Chinese Flock To The Countryside For A More Authentic New Year

Chinese blacksmiths in Nuanquan (Warm Spring) Town perform a folk custom called "making trees and flowers." They throw ladles of molten iron onto a wall, creating showers of sparks. The centuries-old custom originated with blacksmiths too poor to afford fireworks. In recent years, urban tourists have flocked to this once obscure town over the Chinese New Year holiday to enjoy local folk customs.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST: China is going back to work tomorrow after a weeklong holiday marking the Year of the Horse. Working or not, people will keep celebrating. Traditionally Lunar New Year celebrations go on for a month or so. China is a rapidly urbanizing country, but NPR's Anthony Kuhn found that this is a time when many people flock to the countryside in search of local customs they and their ancestors left behind.

ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan was among the usual celebs on this year's spring festival gala on state television. The audience was roughly the same as usual, about 800 million. But many Chinese find the annual ritual of food, fireworks and TV song and dance shows is getting a bit stale. Some now use the holiday to travel overseas. Others, meanwhile, head to the countryside in search of something more authentic.

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KUHN: Locals and tourists crowd around a stage to watch an opera performance. The stage is in a medieval walled village in Nuanquan Zhen, or Warm Spring Town, about a three and a half hour drive from Beijing. It's a rugged land where residents of the North China Plain fought and mixed with nomadic tribes of the Central Asian Steppe more than 2,000 years ago. Wang De is a f50-year-old blacksmith in Warm Spring.

He explains that the town used to have many blacksmiths to make weapons and the blacksmiths devised their own way of celebrating the Lunar New Year.

WANG DE: (Through interpreter) Back then, people with money set off fireworks. People without money had to find ways to amuse themselves. So blacksmiths collected scrap iron from each family, melted it down and made trees and flowers.

KUHN: Trees and flowers are a visual metaphor. He's talking about blacksmiths hurling the molten iron onto the walled city's gates to make sparks, a sort of poor man's display of pyrotechnics. A couple of other locales in China have similar New Year's customs, but this use of city walls in Nuanquan was unheard of elsewhere in China, if not the world.

But Wang says that recently the centuries-old tradition has been fancied up a bit.

DE: (Through interpreter) Since 2008, tourism here has taken off. We now have a troupe that performs in front of a big screen. This custom has been continuously upgraded, and now it's much more interesting to watch than before.

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KUHN: After dark, Wang gets on stage and hurls ladles full of molten iron onto a replica of the city gate. The fiery liquid follows the arc of his arm and explodes into a dazzling shower of sparks that engulfs the whole stage.

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KUHN: That's not all. Backed by professional lighting and sound systems, young performers dance and sing the praises of the local food and liquor, and celebrate tourism's boost to their economy. The show is so elaborate, it practically rivals the state television New Year's extravaganza. Out in the crowed parking lot, I ask tourists After the show, tourists Dong Wennong and Zhang Wenjuan what they thought of the show.

DONG WENNONG: (Speaking foreign language)

KUHN: I would prefer this in its original style, he says. It's too commercialized, too much irrelevant stuff.

ZHANG WENJUAN: (Speaking foreign language)

KUHN: That city wall is fake, it's not the old kind, it's artificial, Ms. Zhang chimes in. But, she adds, everything is modernizing, and customs don't necessarily have to be clung to or repeated mechanically.

Showbiz or not, Chinese New Year's in the countryside is still different. Folks there make offerings to their ancestors, they decorate their doorways with red lanterns and calligraphy, they cook a special dish on each day, and they do all of these with a sense of simple enjoyment and devotion to tradition that is seldom seen in the city nowadays.

And of course if China's farmers and blacksmiths are now making their money by opening country inns and performing local customs for city tourists, well, it certainly wouldn't be the first country where that's happened. Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.

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