Capital of Scandinavia, September 2013

I had been upset that morning, but as I stepped into the Ostermalms Saluhall my mood immediately lifted.  Before my eyes was a high-ceilinged hall, filled with food-stalls, and bright, smartly-dressed people having lunch.

The food is one of the things I had been looking forward to about this weekend in Stockholm.  I love dishes like pickled herrings, and cured salmon with potatoes, both of which I think of as classically Swedish.  The trip didn't disappoint, yet what delighted me more were the unexpected quirks associated with eating.  A classic breakfast is knackebrod (crispbread) covered with butter and cheese, however one must use a special wooden knife to serve the butter - a metal one would not do.  Similarly, contrary to pretty much every other place I have visited, in Sweden one serves crisps after dinner, not before.

There are other unexpected ways in which Sweden asserts its character.  During a visit to the Stadshuset - one of the city's key landmarks and an undeniably beautiful building, not to mention the site where the Nobel Prize dinner is held every year - the guide informed us that anyone can get married there, including gay couples, and non-Swedes.  It is open to all, and the wedding ceremony is free.  He warned, however, that the waiting list is extremely long.

This reminded me of the system for renting houses in Stockholm, which is tightly regulated by the government.  From what I understand, to rent a property, you need to enter your name on a government-managed list.  The longer your name stays on the list (in other words, the longer you are willing to wait), the better the property you can obtain.

In both cases, the government is intervening to disrupt the market.  Instead of people getting desirable things (a cute wedding venue, a smart flat in central Stockholm) through money, they get them through patience.  The unstated sub-text is that patience is sometimes a more valuable attribute at the individual level than the ability to amass or hold onto wealth.  I like this view, since societies need both patience and wealth to function, and the former is a lot more evenly distributed and a lot easier to acquire.

I only played the sightseeing tourist in Stockholm for one day.  The city is a jumble of rock and water - 14 islands at the meeting point between Lake Malaren and the Baltic Sea.  It is practically impossible to escape the sight of water.  And the buildings in the heart of the city - Gamla Stan, Kungsholmen, Skeppsholmen looked, to me, remarkably homogeneous, as if they had all been built around the same time, with none of the higgledy-piggledy quality that I am used to from London.  For both these reasons, Stockholm has a beauty that I recognize as European, but is also quite different from anywhere else I have spent time in.  Perhaps this is the face of Scandinavia...

Thank you to Yvan and Andreas for spending the weekend with me, and for showing me so much of Stockholm.

Daoyunlou (道韵楼）

About two hours east of Chaozhou, there is a small village called Sanrao.  You can get there by local bus, but you have to change once on the way.  There are no tour buses.

I arrived there, and got a lift on a motorbike to the edge of the village.  When the guy dropped me off at my destination, he gestured at the building, shrugged and said, "You came to see this?  For us, it's just here.  We never come to visit this place."

Daoyunlou is a communal house of a type that was typically built by the Hakka, an ethnic minority in southern China.  It is not the biggest in the country - those are a few hours down the road, and UNESCO-listed - but it is still impressive, and it is apparently the largest such octagonal building in the country.  It was constructed over 400 years ago, and even in the 1960s as many as 600 people lived together in this space.  There are still around 100 people who live here and call it home.

When I went there it was early afternoon and dripping hot.  Daoyunlou was silent, but felt alive.  There were motorbikes parked in the central courtyard, and chickens pecking between the grass.  Occasionally a door opened and a man would emerge, get on his motorbike and zoom away.  When I climbed to the top storey, I could hear the hushed sound of babies crying, and scolding parents.  Then silence again.  I was the only visible person.

I stood at the top, hot and out of breath, and it seemed to me that this building was a UFO that had been dropped here, and that the local people had not noticed, that in fact no one had noticed, not tourists, not the government, not local historians.  In truth, Daoyunlou is not by any means undiscovered - at the tiny visitor centre in the middle, I had been shown a short, Chinese-language documentary about the building, and the only reason I knew about it in the first place was because of a few lines in the Lonely Planet - but it is perhaps the first time I have been somewhere with such apparent historical value, and felt like the only person who thought it was in any way special.

I started to wonder about what makes people start and stop valuing things.  For some undefined period in its 400 year history, Daoyunlou had meant a great deal to the people who lived there.  It had been a home, and a fortress, and a community.  They had built it from nothing, embellished it, and filled the space with their lives.  They had passed it on to their children, who in turn had passed it on to their children.  Now, everyone is leaving, and the building looks tumble-down and unloved.  How did this happen?

At this point I entered the realm of pure speculation, far removed from the realities of life in Daoyunlou, which I do not understand, never having spoken to the people who live there.  Nevertheless, I speculated.  What if the original owners had been removed, and the space handed over to outsiders?  What if the outsiders felt completely disconnected from the building's history, and therefore did not value it?  What if the outsiders had been treated as custodians rather than owners, and had therefore been denied the chance to invest in the building, both emotionally and financially?

This may not be the history of Daoyunlou, but it is certainly what happened elsewhere in China, and it could explain how something that had once been a source of pride could, in a short space of time, become a ruin.  When an object is stripped of its sentimental value by being confiscated from its owner, and when economic value is denied, what other value is there?  All that is left is an object's most basic utility - a house as somewhere you live and nothing more.

The value of any object is not fixed, rather it depends on the sense of ownership that someone has towards it.  Even the rarest and most unique objects lose their value in the hands of people who do not know how to treasure them.  I fear this is the legacy that China is still dealing with.

Chaozhou

My first impression when I arrived in Chaozhou at midnight was the motorcycles, which made me feel like I was in the middle of a beehive.  I had arrived without a hotel booking, and as it turned out, a local police regulation meant that only hotels with a 3* rating or higher could accept me, a foreigner.  I had already been turned away several times, and was feeling discouraged, so I decided to just sit by the main road in the old quarter (牌坊街).  Motorcycles whizzed by as I drank a glass of warm milk in the only slightly less warm night.

The motorcycles caught my attention because in most Chinese cities the car is king.  For some reason people in Chaozhou have stuck with motorcycles, and this not only makes the traffic more fluid, but also lends the city an unexpectedly youthful, carefree air. 

Chaozhou is a city of just under 3 million people, which is small by Chinese standards.  Yet its impact on Chinese culture - especially outside mainland China - is disproportionately large.  In Singapore, one in five ethnic Chinese come from around here, in Vietnam, the proportion is even higher.  In fact, people from Chaozhou have established communities pretty much everywhere - Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, USA…there are fair odds that the "Chinese" community in your hometown comes from here.  

Chaozhou's importance to the diaspora was one of the reasons I had sought it out.  For the people who left long ago and planted new communities elsewhere, Chaozhou was almost certainly the place they knew best in China, and perhaps the only place they knew. Much of what they took away with them in terms of language, culture, customs and traditions had its roots here.  What people outside China think of as Chinese, may in fact be Chaozhou-nese.  I wanted to see what such a place was like.

Chaozhou is an old city.  By the Han River, there is a temple to an official from the Tang dynasty, who was exiled here when Chaozhou was still an uncertain, uncivilized borderland.  That was over 1100 years ago.  There is a city wall that is largely intact, and a moat, and an old quarter, that still lives and breathes, dilapidated but intact.  The old quarter has not been substantially redeveloped, or even renovated, so it just quietly continues to decay, as it has done for decades.  This is almost miraculous in China, the old quarter having escaped the twin perils of demolition and Disneyfication. 

The old quarter sets the tone for the city, which has a sleepiness that I like, and that made the word "romantic" spontaneously pop into my head at several points during my stay.  The river stretches slow and wide, like a yawn, and when I went there in August, the summer afternoon heat was heavy and overpowering.  By the river, things happen at all times of day, but slowly.  In the morning, people exercise in the shade; at lunchtime, they lie down and doze; in the evening, couples and families stroll, or husbands go night-fishing.  

The city is livelier elsewhere, but drowsiness still clings to it and gives coherence to the buzzing motorbikes, and the families drawing out the ritual of dim sum, and the bare-chested men doing pull-ups in the park, and the lovely silence of Han Yu temple.  

This makes it unlike other Chinese cities.  I hope Chaozhou doesn't lose this quality.