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.