Tag Archives: China

Gold Seal

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“Do not open your mouth,” hisses Clarissa the fixer at the director, whose Teochew-accented Chinese sometimes risks getting us into trouble. “The man we are going to meet is Mr Lŭ, third tone.”

“Mr Lú,” says the director.

“That’s second tone,” says Clarissa. “You just said ‘Mr Donkey’. Just call him Professor, for Christ’s sake.”

We are interviewing Mr Lu at Shizhaishan, a desolate hillside in Yunnan that once would have had a commanding view of Lake Dian below. These days, it’s blocked by high-rise buildings, and the hillside is walled off by an imposing fence, because it is one of the most important sites in Dian history.

In 1954, archaeologists at Shizhaishan uncovered dozens of graves of the Dian nobility, including one containing a golden seal that bore the Chinese words: KING OF DIAN. A similar seal, denoting the KING OF NA, turned up long ago in Japan, where locals claimed that it had been conferred upon a barbarian kingdom by the Han Emperor Wudi. Nobody took this seriously until the Shizhaishan find, when it became apparent that Wudi had indeed had uncharacteristic gold seals made for the kings of borderland regions that had recognised his authority.

The King of Dian’s seal is in the national museum in Beijing – it officially marks the moment when Yunnan became part of China. The locals in Yunnan have to make do with a replica; just one of several political issues that clearly still needle Mr Donkey.

It is a difficult interview. Our arrival is bodged, because it takes us half an hour longer than planned to negotiate the tight, winding rural roads, and Mr Lu has been waiting by a dunghill with a nameless woman from the Propaganda bureau whom we soon dub the Jawa. Her facial features are entirely covered by a hoodie, mirrored sunglasses and a full-face breathing mask, which is oddly sinister, and turns out to be because she has a streaming cold, and keeps coughing during the interview and ruining the takes.

When we arrive, the director isn’t sure who this odd couple are, and entirely ignores them, and we only identify Mr Lu when I walk up and introduce myself. But that’s only the beginning of our problems, because he is everybody’s second choice. The archaeologist who actually led the 1954 dig, and a subsequent find in 1999, has refused to talk to the media, because of a bad experience with an earlier crew, and Mr Lu is reluctant to discuss several important issues.

Interviewees have to be managed, anyway. It’s part of my job to come in at the start, speak Chinese like a performing dog, and make it clear that I am not some clueless puppet, but someone who has read the Grand Scribe’s Records, knows my Han dynasty from my Tang dynasty, and is here to make the interviewee heard and understood. As regular readers of this parish will already know, it can be discombobulating to have an English-speaking film crew unload a literal tonne of gear in a remote village, and start pushing them around, hectoring them to stand on various unsteady hillocks, and badgering them to repeat themselves, answer leading questions, and film things out of order. I am quite used to having the director yelling at me to take three paces forward and stare into the sun, but the people I have to put at their ease are often facing a camera for the first time.

The Jawa doesn’t help by lurking at the sidelines with a camera of her own, documenting our visit for official reports and local media. When the director jokingly suggests that somebody cooks a nearby yappy dog to shut it up, Clarissa rails at the crew to stop laughing, “because someone from Propaganda is pointing a camera at us, and I don’t want them to think we are not taking this seriously!”

“So,” I say, “are there still artefacts buried here?”

“I don’t want to answer that question,” he says, reddening, because the last thing he wants is literal gold-diggers breaking in with shovels. He knows we don’t have time to explain that an “artefact” is just as likely to be a midden or a cow bone as “treasure”, and that’s all some viewers will hear. Nor does he really want to talk about the progress of the site, because funding is not forthcoming. The site has fallen into disrepair, the duckboards around the edge are rotting, and the “guard house” is staffed by a gurning old lady and the aforementioned yappy dog.

Media people refer to “sit-up-and-beg questions” – simple, rather vague queries designed to give the interviewee the chance to say whatever they feel like. But Mr Lu is deeply cagey about his site, and reluctant to describe “his” discoveries in the first person because he is a stand-in for the real boss. I try to get him to talk about simple issues, like backfilling the soil (in Chinese hui tian, literally “returning the field”), but this is a touchy subject for him, because they only backfilled the site because their funding has ended, on what appear to be five stops and starts, including the 1950s dig curtailed by the Great Leap Forward, and the 1990s dig funded by a relics bureau that lost interest once they’d airlifted the gold seal to the capital. I have mentioned before the intricate politics of the Terracotta Army site, where the archaeologists are deliberately taking years to poke around the edges, because if they dig out the central mound and don’t find buried treasure, their gravy-train funding will be over. Shizhaishan seems to prove my point for me.

Eventually, he relaxes. I assure him that “I don’t want to answer that question” is a valid response, and that we will just ask him something else, but we do run into a large number of dead ends with him, and it’s difficult to get anything out of him. We eventually get enough to fill a segment, and by the end he is starting to enjoy himself.

As so often happens, we film our “first meeting” last of all, by which time he is all smiles, and he doesn’t blink at the fact that we do it in reverse order. On the final cut, he will greet me at the Buick, lead me up the hill and through the gate, and down into the pits of the dig site, while the drone soars up above over our heads. But on location, where we are moving the gear back down the hill to the van in stages, we first film us walking into the pit, then walking through the gate into the site, then up the hill to the gate, then meeting each other at the car, and then the drone shot.

The crew’s behaviour can look weird to an outsider. Just because we correctly walk up a hill, it doesn’t mean that a farmer hasn’t wandered into shot behind us, or the sun has gone behind a cloud and ruined the continuity for the lighting, or the cameraman has forgotten to run the film. We take our positions for a third take, and the director nods to begin.

“You can start walking,” I hiss to him out of the corner of my mouth.

“But the director hasn’t said ‘Action’,” he points out.

While we get our drone footage, Mr Lu smokes fag after fag by the cars, and jokes with the crew. Our driver starts chatting up the Jawa, whose mask turns out to hide an attractive and friendly young girl ready to discuss the pitfalls of local television, and not the terrifying figure we had assumed her to be.

Our backwards shooting schedule continues as the sun climbs. I am dragged off to film an even earlier shot, of me driving through the village to meet him in the first place, and by the time I come back, he and the Jawa have gone. I got the impression with him, as I do with many interviewees, that by the time he came round to appreciating that he was going to be on telly showing off about his life’s work, it was all over.

Spooling through the footage six years later for this article, I realise that Mr Lu didn’t even get his fifteen minutes of fame. There was so little material we could work with that he’s there and gone in thirty seconds, just long enough to point across some waste ground at the place where they found the gold seal.

The afternoon is spent filming the modern legacy of the Dian kingdom. Remember that we knew almost nothing about it until the 20th century. But the archaeological evidence uncovered in the last 60 years has allowed us to discover their clothing, their architecture and their bronzes, enough to supply suitable material for an entire Dian Kingdom theme park by the side of the lake, complete with houseboats, statuary, and a Ferris wheel. I yell a piece to camera in the wind by the lakeside, surrounded by screaming seagulls, and observe that the Dian warriors of old would be aghast at such a use of their culture, particularly since the theme park seemingly lacks a Human Sacrifice Experience.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S05E03 (2019).

Chairman Mao

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Somewhat to my surprise, I show up on the Noiser Real Dictators series talking about Chairman Mao, across three podcasts, here, here and here. My appearance is actually repurposed audio from a TV interview I did ten years ago — contractually, World Media Rights can do whatever they want with the material, and some bright spark there has realised that the world is better served by being unable to see my face.

It was a bit of shock when someone on Facebook told me they enjoyed my “Mao thing”, because it took several minutes to work out how I could have recorded three podcasts without realising it. As long as it keeps shifting copies of A Brief History of China for me, I suppose I don’t mind!

Let Us Pray

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I have developed a new-found respect for Michael Wood, who I have always liked, but whose Story of China I have been looking at again recently. His episodes on the early dynasties found him visiting not only the same places as us, but interviewing some of the same people in Luoyang and Anyang, but what’s striking is how hard he tries to get the grass-roots opinions of the common folk. Always one for social history, Wood happily hangs out with a bunch of farmers’ wives, and asks them what they think of the discoveries at Erlitou or the Wastes of Yin. History has long been divided between the approaches of the high-brow Thucydides, who wants everything cross-checked and assessed, and the low-brow Herodotus, who doesn’t mind repeating gossip as it is a fair reflection of what people believed to be true. Herodotus is often more fun.

It is cold and damp today. Raining. Almost impossible to film anything, and we can’t get indoors at the museum until tomorrow. And so the director half-heartedly rules that we will try to get some footage at the Jiming-si (Temple of the Crowing Rooster), one of the oldest temples in Nanjing, founded in the Middle Ages, destroyed before the Ming dynasty, destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion, and rebuilt once more. It is the location of the Rouge Well, so named because concubines of the Southern Tang emperor hid from rebels during the fall of that short-lived dynasty, and left traces of their make-up smeared on the sides.

Unlike many other temples, a trio of incense sticks is part of the admission fee, leading to baffled crowds of Communist-era Chinese, bumping into each other and squinting at the instructions posted on the wall that tell them how to pray. I light my sticks at the votive candles, blow them out so they start to smoke, and then bow to the four directions before placing them in the censer. That’s more than we can say for The Human Torch, a woman in a mustard yellow puffa jacket who lights her large incense sticks, doesn’t blow them out, and then wanders aimlessly around the courtyard like a roving fire hazard, flames rising a foot into the air.

The director tries to film at the city wall and at the nearby “old” town, which, as ever, is chock full of snack stalls and little else, but the rain is pretty miserable. I spend less than five minutes on camera today, and even that is just walking from point to point through crowds. So an easy day to me, although we will have to make up for it later in the week.

The people in room 1806 are having very athletic sex. Clarissa the fixer and I, whose rooms are on either side, are scoring them on WeChat for volume and achievement.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events (apart from room 1806) featured in Route Awakening S05E06 (2019).

Mainland Matters

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Some interesting comments over on Reddit over one of the last paragraphs to be written in my book Rebel Island, itself a response to the publisher’s sensitivity reader about whether or not I should refer to the place on the opposite side of the Taiwan Strait as “China.”

This is the passage in question:

Over the years, particularly after my time in Xi’an in the 2010s, my own Taiwanese accent faded away almost completely. Every now and then, something still sneaks in, such as my habit of referring to dalu (‘the mainland’ or ‘the continent’), which continues to give me away as someone who learned his Mandarin in Taipei. The term is so common on Taiwan because referring to the land across the Strait as ‘China’ would rather imply that Taiwan was not-China.

And this is the comment from Lonely-Variation6940 that accurately carbon-dates my time in Taiwan — I was sent there to learn Mandarin in 1991, shortly after martial law was lifted, but when a lot of its cultural policies were still in force.

The 1980s was the era of Chiang Ching-kuo. I grew up in that era. The book you mentioned is generally correct. In school we were taught to use “mainland” or “mainland area.” When I was in high school, if I used words like CCP, Mainland, and China randomly in the essay questions on the Three Principles of the People, I would not only fail the test but also be called in for questioning by the instructor. That was a term used in the era of the Kuomintang’s ideological control before Taiwan’s democratisation. It remains in our current constitutional system. For example, the government department in the Executive Yuan that handles Chinese affairs is called the “Mainland Affairs Council.”

You can hear me talking in greater depth about some of the linguistic politics at work here in my recent interview on Late Night Live.

The Luoyang Shovel

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It is the afternoon and I am in a fallow field an hour outside Luoyang. I kneel down in the grass in front of what appears to be a large, football-sized pile of firm turds and announce that I am on an archaeological quest. I then pick up one of the turds and start breaking it apart with my hands.

They are the core samples from a Luoyang Shovel, a device originally developed by medieval grave-robbers for testing the land beneath their feet in search of treasure. Guo Zhenya’s is a three-metre pole, terminating in a long, curved trowel. You push it into the ground, wiggle it around, and withdraw a sausage-sized cylinder of earth, before plunging it in for another go, pushing deeper and deeper.

Mr Guo has an eye for subtle changes in colour. One trowel down, he is pointing to loose yellowish earth that is nothing but common topsoil, churned over every year by the plough. Another trowel down and we’re in darker more compacted earth, backfilled after the local archaeologists had finished excavating Erlitou. Another trowel down, and the backfilled earth reaches a line of sand, which marks the lowermost point of the dig. After this point, we are looking at terra incognita.

“The soil is turning reddish,” he observes. “We could be looking at a Han dynasty tomb. Yeah, this looks like shentu – disturbed ground.” Another few trowels, and we are almost all three metres of the Luoyang Shovel into the ground.

“No,” he says with a shrug. “False alarm. This darker soil is undisturbed. No human being has dug this deep in the last few thousand years. Nothing to see.” Mr Guo was one of the excavators in the Erlitou excavation that stripped this entire field wide open, uncovering a city from some 2,800 ago, laid out in a familiar square pattern, with a royal enclosure, a bronze foundry, and a temple. This was, people still believe, the likely site of the capital of the Xia, the earliest known Chinese dynasty, a people who had only just discovered bronze and seemed to lack any real writing. All we know about them we have got from legends collected in ancient Chinese classics.

Although the Erlitou site was discovered in 1959, excavation there was shut down a few years ago, one suspects because it failed to yield anything as photogenic as the Terracotta Army. It did produce “China’s First Dragon”, a staff or ceremonial item, the wood long rotted away, but retaining an intricate mosaic of turquoise stones, curling like an elephant’s trunk and terminating in a square, symbolic head. I’ve seen a picture of it, but the dragon is in Beijing, propping up an exhibit of ancient Chinese culture in the capital.

At the research institute, an army of workers are poring over the crates and crates of shards from the site, piecing together its pots, and trying to work out the nature of the bronze ceremonial artefacts that Erlitou seems to have supplied to the rest of the Yellow River floodplain. I’m here to interview the second most important man in Erlitou archaeology, the foremost authority having sworn off television appearances after a bad experience on someone’s late-night comedy chat show.

Zhao Haitao is soft-spoken and twitchy. It takes a while for me to draw him out of his shell, by asking questions about the site that make it clear I know what I am doing – the apparent trade value of turquoise, and the mystery that they have found cart tracks at Erlitou, but no evidence of horses.

“If you ask me,” says Dr Zhao, “the chariots here were pulled by slaves,” thereby literally putting the cart before the horse. I get him talking about pseudomorphs on Erlitou pottery, the potential for other finds on nearby sites, and the likely damage done to the north of the site by a shift in the flow of a nearby tributary of the Luo river, until he is laughing and joking, and holding out ancient ceremonial pots for me to touch.

I’ve noticed several times already on this trip that this is a new and unexpected service that I now perform – simply making it clear to the interviewees that there is someone on the other side who is listening to them and understanding what they are saying. That we are not a gaggle of uncaring camera-pointers with a fat white sock-puppet, but an award-winning crew with a public face who know the difference between the Sui and Tang dynasties; who understand the problems with rescue archaeology, and who don’t blink uncomprehendingly when hit with Chinese terms like liusongshi (turquoise) or renlache (man-pulled cart). I know these things because I was up at 4am reading the Erlitou chapters in the Cambridge Introduction to Chinese Archaeology on my Kindle, but that’s what I am paid for.

Another long day that comprises standing around for interminable hours, before being dragged by a shouty director to stand in front of a tree and extemporise a 30-second piece to camera about sustainability in the Tang economy. But I am doing my job, and coming up with several ideas for actual bits, including a semi-jokey bit where Mr Guo and I take the Luoyang Shovel out of the back of the Buick, its three-metre length seemingly never-ending, like people leaving a clown car.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events formed part of Route Awakening S05E01 (2019).

That Hambroek Girl

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Jan Willem Pieneman, “De zelfopoffering van predikant Hambroeck op Formosa” (1810)

Anthonius Hambroek was a Christian minister on Taiwan, who fatefully became embroiled in the negotiations between the besieged Europeans in Fort Zeelandia, and the Chinese who surrounded them. In a moment celebrated in paintings and plays, he returned to deliver bad news to the “pirate king” Koxinga, sure in the knowledge that he would be executed. Despite his daughters’ pleading, he went back to Koxinga and was never seen alive again. Later on, his daughters were among the Dutch girls handed out to Koxinga’s men as part of the spoils of war – one of them allegedly serving briefly as Koxinga’s own bedmate.

Pastor Hambroek’s sacrifice was one of the most iconic moments in the siege of Fort Zeelandia, an event already riddled with high drama and cinematic spectacle. It’s also become the lynchpin of many a fictional account, beginning with a Dutch stage play by Johannes Nomsz, Anthonius Hambroek, or the Siege of Fort Zeelandia (1775).

Dominicus Anthonius Peduzzi “Hambroeks zelfopoffering te Formosa” (1859)

Its most recent manifestation in popular culture is as the background to Yao-cheng Chen’s historical novel A Tale of Three Tribes in Dutch Formosa. Before he turned to fiction in his long retirement, Chen was a pioneering Taiwanese specialist in bone marrow transplants – a background that surprisingly produces one of the most gripping passages in his book. On hearing that one of the legendary ancestors of his own clan was a Dutch woman, he counts the incidences of ankylosing spondylitis (a type of arthritis), and determines that 4% of modern Taiwanese have a north European ancestor somewhere in their genes.

This is what inspired him to write his story, which comes deeply invested in the interlocking politics and tensions of the Dutch, Chinese and indigenous Formosans in the 17th century. They are, supposedly all given equal weight, although that Hambroek girl inevitably takes centre stage.

Who was she? In Nomsz’s play her name was Cornelia. In Joyce Bergveldt’s novel Lord of Formosa, her name is Johanna. In Chen’s book, her name is Christina, although her fate is kept discreetly off-stage, and instead we focus on her sister Maria, who may, or may not be, Chen’s own distant ancestor.

Chen realises that there’s a whole rack of Iliad allegories to be had, with a long siege, a vainglorious enemy and even a last-ditch hoped pinned on a ship called the Hector. His heroine, Maria Hambroek, archly observes that she is a bit like Cassandra, the seer cursed to always be ignored. I would suggest that there might have been more poetic currency to be had with her similarity to Briseis, the captive concubine whose fate is deeply entwined with that of the heroes.

One of the most compelling elements of the story of Koxinga’s invasion of Taiwan, for me at least, is the treatment of the Dutch women, a number of which were parcelled out among the Chinese. Modern authors seems to shy away from what this might have really meant; Bergveldt concocts a subplot in which Koxinga merely pretends to ravish a Hambroek girl as part of a bigger scheme; Chen is delicately coy about the sexual politics at play here, limiting himself to mentioning a few inter-racial “marriages”. Contemporary documentation, however, is considerably more forthcoming about it, particularly Frederik Coyett’s Neglected Formosa (1675), in which he mentions a number of Dutch girls returned pregnant to the East India Company at the final hostage exchange, as well as their widely varying reports of their treatment at the hands of the Chinese.

Dutch girls handed to soldiers who already had Chinese wives were often put to work as skivvies and slaves, complaining about months of hard labour under fierce mistresses. But this is where Chen’s Mills & Boon romanticism finds a legitimate purchase, since Coyett also reported that the Dutch girls who found themselves berthed with unmarried soldiers were “considerably caressed” and “did not complain too loudly, despite having half a Chinese in their belly.” He adds, in an arch footnote, that: “Those who had been kept honest by the ugliness of their faces, those were the women who were the loudest of all and who accused their companions of whoring and merry-making with the Chinese.”

I don’t know what really happened to that Hambroek girl. But I bet she had a story to tell.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan.

Local Ghosts

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On Christmas Day 1953, a huge fire tore through the slums and squats of Shek Kip Mei in Hong Kong. The blaze left 53,000 people homeless, and galvanised the authorities into a rapid building scheme to create new housing for the refugees and migrants that had been clogging the hillsides of the New Territories.

Mei Ho House is an unassuming apartment block in Berwick Street, but it is actually the last surviving example of these emergency housing blocks. Half of the H-block tower is a youth hostel today; the other wing has been preserved as a museum to daily life for thousands of Hong Kong residents in the 1950s, schooled in open-air rooftop classrooms, cooking on open fires on their balcony stoves, and sharing centralised washroom facilities at the building’s core.

The numbers of rehoused locals actually climbed higher in local reports, as they assimilated several thousand more refugees who were evicted from their shanty towns in order to make space for the “Mark I” estates like Mei Ho – several pundits noted that the speed of the government response might have been humanitarian, or might have been the sudden excuse to pull the trigger on an urban renewal project that was already in the pipeline.

A simple public housing project unpacks into the many stories of the 800,000 refugees who formed a third of Hong Kong’s populaton by 1957, a cataclysmic number of new mouths to feed and people to house. A section of the Mei Ho museum pauses to wonder how they were entertained, providing a wealth of stories about the Hong Kong film industry in the period.

For the older generation, newly uprooted from what had become the People’s Republic, the Hong Kong film industry offered a huge number of filmed performances of Cantonese operas – between 1913 and 1990, Hong Kong churned out 1,092 filmed versions of Cantonese opera – and that’s straight ports of the stage shows, not action-movie adaptations like 14 Amazons. Only 800 of these films survive today, but they are largely overlooked. Their heyday was in the 1950s, when the aging population of migrants in Hong Kong, including the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the People’s Republic, thrilled to old-time entertainments – in 1958 alone, Hong Kong produced eighty-nine of them. A generation later, their grown-up children were entertained by a hybrid of the old stories with a new mode of filming, what you and I might call kung fu movies.

Upriver in Foshan, at the Guangdong Museum of Cantonese Opera, many of the galleries are dedicated to the cross-over between Cantonese Opera and Hong Kong film, not merely in subjects, but in performers. I recognise one of the actors immediately: the sign gives his name as Guan Dexing, but he is better known in Cantonese as Kwan Tak-hing, who played the hero Wong Feihong in 77 Hong Kong movies. I am, in fact, quite astonished that I have been in Foshan for two days and only once heard his famous theme song being played in a restaurant.

Wong Feihong has a whole museum dedicated to him inside Foshan’s Ancestor Temple – and his fame is widespread enough that it has separate galleries for his life story as told on television, in comics and in movies. The list merely of Wong Feihong movies is currently at 101, but the curators have left space on the wall for it to go up to 120.

But Wong is not the only figure to unite Hong Kong film and Cantonese Opera. At Guangzhou’s Museum of Cantonese Opera Art, there is an extended display on the Red Boats – itinerant troupes of opera performers, who plied the waters of the Pearl River Estuary and its tributaries, putting on shows, wowing the locals, and so it was said, harbouring dissidents and revolutionaries.

The model ship in Guangzhou even features a group of martial artists practising with a Wing Chun dummy on its stern, whereas the museum in Foshan dedicates an entire gallery to the most famous of the Red Boat performers, Li Wenmao, who briefly led a rebellion and declared himself king of part of South China, before a savage government reprisal wiped out the theatre in the region for a decade. Li’s generals, so it was said, went into battle in their Cantonese Opera costumes, which must have been a sight to see.

I’ve written several times about the Red Boats, mainly in my work for Arrow Films explaining all the real history behind their appearances in kung fu movies. There’s some fascinating stuff to be found out about life on these wandering minstrel ships, including timetables of shipboard life, and the logistics of being travelling players on the water. Most boats travelled in pairs – a Heaven and Earth boat that tended to reflect the division between drama players and the action troupe. The larger companies added a third vessel, the Picture Boat, which transported sets and extra props — the picture I have included below is a historical reconstruction, a screenshot from the Shaw Brothers film Executioners from Shaolin.

The average boat had its dockings booked two years in advance, and the culture is riddled with all sorts of interesting lore and ideas, such as the presence of four all-female troupes, and the fact that the term in Cantonese for a backstage prompter is a “local ghost.” The full list of Cantonese opera plays tops 11,000, but most Red Boat troupes had a revolving repertoire of just 18, of which ten were performed most often, with the final eight dragged out for special occasions. The first play performed in most venues was Tribute to the White Tiger, a staged fight between an actor and the spirit of onstage cock-up, who would depart chastened and defeated, and hence bless the performance. The last play performed each night was Sealing the Stage, a ten-second ritual in which a masked actor closed the performance and shut down the magic, in the fashion of Shakespeare’s “for their sake / In your fair minds let this acceptance take.”

Largely unexamined by theatre historians, for obvious reasons, are the Outline Plays, improvised operas for which the actors were handed a possibly randomised series of stock characters and situations and told to wing it. So there might be a board in the wings that reads (very hypothetically): “Comedy refugees from war / Farmboy argues with Uncle / takes them to the Hermit (old man with secret) / thence to harbour to seek passage with Pilot.” And if you were lucky, you might get something like the first thirty minutes of Star Wars. Sung. With six tones.

The Red Boats were wiped out in the Manchu retaliation after 1858, which toppled Li’s rebel state and murdered a million people in the region, outlawing theatre for a decade. They did return in the 20th century, and were a feature of local entertainment right up until 1938, when almost the entire fleet was unluckily anchored in Foshan harbour during a Japanese bombing raid. A cryptic comment in Toa Wong’s Time of the Red Boats notes: “The last known pair of Red Boats were spotted near Macau in 1951,” as if they might still be out there somewhere, haunting the coast.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. He has recorded several film commentaries on Hong Kong movies, including Martial Arts of Shaolin, Heroes of the East and 14 Amazons. He is the writer and narrator of the Arrow documentary Rivers and Lakes: History, Myth and the Martial Arts Film.

The Qi’Ao Anti-British Skirmish

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The seaside town of Zhuhai is famed for its seafood, its modernist clamshell opera house and its statue of a fisher girl, but my ongoing fascination with Red Tourism leads me to ignore all of that and instead go in search of the Zhuhai Martyrs Cemetery, a modest park with an on-site museum that proudly puts the city on the revolutionary map. For those who had never even heard of Zhuhai before it become one of the Special Economic Zones in the 1980s, the museum has a bunch of interesting stories, starting with the “Qi’ao Anti-British Skirmish” of autumn 1833, in which two Dutch cannons, said to have been liberated from Taiwan over a century earlier by local-born official Zhong Bao, were turned upon foreign opium-smugglers.

According to a 2016 article from the Guangzhou Ribao, the Manchu authorities had “not offered a single silver tael” for civil defence, turning the Qi’ao resistance into a moment of considerable historical moment, in which the Chinese people not only stood up for themselves eight years ahead of the Opium Wars, but did so with half a dozen locally-made guns and two antique cannons – the eight ordnance pieces are, supposedly, still there on the Qi’ao waterfront, elegantly rusting away.

The defence of Qi’ao was a response to years of harassment from opium smugglers, who used the nearby cape as an anchorage, and thought nothing of stealing supplies and livestock and terrorising the villagers. A statue to Cai Yi, one of the defenders, claims that his cannon emplacement sank two of the enemy, leading to his local sobriquet Shen Paoshou, the Divine Gunner. Another commemorates the local men and women, who are said to have held off the attackers with pitchforks and kitchen knives. The British, according to the Guangzhou Ribao, were eventually obliged to hand over 3,000 silver taels in compensation, which was used to restore the local temple of the Goddess of the Sea – and, I suspect, initiated a new era in which the smugglers still showed up, but with a degree more respect.

“Qi’ao has not fallen,” brags the local monument. “And we draw our swords and volunteer to slay the enemy together; the British army [sic] seeks death, and throws away their armour and flees for their lives. Four years of haze are swept away in one day, and the mountains and rivers are forever preserved and the sun and moon are shining again.”

And I’m still only three steps inside the front door!

Pride of place in the opening bas-relief is given to three local boys who were instrumental in the Chinese labour movement. Qi’ao-born Su Zhaozheng (1885-1929) [centre] was the Seaman’s Union leader who masterminded the Hong Kong strike of 1922, over inequities in Chinese pay. Without answers for their demands for 40% pay rises, 1,500 deckhands and stokers walked out in January. Numbers grew to 30,000 by the end of the month, paralysing the colony’s shipping. By February, the numbers had climbed to 50,000, and included workers in the food and transport sectors, and even civil servants at Government House. With Hong Kong shut down, the authorities passed an Emergency Regulations Ordinance allowing the chef executive to enact extreme measures in times of crisis. [As a pre-existing law from colonial times, it remains a “nuclear option” on the statute books in modern Hong Kong, and was recently invoked in 2019 to ban protestors from wearing face masks].

Governor Edward Stubbs imposed strict passport rules, leading to a performative attempt by local union members to walk to Guangzhou to collect their strike pay. Four were shot and killed as they approached a line of colonial troops.

Lin Weimin (1887-1927) [left] went to Hong Kong to work on foreign ship, but became a key figure in the Canton-Hong Kong General Strike of 1925, inspired by the shooting of anti-colonial protestors in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Fearing that the authorities were about to retaliate by poisoning the water supply, a quarter of a million Chinese labourers fled Hong Kong, again shutting the colony down. Notably, he started out as a left-wing Nationalist, before joining the Communist Party and effectively becoming its representative for Hong Kong until his death, apparently from overwork at 40.

Yang Pao’an (1896-1931) [right] was the sole survivor of nine children, who embraced Marxism in his twenties as the only form of “scientific socialism.” He was an early representative of the Communist Party within the Republican government, which ousted him in 1926 on the grounds that he was a subversive and Communist recruiter. He embarked upon writing a Marxist history of the world and was arrested in Shanghai for pamphleteering and sedition. He was executed at the Longhua Garrison Command, now the Longhua Martyrs Cemetery.

Like the cemetery outside, the museum divides its main curation into the fallen heroes of the Revolution, of the war of resistance to Japan, of the civil war with the Nationalists (which actively stretches into the 1950s), and a rather vaguely defined Any Other Business, which I suspect, as in Shanghai, celebrates local-born people who have died in civil actions such as fire-fighting or sea rescue.

In particular there is a wall-length painting of Communist gunboats repelling Nationalists from islands near Zhuhai, bursting with pew-pew energy, and focussing on the immense dichotomy between the plucky little PRC boats and the Nationalist ships they are fighting – a victorious spin on the story that I have normally heard told by the other side, as a lament about lost territory.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan and A Brief History of China.

Surviving in Cashless China 2025

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Last year I wrote an article about the surprises of returning to mainland China after five years’ absence due to COVID and other circumstances. I’ve just come home from another trip in which I drew a lazy circle around south China’s “Great Bay Area”, up and around the Pearl River estuary. So this is your update about getting by as a visitor to a China that has tried to remove all cash from daily life: including ten apps that may make your life easier. I’ve also included a few details about the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong (which still takes cash and everyday credit and debit cards) and Macau (which is a law unto itself).

The official story is that services have to accept cash because not all old people have compatible phones. In reality, whereas you can usually pay in cash at a supermarket or train station information desk, you need to find a human who will take it from you, and they will need to find change. Meanwhile even buskers and beggars now have QR codes written on their buckets, and an irritating enshittification is underway in which some restaurants now want you to scan in a QR code and then do all your ordering and payment on their supposedly bespoke website. I was struggling to scroll down to the noodles in one cafe, when the old lady sitting next to me shouted: “I am not dogfarting around with this nonsense. Give me a paper menu.” They very swiftly provided her with one, so if you are old and angry, you can still get away with it.

On this most recent trip, I only used cash on three occasions — once when a pointlessly faffy restaurant website in Foshan wouldn’t load for long enough to let me pay for my noodles (I handed 51 kuai, the exact amount, to a waitress who may well have pocketed it); once to buy a mini Macanese flag at a souvenir shop in Macau; and once at the bizarrely old-school left luggage office at Hong Kong Airport Express station, which continues to insist on cash-only like it’s 1985.

ALIPAY. My default payment option in China, Alipay offers a visitors’ version that does not require a Chinese phone number. This only works in China, but as it requires a scan of your passport page and some warm-up box-ticking, it is best done before you arrive. Most shops and services take Alipay, and instead of the old “cash or card”, servers now normally say some variant of “Scan you or scan me?” referring to the barcode that activates the transfer. Alipay also has a Transport option that allows you to immediately join the local travel card network. So the moment I walked across the border in Shenzhen, I was able to create a Shenzhen Tong travel card on my Alipay, and use that instead of faffing around trying to find someone to sell me a real Shenzhen Tong card. As an additional bonus, fares are deducted from your standard Alipay account (which links to your credit or debit cards), so you don’t leave China with £20 unspent on a travel card you might not ever use again.

WEIXIN (WeChat). Most Chinese seem to prefer Weixin, which works just like Alipay and seems to have more supporters among some small shops and in certain areas of China. I found myself using it almost exclusively on my first trip to Guangzhou, where the locals seem to favour it. Weixin is fine for payments, and comes barnacled with a bunch of other things such as travel booking, which I don’t bother to use. It also has its own chat service, which often makes it the default app for taking down someone’s contact details. You can also see who else has WeChat near you, which inevitably means a bunch of hellos from under-dressed ladies each time I arrive in a new phone catchment area.

TRIP. For the last fifteen years, I have increasingly come to rely on Trip (formerly cTrip), a travel booking option that streamlines hotels, planes, and trains, as well as access to local attractions and experiences. I’ve used Trip to book me onto a bullet train at twenty minutes’ notice, and onto the Macau hydrofoil with no fuss. The app preloads travellers’ passport details, so your passport *is* your ticket on Chinese trains. To my great surprise, Trip also turned out to offer me better deals on hotels than a well-known chain’s own laughably titled “loyalty” scheme, of which I had been a member for many years. I love Trip so much that I even got it to book my hotels last time I was in London. Trip also has an unexpected bonus value in China, since it has a Map function that works behind the Great Firewall and not only shows you where you are, but items of interest nearby, which led me to several tourist sites on my most recent trip that I would not have otherwise known about.

OCTOPUS. The absolute joy of travelling in Hong Kong is the Octopus card. The version sold for tourists does not require a local phone number, and can be loaded onto your iPhone. Octopus is a reloadable travel card like London’s Oyster card, which works on trains, ferries, buses and the metro. It even works on the Peak funicular tram and the piddly little boat that putt-putts across Aberdeen harbour in three minutes. It can often also be used in place of other payments in 7-11s, restaurants and other shops. Nothing feels quite as welcoming as shambling off a plane at the airport and straight onto the express into Kowloon without a moment’s thought — the Octopus card makes a huge difference to Hong Kong’s ambience by making you feel like a local the moment you arrive.

ALOSIM. None of these digital apps work without an internet connection. You can pay for a travel connection from your usual service provider, but if you have an iPhone X or later you can load in an eSIM card that will handle all your data. I use aloSIM, which offers an Asia data package that works in 13 countries and regions, so there is no tech fiddling as I cross from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Macau. I also use aloSIM everywhere else I travel, switching from their European, to American, to Asian data packages depending on where I am. It usually works out about half the price of getting the same service from my regular provider. If you use my customer code M74D4V9, both you and I will get a $3 discount.

EXPRESS VPN. If you use Gmail, or Facebook, or Google, you may find that these sites are blocked in China. To spare yourself the frustration of suddenly not being able to see your emails, Express VPN will create a tunnel made of Science, under the Great Firewall and onto a server in another country. If you want a free month on your first year’s subscription, you can use this link and I will get a free month, too.

METROMAN. For many years, I have had a growing number of Chinese metro maps proliferating on my phone. Now I just have Metroman, which corrals them all into one place, updates them when a new line suddenly appears, and allows you to plot likely routes before you head out for the day, instead of squinting at a map on a station concourse.

MOOVIT. I didn’t make huge use of Moovit on this recent trip, but on several occasions when I found myself in the middle of nowhere in a strange town, it was handy to be able to call up a free app that told where I could get to from the nearest bus stop.

PLECO. Not everybody reading this is going to be a Chinese speaker. But if you are, Pleco is an app that allows you to write unfamiliar words with your finger, and then look them up in a dictionary. It requires you to be able to work out the correct stroke order to enter your query, so it is not suitable for people who are new to the language.

MPAY. I would like to be able to sing the praises of MPay, a Macanese app that works in much the same way in Macau as Octopus works in Hong Kong. Except currently MPay requires you to have a Chinese, Macanese or Hong Kong phone number, so it was as much use to me as a dog filled with sand. I had no trouble using cash in Macau, but local cash machines only dish out money in large notes. Most places happily accept Hong Kong dollars as payment, but since Hong Kong dollars are worth 10% less than MOP$, everything comes attached to a “surprise” surcharge, like you are in America being having to come up with extra change for a sales tax. Of course, it’s not really a surprise — the Macanese are doing you a favour by taking foreign notes, but they could do everyone an even bigger favour by taking Octopus payments or just setting up an “MPay for Tourists” in the Octopus style. Hopefully there will be some good news about that next time.

Not all these apps will be ideal for everyone — not all of them were ideal for me! But as a Chinese speaker venturing into unfamiliar parts of the country, and trying to make the best of my time, many of them (except MPay) proved to be very useful indeed.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.

Shaking That Arse

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Early morning interview with our landlord, Tubby (his real name is Yu), a jolly little man half my height who will shortly become the village chairman. This makes him something of a heavy-hitter with the locals, and he truly appreciates the value of TV coverage, so he is ready and willing to talk about the history of the Miao, their affection for the pheasant as their totem animal, and sundry other organisational issues to do with the village. He even obliges us by running down the hill to tell the singing competition, which has been running right through the night, to bloody shut up for half an hour so we can film him in relative quiet. When they get shirty with him, he literally steals their microphone, strolling back to the house with it and telling us all will be well.

The Tubby interview is swift and efficient, and it gives us ample material to cover our B-rolls and cutaways. Despite the misery of filming here in what is now our fourth day of impenetrable fog, we have enough in the can now for this episode to work. The fog has become part of the story, as have the armies of amateur photographers getting in the way. There is even a rival Chinese film crew, dubbed Mr Osmo and the Neckbeards, since their chief cinematographer is wielding an Osmo – a tiny steadicam like a gun on gimbals, allowing for running shots and action.

Mrs Yu (Tubby’s wife) and Miss Yu (Tubby’s sister) take me out onto a clifftop to teach me how to walk like a woman. This takes longer than expected, as they have to put their glad rags on and do their hair, and then we have to wait for the air-raid sirens to stop. Today is the anniversary of the Japanese invasion of China, and sirens all over China are going off to remind people of who the enemy is.

“Left foot forward,” says Mrs Yu. “Now watch my arse. I wiggle it this way, and then that way, then this way, then that way.” It’s only when the cameraman reframes for a close-up that she realises she is volunteering to wiggle her bottom on camera for viewers in 30 countries.

The sisters-in-law then move onto the Phoenix Dance, that slow-motion invisible skipping rope motion that combines their wiggly walk with flapping arms and steps that go left-right-left-right-right-left-right-left-left, over and over again.

“Do you think they enjoy doing this?” wonders our fixer.

“I hope so,” I reply. “Because this lot don’t seem to do anything else.”

Mrs Yu is very excited about the electric kettle we have acquired in a vain attempt to have some warm water to wash in every day. She walks around the house caressing it like an adored pet. I have not washed properly for four days now. It is theoretically possible to barricade the door to the combined toilet-shower, strip off and use a kettle, but such an enterprise would require washing the floor first, and drying off afterwards, which since we are literally living inside a cloud, would be a futile exercise. As for going to the toilet, don’t get me started. I am happy if I manage to hit the hole and remember toilet paper.

“When we get to the Congjiang hotel tomorrow,” says the director dreamily, “I’m going to turn the lights low, put on some ambient background music, light some aromatic candles, and have a massive dump.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S03E06 (2017).