First Days in Hohot, Inner Mongolia

First days in Hohot, Inner Mongolia

As I knew before we got there, few Mongols live in Inner Mongolia anymore. It's about 85% Han Chinese nowadays, but in fact the Han Chinese have been engaged in a tug of war for an upper hand in Inner Mongolia for a couple of thousand years. After being there for a while one can see why.

As luck would have it, during our first days in town we stayed in a hotel that is just on the border of the Moslem and Mongolian districts of Hohot. I had no idea that there was such a huge Moslem presence in Hohot. Due to the fact that the economy is taking off, lots of Han Moslems, ethnic Uyghur Moslems and non-Moslem Han Chinese have come to Hohot from far west provinces like Gansu and Xinjiang. Wandering the back alleys in the Moslem district around 9 p.m., we tasted some snacks like hot roasted chestnuts, fried beef dumplings, wind dried beef, and, best of all, delicious greasy mutton roasted on a stick over hot coals with local spices that I could not identify but probably containing cumin. The kids selling it were working for a middle aged Xinjiang Uyghur fellow, but they were Han Chinese from the countryside of Gansu, the province next door, one of the poorest in China. The older one was maybe in his upper teens, but the younger kid looked barely fifteen. They said repeatedly that the place they come from is “very poor” and they looked the part with their quiet manner, dark rough faces and hands, worn down fingernails and brown teeth, all dead giveaways. “Very poor” in this area can mean things like minimal health care, marginal protein intake, limited education and maybe dirt floor houses—things that would make one want to take a chance on moving on and doing just about anything else. I kidded with their boss about how many thousand yuan (rmb) he was paying them per month. He answered with a loud laugh that they were getting a few hundred per month—less than $100 US—plus room and board. But they looked pretty well-fed and I suspect that was their primary motivation for being there.

Just after dark the worshippers in a local mosque were just finishing prayers; most of the people leaving the place on their bicycles were older though there were some younger ones too. All the women had their heads covered but not their faces. Nearby there was also a very large Moslem high school, and restaurants serving religiously appropriate menus were everywhere to be found in the district.

Hohot, a city of 1.4 million, is booming. Baotou, an hour and a half to the west, is the industrial center in Inner Mongolia with its mines and steel mills, but a good bit of the money from resource exploitation in Inner Mongolia seems to be finding its way into Hohot, the provincial capital. New construction and business hotels are everywhere. Tourism is the other big industry. Someone with a strong public relations/advertising background is doing lots of aggressive city planning in Hohot. In the Moslem district all the buildings on the main drag are done in a Mid-East décor of domes and minarets outlined in neon (which happily got turned off around 11 p.m.). Monday was the first day of National Day, celebrating the founding of the PRC and a 3-day national holiday for all workers. However, it was more like a huge city-wide Fourth of July sale at Walmart and a K Mart blue light special rolled into one because nearly every business was open, many of them having nothing to do with direct consumer sales to the throngs of people wandering the streets to shop and sample the street food. Given that there's so much money to be made everyday of the year, why would any fool want to take a day off?

A cab driver we hired to take us to one of the bigger historical sites a bit outside the city turned out to be an ethnic Mongol, but he and his parents were all born in the city in Hohot. I asked him about Mongol-Han relations and he said that they were good. He took a little light razzing in the army (he volunteered for 3 years) about being a mutton eater, but said he never had any problems at all. He recounted his experience in a bilingual Mongolian-Chinese program in high school that he was put into due to his ethnic heritage, but he often skipped the Mongolian language classes because knowing Mongolian wasn't going to do him any good in the future. He didn't grow up speaking the Mongolian at home either. Virtually all shop titles in Hohot are in Mongolian script as well as Chinese characters, but this fellow said that the quality of the Mongolian translations was terrible, probably as bad, he guessed, as the English one sees on signs and T-shirts. He mentioned almost in passing that he has a brother who's studying for a Ph.D. in Japan. This could be testimony of equality of opportunity or just as likely that the family is investing in this brother as the one most likely to succeed.

The place he took us was the tomb of Wang Shaojun（王绍君）, a beautiful Chinese woman who was a commoner but agreed to marry the Mongol chief during the Han dynasty (about 2,000 years ago) to promote peaceful relations between the two peoples and end many years of bloodshed. Due to the success of her mission she was given a lavish burial by the Han dynasty government after her death. On the grounds of the tomb there was also a free live performance of Han era music that was both interesting and enjoyable. Later we visited a district with some Buddhist temples and all around them was a huge area of new construction in traditional architecture—maybe 3 or 4 bocks long and about 2 blocks wide—for shops to make cash off tourists. They were just finishing construction, so there were “for rent” signs for potential shop keepers, but the signs said you could only open a shop if it was for selling cultural kitsch along the themes of the neighborhood or food, of course. One of the temple complexes to the Bodhisattva Kuanyin was being completely rebuilt from the ground up by a company from Hangzhou (way on the other side of China) that specializes in such projects. However, the huge new main temple was being built in concrete, an incredible departure from any other temple restoration project I'd ever seen before anywhere, which is typically done piecemeal maximizing use of original materials by or under the supervision of local monks. I don't think there is going to be as much as a scrap of original material in any of the new structures. I'd love to know who was putting up the cash for this project. This is clearly an economic venture that has nothing to do with Buddhism.

Of the other two temples, one was in fact a rather peaceful place with its original structures intact. It has an inscription from Kangxi, the first Qing emperor, written around 1700 in Chinese, Manchu, Tibetan and Mongol script. It was interesting to see the scripts side by side. In front of one of the statues of Buddha I observed a woman in her 30s giggling slightly and doing a quick embarrassed kowtow (with her family standing sheepishly around) and then drop a 100 yuan note--the only one--into the offerings basket. That could be about10% of an average worker's monthly salary, so maybe it would be no laughing matter for some, though she was pretty well dressed, so the 100 yuan might not be more than she'd spend for a new skirt. She might just as well have been thanking the Buddha for her good fortune as asking for a favor. One might as well cover all one's bases—Pascal’s wager in modern China.

Since October 1st was the actual national day, the day of the proclamation of the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the evening TV was full of appropriate programming—patriotic songs and sketches, etc. Two things of note were that a number of song-sketches gave average people high visibility, one in particular to the hard hat workers doing all the new high rise construction projects going up everywhere around the country. The other thing was the prominent role of the military, both in the performances and in the audience, which was panned frequently by the cameras. Various prizes were given out for artistic and cultural achievements and many of the recipients were in the military. Their acceptance speeches were impassioned declarations of their loyalty to the nation and willingness to sacrifice on its behalf.