In the winter of 2011 I took my first trip to my parents' home town in Fujian province 福建省 in China. With me was my brother and my cousin who lives in Macau. We flew from Macau to Fujian. We stop by this newly build cultural museum.
Initially I was not too crazy about this museum. However after awhile I began to warm up to the exhibition about the people of Fujian.
these herring bone bricks is unique to Fujian
the main lobby
Fujian gains very little notoriety even in today's global information age. Little of the province's historic significance is known. Everyone heard about Shanghai and Guangzhou amongst China's important seaports. Yet Xiamen of Fujian and Dalian of Liaoning are both little known. Xiamen is the reason you can find Fujianese population in so many countries in Asia. During China's short lived golden age of oversea exploration the fleet of huge ocean going wooden ships were at the coast of Fujian.
these posters storyboards tell the ancient sea voyages
the sea routes to Taiwan - no surprise most Taiwanese speaks Fujian dialect too
bamboo basket for holding bridal dowry
ancestry altar of a wealthy merchant home
puppets
more puppet characters
interchangeable heads of puppet characters
these costumes are like those of Beijing opera
street performers
nursery furnitures made mostly of bamboo
little kid is confined to inside the bamboo chair
bamboo baby crib
nothing goes to waste - old wine jugs are used to build walls
more traditional bamboo furniture
this wooden temple pagoda is at least a few hundred years old
we drive for a few hours to get to the Xiamen at the coast and took the ferry to see the
Gulangyu island 鼓浪嶼.
You can read all about Gulangyu in the hyperlink above.
Gulangyu has one of the largest concentration of foreign architectures resulting from the opium war. At the time of my visit they were in varied conditions. Most has suffered from decades of neglect. Many were used as multifamily tenements. It was a miracle that most were not lost to the cultural revolution.
this one is used as tenement
a restored one
"Fujian Road" hand written on the wall
wonder who live in this huge mension
this one has been converted into a restaurant
you can see how glorious this one was
this was the Japanese compound during the war
one undergoing restoration behind the wall
a refreshing drink of this strange fruit
a cafe
you can see many are badly altered
years of neglect
improvised plumbing on this grand building
this is the ugliest building on the whole island - flax Greek revival?
this house belongs to a very wealthy dynastic family
the iconic status of a famous Chinese general
Xiamen is just across the narrow strait
the modern skyline of Xiamen
next stop is to Fujian's famous temple
there are a lot of huge boulders on the hill side the temple was built on
I was so surprised to see the resemblance of the stone lantern to the Japanese's
and this one too
not so much with this stone pagoda
a lotus pond
you don't see too many of these
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