By Jarek
One weekend while I was in Chengdu (see “To the Roof of the World” for backstory), the consulate community organized a trip to pick cherries and explore Taoping village, famous for the stone watchtowers of the Qiang (pronounced ”Chee-ang”) ethnic minority. It was an excellent outing, heading straight into the mountains west of Chengdu.
We arrived in time for lunch, and were promptly welcomed into two large dining rooms with the tables set in the ground. The food was good and the company great—in a prime bit of “yuanfen” (destiny), I got to go on this trip with Catherine, Kaylee’s high school Chinese teacher who retired from teaching and joined the State Department for fun. She has decades of China experience, speaks fantastic Chinese, and is an all-around enjoyable human being—in short, exactly the type of person you want with you anywhere and everywhere in China.
After lunch we had a few hours to explore. It’s my favorite type of travel activity: an interesting place and free reign to go wherever you want. The buildings are unique, unlike anything else in China I’ve seen. The village is several thousand years old, but I believe that it was heavily damaged in the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, and has been almost entirely reconstructed. This fact, alongside the evidence that the town is largely dependent on tourism for income, makes the advertisements to see “the primitive and pure culture of the Qiang people” a little hard to swallow, but it was still a cool place to wander around. The pink water heaters on the rooftops really add to that “ancient and authentic” feel.
To round out the day, we packed into local minivans and enjoyed some hair-raising switchbacks to get high up the sides of those mountains you can see in some of the images above. Obviously, the safest way to drive around hairpin switchbacks on a road really only wide enough for one-way traffic is just to go all in, horn blazing, daring any oncoming traffic to get in your way. I guess I can’t deny it’s effectiveness—I’m still alive to write this, right?
Well, the higher elevation must be the sweet spot for cherry orchards, because that’s where we went. We got to wander through with bags and pick some for the ride home, though as everyone knows, it’s far more enjoyable to just eat them as you go. You can’t really beat ripe cherries fresh off the tree, in mountain air far from the city. I love that China still has a few places like this left.
