Lonely Planet China

by Lonely Planet

  Breakfast

  Breakfast in China is generally light, simple and over and done with quickly. The meal may consist of merely a bowl of rice porridge (粥; zhōu) or its watery cousin, rice gruel (稀饭; xīfàn). Pickles, boiled eggs, steamed buns, fried peanuts and deep-fried dough sticks (油条; yóutiáo) are also popular, washed down with warm soybean milk. Breakfast at your Chinese hotel may consist of some or all of these.

  Coffee is rarely drunk at breakfast time, unless the family is modern, urban and middle-class, but it’s easy to find in cafes, especially in large towns. Sliced bread (面包; miànbāo) was once rare but is increasingly common, as is butter (黄油; huángyóu).

  Drinks

  Tea

  An old Chinese saying identifies tea as one of the seven basic necessities of life, along with firewood, oil, rice, salt, soy sauce and vinegar. The Chinese were the first to cultivate tea, and the art of brewing and drinking it has been popular since Tang times (AD 618–907). Tea is to the Chinese what fine wine is to the French: a beloved beverage savoured for its fine aroma, distinctive flavour and pleasing aftertaste.

  China has three main types of tea: green tea (lǜ chá), black tea (hóng chá) and wūlóng (a semifermented tea, halfway between black and green tea). In addition, there are other variations, including jasmine (cháshuǐ) and chrysanthemum (júhuā chá). Some famous regional teas of China are Fújiàn’s tiě guānyīn, pú’ěrh from Yúnnán and Zhèjiāng’s lóngjǐng tea. Eight-treasure tea (bābǎo chá) consists of rock sugar, dates, nuts and tea combined in a cup; it makes a delicious treat.

  Beer

  If tea is the most popular drink in China, then beer (啤酒; píjiǔ) is surely second. Many towns and cities have their own brewery and label, although a remarkable feat of socialist standardisation ensures a striking similarity in flavour and strength. You can drink bath tubs of the stuff and still navigate a straight line. If you want your beer cold, ask for liáng de (凉的); if you want it truly arctic, call for bīngzhèn de (冰镇的).

  The best-known beer is Tsingtao, made with Láo Shān mineral water, which lends it a sparkling quality. It was originally a German beer, since the town of Qīngdǎo (formerly spelt ‘Tsingtao’) was once a German concession; the Chinese inherited the brewery, which dates to 1903, along with Bavarian brewing methods.

  Several foreign beers are also brewed in China and there's a growing market for craft brews in the wealthier cities. If you crave variety, many of the bars we list should have a selection of foreign imported beers; prices will be high, however.

  Wine

  Surging demand for imported wines has seen China remain the world’s largest consumer of red wine in recent years. Expensive French reds (hóngjiǔ) are treasured in a fashionable market that was only finding its feet a mere 17 years ago. Wine has become the drink of choice among an increasingly sophisticated business class eager to appear discerning and flamboyant. Unfortunately this also means you can pay way over the odds at restaurants in Shànghǎi or Běijīng for imported wines. White wine consumption in China is increasingly associated with female drinkers.

  China has also cultivated vines and produced wine for an estimated 4000 years, and Chinese wines are generally cheaper than imports from abroad. The provinces of Xīnjiāng and Níngxià, in the distant northwest of China, are famous for their vineyards.

  Spirits

  The word ‘wine’ gets rather loosely translated – many Chinese ‘wines’ are in fact spirits. Maotai, a favourite of Chinese drinkers, is a very expensive spirit called báijiǔ made from sorghum (a type of millet) and used for toasts at banquets. The cheap alternative is Erguotou, distilled in Běijīng but available all over China; look out for the Red Star (Hongxing) brand. Báijiǔ ranges across the alcohol spectrum, from milder forms to around 65% proof. Milder rice wine is intended mainly for cooking rather than drinking but can be drunk warm like sake.

  Arts & Architecture

  China is custodian of one of the world’s richest cultural and artistic legacies. Until the 20th century, China’s arts were deeply conservative and resistant to change but revolutions in technique and content over the last century fashioned a dramatic transformation. Despite this evolution, China’s arts – whatever the period – embrace a common aesthetic that embodies the very soul and lifeblood of the nation.

  Aesthetics

  In reflection of the Chinese character, Chinese aesthetics have traditionally been marked by restraint and understatement, a preference for oblique references over direct explanation, vagueness in place of specificity and an avoidance of the obvious in place of a fondness for the veiled and subtle. Traditional Chinese aesthetics sought to cultivate a more reserved artistic impulse, principles that compellingly find their way into virtually every Chinese art form, from painting to sculpture, ceramics, calligraphy, film, poetry, literature and beyond.

  As one of the central strands of the world’s oldest civilisation, China’s aesthetic traditions are tightly woven into Chinese cultural identity. For millennia, Chinese aesthetics were highly traditionalist and, despite coming under the influence of occupiers from the Mongols to the Europeans, defiantly conservative. It was not until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the appearance of the New Culture Movement that China’s great artistic traditions began to rapidly transform. In literature the stranglehold of classical Chinese loosened to allow breathing space for báihuà (colloquial Chinese) and a progressive new aesthetic started to flower, ultimately leading to revolutions in all of the arts, from poetry to painting, theatre and music.

  It is hard to square China’s great aesthetic traditions with the devastation inflicted upon them since 1949. Confucius advocated the edifying role of music and poetry in shaping human lives, but 5th-century philosopher Mozi was less enamoured with them, seeing music and other arts as extravagant and wasteful. The communists took this a stage further, enlisting the arts as props in their propaganda campaigns, and permitting the vandalism and destruction of much traditional architecture and heritage. Many of China’s traditional skills (such as martial arts lineages) and crafts either died out or went into decline during the Cultural Revolution. Many of the arts have yet to recover fully from this deterioration, even though opening up and reform prompted a vast influx of foreign artistic concepts.

  The five fundamental brushstrokes necessary to master calligraphy can be found in the character 永, which means eternal or forever.

  Calligraphy

  Although calligraphy (书法; shūfǎ) has a place among most languages that employ alphabets, the art of calligraphy in China is taken to unusual heights of intricacy and beauty in a language that is alphabet-free and essentially composed of images.

  To fully appreciate how perfectly suited written Chinese is for calligraphy, it is vital to grasp how written Chinese works. A word in English represents a sound alone; a written character in Chinese combines both sound and a picture. Indeed, the sound element of a Chinese character – when present – is often auxiliary to the illustration of a visual image, even if that image is abstract.

  Furthermore, although some Chinese characters were simplified in the 1950s as part of a literacy drive, most characters have remained unchanged for thousands of years. As characters are essentially images, they inadequately reflect changes in spoken Chinese over time. A phonetic written language such as English can alter over the centuries to reflect changes in the sound of the language (so the written language changes). Being pictographic, Chinese cannot easily do this, so while the spoken language has transformed over the centuries, the written language has remained more static. Indeed, any changes to traditional written Chinese characters would result in changes to the pronunciation of how they are read.

  This helps explain why Chinese calligraphy is the trickiest of China’s arts to comprehend for Western visitors, unless they have a sound understanding of written Chinese. The beauty of a Chinese character may be partially appreciated by a Western audience, but for a full understanding it is also e
ssential to understand the meaning of the character (or characters).

  There are five main calligraphic scripts – seal script, clerical script, semicursive script, cursive script and standard script – each of which reflects the style of writing of a specific era. Seal script, the oldest and most complex, was the official writing system during the Qin dynasty and has been employed ever since in the carving of the seals and name chops (stamps carved from stone) that are used to stamp documents. Expert calligraphers have a preference for using full-form characters (fántǐzì) rather than their simplified variants (jiǎntǐzì).

  Chinese individuals and companies are also purchasing non-Chinese art masterpieces. In 2015 Claude Monet’s Bassin aux nymphéas, les rosiers sold for $20.4m at auction to the Dalian Wanda Group.

  Painting

  Traditional Painting

  Unlike Chinese calligraphy, no ‘insider’ knowledge is required for a full appreciation of traditional Chinese painting. Despite its symbolism, obscure references and occasionally abstruse philosophical allusions, Chinese painting is highly accessible. For this reason, traditional Chinese paintings – especially landscapes – have long been treasured in the West for their beauty.

  As described in Xie He’s 6th-century-AD treatise, the Six Principles of Painting, the chief aim of Chinese painting is to capture the innate essence or spirit (qì) of a subject and endow it with vitality. The brush line, varying in thickness and tone, was the second principle (referred to as the ‘bone method’) and is the defining technique of Chinese painting. Traditionally, it was imagined that brushwork quality could reveal the artist’s moral character. As a general rule, painters were less concerned with achieving outward resemblance (that was the third principle) than with conveying intrinsic qualities.

  Early painters dwelled on the human figure and moral teachings, while also conjuring up scenes from everyday life. By the time of the Tang dynasty, a new genre, known as landscape painting, had begun to flower. Reaching full bloom during the Song and Yuan dynasties, landscape painting meditated on the surrounding environment. Towering mountains, ethereal mists, open spaces, trees and rivers, and light and dark were all exquisitely presented in ink washes on silk. Landscape paintings attempted to capture the metaphysical and the absolute, drawing the viewer into a particular realm where the philosophies of Taoism and Buddhism found expression. Humanity is typically a small and almost insignificant subtext to the performance. The dreamlike painting sought to draw the viewer in rather than impose itself on them.

  On a technical level, the success of landscapes depended on the artists’ skill in capturing light and atmosphere. Blank, open spaces devoid of colour create light-filled voids, contrasting with the darkness of mountain folds and forests, filling the painting with qì and vaporous vitality. Specific emotions are not aroused but instead nebulous sensations permeate. Painting and classical poetry often went hand in hand, best exemplified by the work of Tang-dynasty poet/artist Wang Wei (699–759).

  The most abstract calligraphic form is grass or cursive script (cǎoshū), a highly fluid style of penmanship which even Chinese people have difficulty reading.

  Modern Art

  Socialist Realism

  After 1949, classical Chinese techniques were abandoned and foreign artistic techniques imported wholesale. Washes on silk were replaced with oil on canvas and China’s traditional obsession with the mysterious and ineffable made way for concrete attention to detail and realism.

  By 1970 Chinese artists had aspired to master the skills of socialist realism, a vibrant communist-endorsed style that drew from European neoclassical art, the lifelike canvases of Jacques-Louis David and the output of Soviet Union painters. The style had virtually nothing to do with traditional Chinese painting techniques. Saturated with political symbolism and propaganda, the blunt artistic style was manufactured on an industrial scale (and frequently on industrial themes).

  The entire trajectory of Chinese painting – which had evolved in glacial increments over the centuries – had been redirected virtually overnight. Vaporous landscapes were substituted with hard-edged panoramas. Traditional Taoist and Buddhist philosophy was overturned and humans became the master of nature and often the most dominant theme. Dreamy vistas were out; smoke stacks, red tractors and muscled peasants were in.

  Propaganda Art

  Another art form that found a fertile environment during the Mao era was the propaganda poster. Mass-produced from the 1950s onwards and replicated in their thousands through tourist markets across China today, the colourful Chinese propaganda poster was a further instrument of social control in a nation where aesthetics had become subservient to communist orthodoxy.

  With a prolific range of themes from chubby, well-fed Chinese babies to the Korean War, the virtues of physical education, the suppression of counter-revolutionary activity and paeans to the achievements of the Great Leap Forward or China as an earthly paradise, propaganda posters were ubiquitous. The golden age of poster production ran through to the 1980s, only declining during Deng Xiaoping’s tenure and the opening up of China to the West.

  The success of visual propaganda lay in its appeal to a large body of illiterate or semiliterate peasants. The idealism, revolutionary romanticism and vivid colouring of Chinese propaganda art brought hope and vibrancy to a time that was actually often colourless and drab, while adding certainty to an era of great hardship and struggle.

  In 2011 an ink and brush painting by artist Qi Baishi (1864–1957) sold for ¥425 million (US$65 million) at auction.

  Post-Mao

  It was only with the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 that the shadow of the Cultural Revolution – when Chinese aesthetics were conditioned by the threat of violence – began its retreat and the individual artistic temperament was allowed to thrive afresh.

  Painters such as Luo Zhongli employed the realist techniques gleaned from China’s art academies to depict the harsh realities etched in the faces of contemporary peasants. Others escaped the suffocating confines of socialist realism to navigate new horizons. A voracious appetite for Western art brought with it fresh concepts and ideas, while the ambiguity of precise meaning in the fine arts offered a degree of protection from state censors.

  One group of artists, the Stars, found retrospective inspiration in Picasso and German Expressionism. The ephemeral group had a lasting impact on the development of Chinese art in the 1980s and 1990s, paving the way for the New Wave movement that emerged in 1985. New Wave artists were greatly influenced by Western art, especially the iconoclastic Marcel Duchamp. In true nihilist style, the New Wave artist Huang Yongping destroyed his works at exhibitions, in an effort to escape from the notion of ‘art’. Political realities became instant subject matter as performance artists wrapped themselves in plastic or tape to symbolise the repressive realities of modern-day China.

  Beyond Tiān’ānmén

  The Tiān’ānmén Square protests in 1989 fostered a deep-seated cynicism that permeated artworks with loss, loneliness and social isolation. An exodus of artists to the West commenced. This period also coincided with an upsurge in the art market as investors increasingly turned to artworks and money began to slosh about.

  Much post-1989 Chinese art dwelled obsessively on contemporary socioeconomic realities, with consumer culture, materialism, urbanisation and social change a repetitive focus. More universal themes became apparent, however, as the art scene matured. Meanwhile, many artists who left China in the 1990s have returned, setting up private studios and galleries. Government censorship remains, but artists are branching out into other areas and moving away from overtly political content and China-specific concerns.

  Cynical realists Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun fashioned grotesque portraits that conveyed hollowness and mock joviality, tinged with despair. Born in the late 1950s, Wang Guangyi took pop art as a template for his ironic pieces, fused with propaganda art techniques from the Cultural Revolution.

  Born just before the Cultural Revolution
in 1964 and heavily influenced by German expressionism, Zeng Fanzhi explored the notions of alienation and isolation – themes commonly explored by Chinese artists during this period – in his Mask series from the 1990s. Introspection is a hallmark of Zeng’s oeuvre. In 2008 Christie’s in Hong Kong sold Zeng Fanzhi’s painting Mask Series 1996 No. 6 (featuring masked members of China’s communist youth organisation, the Young Pioneers) for US$9.7 million, which is the highest price yet paid for a modern Chinese artwork.

  Also born in the early 1960s, Zhang Dali is another artist who gave expression to social change and the gulf between rich and poor, especially the circumstances of the immigrant worker underclass in Běijīng.

  Contemporary Directions

  Most artists of note and aspiration gravitate to Běijīng (or Shànghǎi perhaps) to work. Today's China provides a huge wellspring of subject matter for artists, tempered by the reality of political censorship and the constraints of taboo. Themes that can seem tame in the West may assume a special power in China, so works can rely upon their context for potency and effect.

  Ai Weiwei, who enjoys great international fame partly due to his disobedient stand, best exemplifies the dangerous overlap between artistic self-expression, dissent and conflict with the authorities. Arrested in 2011 and charged with tax evasion, Ai Weiwei gained further publicity for his temporary Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.

  Working collaboratively as Birdhead, Shànghǎi analogue photographers Ji Weiyu and Song Tao record the social dynamics and architectural habitat of their home city in thoughtful compositions. Běijīng-born Ma Qiusha works in video, photography, painting and installations on themes of a deeply personal nature. In her video work From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili, the artist removes a bloody razor blade from her mouth after narrating her experiences as a young artist in China. Born in 1982, Ran Huang works largely in film but across a spectrum of media, conveying themes of absurdity, the irrational and conceptual. Shànghǎi artist Shi Zhiying explores ideas of a more traditional hue in her sublime oil-paint depictions on large canvases of landscapes and religious and cultural objects. Also from Shànghǎi, Xu Zhen works with provocative images to unsettle and challenge the viewer. Xu's Fearless (2012), a large mixed-media work on canvas, is a powerful maelstrom of symbolism and the fragments of cultural identity. Xīnjiāng-born Zhao Zhao – once an assistant to Ai Weiwei – communicates provocative sentiments in his work, exploring ideas of freedom and themes of a nonconformist nature.