Describing Places: THE HILLS ARE ALIVE- Guilin, China.

Sep 14, 2010, STRAITS TIMES . Describing Places.


THE HILLS ARE ALIVE
...with the sound of music as Zhang Yimou's Liu Sanjie is staged near Guilin

VOCABULARY

Mention the city of Guilin and two images come to mind. One, a postcard-pretty portrait of limestone mountains beside meandering emerald rivers, shrouded in a veil of mist, forming a truly breathtaking tableau of natural beauty.

The other, a classic 1960 Chinese movie, Liu Sanjie or Third Sister Liu, about the love story between a folk singer from the Zhuang minority in Guangxi Autonomous Region where Guilin is located and Ah Niu, a young fisherman. Not unlike a Western musical, the movie is well known 1. ________ for the many folk songs of the Zhuang minority.

Which was why I was skeptical - and 2. _________ - when I heard that the highlight of a recent four-day trip to Guilin was to watch an ongoing stage production of the movie, never mind the producer is acclaimed director Zhang Yimou, who also produced the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The sense of 3. _________ only grew when I turned up at the ticketing counter at the city of Yangshuo, about 60km from the city centre of Guilin, and realised the tickets did not come cheap at all.

They cost no less than 198 yuan (S$40) and go up to a princely 680 yuan for a VIP ticket. That kind of money could buy me a good seat for a Tony-award-winning musical on Broadway.

But the prices did not appear to deter hundreds of chain-smoking Chinese domestic tourists, milling around outside the counter, waiting for their tour guides to usher them into the show.

What would I, a third-generation Singaporean bred on Hollywood movies, possibly enjoy in a musical about a rather predictable romance between two young lovers in a minority tribe in China, and featuring 'shan ge', or mountain song, a genre of Chinese folk song commonly sung in rural provinces?

About an hour later, I was singing a different tune. True, I understood not a single word of the folk songs. True, too, I had only a vague idea of the plot or the key characters among the 600-strong cast comprising villagers and minority tribes living along the more than 100km Li River.

But Impressions: Liu Sanjie was well and truly a spectacle. The 70-minute performance took place on a Li River lake, no smaller than two football fields, encircled by limestone hills and with the violet-hued night sky as the 4. ________. It could be one of the world's largest 5. _______ theatre spaces.

The enveloping mist, moonlight, hills and their inverted reflections in the river formed a constantly changing background, made all the more 6. _______ with strategically hidden floodlights 7. _________ the facade of the mountains.

As the lights fell on the faces of the hills, numerous torches 8. _________ from the far side of the lake as scores of fishermen on bamboo rafts snaked their way across the lake, creating a depth and perspective probably impossible to achieve on a 9. ________ stage.

As the fishermen unfurled large bales of red silk across the lake, now lit up by floodlights, they looked as if they were walking on water.

The finale was no less stunning: Hundreds of performers, each wearing a series of tiny light bulbs, formed a long column across the bridge over the Li River and appeared like an army of 10. ________ pixies.

The performance, which took five years to 11. ________ from page to stage, is no doubt one of the reasons for a growing number of tourists to Guilin.

In 2002, there were close to 11 million tourists, of which about one million were foreigners. The most recent figures in 2008 revealed about 16.3 million tourists, 1.3 million of whom came from outside China.

The city, long 12. ________ for its natural beauty, is one in transition. While villagers continue to hawk their produce - watermelons, cucumbers, tomatoes and cabbages - from the back of their lorries and tricycles, evidence of change is unmistakeable.

Every turn you take, roads are paved and 13. ______. Scaffoldings wrap old buildings to indicate a new facade is on the way. Elsewhere, new developments - commercial buildings and 14. ______ apartments - dot the city landscape.

In March this year, luxury hotel operator Shangri-La opened a seven-storey, 449-room property, located just a 35-minute drive from the Guilin Liangjiang International Airport and 10 minutes from the heart of the city.

The first new five-star hotel in 20 years in Guilin, it has a 9,999-yuan package which includes a two-night stay in an Executive Suite and a chartered 15. _______ down the Li River, Guilin's main attraction.

The cruise down the 16. ________ stretch of the river lasts 90 minutes in an air-conditioned barge, with a hotel chef on hand to prepare the meals.

A village where time stands still

The 10km stretch from Long Chuan Ping Jetty to Die Cai Mountain passes through 10 of Guilin's most famous mountains - the ones which have been the subject of many 17. _________ and postcards depicting the beauty of the area.

Along the way, you will pass the must-see sight of the Elephant Trunk Hill, a karst formation which resembles an elephant drinking from the Li River, as well as Laoren Hill, or Old Man Hill, which bears an 18. ________ likeness to a hunched old man with a protruding forehead, looming over the mountains.

My favourite moment on the cruise was the stretch from Yangshuo to Yuchun, a village by the Li River which was established in the Ming dynasty. Former United States president Bill Clinton visited it when he was on a nine-day visit to China in 1998.

On my visit, save the makeshift stalls that lined the flight of stone steps leading to the entrance, time seemed to have stood still in the brick-and-mortar village.

Water buffaloes grazed on the banks as women did their laundry by the river. Kids dived into the river from small rocky 19. _______ as the older folk hawked deep-fried crabs, shrimps and fishes caught from the river.

Fishermen on bamboo rafts drifted leisurely down the river with their cormorants, which did the work for them snagging fish from the resource-rich river.

In the village, winding 20. _______ streets appeared to lead nowhere and every turn was an 21. ______ in itself. Up on the roofs of the houses (pay 10 yuan to the owner for access), I saw a village of stone houses built along a 22. _______of streets, a village of order in 23. _____. This, just 24. ______ four hours away from Singapore by 25. ______.

ANSWERS- Vocabulary- 1. worldwide 2. apprehensive 3. trepidation


4. backdrop 5. natural 6. magical 7. illuminating 8. flickered


9. conventional 10. shimmering 11. conceptualise 12. famous


13. repaved 14. residential 15. cruise 16. fabled 17. paintings


18. uncanny 19. outcrops 20. cobbled 21. adventure


22. maze 23. chaos 24. under 25. plane