This bookstore orders most of its history books from the same few publishers, so it’s a good place to learn about the incestuous world of writers and those who write book reviews. Writers sometimes cluster into groups that review and promote each other’s books. The author of this book is found reviewing the next five books on the shelf, which are written by people whose names are quickly found on other nearby book jackets, singing the praises of other literary cronies.

“Well-researched” appears a lot in reviews of history books. Jimmy writes a book about ancient Persia; Bozo writes a review that gets published in the London Times. Jerry writes a book about the Mongols; Bozo writes another review that gets published in the Times Literary Supplement. Jesse writes a book about the Polynesians, and Bozo writes a review for the Wall Street Journal; once again, Bozo breezily declares that the book is “well-researched”. How did Bozo ever become such an expert on so many subjects?

I took graduate courses in Chinese. Bring me a book on Tang history and ask me if it is well-researched, and I’ll say, “HOW THE HELL WOULD I KNOW?”

Southern dialects seem to multiply like rabbits.

Wenzhou City, southern Zhejiang

Someone on a bus told me that speakers of Wenzhou dialect were used like Navajo windtalkers during World War Two; the Chinese military felt confident that nobody in Japan could understand Wenzhou dialect (“someone on a bus said” is a good theme and solves many problems–maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; it’s just something that someone said).

I read online that Wenzhou dialect has tricky pronunciaton, grammar and syntax, and is thus exceptionally difficult to learn.

Sounds plausible, but online sources are not really much more reliable than someone on a bus. It’s hard to have much faith in the Internet when learning anything beyond the most superficial stuff about China, unless you are reading a university website written by people with Ph.D.s who will be excoriated for passing on misinformation.

I don’t have a Ph.D. Better stick with “Someone On A Bus said…”

I can say this much–Wenzhou dialect sure does sound funny.

Maybe. Perhaps. It seems. I heard. Someone said. Editors hate these words, but these are the words of a halfway honest person…

Riding downhill through the mountains from Lishui to Wenzhou, I had something like deja vu–it felt exactly like I was in Tim’s old van, and we were coming down from the Central Mountain Range into the city of Yilan in Taiwan. Wenzhou and Yilan occupy alluvial plains on the coast and are cut off from other cities by mountains, both roads follow rivers and head in the same general direction. It was winter both times. If Tim and I were to get a van and drive from Lishui to Wenzhou, we could probably master time travel. But that’s a bad idea; Wenzhou is the pits.

Southwestern Zhejiang

The She people of southwestern Zhejiang occupy the only autonomous region in eastern China, which means they are the last remaining ethnic minority in eastern China. Ethnic minorities are a slippery subject here; read even a little bit and you soon hit chapters that start with headings like, “The Multivalence of Subalternity”.

Better to stick with Someone On A Bus (SOAB).

According to SOAB, the She migrated to this area from Guangdong several centuries ago; they are a Miao people, sort of; the vast majority of She no longer speak She; the She language has been heavily diluted by Hakka, and don’t bother going to a She ethnic dance performance, since it’s just a bunch of completely sinified people pretending that they are still some exotic Miao people. It’s like going to Hawaii and being greeted by willowy Filipino chicks in grass skirts.

According to S. Robert Ramsey (he has a Ph. D. and perhaps even uses public transportation), “Some 369,000 people in southeastern China are classified as She. They are highly sinified, and many–perhaps most–speak Hakka or Min dialects of Chinese.” Linguistic research “reveals a language with some of the typological features of Yao…but a language that nevertheless seems to be genetically closer to Miao.”

Ramsey’s fine book is 22 years old. The few paragraphs regarding the She were based on research done in the 1950s, which explains why he covered their language in less than half a page. Getting to the She would have been an expensive and difficult trip in the 1980s. Now, people like SOAB and I can bump into She people on buses.

Nanping and northern Fujian

The tourist map for Nanping prefecture listed the dialects for every district. Besides Wuyishan, the Min River, tobacco, tea and tree roots (carved and uncarved), Nanping can claim some fame for the Tower of Babel dialect situation within its borders.

The map listed the following dialects for the area of Nanping City: Mindong, Minzhong, Minbei, Minnan, JianOu dialect and Hakka. However, SOAB said that because Nanping is a city of opportunity, it has attracted many outsiders, many locals have been forced out by the higher cost of living, and so people generally speak Mandarin when dealing with strangers.

JianOu is a city north of Nanping City that was larger and more important than Nanping in the past. The city wall in JianOu was first erected in the Tang Dynasty. Small communities of JianOu speakers are found far from JianOu today, which is unusual.Perhaps this city’s dialect was the market and business language for a large area for a long period of time. Perhaps the people of JianOu simply had more babies over time. Since I only passed through JianOu twice on a bus, please give me a full report when you get there.

Zhenghe and Songxi are two very small town in northern Fujian. People were friendly and reassuringly normal. Nobody got in my face with an aggressive sales pitch. According to the prefectural map, they speak Minbei dialects and JianOu dialects (even though these places are somewhat removed from JianOu city).

I started paying a little attention to the dialect situation back when I was taking tours to China. A number of tour guides casually claimed that they could speak seven or eight dialects, and I had to wonder how they could do that. Zhao Yuanren and his wife were considered brilliant linguists; they actually learned seven dialects. Also, people from Mandarin-speaking families and Hakka-speaking families in Taiwan can go their whole life without learning to speak Southern Min, even though they are surrounded by it.

One guy told me that you just have to speak Mandarin and change the sounds according to a few simple rules. However, Chinese dialects have different grammar and use different words than Mandarin; for example, the southern Min word for WOK is actually the Mandarin word for an ancient ceremonial vessel (ding). Dialects also contain words that have no Mandarin equivalent.

A Chinese person who claims to speak seven dialects is probably doing this: find a very cooperative local, someone you know and will see again, someone who is willing to play, “Let’s pretend this guy speaks our dialect.” The local knows Mandarin words and grammar, so when the outsider uses local pronunciation to produce a sentence, the listener converts the sentence into Mandarin and figures out what the outsider is trying to say.

Once I had a Chinese couple in my group. They both spoke Cantonese, but Cantonese from different villages in a small area of Guangdong Province. They said that their two dialects were mutually unintelligible. They were slowly learning from each other, but it wasn’t easy. These were smart people, and they were married. Seven dialects, my eye….

Road to Song Xi

Road to Song Xi

Song Xi Hotel

Road to Song Xi Sights

Road to Song Xi Sights

Road to Song Xi Sights

Road to Song Xi Sights

Zheng He Town at Night