By Jonathan Chandler The Wild East Magazine Magpies… What was it? One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, hundreds of the frockers, a glut. A glut of magpies – building their intricate stick houses the size of an ayatollah’s turban, or a B52 beehive on the just-budding tees. Xi-que, (or in Taiwan…
Read moreCategory: Jonathan Chandler’s Lowdown on The Middle Kingdom
Good Old Uncle Ho
Photo: Caleb Cole By Jonathan Chandler, in Qingdao Lantern Festival marks the end of Chinese New Year or Spring Festival as it is officially known here and the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China is in its annual nod-off. Though glimpses of spring are in the…
Read moreNew Year’s Day of the Tiger – 'Party' town.
Jonathan Chandler The Wild East The snow which fell a week or so back has yet to melt completely and the winds are still bitter in Qingdao. Algae bloom during the 2008 Olympics, in Qingdao. Photo: The Guardian This ultra-wealthy city where two-wheels are banned and all the cars are brand new is a Party…
Read moreDifferent Times, Different Worlds
Jonathan Chandler The Wild East It snowed dream-like and blew bone-flaying gusts of Artic wind last week. The sky was bleeding lead with pure white snowflakes floating along and then for two days a purplish sea-fog rolled in and tied Qingdao into a manky, ice-cold blindfold. Kate McGarrigle Sombre enough for the news that broke…
Read moreAn 'Informal Settler' in Manila
‘Lowdown’ Goes to the Philippines for Christmas By Jonathan Chandler for The Wild East Squatter community in Manila I made a last-minute decision to get out of sub-zero, Siberian wind-tunnel Qingdao for the Christmas holiday. The prospect of a week’s solitary sopping at Old Jack’s Bar, waiting for the unlikely phone call from my daughters…
Read moreWhen Love is in the Air… in China
Statue at China's new sex-themed park. The remnants of a typhoon piddled on Qingdao last night, whetting the thirsts of the flowers, trees and citizens, tantalizingly dewy but nowhere near wet enough to slake the dry. So as the sere winds blow in off the Bao Hai Sea, the collective consciousness begins to fret and…
Read moreStrangely fascinating: China's 60th anniversary fanfare
Golden week came and went in high Indian summer up here in Qingdao. Temperatures in the thirties in the second week of October. Hasn’t rained for months. Big fat flies laze around, eating filth, landing with heavy little legs and a total lack of grace on your skin, billions of them, breeding like flies. Sounds…
Read moreFortune-telling Alive & Well in The Middle Kingdom
By Jonathan Chandler Exclusive to The Wild East Certain practices and “superstitions” were frowned upon, violently so, during the Cultural Revolution – a recent hiatus in China’s rich and ancient weave. But with the revival of Confucianism, along with the “opening-up,” a deep thirst for the old ways and the ancient knowledge has re-emerged. Although…
Read morePeople Mountain, People Sea… of Cars
By Jonathan Chandler Exclusive to The Wild East Traffic control (later) implemented in Qingdao's Beer Street. Photo: echinacities.com September is here, and with it the teeming masses have left the beach – drunk down all the Tsingtao beer during the two-week Beer Festival – and returned to the provinces to take their dearly beloved one…
Read moreChina heads to the beach
This is part of an exclusive, copyrighted series by British novelist Jonathan Chandler, “Lowdown on the Middle Kingdom.” For permission to publish elsewhere, contact the author at jonathan at jagchandler dot com. I took an exploratory trip to Qingdao, (my new home for the next two years), a staggeringly huge beach side mega-city (China doesn’t…
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