Sponge Cities

Sponge City, 12 in  x 18 in, watercolor and paper collage

I have not  posted for 6 months.  Mother nature hasn't been kind to us. In Oklahoma, we survived drought, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods. I used to get tickets from the city for wild flowers growing too tall, lawn exceeding 18 inches, and now, the tie changes.  I was so happy to know in L.A. people quit washing car and proudly display their dirty cars to conserve water. My pretty un-unified lawn and overgrown shrubs and trees are my way to let it be.

However," let it be" for water conservation is , in fact,  not a good idea. Water, come to us, please.

We all know the Inca, just like the Romans were great masters of water systems.  Thanks to the combination of agricultural terraces and efficient waterways, the Incas had managed to bring fresh drinking water from mountain streams to provide water during drought times for centuries. I remember when I lived with my grandma in the country side, she would hand me a soap to wash myself with when it rained to save water. Lately, I notice the city of Chicago has to dig a humongous tunnel to lead runoff water to a huge pond.

This brings up the possibility of building a sponge city ( not the tourist attractions or where to dine) to collect water. This is the least we can design in the shadow of Roman and Inca's ingenuous adaptation of aqueducts.

Links:

Building Sponge City

Build Sponge Eco-Cities to Adapt Hydroclimatic Hazards

A Last Look

by W.S. Merwin

Even the words are going somewhere urban
where they hope to find friends
waiting for them

some of the friends will think of trees as pleasant in a minor
     way
much alike after all
to us

some of the friends will never be aware of a single tree
they will live in a world without a leaf
where the rain is misfortune

                                                                               ***

So bright

Like jewels

Glistening

What I cannot capture

I took it out

Sorry, emerald green

- yiren

                                                                                                                                                                                                               

China's Great Green Wall

In a Geico commercial, the Mongol army stopped at the Great Wall and asked "What should we do?” We know from history that the Mongol armies marching through the gate eventually overturned the Song Dynasty. Nowadays, Chinese, themselves, ask the same question "what should we do?” This time, the relentless foe to the capital city is a sandstorm blowing from the northern desert. In the north-west, north and north-east of China, starting in 1978, row of trees designed to protect Beijing from sandstorms with a goal to last for 73 years, cover an area of 4.069 million square kilometers (42.4% of China’s total territory) to surpass Roosevelt’s Great Plains Shelterbelt and Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. The ambitious “Three North Shelterbelt Project" is by far the world's largest tree-plant project. This was to be China’s “Green Great Wall”.

I knew neither the scale of the desertification in China nor the huge number of people in Inner Mongolia who have been move off land. A big portion of the trees that were planted are withering. Many have died of age as those grown from cuttings have a shorter lifespan. Afforestation in China is a serious business. It is not just planting trees but a monumental effort to restore the productivity of the soil.  Furthermore, it seems the idea that wealthy industrialized countries invest money to adopt tropical forests and pay indigenous people to be rainforest police in order to protect trees is a win win situation. 

***

In early September, famed primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall visited Tulsa and opened her talk to students of a private school, one of the member sites of her Roots &Shoots program. Before leaving Tulsa, Dr. Goodall helped to plant a tree which she affectionately named “Treebeard” on the West side of the River (in the Arboretum off 21^st Street).

https://www.upwithtrees.org/files/2814/1082/0020/Dr._Goodall_small.jpg

Is China's Green Great Wall set to fall?

Afforestation in China: Great Green China

Let a billion trees bloom

Future Forest

The Bloody Tomatoes

The remote Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region is not only a steady oil, coal and gas provider, powering China's economic development, it also gives the nation's people, and even people around the world, good things to eat. There are juicy, sweet Turpan grapes and Hami melons, yet Xinjiang is most famed for its ripe, red tomatoes. Officials in Xinjiang realized very early that a resource dependent economy such as fossil fuels is ultimately not sustainable so they also took advantage of Xinjiang's natural conditions, and have cultivated the tomato trade, or what they call the "Red Industry." (Yu Tianyu, China Daily, 2009-01-12) 

I can never imagine most of the tomato paste for catch-up in the State of Oklahoma comes from Xinjiang. However, it is not hard to understand the 30-42 North latitude is near perfect region for growing tomatoes, while Xinjiang has adequate sunlight and a temperature range that produces large tomatoes.

However, when I traveled in Xinjiang last summer, I missed the close encounters with tomato plants. Not yet the harvest season, and no sign of tomato trucks on the road. I was one month too early for Xinjiang's tomato harvest and too close to the uprising by Uyghur in Urumqi just couple week ago.  The group I traveled with had to cancel the train travel and stayed with the main attractions for safety consideration. The next big news came from this autonomous region was in March 2014 that a mass knife attack at a train station in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming that left 33 dead and 130 were injured. Members of a separatist group from Xinjiang, in northwest China, are believed to have carried out the assault,

Before I ended my trip in China, I watched the amazing Urumqi International Folk Dance Festival on TV; visited many water towns on East of China and ate even more watermelon.  I could not believe the amount of sand and dust on me. The next time I learned something else about tomato is from the science news, researchers had found a fossilized 52.2 million-year-old tomatillo in Argentina, making it the earliest fruit from the tomato family ever found.

The Bezeklik Caves with the Flaming Mountains near Turpan

Entering the Gaochang Ruins

Inside Emin Minaret

Inside Idkah Mosque

Mellons

Bagels and Naan

  

The Kashgar Rawap has a small bowl-shaped body covered with skin and five metal strings, and is decorated with ornamental horns.

Duppi Caps

Abakh  Khoja's Tomb

Kashgar Live Stock Market

Goat Feed

Walking through Kashgar Old City

The Lowest, the Hottest, and the Sweetest

The small city of Turpan in Xinjiang is located on the northern rim of the Turpan Depression, which averages  505 feet below the sea level; one of the lowest depressions on earth only rivaled by the Dead Sea.  In the summer, this “Land of Fire” (Huozhou, in Chinese) can reach 104 F with blustering winds and in the winter the climate drops to 5F. Thanks the ingenious Uygur peoples’ Karez irrigation system, this otherwise lifeless land is an agricultural oasis, renowned for its seedless grapes, raisins and sweet wines. Who would imagine this lowest and hottest region in China produces the best melons and grapes in Asia! When traveled in Xinjiang in the summer, the ubiquitous meal of tomatoes sautéed with eggs is offered on every Chinese restaurant’s lunch and dinner menu (I will talk about Xinjiang’s tomato on my next blog!). Yet, dining in Xinjiang’s Uyghur home style restaurants, one of the high lights of travelling the Silk Road, I enjoyed peaches, apricots, cantaloupe, Nan bread, fresh yogurt and watermelons at every meal.  

Turpan City’s green oasis arises from Karez technology (Karez means “well” in Persian). The Karez is an ancient aqueduct system that provides water to an inhospitable land at the edge of  the Tarim Desert. The system that brings water to Turban ranks alongside the Dujanagyan Irrigation system (built in 256 BCE) and Grand Canal (earlier section dates back to the fifth century BCE), as one of China’s three great water projects. The Karez displays an astonishing level of engineering innovation.  It is highly probable that without the life-giving tributaries created through the Karez irrigation system, the culture that arose on the Tarim Desert Basin could never have reached the size and sophistication necessary to support the Silk Road trade route and allow it to flourish. (Xinjiang, China’s Central Asia by Jeremy Tredinnick)

An article from the farwestchina.com: Uyghur Customs

Lunch at a private Uygur house

Turpan’s grapes are fully mature in July, but raisin grapes are harvested in August to increase the sugar content. Grapes are hung on vines in special drying houses for about 30 days. Those remain on vines are air-dried and become green raisins, while those which fall off are sun-dried and become dark raisins. 

Grape trellises at Miyim Haji Karez Museum

A drying house, the open brick work letting hot air flow through to dehydrate the grapes and create Turpan raisins.

Grapes are draped over wooden racks that reach up to the building's ceiling.

An underground tunnel where a real Karez channel flows.

Open channel of Karez

The girls of Xinjiang are all like flowers ( I bought a key chain from one of the girls after this sweet pose near Gaochang ).