The heart of Moganshan village sits in a bowl on the east side of the mountain, 30-odd metres below the summit. It is a large and natural amphitheatre, with excellent acoustics. So I heard the brass band long before I saw it, blasting out a tune that sounded uncannily similar to "When the Saints Come Marching in." A big bass drum was driving the music, sometimes to a resounding conclusion, sometimes to a faltering stop in the middle of a bar. My curiosity was stirred.
When I reached a vantage point on Ridge Road I was amazed to see, standing in the village high street below me, half a dozen ladies of a certain age. They were wearing matching red puffa jackets, jeans, and knee-high black boots and all holding brass instruments apart from the one leaning backwards with the drum. They started the tune again, stopped just as suddenly, chatted for a minute, then began again. I had to investigate.
"What's the occasion?" I asked.
"Christmas service," one of them replied. "You want to join us?" Inside the open door behind them, a bare room had been lined with chairs, and a red paper cross was stuck on the wall. I was puzzled by the characters below it.
"Emmanuel," said one of the women, who happened to have a feather duster.
I didn't ask, but from my previous experience of what you can and cannot say about religion in public in China, I imagined that the alternative name was used to please the authorities.
"When is the service?"
"When everyone gets here. They're coming up from town." It was still deceptively early in December.
Moganshan has a long Christian tradition. The village was built by foreign missionaries as a retreat from the heat in the early 1900s. Their legacy of religion and retreat from a different heat continues to this day, usually quietly but sometimes as deafeningly loud as a brass band.
Yet more progress on roads
Last month it was dirt roads. This month it is a surfaced road. The administration bureau has come up with a solution to the chronic traffic jams that clog up the village in the high season. During the off season they are widening the main front road into the village. The back road (see China Café, September 2008) is already wide enough, but it is three times longer.
The front road is extremely steep and contorted by countless hairpin bends, but being shorter it is popular with the cars and small buses that can manage it. The bureau is working on the section from where it enters the lowest part of the village to the high street. I estimate that stretch is about a kilometre long. It is due to be closed for about three months.
Once the works are finished, there will be no narrow places left where two cars cannot pass, which used to cause all the jams. I would humbly submit that it is the impatient and selfish drivers who cause the jams, but it is not my place to say.
The local police can say it however, and have long campaigned for a simple one-way system, which would have solved the problem at almost zero cost.
I think the new road will only encourage yet more and even bigger vehicles to try the front road, it will not teach the city drivers manners, and we will just have more cars and more traffic jams.
What we will have less of—and this is excellent news—are unsightly overhead power cables. The electricity department of the bureau is taking advantage of the roadworks to bury them. Now that is progress.
A school trip from Hong Kong
As well as a retreat for missionaries, in its heyday Moganshan was often referred to by the foreign community as a "children's paradise." The Shanghai Boy Scout troop held its annual camp here, the Shanghai American School seniors dominated the tennis tournament (results carried daily by the North-China Daily News) and every Friday afternoon at 5pm, throughout the summer months, children's hour, a variety show, was held in the village community centre. As the Daily News said of Moganshan in the summer: "The mountain echoes with the cries of children in a Babel of languages."
In November there was a resounding echo of the past when the children's Babel returned. Sixty 14 year olds of all nationalities from the Hong Kong International School spent a week here on a field trip. They learned how to weave baskets with bamboo, how to cook local specialties (more bamboo), they cleared trails, abseiled down cliffs and visited a local school in the valley.
This is the third successive year the field trip has taken place. As before I played a small part in the exercise, acting as a local fixer, spare team supervisor for the end-of-week "adventure race"—for some reason the team I supervise always wins—and also gave a short lecture on the history of the village.
I start my talk to the students with the words: "Moganshan village was built for you, or rather people just like you, a hundred years ago." I go on to explain how and why, and how similar life was in those days to today. As you'd expect, sixty 14 year olds look at me as if I am slightly mad. Then, after the prize giving for the adventure race, at 5pm, the children put on a variety show, just as they used to in the century before.
