Tang Paradise

[burlives]

I saw the Tang Paradise yesterday. Riding along on bicycle-back, as is my wont, I was heading for the outskirts looking for the countryside. I was south of the Dayang Pagoda and I found walls. The roads out there are wide and new, and on either side they have 10-foot-high red-painted walls, kilometers of them, and those tall upright sticks denuded of both branch and leaf that Chinese call trees. I rode along knowing that if I asked anyone they would tell me it was beautiful.

But I figured the countryside had to start sometime so I rode on. Sometimes there's gates in the walls, and you can see what's behind. There's nothing behind. It's all uncultivated field. I was a push bike rat in a Chinese maze. But I found Paradise. Row after row of half-finished up-market tenements. In Paradise the walls are yellow, and on the city map it's all a big shooting range. Maybe that's why they have the walls. People just drive out behind a wall and blast away, I guess.

I wonder who decided the walls should be built. Because they're nice walls. They looked freshly painted. But it got me down, because that's one of the things Chinese do, wall off the roads. It seems to be one of those Chinese paradoxes: no-one has any sense of privacy but everything gets hidden away behind a blank face.

[Raoul Duke]

I must confess that I first thought this thread involved big piles of rather sickly-tasting orange drink powder.

I once wrote a movie treatment (Enter The Dentist, a sequel to our completed film Frontier Dentist) that depicted Tang Paradise. It was set in a modern coin-op laundromat. (I'm saving the Werenun sequence from that film for use in some later project.)

I don't understand the obsession with walls here either. I guess it's a by-product of high population density. I usually hate them...trips one could walk in 5 minutes often take 20 because you have to walk miles out of your way to find the gates.

I do envy your finding a field that hasn't been put to some kind of commercial or residential use. I haven't seen one of those in years.

[Lager]

Tang is soup you Philistines!

This refers to the era of the "Soup Nazis." A noble era!

[con's fly is open]

The greatest Chinese soup I ever tasted (and this is a very strong field) was here in Calgary, the highest restaurant-per-capita city in the world. It was a hot-and-sour soup; oddly, its broth was red.
Deep down, I know the greatest soup is still out there.