Ancient Waterfront Towns of China - Part 6: Tongli Hotel and Restaurant Reviews

After stops at Wuzhen, Xitang, Luxu and Lili we arrived at yet another ancient waterfront town of Tongli, renowned for its UNESCO World Heritage Site. This would be our base for the next two nights, where we’re checking into our most anticipated hotel of our 17-day journey.

By this time we’ve already stayed in some very unique guesthouses: the 130-year-old Songhetang in Hongcun and the 500-year-old Shendetang in Xitang among them. If you’re the sort of adventurous traveler who appreciates staying in a Ryokan in Japan or a Gite in France, you’ll also love the Qing Dynasty luxury in this 350-year-old traditional Chinese inn.

Hotel Review: JINGYITANG (Tongli)
Address: Fuguan Jie 5, Tongli
Price: RMB 280
Website: Official Site (in Chinese)
How To Book: *** UPDATED as of 2014 *** now bookable from CTrip.com, thanks to Angie who found the link. Back in 2012 I practically had to call them in Chinese.
Directions: Go to the "Three Bridges" area at the centre of town. The entrance of Jingyitang is a little private alley running north-south perpendicular to the canal. Ask the local shopkeepers to point you to the right door when you get there.


Built in the 2nd year of Emperor Kangxi, or Year 1662 in the Western World, Jingyitang was the office of a Qing Dynasty scholar-bureaucrat now converted into a traditional guesthouse, or Kezhan as locally known. In the rest of the world, France was about to enter its golden age under Louis XIV and the Ottoman Empire enjoyed its greatest expansion into Europe. Here in our remote little town of Tongli, the Emperor’s appointed engineer for waterworks infrastructure set up his office in this courtyard mansion.



A prototypical scholar’s mansion in this historic region of Jiangnan, or South of the Yangtze River, Jingyitang was designed as a narrow and deep complex of living quarters flanking a series of central courtyards. Over the centuries the outer quarters have been either sold off or confisticated by the socialist government and redistributed to poorer peasants, with only the innermost section remaining with the original descendants and eventually becoming the guesthouse of today.



Today the complex is owned by two modern descendants of the town’s powerful Wang clan, operating a guesthouse in the front quarters and retaining the back for their own private use. Pictured is Mr. Wang Peng sitting in his elegant greeting hall, working on the ledgers of the guesthouse in the early morning. The guy is also a quite a good cook, as we will see.



The historic greeting hall still serves its original functions of welcoming faraway guests and hosting dinners in the evening, in addition to wowing its visitors with some beautifully carved door panes, Qing Dynasty calligraphy scrolls and the owners’ collection of antique ceramics. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t a museum, but someone’s living room.



But nothing prepared us for the entrance into our Qing Dynasty bedroom known as the Xixiangfang, or West Suite. This might have been the best RMB 280 (CAD$44) per night that we had ever spent in any country. After pushing open a set of heavy, creaky wooden doors that must have been a couple centuries old, we were led into our own private greeting room with its own antique furniture pieces and decorative calligraphy, as well as a study desk facing the windows.



To give a sense of how spacious this suite was, the greeting room alone was about the size of a 4-star hotel room I've had in Tokyo. The bedroom itself stood beyond a series of floor-to-ceiling door panels, the airy windows led to a serene view of the central courtyard and the guesthouse’s impressive main greeting hall. This was easily the best room in the house.



The bedroom was absolutely the stuff of fantasies -- we’re practically inside a museum of Qing Dynasty furniture pieces, except that we could touch, recline on and sleep inside the exhibits. Everything from the magnificent bed frame to the dresser table of dark rosewood to the flimsy standalone washbasin seemed to have come right out of an exotic movie set. We must have spent hours exploring every unimaginable detail in these 200-year-old artifacts that told the stories of the cultured scholars who once lived in these quarters.



Look at the exquisite craftsmanship in these intricate figurines telling the story of an Imperial official’s parade at just one little corner of our bed ... these scholar-bureaucrats knew how to live! While we also slept in one of these antique Eastern Chinese box beds at our guesthouse in Xitang, that still wasn’t quite as extraordinary as this museum-worthy piece of folk art.



At least I knew what to do with a bed ... but what about this exotic red box on the bedside with these evil-looking horns jutting out of it? Luckily one of the Mr. Wangs showed up to explain that this was merely a Qing Dynasty shoe cabinet for storing one’s odorous shoes at bedtime. It was too small for our modern hiking boots of course, and I ended up using it as a bedside table for the alarm clock.



But I definitely wouldn’t use this Qing Dynasty toilet bowl, now rendered as an object of decor in the greeting room ... besides this was a child-sized version anyway.

Aside from all its antique furnishing, our room also came with modern necessities such as a Western style toilet in a private bathroom, air-conditioning, TV, and wireless internet connection. Our two-night stay here was definitely the most memorable of our trip to Eastern China, and I have no hesitation recommending this place as an informal guesthouse so long as you don’t expect spotless cleanliness in a 350-year-old room. You could also pay a little extra like we did and turn the whole stay into a bed-and-breakfast or even half-board experience.



Dinner was served among the ancient calligraphy and priceless antiques in the aforementioned greeting hall, which was only large enough for about three tables. Hence it’s best to pre-order the dinner before heading out in the morning, which reserves a table as well as allowing for selection of the more time-consuming slow-cooked dishes. Our dinner started with these Smoked Small Fishes (Xiao Xunyu), which were drier and crispier than the typical round steaks of Shanghainese Smoked Fish that I’m used to. The flavor was on the sugary side as you would expect of most cold appetizers in this region, and was quite decent as a starter.



Tongli’s proximity to China’s largest freshwater lake brings to the dinner table a large variety of fresh fish and crustaceans, the most famous being the so-called "Three Whites of Lake Tai": White Fish (Baishuiyu), White Shrimps, and Whitebait. On this night we ordered the local version of Scrambled Eggs with Whitebait, a standard peasant dish you’d find along the entire Southeastern Chinese coast from Shanghai to Hong Kong. The whitebait tasted pretty standard, but the eggs did taste of a slight free-range flavor which would be harder to find in the big cities. While it was nowhere as miraculous as the free-range eggs we had in Hongcun a week ago, it would still beat the Cantonese version of this dish served in most Hong Kong restaurants.



But the definite best dish of the night were theses Oil-Braised Manchurian Wild Rice Stems (Youmen Jiaobai), a vegetable that seems quite common in Eastern China and nowhere else in the country. The classic combination of crispy wild rice stems with the slightly caramelized glaze of cane sugar and dark soy sauce was just too good. These fresh ingredients and simple flavors really embody peasant cooking at its best.



As I mentioned Mr. Wang himself was quite a decent cook, and when we pre-ordered our dinner he recommended that we try his proudest creation -- Slow-Simmered Free-Range Chicken (Dun Tuji). This was half a bird, lightly seasoned and slowly steamed for hours and hours until the meat became fall-off-the-bones tender. The focus of the dish wasn’t the seasoning of course, but the slight gameyness in the free-range bird. My wife loved this dish, and I thought it was the second best dish of the evening after the wild rice stems.



I was pleasantly surprised with the fair prices as well as the quality of food in this guesthouse, compared to the usually less-than-stellar restaurants in many family-run hotels. And while breakfast wasn’t included in the room price, for RMB 6 more Mr. Wang would get the neighboring Wonton lady to deliver a bowl of fresh Wonton (or more properly, Huntun) with a soft boiled egg into the guesthouse. There’s hardly a more relaxing spot for breakfast than sitting in the private garden of a stately mansion from a bygone era.

Dinner Bill for Two Persons

Smoke Small Fishes	RMB 20
Scrambled Eggs with Whitebait	RMB 30
Oil-Braised Manchurian Wild Rice Stems	RMB 15
Slow-Simmered Free-Range Chicken	RMB 28
Rice x 2	RMB 4
TOTAL	RMB 97 (CAD$15.4)

Aside from dining at our guesthouse we took the advices from the Chinese visitors and tried two other eateries, both of which turned out to be pretty good value.

Food Review: JIUTANZI FANTONG (Tongli)
Address: Zhuxing Jie 13, Tongli
Hours: 11:00 – 21:00 (unofficial; based on observation)
Website/Map: Map from Baidu

Directions: Start from the town's main entrance (ie. the broad stone bridge). Facing the town, turn left into the first pedestrian street. The restaurant is about 50m down the street on the left hand side.


This is a hidden gem among Tongli's countless overcharging teahouses and restaurants. Walk into any other canal-side teahouse and you'll see what a bargain this place is -- instead of RMB 50 per person for tea alone, for the same price we had a seafood dinner complete with wine and beer.

Okay ... it's not technically seafood, but riverfood selected from the local region's abundance of freshwater produce. Jiutanzi Fantong is famous among budget-conscious Chinese travelers seeking authentic local flavors at reasonable prices, and of course its prime location on the canal doesn't hurt. There are no English menus, but who needs them when it's just as easy to glance at the next table to see what everyone else orders?


This was one of those really traditional eateries with square wooden tables that could be used for mahjong, crude wooden benches you'd see in Chinese martial arts films, and giant vats of nameless rice wines on tap. Local beers were already cheap at RMB 6, but an even better deal was the house premium yellow wine (Youhuang) that came in an intimidatingly large bowl for only RMB 9. This was perfect to go with the several snack sized dishes we ordered.


Our most expensive dish of the night was an appetizer featuring one of Three Whites of Lake Tai hailed by local gourmands. This impossibly plain dish of White Shrimp in Brine (Yanshui Baixia) was as simple as it looks -- small, plump freshwater shrimps boiled in a light brine, with nothing but green scallions and ginger to accentuate the sweetness in the meat. While the shrimp wasn't anything extraordinary, I definitely had no complaints about a RMB 35 (CAD$5.5) order of shrimp, especially in a waterfront restaurant in a tourist town.


As if RMB 35 wasn't cheap enough for shrimp, they also offered these Stuffed Lotus Roots with Pureed Shrimp (Xiarou Oubing) for the rock bottom price of RMB 18 (RMB 2.9). Granted there's only enough shrimp to fill those little holes inside the lotus roots, but the promise of shrimp alone seemed to put this rustic Eastern Chinese dish on virtually every table in the house. I guess this was the local version of onion rings in a pub -- a greasy snack to go down with the blue-collar favorite of yellow wine.



For more local flavors we ordered this plate of Stir-Fried Water Caltrops with Edamame Beans ... or Maodou Beans as they're known in China. This was actually my first time having water caltrops in the cooked form (as opposed to the peanut-like texture of raw water caltrops), and they turned out to be an great palate cleanser after those deep-fried lotus roots.



It was time to wrap up our dinner with some comfort food. This delicious pot of River Clams with Tofu in Broth turned out to be the best dish of the evening -- the clams were fresh, the tofu was silken smooth, and the thick broth was excellent as a clear sauce over plain rice. And best of all, this was also the cheapest dish at only RMB 18.

Even after four courses, a local beer and a large bowl of yellow wine, this meal still ended up being one of our cheaper dinner over four nights in the ancients towns of Wuzhen, Xitang and Tongli. If you're traveling to Tongli and want an authentic local eatery at a reasonable price, this would be my recommendation.

Bill for Two Persons

White Shrimp in Brine	RMB 35
Stuffed Lotus Root with Pureed Shrimp	RMB 18
Stir-Fried Water Caltrops with Edamame Beans	RMB 20
River Clams with Tofu in Broth	RMB 18
House Yellow Wine	RMB 9
Local Beer	RMB 6
Rice x 2	RMB 2
TOTAL	RMB 108 (CAD$17.1)

But if you're pressed for time and need a quick meal between Tongli's many lovely gardens, perhaps a noodle house would suit your requirement better ...

Food Review: CHUNGUAN MIANFANDIAN (Tongli)
Address: Shentian Jie 215, Tongli
Hours: 11:00 – 20:00 (unofficial; based on observation)
Website/Map: Map from Baidu
Directions: Stand outside the main entrance of Tuisi Garden. Facing the square, Chunguan Mianfandian is immediately on the left hand side.


As "hole-in-the-wall" as this unassuming noodle house may appear, it's been a Tongli institution for decades, due at least in part to its prime location next to the top attraction in town. Prices are slightly higher compared to similar noodle houses in Suzhou, but still cheaper than most places in expensive Tongli. RMB 18 (CAD$2.9) buys you a hearty bowl of noodles with regional specialties such as Pork Knuckles, Deep-Fried Fish Fillet or Sliced Eels. And if you're really on a tight budget, RMB 12 (CAD$1.9) buys you the regular noodles with sliced pork or mixed veggies. That's about as cheap as it goes for a filling lunch in this tourist town.



The noodles here are a little wider than the extremely thin variety that Suzhou is famous for, and was only slightly chewy. Even though the soup was nothing spectacular, this Deep-Fried Fish Fillet was pretty good ... and would have been better if only the portion was larger.



Tongli's version of the ubiquitous Red-Braised Pork Knuckles, promoted in this town as Zhuangyuanti (Top Scholar's Knuckles), tasted remarkably similar to Xitang's version. For those who don't mind the layer of fat -- and you really shouldn't order pork knuckles anywhere in the world if you do -- the combination of fat and lean meat should be tasty enough for any carnivorous man. Again the portion was too small to fully satisfy, and larger groups should probably order a whole knuckle for RMB 50 to share. But for the two of us, we really couldn't complain about RMB 36 for lunch at a town where teahouses charge RMB 50 per person for tea.

Bill for Two Persons

Noodles with Deep-Fried Fish Fillet	RMB 18
Noodles with Pork Knuckle	RMB 18
TOTAL	RMB 36 (CAD$5.7)

Ancient Waterfront Towns of China - Part 5: Luxu and Lili

I’ve looked forward to posting these pics from the pristine ancient towns of Luxu and Lili. In fact this is probably the first ever trip report in English on these two near-anonymous destinations, just a couple hours from Shanghai.



In this fifth article of a series on our town-hopping journey among the waterfront towns of Eastern China, right at the centre of the Shanghai-Suzhou-Hangzhou triangle, we found ourselves asking a question any perceptive traveler would be bound to ask ...

What did Wuzhen / Xitang / Tongli / Zhouzhuang look like, before the arrival of mass tourism?



Venice of the Orient these quaint little towns may be, but they’re also disappearing way faster than the sinking of the Venetian Lagoons. And those that have survived the ruthless urbanization of their ancestral landscape of marshes and canals have mostly been reinvented into entire communities of inns, eateries and souvenir shops. Wuzhen and Xitang were no longer the unspoiled traveler’s paradise that my father once described to me, back in the mid 1990’s. Some 20 years later I also found myself in this ancient land, and I had to discover the Wuzhen of my generation, before it’s all too late.



One morning in late 2012 we journeyed across this landscape of marshlands, with no expectations on what we might encounter. As public transportation options remained scarce, we negotiated a full day of transport with a private driver, introduced to us by our kind hostess at the 500-year-old Shendetang guesthouse. The plan was simple: start from Xitang in the morning, deliver us to Tongli by sunset, and explore the untouched canal towns along this 50 km route.



That was how we came across the unpolished beauty of Luxu and Lili, two prototypical peasant towns that had remained under the tourist radar for decades. But the two towns will soon be heading in completely opposite directions: one will be forever changed by a grandiose government scheme to be ... ahem ... preserved as the next Wuzhen, while the other seems to turtle along in this new millennium as it had for the past one.



We arrived first at the tiny and intimate town center of Luxu, a small community carved up by a sprawling network of canals somewhat comparable to our latter and better-known destination of Tongli. Along the sides of the canals stood two-storey brick rowhouses dating to late Qing Dynasty or early Republican era, a time when Luxu was practically one of the many islands in the midst of a 200-km-wide swamp, connected to neighboring towns only by boats. Even if it wasn’t Venice, it’s at least Bruges.



It was as off-the-beaten-tracks as could be -- even our trusty driver Mr. Gao, who lived his entire life barely 15 km away in Xitang, couldn’t locate the Qing Dynasty section of the town without asking the townsfolk for directions. While Luxu’s new town had been busy integrating its brand new roads and drab modern apartment complexes as a distant suburb of Suzhou, the ancient core of the town had been brushed aside as an enclave of antiquity among 21st Century urbanization. There were no hordes of international tourists or the loudspeakers of local guides, only the flow of water through the timeless canals, and curious glances from the elderly neighbors at these rare guests from the outside world.



While the likes of Wuzhen and Xitang raced towards the promise of tourist dollars, Luxu remained the same overlooked waterfront town that it had been for centuries, free from any commercialization and embellishments catered towards the domestic tourism industry. Still occupying the Qing Dynasty peasant houses were real descendants of the ancient clans who had dwelled here for generations, a far cry from the picture-perfect but soulless souvenir shops and restaurants of the gentrified Wuzhen West.



The absence of a prominent and promotable tourist attraction became the saving grace that rescued Luxu from commercial redevelopment. For most of the past 1000 years this had traditionally been a blue-collar community of kiln-workers and rice farmers, content with playing its small part in the region’s canal-based trade routes. Instead of the flamboyance of a brand new pagoda reconstructed in Ming Dynasty fashion, you’re more likely to encounter authentic scenes of everyday life such as the street-side haggling for electronic junk that you once thought was worthless.



Arguably the most distinguishable sight in town was a series of tunnel-like arcades known as Kuajielou, or Street-Spanning Mansions (my translation). A remnant of medieval town plans, the 2nd floor of waterfront houses were extended to the edge of the canal to provide living spaces upstairs as well as a crude indoor mall to shield shoppers during the region’s infamous Plum Rain season. All kinds of miscellaneous shops still occupied the interiors of the arcades, making for some interesting window shopping.



But the best moment of the day was stumbling upon vestiges of life from a bygone era. What’s this man doing with his ballistic-looking cast iron device? I honestly had no idea until our driver Mr. Gao gleamed in excitement and told us to prepare covering our ears. I then realized that I was witnessing something that belonged to the collective childhood memory of the Chinese ... it’s China’s famous Popcorn Cannon!



I thought this old trade was extinct, and even our local Mr. Gao hadn’t seen this for years. I had only previously seen this on a Taiwanese TV programme, way before that 2013 episode of MythBusters in which the hosts donned bomb suits, read the instructions wrong and launched a meteor shower of popcorn into the low-earth orbit. Here our explosion expert simply added a pinch of sugar for flavor as well as a tiny amount oil just to melt the sugar, creating a popcorn with much less fat and calories than its western counterpart. As great tension built with every blast of the bellows into the miniature furnace, we all stood behind the cannon man covering our ears.



With a deafening boom our explosion expert set off the cannon, blasting its contents into something that looked like a giant laundry bag. It turned out that he wasn’t making popcorn on this day, but even better ... fresh rice crispies! For RMB 6 each we purchased one order for ourselves and one for Mr. Gao to bring home to his son, and it turned out a real bargain. The rice crispies were deliciously sweetened, thunderously crunchy and came in such a massive bag that we couldn’t even finish in two days and ended up sharing with our Chinese neighbors at our next Kezhan guesthouse.



This was precisely what we came for: a glimpse into the real China, and into the lives of its peasant families and fascinating local characters beyond the glitzy metropolises of the Yangtze Delta. Wuzhen and Xitang were nice and photogenic, but Luxu was much more authentic as a travel experience.



We had such an awesome time watching the Popcorn Cannon guy that we almost missed lunch when we left Luxu for our next destination of Lili. Upon arrival we wasted no time rushing into the first roadside eatery we saw, a small mom-and-pop operation with the slogan of "Home Cooking and Traditional Taste" posted at the storefront. It was time for a little adventure in the local dishes.



We ordered the most famous -- and likely most expensive -- of all dishes in the restaurant, the local favorite of Steamed Baishuiyu Fish. This is one of those time-tested recipes that works as simply as it looks -- half the fish lengthwise, sprinkle with ginger, scallions and a light-colored soy sauce, and put into the steamer. Freshness of the fish is the ultimate determinant of quality -- there's nothing to mask the stink of a stale fish, only the soy sauce to enhance the flavor of a fresh one. I left the verdict up to the local tastebuds of our driver Mr. Gao.

"Kengding Shi Yesheng De!" proclaimed our driver that this was definitely a wild-caught fish, as the meat was much sweeter than the Baishuiyu fish that he grew used to in his own town. While the small bones of the fish required quite a bit of work, the soft white flesh was extremely tender and went very well with the mild flavoring.



Our next dish of Pork Uterus with Pickled Cabbages was nowhere as good though. I don't know why they even have this dish on the menu -- to me they clearly haven't learned how to cleanse the strong gamey smell from the uterus. I don't think we even finished this dish.

Bill for Two Persons + Driver

Steamed Baishuiyu Fish	RMB 50
Pork Uterus with Pickled Cabbages	RMB 25
Stir-Fried Snow Peas	RMB 10
Tofu Soup	RMB 8
Rice x 3	RMB 3
TOTAL	RMB 96 (CAD$15.2)

Our exploration of Lili started with some bad news in the form of a giant public notice: the town was to be preserved and developed, just like Wuzhen and Xitang in the last decade, into the next great tourist attraction by the local government. This was our last chance to see Lili as a genuine, undeveloped ancient township complete with its original inhabitants and close-knit neighborhoods, before it gets turned into the next Wuzhen.



The first thing that impressed us was the sheer size of the old town -- the total length of its canal frontage was probably as long as those of Wuzhen West and Wuzhen East combined! One could imagine the gigantic theme park that would be constructed out of this heritage town within the next 10 years, satisfying the government’s ambition for yet another golden goose in the grand scheme of its planned economy.

With sadness I realized the meaning of my photos -- these would become some of the last images of this ancient community of Wu-dialect speakers, before the ruthless eviction of many of the townsfolk out of their ancestral homes, all in the name of progress.



This was as close as I’ll ever get to the untouched ancient towns described by my father 20 years back, when these enclosed waterside communities existed in near isolation except for the infrequent boat connections. Every mansion came with its own private mooring on the canal, complete with stone gargoyles protruding out of the canal’s sidewalls to serve as anchors for the flat-bottom boats. Today’s townsfolk still cross the same canal by the same myriad of medieval stone bridges, the oldest dating from time of the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty 700 years in the past.



Officially the top tourist draw in Lili was the stately mansion of a Qing Dynasty scholar-bureaucrat, now converted into a museum and polished as the centerpiece of the town’s numerous heritage sights. As the mansion was also the former residence of a nationally renowned poet and political activist, much of the exhibits could be skipped you aren’t particularly interested in Chinese literature.



A better exhibit was the mansion itself with its grandiose 6-layered halls and courtyards, complete with curious furnishings and artwork from the era of the Imperial dynasties. Admission was amazingly free-of-charge (I couldn’t even recall the last time I found a free museum anywhere in China), though we knew everything would change at the completion of the town’s redevelopment.



But the best attraction by far was something entirely unadvertised, something mysterious and completely unknown to outsiders like myself. Our local driver guided us into the town’s labyrinth of dark, narrow tunnels known as Anlong, or Hidden Alleys. Originally designed as medieval defensive structures by the town’s wealthy clans, the living spaces along these semi-private passageways had been passed down through countless generations, transforming gradually from the original usage as commercial arcades to become the living rooms and bedrooms of the less affluent modern descendants. I would never have dared to venture in on my own.



My focus of the day was in recording the distinctive character and spirit of this ancient town, on the eve of its dismantlement and reassembly into yet another tourist destination in the model of Wuzhen / Xitang / Zhouzhuang. Just look at the unpretentious charm of this slightly slanted Jiuzhou Barber Shop and compare it to the ubiquitous wooden storefronts at Wuzhen West. Here was something nostalgically enchanting and irreplaceable, and soon it will be forever gone.



Across the canal stood another neighbor that surely would not survive the town’s reincarnation. Any Protestant Church would be a rare sight in conservative rural China, let alone one housed in indigenous Qing Dynasty architecture and adorned with these intricately carved window panes. How did Christianity even reach this secluded corner of Eastern China in the first place? That’s something I’ll likely never find out, unless this somehow gets miraculously preserved as a museum.



The old Mahjong parlour seemed to have already closed down, and would soon be followed by its neighboring merchants amidst a massive infrastructure project to bury the entire town’s electric lines underground. To be demolished next would be all buildings not conforming to old-new theme of a Qing Dynasty town, again following the footsteps of the highly profitable Wuzhen. Will the transformed town of Lili receive the same level of financial success? Somehow I’m not quite so optimistic.

On our way out I pondered the future of hundreds of similar historic towns across this ancient land of 1.3 billion citizens, at a time of crossroads between a proud past and a promising future. While I thought I had found the Wuzhen of my generation in the unembellished town of Lili, I also witnessed the beginning of the end of its innocence. Only time will tell how Luxu and Lili will stand against the onslaught of 21st Century mass tourism in the next 20 years, but I guess that's for the next generation to find out.