A Visit to Gansu Province for the Chinese New Year

Author(s): Helen Walliman

Location(s): Gansu

Genre(s): Travelogue

Era(s): 2003

Location

Content

In 2003 about sixty percent of China’s population still lived in rural areas. And of that population, about forty million still lived in the man-made cave dwellings known as yaodong. Whereas life in the cities had changed radically, in the country change was slower and many old customs still existed – as the author of this book, Helen Wallimann, was to experience during her stay with a Chinese family in their farmhouse on the loess plateau of Gansu Province, northern China.

There, during the Chinese New Year holiday, she witnessed everyday family life, the busy market, weddings and preparations for weddings, and also various traditions connected with the New Year celebrations or the commemoration of the dead. She visited people in farmhouses and yaodongs, sat with them on the heated kang, ate with them; she watched women doing the cooking, spinning, sewing shoes, doing embroidery; she chatted with old ladies about foot-binding and their work in the fields, with young women about courtship and marriage. She talked with school teachers about schools, a long-distance truck-driver about his work, the local doctor about euros and Swiss francs. She met a government surveyor, a woman who ran a bus line, a man who sold clothes in Moscow…

This does not claim to be an academic anthropological study, it is simply the diary of an open-minded woman who noted and photographed what she saw and heard. Now that so much has changed and that many traditions have been lost or have lost their meaning, this account may serve as a partial record of a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.

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