Day 4 (26/6) - Tongli (Part 1)
The scale of Social Engineering in China ("文明" - civilization/culture) is matched only by the magnitude of its failure. I think it's the mixture of the country bumpkin mentality with the nouveau riche mentality. OTOH, HWMNBN says everyone tells him there is less spitting in Shanghai than 10 years ago, and there was less than I expected.
China is full of people trying to extract money from you one way or another: beggars, touts - and shops where you should bargain prices down to 1/3-1/5 of the initial offer price and more. But then since everything is already so cheap, the marginal cost in time and energy of bargaining is not always worth it, espcially if you lack both interest and aptitude in bargaining.
The train stations have separate waiting rooms for soldiers. Wth. No wonder everyone wants to join the PLA.
The weather was a bit better than Singapore but it was still bad, especially since I was a tourist. I almost wished I hadn't gone to Stanford, so I could've visited China in May. I don't know how Ang Moh tourists stand Singapore.
This day I went to Tongli, a water village, with Johnny Malkavian. Zhouzhuang was more popular, but Tongli was less inauthentic.
When we arrived in Suzhou, from which we were to take a bus to Tongli, we went to the wrong bus station and wasted almost an hour; everyone was talking about a bridge but it was obscured by construction, which is why we didn't see it initially. This is why many people go on tours - to save time, effort and sometimes, money due to imperfect information.
Welcome to Tongli
Gateway
Propaganda: "8 things to do and 8 things not to do"
Rough translation: "To love your motherland, do not harm it. To serve the people, do not desert them. To love learning, hate ignorance. To work hard, get rid of bad habits. To promote community cooperation, get rid of undesirables. To promote honesty, nix forgetfulness and [something]. To respect the law, get rid of law breaking. To endure in the face of unlimited suffering, get rid of arrogant [something]."
Walking in
Map of Tongli. Instead of "NSEW" or "东南西北" they had "北南EW". Wth.
Since we had different interests and aims (his was photography), both of us split.
Ter Kar - Pigs' Trotters. A local delicacy.
The coveted UNESCO plaque.
Since real people still lived in Tongli, there was the smell of remains and refuse in the air. Another advantage of coming when it was colder would've been that the smell would've been less.
The first stop was the sex museum (China's first, showcasing China's long tradition of Asian Values), highly recommended by YuCheng, Lin and his girl. Johnny didn't care to go because indoor photography was banned. Unfortunately most of the outdoor exhibits were poorly labelled, having only brief descriptions of the contents, no dates and little explication. Unless otherwise stated, all information referred to (or was presumed to refer to) the Ancient Chinese context.
Hear, see and speak no evil.
Zoophilia.
They claimed that the Buddha holding a pagoda was symbolic of the penis. And that the swastica symbolised 1 wife with 4 husbands. I found this dubious.
Tang Musician-Prostitutes
Pseudo incest: a couple making love. The child is urging his father to win and return swiftly.
"Women's dependence"
Inside, the artefacts were slightly better labelled, with dates. However they still had no origin information. I was too tired and my feet hurting too much to play many games with the staff, but I still took some pictures.
Really screwed up English 'translation': "chinese culture nohich could he hrovived by a lot of antigues". I'm not sure what they were thinking.
There was a pottery jar from 3000 BC where each leg was a breast.
They used to keep erotic paintings in buildings to prevent fires, because the fire goddess was ashamed to look at sexual behavior and would run off on seeing it.
Group sex, early 20th century
Fu-xi and Nu-wa intercourse (isn't this incest?)
They claimed the top 3 "abnormal sexual phenomea" globally were prostitution (which they called 'disgusting', hurr hurr), foot binding and eunuchs. Given that the first is the world's oldest (or second-oldest) profession and the last was a cross-cultural phenomenon, I'm not so sure about "abnormal". And given that foot binding was only practised in China, I'm not sure that it merits a number 2 spot there (but then again, since so many women were so-mutilated in China, it may deserve its place after all).
Foot binding is supposed to make you walk in a funny way which tightens your genital muscles, which is good for the men using you.
Woman with bound feet masturbating
In Chinese brothels in the 19th century they used to have lists of the staff with portraits and the services they provided written alongside.
Bestiality, early 20th century
Woman using dildo
Dildos were very popular in Ancient China. They were used by:
1) Widows (adultery was very bad but dildos were okay)
2) Concubines to satisfy themselves
3) The sexually impotent, including eunuchs
4) The wives of seamen
Even in ancient society not all women were frigid, hurr hurr.
They had erotic paintings on porcelain plates with scenes that wouldn't be out of place in their modern equivalents. Some things transcend cultural, spiritual and temporal bounds. That said, seeing a couple in threesomes with a cock, tiger, dragon, rat and monkey (it was a zodiac cycle) in an eroticisation of superstition still manages to befuddle.
Sex with a cock
Sex with a dragon and tiger
They had MAD-esque foldout fans, where a scene appearing innocuous on an open fan would be naughty when it was folded in.
Porn and erotica were most popular in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when sex restrictions were greatest. Hah. Their spiel: "Ancient Chinese porn holds the functions of entertainment, instruction, research and fleeing from evil. It would probably a negative role in the society if treated improperly". Right.
"Fang Zhong Shu in Ancient China
Fang Zhong Shu means sex intercourse techniques in a narrow sense, but sexual science in ancient China is also called Fang Zhong Shu. Chinese sexual science, an important component of Chinese cultural relics, was particularly advanced during the Spring and Autumn period, and the Han and Tang Dynasty.
The Chinese Taoism and sexual science are closely related. Zhang Daoling, creator of Taoism cured patients with sexual science. The sexual science that Taoism calls for are not for sensual pleasures, rather, it's for health cultivation; hence 'Sex and Health Cultivation' was once very popular in ancient China.
There are many advanced theories in ancient Chinese sexual science. A lot of theories on sexual development and reactions rival modern science"
Sexual education was carried out through dowry paintings. When daughters married, their mothers would put a scroll in their dowry, to be spread on the bed during the wedding night to imitate. Another channel was from mothers to daughters, so that usually the bride taught the groom what to do on the first night [Ed: ?!] Mothers would also give silver hairpins to their daughters for "saving the husband in the accident of sexual life". I am unable to figure out what that means (maybe the ancient Chinese were unbelievably kinky).
They called Chinese sexual culture relatively implicit, called by some "external implicit while internally explicit" (what a Marxist turn of phrase!)
2 Buddhas in coitus
Asceticism was typical of religious belief, but there 2 notable exceptions were Taoism in "sexual cultivation" and Nizong Buddhism with "double bodies".
They didn't condemn homosexuality but urged us to take a "scientific view" of it. Nonetheless, it was labeled as a "sexual abnormality" which resulted in "overwhelming physical/psychological harm", and classified it with "fetishism, sodomy, buggery, sadism & masochism and exhibitionism". While technically it is an abnormality, the rest is dubious, not least because the other abnormalities are hardly harmful (the only harm I can think of from exhibitionism is being lynched by prudish people). The politically correct (imagine!) conclusion was that "neither discrimination against homeosexual (sic) nor advocacy of it is correct".
They had a picture of Abdullah Daoud, the man who supposedly has the longest penis in the world (apparently it's not Long Dong Silver).
There was a stick with a claw on one side and a phallus on the other. This was called "The Treasure of Widow" - one end was for scratching itches and the other for masturbating.
There was only a small section in the museum dedicated to artefacts from the rest of the world outside China, and then some of the stuff in this gallery was from the rest of Asia.
Taking a broader view, museums in the West feature stuff from all over the world, whereas those in Asia feature stuff from their own country, their region or the rest of Asia at most.
This smacks of a parochial attitude (perhaps 'Asian Pride'), whereas in the West they have a sense of inheriting a common world culture of humanity.
The natural objection is that much of Asia was colonised, but that excuse has worn out after 2 generations. Furthermore, in Western museums we see artifacts from countries that the respective countries didn't colonise; the prime example of this is the US, whose museums have stuff from all over the world. Besides which, in the post-colonial period, Western museums have continued adding artefacts from all over the world to their collections.
A more plausible excuse is that Asian countries lack the money to build massive collections, but then even in moneyed Japan (which also did not suffer the depredations of colonisation) the museums contain mostly exhibits from Japan, with some representation of the rest of Asia. Besides which, not all artefacts cost as much as a Venus de Milo; there're probably enough Roman copies of Greek works to give a few to every museum in the world.
