Liaoyuan is in Jilin, in Northeast China.
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Jilin · City Guide
Liaoyuan, Socks by the Billion and an Imperial Deer Park.
Overview
Why Go
Liaoyuan turns out cotton socks in the billions of pairs a year and is one of China's large production bases for them. It is the sort of industry nobody names a city for and almost everybody wears.
Dongfeng County is one of the main centres of Chinese peasant painting, with flat bold colour and farm subjects, and a dedicated gallery. Painters are farmers who paint rather than trained artists.
Dongfeng held the Qing court's deer park inside the Shengjing hunting grounds, and the county still farms sika deer at scale. The animal has been the local economy for three centuries under two very different systems.
A camp here held senior Allied officers captured in the Pacific between 1944 and 1945, among them the American commander who surrendered in the Philippines and the British commander who surrendered at Singapore. The site is preserved.
The East Liao River rises in these hills and runs west into the Liao. The city is named for it, and the source is marked in a forest park at the top of the catchment.
See
A gallery in Dongfeng hung with peasant painting from the county and from elsewhere in China, with studios attached. The colour is the opening thing and the subject matter the second. Ninety minutes.
Preserved camp buildings with an exhibition on the officers held here in the last year of the Second World War. Documentary and plainly presented. Ninety minutes, and signage is mostly Chinese.
Sika deer farmed across the county, with a museum covering the imperial park and the modern trade. Visits are to working farms rather than a wildlife park. Two hours.
Mixed forest on low hills with streams and paths, named for the wild onion that grows in it. Good autumn colour and cool in summer. Half a day.
A marked spring in a wooded hollow at the head of the catchment, with a short path to it. Modest, and the point is the name of the city standing beside it. An hour.
A reservoir in the hills used for fishing and weekend walking, with a shore path and simple restaurants. The local day out rather than a destination. Two hours.
On the Map
Approximate locations of the attractions above, across Liaoyuan.
Eat
Farmed sika deer, stewed with mushrooms or grilled in thin slices. Lean, faintly sweet and drier than beef. Restaurants in Dongfeng serve it as the county's own product.
A wild allium picked in the forest in spring, stronger than a chive and sold by the bundle for a few weeks alone. Eaten raw with bean paste or folded into dumpling filling.
Cone-shaped steamed buns of coarse maize flour, dense and faintly sweet, eaten with soup and pickles. It was the staple when this was poor coal country and it stayed on the menu.
Meat and vegetables stewed in an iron pot with cornmeal cakes stuck round the rim to cook in the steam, so the whole meal comes out of one vessel. The northeastern standard for a table.
Do
Peasant painting uses flat unmixed colour and no perspective on purpose, which is why it reads from across a room. Stand close to one and then far back; the difference is the technique.
The exhibition is documentary and specific about who was held here and when. For visitors from the countries those officers came from, it is an unexpected place to find that part of the Second World War.
Antlers grow in spring and early summer, which is when the farms are busiest and many interesting to see. Ask what visitors are looking at rather than assuming; this is livestock farming, not a protected area.
The wild onion comes up for a few weeks in May and the forest edges fill with people picking it. Markets sell it the same day. It is the one strictly seasonal thing here.
When
Mild and green with wild vegetables in the markets and the deer in velvet. The strongest window of the year.
Warm and humid, with the forest parks cool and the reservoirs busy at weekends. Thunderstorms many afternoons.
Clear, cool and strong autumn colour through the hills. The other good window and the ideal light.
Cold to minus twenty-five with snow on the ground for months. The gallery and the camp site are open and empty.
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Liaoyuan is in Jilin, in Northeast China.
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