Xie Yufeng, a 39-year-old prepare dinner, throws a fowl up as he shoots a bead via a tube for it to catch in mid-air AP
Passersby in Beijing throughout winter or early spring would possibly occur upon teams of residents enjoying fetch with birds. The gamers blow plastic beads into the air via carbon tubes for the birds — usually from the migratory wutong species — to catch and return, in trade for a deal with.
It’s a Beijing custom relationship again to the Qing Dynasty, which dominated between the seventeenth century and early twentieth century. Today, solely about 50 to 60 folks in Beijing are believed to nonetheless apply it.
Xie Yufeng, a 39-year-old prepare dinner, is certainly one of them. Late Tuesday afternoon, Xie gathered with a number of associates close to Workers’ Stadium, the place residents usually congregate within the evenings to bounce in tandem, apply tai chi or play the Chinese yo-yo.
Xie and his associates introduced alongside their winged playmates — most of them wutong birds, with their distinctive yellow beaks and which fly southward from China’s northeast to Beijing each fall to flee the bitter winter.
Domesticating the birds and coaching them for the bead-catching sport could take 4 to 5 months, Xie stated. Players educate the birds to fetch by first throwing seeds into the air, and later changing them with plastic beads. Every time the birds retrieve the beads, they’re rewarded with a snack. In the previous, the beads have been made from bone.
“In order to do this well, patience is the most important quality for a player,” Xie stated.
The custom is claimed to have taken root within the capital with the arrival of the Qing Dynasty, a Manchu group that took management of Beijing within the mid-1600s.
Manchu nobles, dwelling across the Forbidden City, are believed to have popularized catching and coaching birds as a pastime.
Today, residents of Beijing’s conventional alleyways, known as hutong in Chinese, usually nonetheless elevate birds in cages and will even take the entire birdcages out for walks.
The wutong fowl house owners normally launch them in late spring and permit them emigrate again to the northeast — solely to catch or buy new ones the next fall.
