June, 2010: Hefei, AnHui, China

I arrived in Hefei on the day Japan plays Cameroon.
It was June and the city is celebrating the Dragon Boat festival with a three days holiday. World Cup fever is on, too.
If you can't catch it in the hotel, there is still MacDonald's and beer gardens dotting the city. Here, Argentina plays South Korea on the giant screen, right before the floodgate opens on the Korean's goal. The beer garden was serving up mini lobsters, the kind I was thinking of having in WuHan but never got around to it.
AnHui is considered one of the poorer province in China, and its main tourist attraction, HuangShan, is pretty far from the provincial capital of HeFei. Other than going for classes at the HeFei TCM hospital, the only places of interest (to me) in the city were the tomb of Justice Bao, and the old family house of Li Hong-Zhang.
A park is built around the Justice Bao tomb, with ponds (the type you can find paddleboats on), a well-kept garden, a temple with Bao as its main deity, and a pagoda, amongst other things.




















There is a underground passageway leading to tomb, where Bao's coffin (the glossy black solid heavy-looking type you see in Chinese vampire movies popular in the 80's) is displayed behind glass panels. No photoes allowed, and I wasn't interested in taking one, just in case some abberation shows up on the pictures.
I knew Justice Bao is a real person from back in the Song dynasty. And his exploit is well known to Chinese the world over, just like Qiu Yuan, another of those legendary righteous officials
whose death gave us the Dragon Boat festival.
But the more I walk around the tomb and the parks, the image of Bao that we knew is more like a symbol than what he really was. He is righteous all right, but looks at what the displays in the park says about him:
He was born so dark-color that his own mother hated him. He was abandoned by mummy on a lily pad and was saved and adopted by an auntie. And he had a birthmark on his forehead the shape of a cresent moon.
Well, I don't really buy any of that. He had to be made dark so as to symbolize that, while a court official, he was closer to the farmers and labourer of lower status than to the nobles. He had to be abondaned on the lily pad because, the lily, growing so surprisingly clean and bright out of muddy pond, has longed symbolize those righteous men who are firm and untainted by corruption going around them. And that cresent moon birthmark of his on the dark forehead, that symbolize a man with no skeleton in his closet.
Away from the Justice Bao tomb, on one of the busiest shopping street in HeFei, is the old family house of Li Hong-Zhang, looking out of place between the malls.
Li can't be more different from Sun Yat-Sen. He was well-established in the court while Sun is just a fledgling. He served a dynasty while Sun fought for a republic. Sun is known more for his ideas while Li was a man of action. He was something of a iron chancellor of the east then. What could be common between them could be that both believe that westernization would be good for the nation, even here they would have disagree on how deep and extensive this should be. It is no wonder then that Li was also a proponent of railway in the country.
Li had his fingers in quite a few pies: the military, financing the nation's coffer, health reform, foreign affairs amongst others. The thing about doing so much is that, the more one does, it is more likely that one would screw up along the way. And the tragedy is if the rest of the world choose to remember you for your follies than your successes. When the Qing navy lose at the hands of the Japanese, it fell on Li to lead delegates to Shimonoseki in Japan. The agreement signed by him saw China ceding land, sovereign right and money to the Japanese. For this, he was seen as a traitor. The display in the old house showing the site of Li treaty-signing, and the photo of the same street taken when I was last in Shimonoseki.















Fortunately, Li did not live to see the demise of the Qing dynasty, thus sparing him the possible agony.
Before leaving HeFei, it is worth noting that the HeFei TCM college, which the TCM hospital is affiliated to, runs a AnHui TCM museum. It is not large but well-run.
It's just too bad the museum is not open to the public.