China 2008, Part X: Shilin

I've been pretty busy for the last few days, especially with watching the Olympics (sometimes while at work!), so this Tropical Storm Fay finally gave me a little bit of time to write since we have the day off from work! Hopefully, the house doesn't take too much damage during the storm though!

This past weekend, we met up with my family for the first time since we got back from China. The main event was yet another wedding reception for my parents' friends to attend - this one was substantially smaller than the one we had in Wuxi, with about 50 guests, most of whom we knew. The party was okay, too - a lot less variety of food (although we had a sushi boat!) but there was Karaoke afterwards, which made up for it somewhat!

Well, back to the China 2008 series. We last left off in Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan province in China, where we visited the Tribe Exhibition Park. On Monday, decked out in my new Metersbonwe gear, we headed to the nearby 石林 (shi lin, or Stone Forest). This natural wonder is a huge park that is characterized by thousands of limestone pinnacles that jut out from the ground up to several hundred feet in height. The 2,670 square kilometer park is actually separated into several scenic areas, but for obvious reasons we were only able to check out two of them, the 大石林 (da shi lin) and the 小石林 (xiao shi lin), or Great and Lesser Stone Forests, respectively.

Of note, the Shilin park is in an area in Yunnan heavily populated by the largest minority group in the province, the Yi people. The Yi, also called the Nuosu (a transliteration of their local name) have their own unique spoken and written languages, as well as their own dress. Since Yi women, like many of the minority women in Yunnan, are typically the workhorses of the family, they tended to age very quickly, such that women as young as 30 often look like they are well into their 60s! This phenomenon can be considered one of the recurring 18 Oddities of Yunnan.

After touring around Shilin, we stopped at two of the several "shopping traps" that are obligatory for just about every tour in China you can take. First, we stopped at a Puer Tea (普洱茶) Depot, where we were presented with ample opportunities to purchase Puer tea. Puer tea is actually unique among Chinese teas in that it is a black tea, rather than the green teas that are more common in the Far East. It is also unique in that, unlike many teas, Puer tea gets better with age, and as such, it is often compressed into sculptures and used as decorations until such time that it is used to drink! I suppose the dust and germs that it would have collected over the years would be sterilized from the boiling water... at least I certainly hope they would!

One last note about Puer tea - Puar, the cat like character in the original Dragonball anime, is named for Puer Tea, much like the bandit character Yamcha is named after 饮茶 (yin cha, or Dimsum), which is pronounced yam cha in the Cantonese dialect!

Our last stop was to a famous Jade depot. Being so close to Burma, which is widely regarded as the largest source of high quality jade, Yunnan is the largest source of high quality jade (also called 翡翠玉, fei cui yu) in China. Jade is a very special stone that is highly prized in East asia for it's luminescenence, hardness (scoring just a few decimal places below diamond), and it's vibrant range of color, although green is the "classic" favorite. Jade bracelets, due to their hardness, can cut right into glass, despite the bracelet being round. In addition, due to the consistency of the stone (despite the inconsistency in its color, another prized feature of jade), when lightly struck against another hard surface, a jade bracelet produces a pleasant metallic ring similar to that of a tuning fork. We end up visiting one more jade depot on our trip, so I will conclude my discourse on Jade when I write about that visit!