pot, and you couldn't pour too much – if there was too much it meant the wine was poor quality. When she was a bit older, seven or eight years old, the brothel started to teach her the knowledge of sex: bed skills, the art of keeping the clients company, and nibbling melon seeds, opening melon seeds with her teeth ready to spring the kernel into the client's mouth when he opened his mouth, without touching her lipstick.
She told me a lot of things: about the prostitutes' personal hygiene, how to arouse a client's interest in sex, how to stay neat and clean afterwards, and how to keep the client after that. In those days if a man wanted to enter one of the famous brothels, he had to improvise a couplet of classical poetry based on a line supplied by the bouncer at the gate, and they wouldn't let him in until he had successfully completed the couplet. The prostitutes' name tags, the wine list and the menu in the brothel used metaphors from Tang and Song poetry too, so men who knew nothing of poetry would have no idea what those name tags, wine lists and menus were saying! She also told me about a special bed, and later I found similar beds mentioned in books of antiques. This bed had two layers of bed curtains: one was hanging gauze, with different gauzes according to the seasons, which was used for making love, then there was an opaque silken hanging that was used for sleeping; they were very particular about getting the two colours of the hangings right. When she was still very young she learned all the knowledge passed down from previous generations, about sachets of scented herbs to keep with clothes and fill quilts, and incense to burn while washing, all of which were used to prevent pregnancy. So she felt very sorry for people nowadays, who had rejected the natural techniques of cultivating the body left to us by our ancestors, and chose instead to spend huge sums of money on researching the safest contraceptive pill!
She said that often when many rich and powerful families married off a daughter they would send to the brothel to invite a 'mama', an educated, elderly prostitute, to go with the matchmaker to examine the son-in-law's feet. That old lady said, 'Modern people get their palms read or fortunes told, what a load of old rubbish! What do they know!' When she and her sisters were examining a man they had only to touch his foot to know everything about him, from his feet to his head. They had all learned this skill from their 'mama'.
During the last three generations, the brothel would choose a woman in each generation with a gift for the pen, not to do the bills, but to record the brothel's history, complete with the clients and their gifts. This was so that if they fell on hard times, these 'women of dust and wind' would have funds to flee, and the record of the existence of these gifts would offer them some protection when they needed it. She said the brothel historian in her generation had hidden these things in the well of the brothel courtyard. The old lady also told me that each generation put aside a set of drinking vessels, to be kept back as a prize for the prostitute who had earned most money for the brothel, and she remembered how her apprentice mistress had hinted to her where she had hidden them.
But when I tried to follow her directions, that place was already a mass of tall buildings and skyscrapers.
TASHI: Did you see her again after that?
XINRAN: How could I? The place where she lived has been demolished, there's nothing left! I've been looking for three to four years, the only name I had for her was what I'd heard people on her street call her, Old Lady Apple-Cheeks, but there was no such name anywhere in the household registration records.
TASHI: I'll try to help you find her. I'm sorry, I have to take a phone call…
The male voice declaiming Mao Zedong's poetry had started his recital again.
6 Tea Houses and News Singers: Three Thousand Years of Anecdotes and Wonders
The news singer reciting, Linhuan, Anhui province, 2006.
A typical traditional tea house, full of men, Linhuan, Anhui province, 2006.
MR WU, aged seventy-five, a news singer from a traditional tea house,
My conversation with Tashi reminded me that I first heard about tiger stoves – these hot-water shops that double as tea houses – when I was in Shanghai on business in 1995. And by that time there was only one tiger stove left in the whole Shanghai area. The older locals told me that tiger stoves had been at their height in the early 1950s, with more than two thousand in the city. After that their numbers declined over the years as the water- supply systems improved, especially after the 1980s, when almost every Shanghainese home had a bathroom with a water heater. Nobody went to the tiger stoves any more, and the scenes of people chatting as they queued for water died out along with the tiger stoves. By the time I had a chance to investigate the subject, the last tiger stove had closed down in 2005, though the old people sipping cups of hot tea under the trees nearby told me that this habit was a relic of the tiger stoves. And this in turn reminded me that many folk customs are subject to history, and also that many folk customs will one day disappear with history.
In the course of my investigation and this 'unearthing' of tiger stoves, I heard a story about a customer who used to wash at one. He had been a small trader all his life, and he had his fixed place in the tiger stove where he sat every day. All his fellow bathers jokingly referred to him as 'Number XX', but nobody knew his real name. A few years ago 'Number XX' became ill and he wanted a wash, so his son dutifully ran him a bath in his modern imported bathtub, but the old man flatly refused to take off his clothes. When the son finally understood what his father wanted, he took his arm and supported him to the one remaining tiger stove in Shanghai. The old man was helped to his accustomed place by all his old bathing buddies, like a crowd of stars surrounding the moon. He seemed to have come to life once again, whipping out a packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and sitting down for a smoke, beaming. The following day, this old bathhouse customer left the world, with a smile on his face.
As we travelled northwards from Nanjing, the view outside the bus window was gradually changing from the scenery of the lower reaches of the Yangtze Delta to a landscape of 'poor mountains and impoverished soil'. Our driver told us that we were heading north by the side of an ancient canal running from north to south that could tell the story of three thousand years of China's transport history. The canal had been excavated in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770-221 BC), and was expanded many times in various dynasties. Up until ad 618 in the Sui dynasty it had been the main water-transport route of China's eastern region, which was the most densely populated part of China and remains so to this day. The Grand Canal went as far north as Beijing, linking it to the coastal city of Hangzhou, and sideways to connect China's three great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Huai. It had a total length of over 1,700 kilometres – twenty-one times the length of the Panama Canal – making it the longest canal in the world. Together with the Great Wall, it is one of the two most important engineering projects in ancient China. Because there had once been a branch of the ancient canal in the place we were driving through, the 'Tongji Channel' that cut across Anhui province north of the Huai River, the area became a place of political, economic, cultural and military importance in the Tang and Song dynasties. Later on, the Yellow River flooded in 1194 in the Southern Song dynasty, and the Tongji Channel became silted up. The surrounding regions went into decline with the end of transport on the channel, and the area to the north of the Huai River gradually moved up the list of China's poorest places. This was our destination: Linhuan.
