From Nanjing we flew to Kunming in the south of China where a driver was waiting at the airport to take us further south to the rural city of Yuxi. It was a pleasant drive through intensively cultivated rolling hills and in places with plastic horticultural igloos stretching to the horizon. They made an impressive sight and must have covered an area of thousands of hectares and contained an enormous volume of growing vegetables and flowers.The Yuxi municipality has a population of nearly three million people and is one of China’s most prosperous rural areas. It has a lot going for it; the weather is pleasant all year round, the local economy is strong, and the city is clean and green with tree-lined streets and manicured gardens and parks. And its lit-up town square is very impressive, occupying the equivalent of many city blocks and featuring a lake, bridges, an artificial beach with volley-ball courts, an enormous walking area used by the locals for evening strolls and mass ball-room dancing, a performing arts centre and concert pavilion, and a large statue to Ni Eer, a music-loving doctor born in Yuxi who composed the music that became China’s national anthem.
And the hot and spicy food here is great too. A variety of cooking styles is employed but the Hotpot seems to be the preferred method. We ate out at a different place every night and found ourselves seated around a large charcoal or gas-fired hotpot on several occasions. One night we had Chicken and the Foot of the Pig Hotpot, another night Beef and the Foot of the Cow Hotpot and on the final day of the class we were driven to a farm in the hillside surrounding Yuxi where we had Ostrich Hotpot. In each case, as well as the featured ingredient, the hotpot was loaded with fresh vegetables, mushrooms, chilies and spices, and sometimes noodles. The common factor was that the end product was always filling, satisfying and excellent. As each day of class also entailed a lunch at a different city restaurant, breakfast provided the only possible daily respite and we assiduously avoided that. But resistance otherwise was useless and our tummies were bulging by week’s end. On Saturday night when we waddled back into the Zhong Yu Hotel we saw that a “Body Contouring” service was being promoted in the hotel and we wryly noted that we had been body contouring all week but unfortunately of the convex, not concave, kind. It would be impossible to meet more friendly or hospitable people than those we spent the week with in Yuxi.
Yuxi’s affluence is underpinned by its agricultural production with a myriad of vegetable and grain crops produced in the vicinity. But the main crop in these parts is certainly tobacco, for Yuxi is the heart and lungs of China’s huge tobacco industry. According to an article I read in the China Daily, 1 trillion cigarettes are produced in China each year (a significant percentage of these in Yuxi), and the government collects a staggering US$1,000,000,000 per day in taxes from China’s several hundred million smokers. According to the same article, the World Health Organization estimates that there are 1.2 million smoking-related deaths each year in China. That’s about the total population of Adelaide, dead each year from fags!
The China Daily is the only English language newspaper widely available in the larger cities and it is an interesting read with serious articles on the developments taking place around the country as well as the more quirky happenings in the suburbs across the nation. An article in the Health Section that caught my eye last week reported on the work of a gerontologist who was studying ageing processes and behaviours in male rats with a view to advancing knowledge of ageing in the human male. When his findings were greeted with skepticism, the professor, obviously not one to eschew mere anecdotal evidence if it helped his case, questioned why there should be such doubt when many women easily saw the parallels between ageing rats and their husbands.
But I digress - back to Yuxi. It is tobacco that keeps Yuxi’s economy smoldering, and 6,000 people work at the local Hongta Tobacco Corporation's cigarette factory (the largest in Asia) that churns out fags 24 hours a day. One evening during our previous visit to Yuxi two years ago, our hosts took us there for a visit. We didn’t have to travel far, for the factory is located near the city centre. The factory throbbed away and the delicious aroma of tobacco wafted in the surrounding air. It is certainly the best-smelling factory I’ve ever visited. Near the entrance there is a large monument featuring 8 towering cigarettes that celebrate Yuxi’s premier industry, and a small park with bronze statues of men Yuxi admires. Men with enlightened attitudes towards tobacco. Like the famous Chinese poet (whose name I can’t recall now) who put his literary genius down to tobacco and who claimed that without a fag between his lips he could barely think straight let alone produce the dazzling works for which he is renowned. He keeps good company in the park. Busts of Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde and Rousseau are there too, along with their alleged favourable comments on the fine qualities of tobacco. Even in the local Buddhist temple complex there is a large plaque next to the Golden Buddha in honour of a former CEO of the tobacco factory, acknowledging the bounteous gifts he bestowed on the city in the form of freeways, bridges etc. It wouldn’t be smart to denigrate fags in these parts.
I did just that the following day. One topic I cover in my subject is a method for choosing between alternative investment options, and my example that I had prepared months before was a choice between opening additional beds in a respiratory ward, or conducting a Quit smoking support program in the local community to help avoid future hospital admissions. It was too late to change it, and as fate would have it, it was time to cover this topic the morning after the visit to the tobacco factory. I soldiered on, but for a few minutes I felt as uneasy as a margarine salesman at a dairy farmers’ conference. But any upset I may have caused was obviously soon forgotten and following lectures that day, two class representatives took us for a drive about an hour away to see another of Yuxi’s treasures, Fuxian Lake. With a circumference of about 200 km and a depth in places of 1,000 metres, the lake holds an enormous volume of crystal clear water, and the government has imposed strict controls to maintain its pristine condition. We had dinner at an open air café at the lake’s edge, following negotiations between our hosts and the café manager as to what fish would be prepared, and the price. The fish was boiled in a large solid copper pot with assorted fresh vegetables, and the pot was placed on our table when it was ready, along with bowls of local spices and wild herbs. It was a great meal and a serene hour with fishers setting their nets just off the shore as the sun set over the watery horizon.
