognisable creatures looked like a macabre WI market. Some cages housed a live menagerie that included a few chickens, a peacock without a tail and dark hairy beaver-like animals. Two girls came in behind me, took one look and ran out shrieking. I legged after them, not because of the strange glass jars or even the putrid smell – but because I really didn’t want to catch bird flu.
Pingyao is like a low tech, ancient theme park. It’s strangely Victorian, the pantomime revue and freak show belong to another time. Yet there are strangely modern overtones: street vendors don’t bother shouting their wares, they use megaphones with a recorded cry on a loop that sounded oddly synthetic.
A few hundred miles to the east is Shanghai and another world. The contrast couldn’t be bigger; from the bumbling simplicity of the ancient to the sleekness of the new ultra-city. I wasn’t prepared for the scale: twenty-two million people cram the megalopolis and vast swathes of the cityscape have been rebuilt sky-high in only the last fifteen years. The ugly-beautiful modern parts look like they’ve been designed by a comic book illustrator in the 1950’s; this is a twenty-first century city that Buck Rogers would recognise instantly. The only thing missing were personal jet-packs, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they arrive.
In Yuyuan district – an old part of the city where buildings are punctured with bamboo washing poles that looked like acupuncture for the architectural – the lantern festival is ten times the size of its country cousin’s and a hundred times gaudier. All the shops and stalls were selling cheap seasonal boxes of oranges and biscuits in packaging as polished and expensive as anything you’d find on Bond Street. Thousands flock to the markets and make their last festive visits to a Buddhist temple marooned in the glorious hubbub of the city. But after only a week of celebrations the urbanites were already thinking of getting back to the desk or building site. Everything is so much faster.
Shanghai is a city that shops and eats; apart from the customary New Year’s Eve family banquet, the entire population seemed intent on getting out onto the street to do what they do best; and to hell with tradition. The wealth is dazzling. Brown South Sea pearls the size of marbles jostle in shop windows with gobbets of green jade and diamond rings that would make Liz Taylor blush. Mink is the fur of choice for well-clad ladies. It’s also a city of extremes; ten bogus Mont Blanc pens can be picked up for a fiver in the fake market and a meal can cost less than a coffee from the ubiquitous Starbucks. I visited a grotty, steaming café and had some of the best food of my trip, washing it down with a bottle of Beijing Two Pot – a liquor of startling 55% proof potency. This feast for two, including the firewater, cost less than three pounds.
Shanghai is a city that works best at night. Futuristic electronic billboards fifty stories high, wishing the populace season’s greetings, have come straight out of Blade Runner. Neon lit beauty salons and massage parlours are everywhere. For 60 Yuan (about four quid) a blind man mauled my feet in what was simultaneously the most agonising and refreshing pedicure of my life. Dodgy bars – like Saladin – are full of card playing sharks and whole streets of tailors are ready to run up suits for pennies at any time of night.
But perhaps the single most striking thing about both Shan Xi province and Shanghai is the easiness of accessibility. I speak no Mandarin, except a few pidgin phrases I picked up along the way, yet found them easiest of places to navigate.
Xin nian hao, as folks will be saying soon. Happy New Year.