14 minutes 48 seconds, Direct YouTube Link
Click here to see ALL PHOTOS of the trip on Flickr, sequenced by date and location.
Quanzhou is a city in Fujian, Southern China. I went there on October 27, 2018 with family to visit relatives. It used to be a booming port city back in the days of the Maritime Silk Road. According to Wikipedia, it was China’s major port for foreign traders during the 11th through the 14th centuries, visited by both the famed Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the famed Muslim/ Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta. Back then it was known as Zayton. Even today, when I geotagged my photos, the city shows up as “Zayton” on Facebook and Flickr’s maps.
There’s an interesting footnote in Wikipedia though, that there’s some controversy in the 19th century among scholars whether the Zayton written about in these foreign explorers’ records was actually referring to Xiamen, a different attractive port city also in the province of Fujian. But supposedly Chinese records were clear that Zayton refers to Quanzhou, formerly home to an excellent harbor that slowly silted up over the centuries.
Before 2018, I was last in Quanzhou back in the mid 1990s. It didn’t have its own airport then, you had to fly to Xiamen Airport and drive two hours to Quanzhou. As what that aforementioned Wikipedia footnote said, Xiamen is the current Fujian boomtown, the current holder of the “attractive” harbor crown.
Fast forward 20 years and there’s a nice little airport serving Quanzhou already.
Day 2
I went around some parks and tourist spots in Quanzhou City. There’s a giant stone sculpture of the famous Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu in one of the parks.
Another attraction in the park is this giant rock with Chinese characters on them, and a viewing station overlooking the city.
You can click on the thumbnails to zoom in.
This park also has a Buddhist temple in it with a statue of a Chinese goddess out front and a giant reclining Buddha carved into rock.
For lunch, we went to one of the supposedly top ginger duck restaurants in all of Quanzhou. They cook the duck traditionally in clay pots with coal, tear drop emoji for climate change. It was pretty good though.
A huge part of China has gone cashless, even small corner stores and street food vendors. They use mobile wallets built into the WeChat messaging app. Not “cashless” that’s tied to your credit card like Apple Pay or Apple card. More like paying with your Venmo or PayPal wallet to vendors.
I like this sugarcane peeler contraption. The sugarcane vendors on the streets of the Philippines usually just use huge knives to hack and peel them.
After lunch, we checked out a few more tourist spots like the Quanzhou Kaiyuan Monastery, first established in 686 A.D. It was known by a different name back then and only got its modern name in the year 739. It used to be an orchard of mulberry trees. It now occupies 80,000 square meters (861,113 square feet) and is Fujian’s largest temple.
It’s more of a temple complex with many pagodas than a single temple structure. Juse pause the video anytime you need to read the information placards.
After that, we hit up West Street, which is a bustling street of small shops and eateries. Yes, all cashless transactions using the WeChat messaging app’s mobile wallet. The amount is drawn from your WeChat balance, it’s not serving as a go between and just withdrawing from your bank account on the fly at the moment of payment. Pretty cool.
Day 3
Headed to Wu Yi Shan via train. It’s a town known for tea plantations and a big park with mountains and rock formations.
You can buy a day pass or multiple day passes as it’s a huge park.
The way the park is laid out is there’s a bunch of attractions inside, and it’s up to you to go in them one by one.
Like this spot called Yi Xian Tian. The notable part of it is that it’s really dark inside with only a narrow sliver of a crack up top.
There were some pretty exotic fruits at the local market outside the park.
At night, we watched this musical set in an outdoor amphitheater. It’s outdoor seating on plastic chairs mounted on concrete. The seats were pretty damp with dew and it was cold. Cold for someone like me from a sunny tropical climate like the Philippines. It was around 10 degrees celsius (50 Fahrenheit).
So the entire musical is just about tea, tea farming, a journey to make tea, and all that. Since it’s the main money making export crop of the town of Wu Yi Shan. The name of the show is the Impressions Da Hong Pao show. I think that’s the brand of the tea they make, I saw that labeled on the tea bags at the hotel. The production is pretty grand, like the kind of spectacles they put on at theme parks – hologram projections, laser light and special effects, and a huge cast of people doing choreographed moves. This was directed by the famous director Zhang Yimou.
Day 4
After breakfast, went back to the park to take the bamboo raft tour via water of the various mountains and rock formations of the park.
Went back to the hotel for lunch after, then checked out two other attractions. At the Tian You Peak, you get to see the view down below from up high. So I got to photograph the other tourists on their bamboo raft tour, the same tour I took earlier in the day.
There’s a couple of other attractions I skipped, and the last one I went to is this flat valley type spot with Chinese words carved on the rock face. This spot has more than ten caves.
Day 5
Back to Quanzhou City via train. Around a two hour ride.
Day 6
It’s November 1 and the hotel had some bizarre Halloween pumpkin carvings. This is the Quanzhou City skyline as photographed outside my hotel window.
That night, went to an interesting cafe that specializes in pour over coffee, there’s single origin beans on the menu. There’s an old school barber’s chair and boombox as a decor. It’s called Local Fish after this apparently famous fish native to Quanzhou that people fry up and eat as snacks.
Day 7
I went to this historical replica town called Wu Dian Shi.
Many of the Chinese migrants to the Philippines from the early to mid 1900s wave of immigration came from Fujian, that’s why most of the third or fourth generation Chinese (I’m making this video in 2019) are Hokkien speakers (or if they’re not, their parents or grandparents are) rather than Cantonese or Hakka speakers unlike other parts of Southeast Asia. They came from all over Fujian, like Xiamen or wherever. My ancestors came from Quanzhou City, that’s why I was there to visit my relatives in 2018.
Now Quanzhou City has a lot of boroughs or districts like Li Cheng, Jinjiang, etc. I know the first borough because that’s where my relatives live and I know the second because that’s where the airport is. I don’t know the rest.
This historical replica town is in the Jinjiang district of Quanzhou City. Interestingly, a lot of the very wealthy Chinese Filipinos came from this Jinjiang district. When they became rich, they sent money back to China to build this historical replica town depicting old school houses from back in the day. If you look at the information placards, you’ll see which houses were built by overseas Chinese – Filipinos.
These are classic Southern Chinese family homes, with a courtyard and various sections and bedrooms. Like there’s a bedroom for the firstborn son, the second son, the third son, etc.
I also had lunch in that historical replica town. Obviously since it’s a replica town, it’s more like a theme park than actual preserved old houses. That’s why there are restaurants and gift shops and cafes in the complex. The lunch was classic Fujianese fare, the same kind of food we eat as typical Chinese food staples in the Philippines actually – like lomi (various mixed ingredients with noodles in soup), lumpia (kind of like a spring roll but not the kind Westerners think of), barbecued pork with a lot of fat, etc.
Had more Chinese food for dinner, it’s regular Chinese food, a lot of seafood, nothing specifically Fujianese.
Day 8
Checked out the Confucius Temple that was built in the 8th century and moved to its current location and got its present layout in the 10th century.
Went to another park with a lake after, then walked around the streets for a bit. There was a weekend flea market going on.
The usual Taiwanese milk tea franchise chains are also present in Quanzhou, but I popped into a traditional tea shop instead. This place is very cool, and on some afternoons, they host oral retellings of the history of Quanzhou.
Afterwards, dropped by the Quanzhou Qing Jing Mosque or the Masjid al-Ashab. It was built in 1099 and restored in 1310 by a Persian pilgrim.
At the start of this video, I mentioned that Quanzhou used to be known as Zayton, spelled Z-A-Y-T-O-N back in the Maritime Silk Road days when it was the premiere harbor/ port city of Fujian, before the rise of Xiamen’s prominence as a global port.
Quanzhou’s old Chinese nickname is Zi Tong City, a city named after a tree that was extensively planted there in the 10th century. According to Wikipedia, Zayton is an Arabic word that’s a calque (loan translation) of that former nickname, Zi Tong City.
I guess the ties between the ancient Muslim traders from the Near East and Quanzhou were strong during the Maritime Silk Road days when even its former Western name is not an Anglo like, say the old name of Beijing – Peking, or Taiwan – Formosa, but an Arabic word.
There’s even women making dumplings in the complex, but this is the kind without pork as Muslims don’t eat pork.
Here’s another sugarcane peeler contraption, it looks different from the machine I showed in Day 2.. The sugarcane street vendors back home in the Philippines are usually men as it takes a lot of upper body strength to hack sugarcane with the big knives they wield here. But with these machines, you can just feed the sugarcane into it and it’s peeled. The three sugarcane vendors I saw in China were all coincidentally women.
Dropped by a little private novelty museum called the Mind Museum for a bit, it houses the private art collection of some wealthy guy.
Afterwards I went to Yuanhe 1916, which houses cafes, offices catering to creatives and designers, event spaces. It used to be an industrial lot. There’s a hypebeast cat in faux Supreme in one of the cafes there.
This is Quanzhou City Hall. Stopped by the outside before going to a nearby seafood restaurant for dinner.
Day 9
Flew back home to Manila.
My Favorite Photos from the trip:
All food photos:
