Day Four - The Silk Market and the Hutongs

Our morning visit, we were told, was to be to the Silk Market. After the great visit to the jade gallery the day before  we thought, 'Fantastic - probably expensive - but no doubt high-quality silk products and probably the chance to see how things are made'. How wrong could we be? The Silk Market is nothing whatever to do with silk. It's name is a corruption of Xiushui (pronounced something like she-oo shway) which apparently sounded like silk to foreign ears!

In actual fact it's more like Affleck's Palace but for fakes, copies and counterfeit items. 

It's a 5 storey shopping centre

Very modern and glossy

In some respects it was an interesting visit, none of our group were impressed by the shopping opportunity, but it was very interesting to see what the Chinese thought that the foreigners would want. We don't think they realised that markets at home sell similar products, though maybe not in such swish surroundings.

Not at all blingy!

Subtle

Something for me!

Something for Bev!

It's right by the diplomatic district and we were told it was popular with visiting dignitaries - they certainly had lots of photographs of visitors to the Silk Market on the wall as you went up the escalator including Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson. Possibly, possibly? But then again - they could be fakes!  It was fun for a short while but we'd been given too long to spend there.

Soldier guarding the diplomatic quarters

Lovely blue skies!

On the plus side all the holiday-making Chinese had returned home and the air was clear so we could actually see Beijing.


After our bizarre shopping experience we visited the Hutongs. The Hutongs are the old city of Beijing where the houses are tiny, built around a courtyard and have little in the way of mod cons. Many have no sanitation and each block has a public lavatory and washhouse. However these houses are quite popular, for one they are much cheaper than the modern flats. 

The courtyard is behind the open door

Space is at a premium - a cricket is a family pet

A quick word here about Chinese toilets. We'd been severely warned about these - outside of your hotel don't expect anything other than squat toilets, take your own toilet roll and hand sanitiser - and expected the worst. However there was usually toilet roll even in busy public loos, the difference is that it's in the main area, you have to remember to get some before you go into a cubicle. There was quite often one western type loo even if the rest were squatters, it was labelled 'for seniors'! Availability of soap was only about 50/50 but then that's probably true in most places. On the whole they were pretty clean and if you didn't object to squatting you could jump the queue of western ladies (and I bet half of the ones who wouldn't use a squat toilet 'hovered' over the western type!).

A (rice) wine shop decorated with old wine jars

A typical Hutong lane

In a way our lunch experience was a little counterfeit too - though not nearly so disappointing as the Silk Market. We'd been told we'd have lunch with a local family and we'd been wondering how a local family would manage to have lunch with 20 foreigners. Actually lunch was in a Hutong house which had been turned into a restaurant by a local family... semantics. 

Lunch was cooked for 20 in a tiny kitchen

Traditional Chinese zither

However it was a very good lunch and our hostess played the zither in the courtyard. It was well worth the visit. 




After lunch we had a rickshaw ride through the Hutong lanes. The drivers earn their tips just by avoiding the traffic which although very slow moving is certainly heavy. 

Rickshaw driver waiting for a break in the traffic

Negotiating the traffic on the move

Even if lunch was not quite as authentic as advertised the leafy parochial Hutongs were fascinating to see and the contrast with ultra-modern high-rise Beijing was stark.