Floyd’s China. Keith Floyd
by hoardes of Swedes, Americans, Germans, Japanese, etc., all clutching their T-shirts, the mystique somehow disappears. The only sane man that day was Mr Jing, who, when we arrived at the barrier of the car park, which would have forced me to have walked another 200 metres, refused to be kowtowed and said, ‘I am taking Mr Floyd to the closest point possible!’ If you ever find yourself in Beijing (once know as, Peking and before that Ping Pong), call up Mr Jing. Without Mr Jing, life would be as for Bertie Wooster without Jeeves!
The morning had been cold, but now it was hot and overcast and in the hot wind it was snowing little puffballs of blossom as we bounced along in Mr Jing’s uncomfortable, hot, cramped car, smoking Mr Jing’s Chinese cigarettes. It had taken us three hours to get to the Great Wall instead of the estimated one hour. Jet lag and the early morning start were weighing heavily upon me as we headed back to Beijing. Mr Jing, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, was chattering away and, from time to time, poured some warm tea from a screw-top jam jar and handed it to me. Apparently all Beijing drivers carry endless quantities of tea in their cars and also endless packets of cigarettes, but then tea drinking is a cult in China. There are three kinds: fermented (red/black), unfermented (green) and semi-fermented (Oolong). Then there are the smoked teas, the scented teas and chrysanthemum tea. The flavours can vary enormously depending on which province the tea has been grown in and each has its own subtle fragrance. Tea is drunk all day and is considered good for just about anything that ails you; and by the way, it’s also still sold in bricks in China. But I digress. Anyway, we pulled over to the side of the road where there was a stall selling nuts and fruits and we were greeted, to my surprise, by a diminutive, elderly lady in a brightly coloured frock who led us across the road, chattering comfortably with Mr Jing and with the photographer, and into her one-storey, brick-built, shabby little bungalow. The garden had a rudimentary chicken coop and there were stacks of dried maize stalks, piles of nappa cabbage and a few tomatoes, but it was neglected and somehow rather sad. We went into the cool, gloomy house, illuminated by two flickering lightbulbs without shades, one in the kitchen and one in the other room. To the left and right of the kitchen door were two stone-built rectangles, each one containing an iron built-in dish about three feet in diameter. These were wood-fired, or maize stalk-fired, woks, that indispensable cooking utensil in China. We went into the other room, which had two chairs, a large built-in wooden bed about eight feet long, a bucket of water, a small table and shabby walls covered with garish photographs of Chairman Mao. Mrs Li’s husband (Mr Yang) sat, serene but smiling in his blue overalls. He was probably seventy. I didn’t know what was going on and I know not to ask. When something good happens, let it happen. There were three or four ladies in the cramped room and in a battered aluminium bowl they mixed flour and water into a dough, rolled it out very thinly and then cut it deftly into circles about three inches in diameter. Meanwhile, the old man, bent, slowly collected maize stalks from the garden and lit a fire under one of the huge woks. While he did this, the ladies chopped wild, green vegetables for which I have no translation – perhaps wild spinach or lovage, and other herbs; they added a little rice vinegar to this mixture and deftly, so deftly, rolled them into balls the size of a marble, folded them into the little rounds of dough and formed them into crescent shapes. After the smoke had settled, the water in the wok began to boil and one by one they dropped these wonderful dumplings into the water. After ten or fifteen minutes they were cooked and we all sat upon this built-in bed with a narrow plank of wood on stubby legs between us and ate these amazing dumplings.
They showed me the crude cellar in the garden, where, in former times, they had kept their cabbages and potatoes for use during the winter. They made green tea, talked and smiled and urged me to eat more. They had no money, barely any kind of a pension, but they had a dignity and a kindness that was most moving. Outside on the sill of the window, which in common with houses built at that time had no glass, just a kind of paper tissue, there lay drying in the sun a pile of orange peel, crisp like a poppadom, which they infused in boiling water and used as a remedy for colds, tummy upsets and as a general cure-all.
We shook hands, we hugged and said goodbye and bounced off down the congested road back to town, but again Mr Jing stopped, this time at a place the size of a European garden centre, next to a large plot of exquisite pottery – dragons, urns, pots, fish, warriors. There was nothing growing on the floor of the place that brought to mind a garden centre, but the sky was fluttering, clacking, flicking and swooping with hundreds of magnificent kites. They were purple, vermillion, orange, ochre, green, and red and on the ground there were row upon row of these multi-coloured kites in the shapes of hawks, eagles, fish and dragons. I bought two kites, each one with a wingspan of about eight feet, and Mr Jing made the staff fly them for me to see that they were right. They reeled them in on a large hand-held fishing reel and Mr Jing handled the transaction and, my God, he drives a hard bargain. These two exquisite flying creatures, because creatures they are, cost me the princely sum of three pounds! They are fragile and fine and I managed to get them back to France, undamaged and unbroken.
We made good progress towards Beijing until we hit the city. The traffic is horrendous, on four- or five-laned highways that cross the city of multi-storey buildings. Gotham City. Finally, we made it to a quiet parking lot and into an elegant, minimalist, glass-fronted restaurant called Din Tai Fung, allegedly Beijing’s finest dim sum restaurant. Dim sums, both sweet and savoury, were in former times served in tea houses so that businessmen, artists, philosophers and poets could sip tea and have a light snack while they discussed the day’s affairs. I suppose it was the Chinese version of an early English coffee house or a proper French cafe. The kitchen was screened by glass and you could see the sixteen or seventeen cooks working deftly, but it was surreal. I had hoped to enter the kitchen myself to observe very closely what they were doing, but I was not granted permission. They were clad in immaculate white uniforms, white, anklelength rubber boots, thin, white rubber gloves, crisp paper hats and masks. The fear of SARS still lingers. We ate some dim sum, drank some tea, took as many pictures as time would allow and worked out the recipes as best we could – many Chinese are very reluctant to reveal their culinary secrets to you. However, that did not stop me from finding out because I had Mr Jing.
By 9.30 p.m. I was back at the hotel, tired, elated, exhilarated and anxious for an early night. We had after all started at 5.00 a.m., but unfortunately, as I walked into the, if you like, Chinese brasserie of the hotel I was recognized and hijacked by a multi-national team that was there sponsoring the Johnny Walker Golf Tournament. Later I had some steamed sea bass with ginger, some plain boiled rice and a bowl of fresh fruit and then happily took the lift to my room on the fifth floor. I lay on the bed and continued to read Patrick O’Brian’s Desolation Island and minutes later the phone rang and it was 5.00 a.m. again!
I had read in the hotel’s brochure that a good way to enjoy Beijing would be to hire a bicycle and ride around: that must have been written in about 1954. It is utter bollocks, there is no way you can safely ride around the congested streets of this city. But, I had some lamb curry and some noodles, just quickly boiled with fresh greens thrown in, and set off anyway around the streets looking for what people ate for breakfast. Everybody seems to eat steamed buns, a bit like a dumpling with a little tiny bit of slightly sweet meat inside, or a deep-fried ‘youtiao’, a sort of long doughnut made from rice flour and water that costs ha’pennies. Others would go into little restaurants and have a bowl of noodles or a bowl of soup.
I chanced upon one really amazing street vendor. He had a large circular plancha, about two and a half feet in diameter, which was mounted above a charcoal fire on a spindle so he could spin this wheel around. He would spin it, pour a ladleful of his maize flour pancake mix onto it and all the while the wheel was turning he would scrape it out and scrape it out until he had a thin disk of a pancake about two feet in diameter. He flipped it over to his wife who filled it with finely chopped salad, coriander and chillies and folded it into a manageable envelope. It was outstanding.
On we went to the central market: sacks of chillies, dried fungus, dried mushrooms, mountains of Chinese greens, tank upon tank of live fish, frogs, snakes, turtles, mountains of pigs’ ears, pigs’ trotters, pigs’ intestines, pigs’ hearts, fat, plump ducks, chickens, chicken feet, chicken necks, chicken wings, pigs’ tails, ox tails, beef tripe, pork chitterlings, hearts, kidneys, lights. For me it was better than the finest art gallery, but I am sure many from the West would have found it unacceptable.
Then