Culinary Therapy

Made with local apricots, it helps me to recall a past life and pairs well with frozen custard.

The Selfdestructive Chinese Wine Market

One aspect of modern China that is overlooked to the detriment of anybody who wants to understand where the PRC is headed is shanzhai culture. One can describe shanzhai culture as a counterfeit industry that makes replicas of branded products with varying degrees of credibility. While counterfeiting is a fact of life in any industrialized marketplace, it's the extent that it has captured the Chinese business model and the range of brand name products that are considered worthwhile for replicating.
The presence of Shanzhai wines in the PRC gets a regular amount of press coverage because so much of the market is international and international wines sellers with well established businesses don't enjoy having their reputation expropriated by shanzhai wine merchants simply for trying to sell their products to Chinese mainlanders, who are by the by learning how to drink other than baijiu, sorghum based brews, or watery beers .  The economic damage done to domestic wineries has not even slowed down this trend. When the Chinese media publishes about criminal activity, it becomes clear just how undeniable and destructive this has become domestically.
So shanzhai culture is here to stay and only getting more daring.

I came across this mural in the Nanjing subway system. It and similar advertisements have been on display for a few weeks, to the best of my recollection, and are featured in more than one station.I had passed by them several times as I do with most advertising, but this one caught my eye because it almost seemed like a parody. The brand name, Wine, is featured one the label in a decorative script. How better to call a foreign product than with a foreign name, right? Looking closer, (which might be hard to do with this photo. It was illuminated from behind.) I saw that this was a "Day Red Wine".  This kind of spelling mistake appears everywhere in China (spellchecker rules!) and for all the average Chinese consumer knows, some foreign wines are for day drinking and others, for night drinking.

It must have dawned on some fast thinking member of the marketing team that labelling a wine with the name, Wine, was not an effective branding strategy, and after all shanzhai culture is all about brand awareness. You can ask any young office lady about why she owns a shanzhai YSL or LV handbag for confirmation. This explains why some bottles were updated with Penfolds Grange on the label. Penfolds has become quite successful on the mainland so by spelling the name correctly, the shanzhai salesman were paying a very sincere form of flattery. For those Chinese winedrinkers who might not have heard about this Australian brand yet, the marketing team decided to include something that all Chinese know to be true about wines: the very best and most expensive are from French and "Produce of France" is, therefore, also printed on the labels.
Based on the dates from the above linked article about the crackdown of the shanzhai wine operations in Guangzhou, I think it is safe to conclude that those same operations were simply relocated farther from the coast. The 2010 date of that article also helps to explains why these labels still have 2009 printed on them. The advertisements might even be the same as seen in the tradeshows mentioned in the piece.
I've not seen this wine on sale yet in Nanjing. I avoid buying any wines from the many wineshops around the city which usually put their bottles behind the plate glass windows. The faded labels indicate how long they have been on sale in the bright Nanjing sunshine.  Given the considerable sum spent on this marketing campaign, I think that this wine, Wine, will be on sale in Nanjing until local authorities are compelled to shut it down, which says all one needs to know as to how little a priority enforcing copyright is and how entrenched Shanzhai culture is in China, WTO or not.

Phenomenal stemware

When I heard the sound that I've heard before during many festive occasions, the shattering of a crystal wineglass, from where I was working, I could see the remnants spill across the hallway floor.
So I rose to sweep up the shards of a newly bought redwine glass that since I had washed the dishes a short time before, I believed must have slipped off a rack for some inexplicable reason. A hungry ghost seemed a plausible agent at that moment. But the wineracks remained full.


I picked up what was underfoot and after reassembling the fragments, saw that they resembled a band. I then looked back up at inverted wineglasses and noticed that one was oddly shorter than the rest.  So at that point I had solved one mystery. The wineglass had simply exploded spontaneously, rather about 1 cm of the rim had done so.
I have known punch bowls to develop stress fractures. Usually this would happen when they were brought out of a dishwasher hot and set out in a cool room. But in those instances the glass body was much thicker than what is found in stemware.
I am posting this as an example for the world to behold. Does this happen very often? Does anybody wrongly accused of carelessness need my photographic evidence to settle a domestic dispute as to how when nobody was around, it just broke? (I can hear my mother's raging timbre as I type this.) Because sometimes things do just break on their own and it's nobody's fault.  But since this is China, it was probably a ghost.

Save any remaining paradise; build a better parking lot

 Shanghai can be a delightful city to stroll around. The metropolis presents something noteworthy around every corner. I cannot say much about the color scheme although pink can be both calming and easy to spot against both clear and overcast skies. In my urban studies course at university, it was stressed that open air lot parking was the only acceptable and economical method of accommodating cars in a city. Yet in China the rule is to build underground parking with nearly every new construction.
This parking elevator tower is operated as a public facility. It charges 10 RMB per hour, about $1.50 US. Behind it was a landscaped walkway that abutted the river.

Spolia with Chinese Characteristics

I cannot say what caught my eye first. There was something unusual about the size of the exposed bricks; equally, there was something familiar about the color. I started tutoring a student in an office on jiefang lu that she borrowed for the purpose on Sundays while she was in Nanjing. I took my camera on the second visit to document the repurposed pieces of the Nanjing city wall.

Modern utilities drilled into historic bricks

I don't think that the businesses nor residents very much benefited from living in 600 year old embossed bricks. The condition of the buildings is in a fairly low state of maintenance, but that is common for structures built during the Mao era. I have seen this construction method practiced before in Nanjing. Mortar is laid over a brick core to give an impression of uniformity.

Exposed bricks

 On one wall for some confounding reason, brick fascia were then laid atop the mortar to give the impression of a brick wall!
The residents don't have much incentive to put much money into maintaining these structures since they have no legal title to them and are subject to eviction whenever the government might decide to follow through on any development plans. For 600 year old bricks, there is probably no rush. In the meantime, the bricks undergo whatever the residents decide they want to do to get on with their lives, seemingly indifferent their buildings' origins.
My best guess is that these structures were built some time after 1954 when it became fashionable to demolish the remnants of old China in order to help develop new China. Sources of accurate information are hard to come by. I don't want to speculate too much about the motives. Peter Hessler in Country Driving taught me that there is not even a university scholar anywhere in the world who specializes in the Great Wall. All the work is done as secondary research or by volunteer researchers. It ought to not come as any surprise, therefore, that there is little published about the other great Chinese walls.
Hessler also recounts the feelings of remorse among villagers who demolished a fortified gate in the same era to reuse the stones in other projects. Their regrets came about when they considered not what they had done to their legacy but that they didn't have a tourist attraction to exploit. (Country Driving p146)

Old, new, and reused

Typical maker's stamps

There have been many efforts to make better use of the Nanjng city walls as an urban asset. A
section new Zhonghuamen was recently opened for walking along the topside.
Another section has been rebuilt, Yuejiang Lou Park. It's not at all clear what the present construction represents. It is not a rebuilding although I can find no evidence to show what condition the wall was in before 2011.
The signs on the wall hint to this effect.

It is evident that the original Ming wall was located in this part of the city. The wall rebuilding involved both original bricks along with modern replicas in a similar style.

An subtle acknowledgement of the reconstruction

Similarly stamped bricks, 2001

A second style of modern brick

Markings left from the pug mill extrusion

Sloppy mortar joints with original brick

White surfaces likely due to historic use of lime mortar

Yifeng Men at one entrance of Yuejiang Lou Park

Spalling likely exacerbated by incorrect mortar

Additional bricks were used in the reconstruction to supplement the originals as they were incorporated into the new design and functions, the upper pedestrian walkway as well as public toilets.

Archway windows in public toilet addition.

Even sloppier mortar repair

 

Juncture showing new and old brickwork and mortar joints

Entrance to the promenade up from the public toilets, blocked by a rusty gate

Subsidence above the public toilets near the juncture between old and new construction

Woody plants frequently establish roots in joints

Masons reusing common red bricks

It's frustrating to witness the level of deterioration on this section of wall. The sloppy and irresponsible repairs as well as the lack of invasive plant removal suggest that the monies obtained from entrance fees are being siphoned off and not adequately spent on any sort of routine maintenance, especially since Chinese masons are generally quite capable and the Chinese are experienced wallbuilders. The Nanjing city wall in spite of its importance to the reputation and history of the former imperial capital suffers from neglect due to a common problem that plagues most Chinese buildings: monies are spent on construction and the subsequent fanfare, but little concern is paid to ongoing maintenance.
And yet while gradual and irreversible deterioration is an acceptable norm, symbolic damage demands an immediate and public apology. Zhonghuamen is an impressive Ming relic as it still shows much of the original, defensive triple gateway arrangement. Its ramparts have been recently restored to pedestrian traffic and two impressive archways have been rebuilt to bridge the massive ruptures that were cut into both sides of the defensive gate arrangement. This makes the claim by the Nanjing preservation bureau quite risible because the constant stream of heavy vehicular traffic around the gate does far more damage than any one Italian sportscar. As for the tire treads on the surface, the 80,000 RMB user fee would more than clean up any of the rubber marks. The outrage has much less to do with concern over a cultural artifact than class resentment regarding a status symbol that only the plutocrats can ever aspire to own.

Citron verdâtre

This promotional advertising panel explains a little bit as to why it's so difficult to find limes in the PRC and why even upscale bars that try to appeal to western tastes and standards regardless put lemons in every drink.

Diaoyudao shi womende!

It must have been a very strong breeze that propelled this scaffolding bracket from a construction site near the Zhujiang metro station...

to float across an alleyway...

and then land atop this Japanese brand automobile,

  where it struck squarely in the middle of the sunroof.