On a balmy early evening about a month ago we drove some kilometers south from Kaiping and crossed a little ways into the county of Taishan (see map at end of post). Our mission was to have dinner in an unassuming countryside restaurant (read: converted private home; no name, no address, no license) that had become popular merely by word-of-mouth.
While the others ordered our meal - all from live and fresh farm ingredients - I grabbed my camera and walked down a path off the paved country road. Want to come along? You may like the images better enlarged.
I crossed the bridge to find farmers working in a rice paddy and vegetable field, although it was quite late in the day.
Turning back, I see both sky and river showing off soft pale pastels.
Not long after, the sun painted the sky this rare (for Guangdong) brilliant orange for me.
Taishan, 2012
Taishan, which I've always called the Cantonese Toisan, is a county-level city. You can see most of its borders in pink on this map below, and we didn't drive far into it this evening. The tip of the arrow marks the dinner spot.
Taishan is the place of origin for many of the Chinese who migrated to California to work as contract laborers during the Gold Rush, then later to work on the Pacific Raiway. The Taishanese were among the many migrants from four counties (Kaiping, Enping, Taishan and Xinhui) who established the Chinatowns in North America. Until as late as the 1980s, when more Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese and Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong people started to emigrate to North America, the languages I most heard spoken in Chinatowns were the dialects from this region.
