Eighteen kilometers
from the city center and a crowded 15-minute bus ride from the huge metro
terminus at Xinzhuang, the township of Qibao is a different kind of
neighborhood. An official heritage attraction, a stroll through a past
violently disavowed for its feudalism during the Cultural Revolution but now
embraced as folkloric national culture, Qibao is newly elegant with canals and
bridges, narrow pedestrianized streets lined with reconstructed Ming and Qing
dynasty buildings, storefronts selling all kinds of snack foods, teas, and
craft goods to Shanghainese and other visitors, and a set of specimen buildings
skillfully renovated as sites of living culture: a temple with Han, Tang, and
Ming dynasty architectural features, a weaving workshop, an ancient tea-house,
a famous wine distillery, and—in a house built specifically for the sport by
the great Qing emperor Qianlong—Shanghai’s only museum dedicated to fighting
crickets.
All these crickets were collected here in Qibao, says Master Fang,
the museum’s director, standing behind a table laden with hundreds of gray clay
pots, each containing one fighting male and, in some cases, its female sex
partner. Qibao’s crickets were famous throughout East Asia, he tells us, a
product of the township’s rich soils. But since the fields here were sold off
in 2000, crickets have been harder to find. Master Fang’s two white-uniformed
assistants fill the insects’ miniature water bowls from pipettes and we humans
all drink pleasantly astringent tea made from his recipe of seven medicinal
herbs.
Master Fang has considerable presence, the brim of his white canvas
hat rakishly angled, his jade pendant and rings, his intense gaze, his animated
storytelling, his throaty laugh. Michael and I are drawn to him immediately and
hang on his words. “Master Fang is a cricket master,” confides his assistant Ms. Zhao. “He has forty years
experience. There is no one more able to instruct you about crickets....”
