I1-3: Shijiazhuang to Zhengding and back 石家庄⮌正定

September 6, 2018

Two weeks ago, while I was still in Beijing, after Zaiming left but before Harrison and Liz arrived, I was walking somewhere with Myf when I broke my flip flop. I made a perfunctory effort to get it repaired but I couldn't immediately find any shoe repair places and this particular pair of flip flops—which started out life as a cheapy pair from Carrefour—had been repaired so many times that there was hardly any part of them that hadn't been somehow sewn down or glued. Also, the lift on the rightfoot sandal had been cut off of previous iterations and moved over to newer shoes at least twice (possibly three times) and had long since reached the point of not only just having no tread—as is normal with flipflops—but also being dangerously smooth, especially in wet weather.

So, despite not really like the whole situation where I'd have to either be wearing sneakers or be barefoot when off my bike, I threw them out and sent a message to Kaylee telling her to get me new shoes. She's previously taken a pair of shoes (the sneakers I have with me, in fact) to the cobbler I've been using for new shoe construction.

The same giant turtledragon 15 years ago during the day

I appreciate that, in this case, they did not add new stone work to 'fix' the missing bits

(In general, despite the whole leg length discrepancy issue making it hurt to walk any length of time without a lift, I really like being barefoot. In northern China, where I might have to walk across the courtyard of a 'hotel' to get to a long drop squat latrine, I don't like this idea so much.)

She actually bought me two pairs of shoes and, after having them modified, sent both of them in the care package along with a big caramel chocolate bar from my snack stash and a box of cookies from Talisa at the American Bakery. I shared the cookies with Joy, Ridge, their daughter, their very naughty kitten, and also the two foreigners I know in Shijiazhuang (both of whom used to live in Haikou and who were very happy to have good cookies), hid the chocolate in my luggage in the hopes that it would make it uneaten until I got back on my bike and wanted a chocolate treat, and mailed the less comfortable pair of flipflops back to Haikou along with a local donkey sausage and some other cruft I'd picked up that I wanted but didn't want to carry.

Yesterday, upon the stair, I saw a man who was not there / He was not there again today; I think he's from the CIA. (Apparently this is the Mad Magazine version of that poem but it's the one I've always known and I actually like it better than the original). I really like this style of non-reconstruction which shows where a structure was without completely rebuilding it from scratch.

The cookies weren't supposed to be shared with the kitten but, because they are made with real butter, the kitten stole some of them off the table and ate them anyways.

While Joy and Ridge were at work and their little one (who isn't nearly so little as the last few times I was in Shijiazhuang) was at school, I mostly spent the day working. Around 3pm or so, I couldn't physically tolerate sitting still and working on work any longer so I went out to get breakfast, to mail stuff home, to look for massage, and to ride around Shijiazhuang on an Ofo sharebike. In theory I was actually going to head all the way down to Number One Middle and check out some of the changes that had taken place there but I kept getting sidetracked by things like the Old Central Train Station or the Great Stone Bridge. I also, somehow, managed to get lost (an impressive feat in a town that's mostly built on a grid) and find myself almost back where I'd started and close to where we supposed to have dinner on Muslim Street.

Ridge's back-up camera integrates pictures from multiple cameras and shows a composite image of a bird's eye view of his car and the cars around it. How cool is that?

By the time dinner was done and we were back at the apartment it was 8pm and the end of traffic restrictions. This meant that Ridge and I could drive to Zhengding [正定]. Despite twenty years or so of living in Shijiazhuang, he'd never actually been and he'd heard from neighbors that it looked cool at night. I'd gone multiple times in 2003 and, even adjusting for the idea that it surely must have developed since then, couldn't imagine it being "cool looking at night" but figured it would be a neat side trip.

Neat doesn't even begin to describe it.
More like mind blown.

The Tang Dynasty city walls in 2002, 2015, and now.

When I was last there population crashes since the Ming Dynasty expansion of the city walls in 15th century meant that there was still farmland inside the walls.

A lot of that empty land is still empty. However, it's empty with a parking lot and manicured gardens.

Aerial view of the south gate found online

I have some theories regarding why Zhengding managed to escape a lot of the wanton cultural destruction of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the general development ideas of China throughout most of the 20th century and it basically falls down to it having become a neglected backwater after it was eclipsed by Shijiazhuang.

The current ongoing projects to make Zhengding not just beautiful but amazing and a huge tourist draw date back to the early 80s when Xi Jinping—now General Secretary, Chairman and lots of other important titles of the Communist Party of China—was a 23 year old princeling and baby cadre working in Zhengding.

There's a cute advertisement for some job hunt website that uses this picture with the caption "find talent early"

Even back in the early 80s, when he helped get a (not the slightest bit interesting to me, even in 2003) movie set built in Zhengding for a filming of Dream of the Red Chamber, he apparently saw the potential that this site had as a tourist attraction and put in place—both formally and informally—policies which kept it from being turned into yet nth tier minor Chinese city completely undistinguishable from all the other nth tier minor Chinese cities.

It so happens that I'm in complete agreement with the writer of a massively fascinating and photo filled Chinese language blog post on the history of the Zhengding City Walls that some of the restorations that have been done to sites in Zhengding are shameful destruction rather than preservation but, at the same time, what's going on in Zhengding is really really cool.

Before the 10pm closing time of many of the sites, Ridge and I had a chance to check out two of the pagodas. It's actually pretty good that we got there with so little time to walk around and look at stuff as the amount of time we spent walking (which the GPS shows as being about 4km) was enough that I was in a great deal of pain by the time we got back to the car.

These buildings weren't even there at all in 2003. There's a neat bit where the floor is glass and you can see the foundations of the original building that this is a replica of.

Today's ride: 20 km (12 miles)
Total: 573 km (356 miles)

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