Chinese Venice(3)
Boats waiting at one of the many jetties along Wuzhen’s canal. Besides colour and style, the elaborate language of the tiny shoes dictated that embroidery motifs must be appropriate to one’s social rank, for example, lotus and laurel for officials’ wives and goldfish for rich families.
Further north toward Shanghai, the 2,700-year-old water town of Xitang is reputed to have especially good fengshui as its nine canals are said to represent nine dragons. Its claim to fame includes a 1,300m-covered corridor necessitated by the rainy climate. Some of the scenes in Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible 3 were also filmed there.
Xitang’s crowded narrow streets are full of the usual shops selling handicrafts and local snacks, the most delectable (or repulsive depending on your point of view) being the stinky fermented bean curd (chou dofu) that, for aficionados, is an addiction like the durian. Though the bland millet zongzi (rice dumpling) left me unmoved, the local specialty – succulent pork leg braised in dark brown sauce was a gastronomic treat.
It is perhaps inevitable that thousands of visitors will converge on these delightful shuixiang. But on that rainy night in Wuzhen, few people were out on the stone street and it was then that we had a feel of the peaceful ambience of the watery enclaves of old.
