After a 5-hour night (we have flown around the globe fast to catch up with sunrise), and a very stiff neck, I am awakened by a lovely Dutch airhostess. I am enjoying my last Western breakfast, daydreaming through the window, when I spot mountains like I have never seen before. It’s as if someone ruffled a tablecloth placed on top of the earth, and the houses below are about to tumble. The earth has rippled to created folds that remind me of silk ribbons, what a nice welcome from the country of silk.
We are welcomed by Feng Xue Qin, our host at Hangzhou Normal University, and two lovely and pretty young students offer to take us to the Silk Market. A scary drive in a taxi with no seatbelt, horns beeping all around, and people on electric motorbikes whizzing passed us with no helmets. My health and safety customs are shattered right away!
We arrive in a busy shopping mall, buzzing with people and big green bags of goods being wrapped and unwrapped right in the middle of a 7-floor building, it gives me a sense of what an ancient silk market might have looked like, with lots of people bargaining and bartering silk for other goods. Dorothy thinks we might have swapped Blue Zaffra copper extracted from European mines for Chinese silk. All the colours we can see have been created form the ground, either with shades of Copper ores or plants cultivated for their colour. In England, purple was the colour used for the Bishop. Black was the hardest colour to make as it would easily fade away from the fibre.
We reach the top floor by lift and wander through rainbows of colours and patchworks of patterns, with silk scarves and garments varying in price from £1 to £100 depending on the quality of the silk. To be honest, at that point, I cannot see a great difference, but the girl can. Eyes are not enough to judge, touching and feeling is needed. I cannot understand what they say but I know when they are mentioning silk because in Chinese they say “ssssss”. It sounds as smooth and shiny as it looks.
I leave the market with a scarf for my mother, mother in law, grandmother and grandmother’s sisters. I wish I knew more women I could buy silk scarves for!
Tiredness is now hitting me, but we need to eat. Back on university campus we head for the canteen, desperate to find dumplings. Unfortunately (and obviously!), all the menus are written in Chinese, and the 2 girls have now left us… We suddenly spot a kiosk with food on display… saved! We don’t have to choose blind we can point!
A delicious soup with noodles and vegetables was just what we needed. Just a bit spicy, Dorothy scares me to death as she nearly chokes to death with the heat! I rush to ask for water but cannot find a way to describe it with my hands and facial
expression only. I spot on the counter a soft juice of an orange colour, not orange juice, and I’ll never know what it was, but this cooled down the fiery Chinese dragon lodged in Dorothy’s mouth!
