Tea merchant manor
25/9/2004 8:41
Shanghai Daily news
In part two of a travel series
on Shanxi Province, Michelle Qiao visits another extraordinary home of an old
Chinese businessman family The Chang Family Home in Jinzhong City, Shanxi
Province is a little known home, which only opened to the public three years
ago.
This large-scale manor is overwhelming at first sight -- the gate is a
high city-gate tower, which looks as impressive as parts of the Forbidden City
in Beijing. A 100-meter-long path paved with gray stones leads you into a maze
of ancient houses. It's hard to imagine this was once a home as it is more like
a city. Chang's ancestors were penniless farmers until the eighth-generation
Chang Wei made a small fortune selling textiles in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province.
His third son Chang Wanda chose a more challenging business. In the mid-18th
century, Russians demanded more Chinese tea, but the trade between the two
countries was undeveloped at that time. But Chang Wanda began to build up the
renowned ``tea road.'' He purchased a mountain planted with tea trees in Wuyi
Mountain, Fujian Province, which produced high-quality oolong tea. He processed
the tea leaves into tea bricks and transported them to Moscow by ship after a
camel trip on a road, which was more than 5,000 kilometers long. At that time
tea occupied 94 percent of China's export to Russia, and Chang controlled 40
percent of the business. To carry the tea such a long way, Chang stored tea
leaves in iron cans and wooden boxes to maintain its freshness and original
flavor. They also employed doctors for each camel team to provide medical
treatment to team members and Mongolian residents on the way. In addition to
business, the family paid great attention to merit and education, which earned
them the name of ``Confucius merchants.'' The family opened 17 private schools
for its descendants. ``We had math, history, geography, music and sports
classes,'' recalls Chang Guohui, a 15th-generation descendant of the family.
``Our teachers were excellent students from Taiyuan Normal School. The school
had better facilities than other public schools and a teacher often played the
organ. The music was so heavenly, it still lingers in my ears today.'' After
making a great fortunate from the tea business, the family started constructing
the manor in 1768. When finished, it had 4,000 rooms and 13 gardens. The
magnificent family ancestral temples, drama stages, dazzling stone and wood
carvings, gardens and windows in 120 different styles paint a vivid picture for
the family's once glorious life. It is said that the family were so picky with
the quality of bricks that each worker was only allowed to pile up 200 bricks a
day. A local tour guide says: ``This manor suffered a lot of damage during the
`cultural revolution' (1966-76). What you see today is only one fourth of the
original manor.'' The manor housed more than 2,000 people including 1,000 family
members and 1,000 servants, who lived in a traditional Chinese way. Elderly
brothers lived in the east while the younger ones the west. Unmarried daughters
lived on the second floor while their maids on the first. Many women in the
family died early. For example, twelfth-generation Chang Bing had eight wives
and concubines, seven of whom died before the age of 30. People says it was
because the husbands were always busy, leaving their wives lonely. The Chang's
tea business flourished for more than 150 years. In the early part of the 20th
century, the business suffered from wars and gradually ended. Wandering through
the 40,000 square meter of houses and 80,000 square meters of gardens, it's hard
not to be deeply impressed by the grandeur of this lavish manor. How to get
there: Two hours by air from Shanghai to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi
Province, then an-hour drive from Taiyuan to Jinzhong City.
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