Chao Yang Jie-Bar Street Yantai, Shandong, China

Chao Yang Jie

 

Sometimes you just have to hop on the bus and see what you can find. The double decker number 17 bus runs along the road in front of my complex of 18-storey apartment towers and past a couple of universities before it joins with the coast road. It’s designated a tourist bus, though it’s the same price as other buses, 1 Yuan—about 15 cents. It travels beside the wide, long promenade along the beach, past an old fort built into a rocky headland, the new aquarium, a reconstructed fisherman’s wharf area with a sort of neo-British tower architecture, and the 125 year old Winery, now The Wine Culture Museum, as it makes its way to downtown. The other terminus is close to my school, in a new high tech corridor of wide boulevards and buildings rising from converted farm fields.

I got off somewhere near the train station and port. I kept my bearings and wandered around past tall office towers and shopping complexes, small and large shops, a new performance theater and museum, an old guild hall for sailors and merchants with a fabulous phoenix and dragon incised gate, and lots of small restaurants.

Yantai has been inhabited for a long time, and in China that can mean a thousand years or more. This fast growing city sits at the tip of the Shandong Peninsula. The harbor is a good, natural one, and it has been used for trading for centuries. There are a couple of long beaches broken by low headlands and islands poke out of the horizon on clear days. There is a large ferry terminal at the port in downtown, big cargo ships go in and out and massive oil platforms are built and shipped around the world from there. Ferries depart into Bohai Bay in the Yellow Sea and cross to Dalian in northern China, Incheon in South Korea, and even the southern islands of Japan.

As it grew dark it seemed time to head back down the coast towards home. But still I strolled until the buildings began to grow quaint, old, and oddly angled. A pedestrian alley opened up heading towards the sea. A cool wind blew down the alley. A bike shop and a bar flanked the entrance to the narrow street. It seemed a good omen. I walked into Choa Yang Jie.

On the narrow street, a few trees arched over the smooth stone, soft colored lights twirled slowly, and red, yellow and green signs in Chinese script flashed unobtrusively in the evening light. Choa Yang Jie, (jie=street), also called Bar Street, is about a quarter mile long. At one end it is bordered by a narrow seaside street where surely many a sailor has walked. There’s a Sailors Hotel, and just down a bit is a Chinese Navy Pier. Yantai’s main tourist draw, Yantai Hill, juts into the sea there. It was a small foreign concession area, where a few foreign traders were allowed to live and work beginning in the late 1800’s. The dwellings wind and wrap around the hill, old and European. A lighthouse sends it signal out, from the spot where fires used to be built to warn of Japanese pirates. On Choa Yang Je and a couple of the surrounding streets are still a few courtyard-houses whose dim interiors are just glimpsed through creaky wooden French doors on heavy wooden frames embedded into the stone. The buildings are grey and tan two and three story solid stone structures with red clay roofs and small architectural details around the windows and entrances—a stone dragon sculpture, curved and slab stone entrance steps, ornamental iron, shutters, rounded windows and inlaid columns of stone.

Probably many of the old buildings were torn down, but Choa Yang Jie and a couple other streets are still there—atmospheric narrow streets with a string of small bars built into the old stone and brick buildings. Many of them have small, intimate stages with English names like Druid’s Pub, The Jazz Bar, and Annika’s. At the other end of the street, just beyond where I entered, the 50-story, well-lit, curvaceous skyscrapers of downtown rise up from the half-mile wide, flat inland strip of land, which then slopes up to thousand foot hills topped by a couple of curved-roof Chinese temples. In between the tall buildings and wide boulevards of downtown are plane tree-lined, narrower streets of pre-boom China with five to ten story apartment complexes and shops and restaurants at street level.

That first night I decided to leave the street without venturing into an establishment. The buses would stop running and I had had a long day. I felt happy with my discovery of this enchanting place.

Druid’s Irish Pub was my destination the next weekend when I made it down to Choa Yang Jie. It is small but comfortable spot with a few wooden booths and a wooden floor. The smiling, young, longhaired Chinese waitress sat me down in a corner booth with a view to the street. It was 8, and bit late for dinner. No one else was there, but I had the attention of the waitress and her hostess in training. I ordered a burger and fries with a Tsing Tao lager for ten bucks. The meal was decent—the hamburger tasted of good grain-fed beef and the French fries where full of the fried root vegetable goodness. It was my first western dinner since I’d arrived here a month ago. When there is a plethora of good Chinese food for 3 dollars a bowl and you have eclectic tastes as I do, the western food isn’t much of a draw. I had to stop my self from getting a couple of grilled skewers of food from the street vendor as I walked towards Druid’s; the smoky scent of charcoal and the display of vegetable, seafood and meat was enticing, but the cold and my mission to try out an expat establishment led me on into the comfy confines of the pub.  I topped my meal off with a well-made piece of cheesecake swathed in a berry glaze and a tap of Guinness, which brought my tab up. The waitress brought the beer down from upstairs, which clued me in to the fact that there might be a bit more to Druids then this small restaurant. I did eventually make it upstairs. But by then my Guinness was gone. The bar seemed comfortable. A Caucasian couple sat in a corner and a couple of smiling young Chinese women were at the bar in high stools and they warmly bid me to stay. A small stage was in the corner, but there was no music that night, so I decided to wander off down the street to see if other places might be happening.

I heard music—an acoustic guitar and a pleasing female singing in Chinese in the mode of modern singer songwriters like Mason Jennings, Ryan Adams, or Brandi Carlyle. I followed the sound by going off the street, under a section of old building that lead to an inner three-story courtyard. Odd pieces of furniture and some miscellaneous tools where lying about in the courtyard, looking like an abandoned workshop. A handwritten sign in Chinese with an arrow pointed up the wide staircase. A tremendously thick wooden railing ran up along the stairs and continued to wrap around the mezzanine. Another hand-written Chinese sign pointed to the double wooden doors with large, ancient metal rings for handles that signaled the end of the balcony. To enter would require opening them, stepping in over the lower wooden section of the door, directly into the middle of the bar. I peeked in through the slit and saw a Chinese couple sitting at a table, but that was about all I saw, and still the sweet voice continued and I hesitated. But after a couple of minutes, an older, non-descript women in what seemed like a cleaners uniform came up the stairs, she motioned to go in and so I followed her through the doors.

Immediately, a short, thin, middle-aged woman with a narrow, laughing face smiled at me and ushered me to the small bar, which was at one end of the rectangular room. A seat was made for me and I bought a beer from the young Chinese female bartender with long black hair who was dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket. The bar, like the railing, was of extraordinarily thick wood. It curved up at one end and seemed to be a section of an old junk’s prow. The room was dimly lit with a red glow. Red Chinese parasols where attached to the walls along with some old paintings and maritime nic-nacs. A small upper loft made of thick wood, with a table or two overlooked the stage.  The palette of soft red colors and heavy, old wood seemed to situate this place as only possible on the coast of the Yellow Sea.

Smartly dressed Chinese couples, the women in black knit dresses with black tights, the men in dark, well-tailored dress slacks and black pea coats occupied the few wooden tables on the floor leading up to the stage. Tall green beer bottles stood empty on the tables and one group was eating a collection of street food on sticks. Cigarette smoke swirled around. At the end of the narrow room, on the small stage, the male guitar player with a baseball cap sat on a stool strumming, head down to his strings. His partner, a 21-year old, sylphlike, women with a round, soft face accentuated by her bob haircut, doe eyes, and white cashmere sweater, sang from the other stool.

The man next to me bought me a serving of peanuts served in a heavy, stylized boat shaped bowl. They tasted of sea salt, slightly sweet and hot with a scattering of dry red pepper slivers. They were redolent of the earth of Shandong Province, tan and richly roasted. Shandong is renowned for their peanuts, among other food crops such as apples, pears, and grapes. Nowhere else have I had such rich tasting peanuts. Only perhaps the steamed peanuts from the volcanic soil of Sumatra compared, but they were a rawer, natural taste; whereas these peanuts partook of a refined preparation typical of the Chinese aesthetic seen in their food and landscaping, a sort of human-altered appreciation of nature.

After a while, in stepped, over the threshold an older, debonair Caucasian man. The hostess, who he apparently knew from their warm, French double cheek kiss greeting, seated him next to me. We soon struck up a conversation. He went by the name of Jack. He was a charming Frenchman from Paris (whose last name was in fact Charmeteau) who had been living in Yantai for 3 years, married to a Chinese woman. He had friends on this street and offered to take me on a tour of the establishments. And so we did, until quite late at night.

It was a good. At the last place, I met the proprietress of La Casa. She was a middle aged Chinese woman dressed all in black, a v-neck sweater and black leather pants, with long dangling beaded earrings in the shape of a triangle with a necklace to match. She had a warm smile affixed to her flat, round face and her cheeks were rouge and appeared to glow as she laughed with a small hint of middle age lines around her eyes on her otherwise smooth complexion. She had lived in Switzerland for 8 years and is married to an American. On my next visit we talked of Shakespeare. She favors the history plays. She has kids, one of whom lives in Switzerland with one of her friends. He snowboards.

It was a late night after many beers. The bars there apparently stay open until the last customer leaves. I’m not sure if Jack and I were those customers that night, probably not, but it was after 2 AM. At the end of the street, on the city side, taxis waited for us. I showed my taxi driver a picture of the shopping mall next to where I lived and he was happy to take me there, even happier when I could understand and speak a few words of Chinese (“you,”-“ni” and my most practiced phrase, “I am an American”-“wo shi Meiguo ren”) The bus ride down the coast was 15 cents and this taxi ride back was 5 dollars, a fine deal for a guy who doesn’t have to pay for a car, insurance, or gas now and who gets a chauffeured ride into work everyday on a wide road along the sea.