I’m lucky enough to have a fiancee who isn’t too excited about weddings so we’ll most likely be skipping our Chinese wedding. But I’ve looked at quite a few wedding albums (not much else to do when you visit friends you can’t understand) and weddings are pretty hard to miss on the street since they involve prodigious amounts of fireworks, giant inflatable gates and extremely amplified live (well a token singer and some sort of trombone or piano along with a recorded track) bands. From what I gather, the process of a Chinese wedding is quite different from Western ones so I thought I’d try to detail it:

1. Several months earlier the groom and bride (without any parents or friends) take their wedding photos in a sort of wedding photo factory. I actually did this one so I’ll detail it later.
2. At midnight the groom’s family lights off fireworks.
3. Around 7 in the morning, the groom leaves the groom’s parents’ house (actually usually an apartment) in a car covered in roses. As many of his friends as possible borrow fancy black cars (at least 6 or so) from their work (apparently every company and bureau must have a stock of fancy black cars for weddings and official visits) and form a big caravan. The groom and his friends but not his parents or siblings drive away. More fireworks are launched.
4. The groom arrives at the bride’s parents house. More fireworks are launched and a band plays. The bride’s parents lock the door and don’t let the groom in until he slips numerous red envelopes filled with cash through the door. The groom and his friends finally get in and then find the bride waiting in her bed without shoes. More red envelopes of cash and lots of searching are required before the shoes appear. Then the couple gets to bow to all the uncles, aunts, siblings and parents of the bride. The relatives pay the groom red envelopes and in return he calls each one by their new relationship. Then the groom carries the bride to the caravan of cars through sprinkles and silly string. More fireworks ensue.
5. The groom’s caravan arrives back at the groom’s parents’ house. More fireworks are launched and the band (that drove over early) plays again. Sometimes the band manages Here Comes the Bride and sometimes they play songs more appropriate for sporting events. The groom carries the bride up to his parent’s house through more silly string. The couple bow to all the groom’s relatives and the bride calls them by their new relationship in exchange for more red wrapped money. Then one of the bride’s friends brings in a suitcase with blankets and some money in it from the bride’s family. They make a big deal about counting the money and then the groom’s parents have to put in double the amount.
6. The bride changes from (typically) a Western-style (although not necessarily white) dress to a Chinese-style (usually red) dress. The groom’s entire group and the bride go to a restaurant where they are joined by more distant friends of the groom. Each guest has to sign in and give money (in a red envelope) which is counted and recorded. The bride and groom spend the whole time walking around pouring a drink for each and every guest and receiving congratulations one by one.
7. In the evening, there is a sort of combined bachelor/bachelorette party involving alcohol, cucumbers, apple pies and/or ropes (I’m a little sketchy on the details) and making the new couple feel nice and uncomfortable before they are finally left alone for the night (often still at the groom’s parents house).
8. The next day the bride and groom go visit the bride’s parents and go to lunch with the bride’s family and friends. Again guests sign in and their gifts of money are counted and recorded. The couple again spend a few hours going from guest to guest pouring drinks.

That’s about it. I’m sure these things vary but I think those are the normal bits. I found it interesting that there was such emphasis on money in a Communist country and that the bride’s and groom’s friends and relatives don’t mix (I guess Chinese wedding crashers don’t have much luck). Also the fireworks really give you a feel for how many weddings occur since you can hear them from all over the city. During Golden Week (a week long break for national day), there seemed to be a wedding every few minutes for the whole week.

Interestingly, all these customs have redeveloped rather recently since the previous generation discarded it all with the Cultural Revolution. For example, Xiaofen’s parents were married before they ever met. They wrote letters to each other and somehow her mom knew her dad wanted to get married although they apparently never wrote it out. So she got a friend in the wedding office to skip the groom’s signature part and issue them a certificate. I asked them what they said to each other when they finally met but unfortunately they don’t remember.

As for us, I suggested we skip the bowing and pouring drinks and keep the fireworks, band and driving around in a caravan. Xiaofen’s parents suggested we skip the fireworks, band and driving and just do the bowing and pouring drinks. Xiaofen didn’t want to do any of it because she saw what a pain the bowing and pouring was at her sister’s wedding (and I guess it’d be worse with a groom that can’t speak), she feels silly having a caravan pick her up, go around the block and come back to her place (I suppose she does have a point) and she feels bad getting money from everyone and then not going to their weddings. So we ended up not doing any of it. Kind of a shame since, to tell the truth, I was actually kind of curious to try it out.

This was a ripe (and pretty tasty) orange. I would have thought it needed a few weeks to ripen (or was actually a lime) but it turns out that oranges in China are often green. I guess that’s why the Chinese word for the fruit orange (橘) is different than for the color orange (橙) although I just noticed that the two characters are pretty similar and both pronounced ju.

I remembered to get a picture of a cut one so I’ll stick it here.

It keeps taking me days to put together posts so I’m going to try to get used to writing quicker by firing off a few quick ones of random odd things I see while I’m travelling in China. In that vein, the first subject is toilets. I ran into these in Japan and Korea so I guess they’re not exclusive to China but this time I actually got around to taking a picture. So the Asian toilet:

As you can see someone seems to have decided to cut all “unnecessary” parts and reduce the toilet to it’s essence, a hole in the ground. I guess it makes sense since you don’t really want to touch anything in a public toilet. It (and perhaps the lower average weight) also explains why I see a lot more people over here squatting during normal circumstances. I guess it would make you ready for camping too although there doesn’t seem to be much of that here.

Another interesting point is the garbage can next to the toilet. I had never ran into this before and had no idea it meant you were supposed to throw your toilet paper in there until I mentioned to my fiancee that they sure expected people to have a lot of garbage in the bathroom. I may have left a string of clogged toilets behind me before that. Anyway, it’s surprisingly easy to get used to although I still forget once in a while (no I don’t go fishing. it seems a couple misplaced sheets don’t hurt). I don’t think it’s a habit I’ll carry back to the US though.

After a few days touring Beijing and seeing the normal Great, Forbidden and Heavenly sights, I noticed the guidebook mentioned the Peking Man Site in Zhoukoudian as being reasonably nearby. After several days of temples and castles and with the Chinese National Holiday promising to swamp every tourist location in Beijing, I thought it might be nice to take a trip out to see Peking Man’s cave.

I can’t really do a good look at the literature since most of the stuff is in Chinese or too old to access easily while traveling (made even more difficult thanks to China’s Great Firewall). But from what I gathered from some Googling and the site’s museum, Peking Man was actually the fossilized remains of a bunch of male, female and child (they weren’t too big on political correctness back then) Homo erectus, the hominid (almost but not quite human [i.e. cavemen]) species thought to be closest related to humans. Bones were first found in Zhoukoudian in 1923 and pieces from several individuals were found before World War II. At the start of the war, the scientists decided to send the bones to America for safety but somewhere along the way the shipment disappeared. This was a major loss to science (but luckily there were some casts made of the fossils so at least some information is still available). Effort to track down the missing fossils was renewed in the last couple years but their location remains a mystery. Since the loss, further excavations have turned up additional specimens including additional parts of of a prewar skull. The bones are estimated to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old.

Interestingly, although Homo erectus lived in Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, genetic analysis of 12,000 men across Asia showed that all had a mutation in the Y chromosome though to have originated in Africa in the last 90,000 years. This likely means that modern humans (H. sapiens) migrated out of Africa and displaced/eradicated the native Peking Men (H. erectus).

Anyway back to the travel. Unfortunately, it turned out that the holiday also swamped the bus and the highway so I was stuck standing squished in the aisle while the bus crawled through a three hour traffic jam. Once we finally got to Zhoukoudian, the buildings and houses on the walk to the site looked a little run down but everyone we asked for directions met was very friendly with a few kids even playing the yell “Hello!” at the foreigner game.

The guidebook describes the site as “geared towards specialists” and “suffer[ing] neglect recently” so I was a bit worried. But I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived. It seems quite well maintained and, in fact, it seemed they had an overabundance of staff (although no English speakers) probably due to funding from it’s World Heritage designation. Most of the museum has English captions and I found it pretty interesting. The high point was of course the hominid bones from the site. Most of the bones were labeled as reproductions but a few were not. I don’t know if that means those bones were real or just that someone forgot the label. Hopefully it was the former. The museum also had some of the stone tools made by the ancient people and evidence of fires. The museum claims that there are several layers of the excavation that were full of ash but I’ve since read that this evidence of fire use is disputed. Recent more detailed examination found that this ash-like material was actually not ash but deposits from a quiet pond type environment although there were definitely a lot of burned animal bones. This makes the claim that Peking Man used fire questionable although it seems to me (note I’m not a anthropologist) like a body of water in the back of a cave might make for a good garbage disposal (which on further investigation seems to be roughly what this scientist is saying).

The museum also shows some rather formidable skulls of giant hyenas found in the cave. These hyenas seem to have alternated habitation of the cave with Peking Man and several layers of the excavation had numerous hyena poop fossils (called coprolites if Jeopardy ever asks). Some scientists suggest that Peking Man did not actually live in the cave and that the bones found are just the unlucky prey of the hyenas. The most recent article (currently directly available here) I could find (in my limited search) weighs in strongly for this hypothesis. The researchers point out that only fragmented pieces of bones have been found and that most arm, rib and leg bones are missing just like in modern hyena dens. They also looked at all the bones and suggest that almost all of them show marks of large predator chewing (one example shown in the picture to the right). But they do point out that there are numerous artifacts and burned bones found from within the cave so Peking Man must have had at least a “transient” (I’m not sure what transient means when the time scale is measured in hundreds of thousands of years) presence. I was a bit disappointed at first when I read this but then I realized I had been to the site of a 200,000 year battle between (almost) humans and beast.

I managed to get side tracked by the science again. Back to the travelling. After the museum, there is a nice little path that visits the remnants of the famous cave. I believe most of the cave collapsed some thousands of years ago and there have been intense excavations so I’m not exactly sure what part of this is actually where the hyenas and Peking Man would have been but it’s still pretty cool to walk inside and see it. Megaphone toting tour guides come through every 10 minutes or so but if you get there in between them you can actually have the whole place to yourself. Which reminds me, even during Golden Week the site was not busy. I guess it’s too far (although not that far if you’re not stuck in holiday traffic) out of Beijing and not as catchy as the (hundreds of times younger) Great Wall or Ming Tombs.

After the cave, we came to what was for me the most striking part of the tour, the location where the main excavation had occurred. Scientists had dug more down more than 100 feet into the dirt and debris filling the old cave and found bones throughout. This really brought home that fact that Peking Man had been living in (or around) this cave long enough for 100 feet of dust and debris to build up. 250,000 years. More than 3,000 (modern) lifetimes. 60 times longer than recorded history.

I wasn’t sure if this was the actual excavation site but this article about fire use shows this very location (shown to the right) being researched. Definitely a very cool site and well worth visiting even with the traffic and sardine-like bus experience (which should be an unusual event).

Directions

To get there, take bus 917 from Tianqiao Station in Beijing (9 元 [$1.5]). But you have to be careful because there’s 4 or 5 different 917′s, you want the plain 917 without the extra symbols. Once you get on the right 917 go until Zhoukoudian (周口店) Daokou station (actually just a sign next to the road). The bus station should be on one leg of a T-intersection. To get to the Peking Man Site, walk back to the T, turn left (away from the gas station) and walk about 15 minutes. Once you cross a bridge over a small creek the road should turn right and the entrance to the Peking Man continues straight. Or you could just take a taxi which shouldn’t be more than 15 元 ($2). The ticket for Peking Man Site was 30 元 ($4).

This article provides a decent (although biased towards Peking Man) review of the science and theories surrounding the site. It might be worth a quick skim if you’re planning on going and don’t feel like reading any of the ones above (I wish I would have read up a bit first to appreciate the site better but it was a spontaneous visit). This recent article mentioned above provides a more hyena-oriented perspective and some nice maps (which I wish would have been shown at the site so I’ll include one of their several below).