Ancient city of the great eagle

Last month of the job has been a madhouse, scrambling to tie up loose ends created over a year of never having enough time. It should be clear, shouldn't it, that if you couldn't finish it in the previous eleven months, it isn't going to be finished in the last one. Still, never stopped me trying. (And indeed, I did finish some things)

Liz & I still managed to get out for a few excursions though, this one to yet another of those things Shenzhen notionally lacks, to wit, places of historical interest. Admittedly, this particular place is 40 km outside of the city itself, but it is still inside the special economic zone that is Shenzhen. It's also true that Guangzhou friends claim it is in Dongguan, not Shenzhen, and that 30 years ago this would actually have been true - and for the previous 1200 years at that. But as of this moment in time, it's in Shenzhen. The map says so.

Welcome to Dapeng. More specifically, for the touristically inclined, welcome to Dapeng Gucheng (The ancient city of Dapeng - see the "pin" below).

On the greater peninsula that terminates in Hong Kong are a number of lesser peninsulae - there's probably a technical cartographer's term for these - and on one of these on the east side of the greater peninsula (SZ is on the west) Dapeng, the 'new' city occupies the north of the lesser peninsula and Dapeng the 'old' city nestles on the south.

'Dapeng' means 'great/noble/old/rich roc' - I can see this will need more research. I'm 99% sure that when the Chinese invented the word 鹏 they weren't thinking about a Euro-Persian mythological bird, despite what my dictionary says. Lucky we don't have to translate place names, but there is resonance in the literal meaning of place names, even if it is a purely imaginary resonance. 'Beijing' - 'Northern Capital' - hints at the complex and dynamic history of China. In the case of 'Dapeng' it's not hard to imagine eagles/ospreys/albatrosses drifting on the thermals and updrafts provided by the beaches and cliffs here. No need for mythology - around here fish turn into birds through the process of digestion.

There's a lot of development of recreational housing for the rich along the east coast, so there are numerous expressways being laid down to get their owners back and forth from the city in good time. However the development hasn't reached anything like the eyesore stage yet - it's a very pleasant part of the world right now. There's also a scenic - bumpy - coast road, taken by the bus we came back on.

(The above copy courtesy of my attempt to get hired as a consultant to the real estate industry)

Back to the ancient city of Dapeng...It was a day of failing camera technology (note to self, buy more spare batteries). If you run out of film, you can buy more anywhere, at least for the time being, although the boxes of film are starting to fade in the sun. There are a lot of film cameras in China still, but people who can afford tourism sufficiently to come to the distinctly unfamous venues don't have them. All my cameras now have proprietary rechargeable batteries - devices using double AA's suddenly looking like a useful alternative (but not an environmentally sound one). And I suddenly realised why I need to upgrade my mobile phone to get a decent camera in it - these picture come from my current mobile which is about three years old and hence the resolution is pretty rubbish. But maybe better than nothing?

Consequently, I don't have many pictures. I'm still squeamish about photographing people too, so one of the best pictures I saw I wouldn't have been able to photograph either. Still, apparently writing about it doesn't have the same effect. 

DPGC is another (like Zhaoqing that we've seen, and doubtless others) small former city of sufficient significance to have had a wall and a mixture of sufficient insignificance and prosperity (no-longer-required walls make excellent sources of building materials for the not so prosperous) not to have lost it through expansion, invasion or modernisation. 

This is a view from outside the South gate - no cars inside.

DPGC was a naval base, whence the local navy fought the first skirmish of the Opium Wars (opinions on who was victorious depend on which side of the HK /SZ border you are buying your books, because the British still exercise  significant control over the story of Hong Kong despite their political departure). Victory by the local admiral (SZ-side history now) saw him elevated rapidly in imperial prestige, and saw his family similarly prosper over the next three generations. His house, a 40-room mansion, is here. 

One of the things I like about these small cities is that I can grasp their scale without too much trouble. This is a walled city you can walk around in an hour. A 40-room mansion sounds like a big place with a lot of rooms, but actually the rooms are very small and the layout very simple, so I feel able to understand more about it. For instance, there are courtyards about every two rooms, in every direction. They're not for decoration, I finally realised, they're for light. They are really light wells. Of course, in the massive mansions that constitute the average tourist destination, the light wells have expanded to such a size that they are decorative courtyards first, and light seems to be not a problem. Maybe it's possible to extrapolate the principles of architecture from Windsor Castle back to a terrace in Marrickville, but not for me. Tourism is (usually) a wealth of information about a very small minority of people. That's possibly dawned on other people before now, but I'm a bit slow.

Still, I wondered what principles could be extrapolated from a 40-room admiral's mansion to the single room of an, say, AB's single room? But almost immediately I found one - light is still an issue and I saw two kids sitting at desks in an alley doing their homework (with all due diligence) to prove it.

Most of the houses inside the wall were very small, and not particularly private in that the one room is the room into which the front door opens, and it needs to stay open to get light in. So it's almost impossible not to see that life for a lot of people is pretty stripped down. I'm reminded of the comment by one of my colleagues who said that when he and his wife moved into a 45 meter squared flat they couldn't believe how much space they had.

I passed one half open door - it was so dark that it was almost impossible to see inside, but there were clearly people inside because there was a very curious noise coming through the doorway. Actually, I had to walk past a couple of times until I worked out what it was (not squeamish about eavesdropping) but then I realised it was the sound of mahjong tiles being shuffled. This was fantastic, because in stories of China that sound is extremely famous, and so little mahjong seems to be played around Guangzhou these days that I hadn't heard it previously. It is a fantastic sound, well worth its storied reputation. (There's a Chinese idiom for it but I can't remember it)

Apart from admirals' mansions & temples, there's been a very good restoration of the granaries in the centre of the city. Again, these are something that doesn't usually get restored (lacks glamour), but are actually the sine qua non of the walled city.

This is the view North from the top of the centre of the city, which is where the granaries are located. It's a location that has protection on all sides except the ocean, really a quite neat piece of siting. Although ultimately rendered irrelevant as maritime technology meant the local harbour was not big enough to support boats useful for naval warfare.

I'm guessing there was a fair bit more here, both to be seen and possibly deduced, but it probably needed research beforehand, because it's a site in progress as far as tourist information is concerned. If I come across any, I'll post it.