China is not necessarily known for being an animal-loving country. Rather, Chinese people are infamous for putting on their dinner plate whatever moves in nature – a stereotype that we can confirm.
If you get an English menu or wander over a Chinese market, you find all sorts of animals you never thought of as food: snakes, frogs, turtles, cats, dogs. You can buy the animals alive or they will slaughter them for you – just pick one out from the cages or basins. Sometimes it seems more like a zoo than a food market.
But it’s not all about eating animals. Chinese people seem actually very fond of being surrounded by living animals as well. In Chengdu, we visited a pet market – a huge street lined with shops selling crazy-looking fish for aquariums, turtles of all sizes, tiny fluorescent frogs, birds, rabbits, cats and dogs (in the same wire cages than on the food market). Some animals seem almost a must-have interior in more traditional Chinese houses.
In the beautiful courtyards, you often find a wooden cage with a songbird in it, and there is always a little pond or basin with goldfish and turtles in it. If you take a closer look at your table decoration, you might also find a fish circling in the flower vase.
Curiously, we also noticed that there are often many of these wooden bird cages standing around when people sit in the parks and play cards or mahjong – but we didn’t quite get what was going on. The mystery got solved when we got up really early one morning to see the sunrise over Lijiang old town.
We strolled through a park, and there they were: the Chinese, taking their birds for a walk. They came with the cages, hung them on the trees, where the caged birds joined into the morning concert of all the other free birds in the forest. The men did Tai Chi exercises in the morning sun, and it was such a serene moment that we only tiptoed around not to disturb it. When we descended from the foresty hill down into the bustle of the city, the Chinese were already munching on chicken claws for breakfast in the streets – well, they love their birds in many ways…
