A few posts ago, I featured a gallery of monochromatic photographs of the old Qi Bao teahouse, and today I follow it up with a "photo-film" made of photographs and ambient audio recorded of the conversations I heard on site. I also added recordings (and a video clip) of Ms. Chen Lan Jun's electrifying Pingtan (评弹) performance. All these to give an aural texture and a -"as if you were there"- feel to the photographs.
The old (or ancient) teahouse is in the old water-town of Qi Bao (七寶鎮) where the highlight is the daily storytelling known as Pingtan. This is a genre of musical storytelling that originated in Suzhou at the end of the Ming dynasty and employs the Suzhou dialect as its linguistic medium.
On the occasions I was there. the storyteller performed her art of talking, joking, singing and acting; all accompanied by a three-stringed lute (sanxian). She had a lot of charisma, and knew how to keep her audience spellbound during her performance.
Most of the audience were elderly men who had paid around 2 yuan ($0.30) for a tea-pot and a place to snooze for as long as they want. I gathered that the audience must've heard these stories countless of times, and yet they frequently return...perhaps partly for the cheap tea, entertainment, the companionship and nostalgia for times past.
By any stretch of the imagination, this teahouse cannot be commercially viable... so it must has the support of the Qi Bao municipality or similar; perhaps on account that Chinese storytelling is also considered as an intangible cultural heritage, and receives governmental subsidies.
To my knowledge, there are fewer and fewer teahouses in Shanghai and its environs that still retain the authenticity of this one. The well known teahouses have been tarted up to cater to domestic and foreign tourists, and although traditional tea is served at them, the atmosphere is nothing like the one in Qi Bao.
