You know you’re going off the beaten track when the only website in English to provide information about the city is one Wikipedia stub, it’s not mentioned in your China Lonely Planet guide and your Chinese friends have never even heard of the place.
Welcome to Ji’An city. Population 500,000. Small by China’s standards.
I was leaving the big lights of Shanghai behind, after spending a rather laid back New Years there with my boyfriend, Steve, and friends from Nanjing University after the end of our classes.
Steve and I decided on Ji’An as our next destination, partly out of a sense of adventure and partly due to an offer I had received to do an NGO internship there. The NGO in question was centered around a typical social issue befalling the small cities of China, youth are rapidly leaving their hometowns to seek employment in bigger cities, namely Beijing or Shanghai, themselves and their families believing this will provide them with a better quality of life. Unfortunately, these youth (who are often highly educated) are going into big cities and being faced with discrimination due to their ‘migrant worker’ status, they will often fall into working menial jobs such as production line/manual labor work. Living conditions are extremely poor for many migrant workers, and rates of depression and suicide are high. This NGO is trying to stop the brain drain at its source, by creating programs for community and youth education, enrichment, volunteering and artistic expression. They want to show the young people that their community, culture and city is valuable to them and that they are valuable part of this.
The train was overnight from Shanghai to Ji’An, it was nice to get a chance to see the countryside. Early in the morning, I sat watching the layered blue mountains in the distance, the sun struggling through the grey overcast winter sky to reflect on the rice paddies below. It was a moving moment, I had caught another glimpse of the China that I am forever seeking.
The moment was squashed quickly as black clouds of smoke ran cartoonishly across the landscape, more industry of a type. Grey rows of spooky, uninhabited highrises. We were in Ji’An.
The hotel we stayed at (Vienna International Hotel) was close to the train station, they had no record of our online booking, could not read the English booking form, did not know the company we had booked through. We payed for another room with cash, because they did not accept our credit cards. I asked them to speak slower, they did not, they had an unfamiliar accent and their Mandarin was anything but standard. Some words were different to the ones in my textbooks and in Shanghai. We had a difficult time communicating, I had to embrace the opportunity to adapt to an unfamiliar place and culture. Right then, I was just too tired.
Steve and I decided to venture out to the centre of the city to find the pulse of Ji’An, to see if it even had a pulse. We found the People’s Square comfortingly familiar, a typical winter clothes market and an array of street food which I knew and loved and which Steve quickly came to appreciate too. Everywhere we went people stared, pointed, took photos and speculated about our nationality. We didn’t see a single other foreigner the whole time we were there, but the attention wasn’t as unpleasant as it can sometimes be. Mostly people were curious and shopkeepers were happy to strike up conversation. I tried to get a feel for the issue of mass migration, but the only young person I spoke to was a 17 year old waitress, who took a photo with me for her Weibo and told me she liked Ji’An and had a lot of friends here. She would start at the city’s only university in a couple of years. She waved goodbye and then skipped happily away as it was the end of her shift.
I spoke to a taxi driver (mid-30’s) as well, he told me he dreamed of going to Chengzhen, when I asked him why he just shrugged and said that you could earn money, really better yourself in a city like Chengzhen. I said I hadn’t been there, only to Shanghai, was it similar? He emphatically waved his finger and told me that Chengzhen was the most beautiful place in China. He then gave me a 5 yuan discount for the ride.
Ji’An doesn’t exactly get tourists, and a lot of information that we found was from scouring Chinese websites and speaking to people at the bus depot near the train station. There was a lot to see and we were very excited when we discovered that The People’s Liberation Army had formed in a town nearby in 1927, and was a significant place for Red tourism (touring areas which were somehow related to the rise of communism in China.) The area is called Jinggangshan and there you can see The Mint of the Red Army, The Revolution Museum, The Martyr’s Cemetery and Mao’s Former Residence. It is a full day trip from Ji’An and we saw that there were specific buses from the depot which were labelled with the area. We didn’t have time to make it out there, unfortunately.
The next place we wanted to go to was a bit closer, Diaoyuan Ancient village (钓源古村），a 1000 year old village which was still functioning. On the first attempt, we were sent to People’s Square to wait for a bus which never came. On the second attempt I had the correct bus number, 203, and stop, 兴桥（钓源）from a Chinese website. However, when the bus came to People’s Square 人民广场 I spoke to the bus driver and he shook his head, saying that the only bus that day had left at 8.30 that morning. We abandoned the quest after that. The only bus leaves at 8, 8.30 or 9am every day. I’m not sure when the bus returns to Ji’An.
We went for the closest and simplest option, Jinju Buddhist temple in the QingYuan mountain Scenic area 青原山, opposite one of the entrance gates to the bus depot is a China mobile company building, it has a private parking lot next to it. In front of this parking lot you can wait for a bus that comes every 15 minutes to go to QingYuan. Bus 208. It takes about 30mins to get to the area. The last bus back to Ji’An leaves at 6.30pm and you can wait for it in the central square of the tourist area. The 1,200 year old temple was under restoration, but it is fully functioning and is surrounded by amazing rainforest-like scenery. We bought some incense after being pestered by old village women and lit it in the temple. We drank out of the ‘Clever Spring’ and admired the view of the temple and the mountains from a quiet shrine with a softly chanting monk.
We got pointed to a walking track by a vendor cart woman, which took us easily up the mountain to a small lookout of the industrialised valley below.
At 4am the next morning we took a 7 hour train to Wuhan to recover with some Western food and to meet a friend of mine.
I don’t know what I think of Ji’An, but the people, and the surrounding mountains and villages forgotten by the tourists definitely draws me to it…
Main Bridge in Ji’An (photo: Emccall 1/14)
Steve and I resting near the lookout of QingYuan mountain (Photo: Emccall 1/14)
Soaring Red Bucket 