The Oldest People in China

Born March, 31^st 1899, Lu Pan Zhen is the first to warn others that smoking is bad for your health.

It’s a vale of tears, a long and winding road, yet we still cling to life as though we’d live forever, given the choice. Most of us city dwellers despair of seeing a hundred years. Such longevity must be reserved for mountain-dwelling monks, or seaside sushi -eaters who do little other than drink green tea and work on their bonsai collections.

Yet Rugao, an industrialized city of 1.5 million in Jiangsu, boasts the largest group of centenarians in China, over 250. Another 2000 have reached the age of ninety five, 5800 ninety three, and close to 50,000 are over eighty. Rugao is within the confines of Shanghai’s economic circle, so air and overall environmental quality can scarcely be credited for so many venerable souls. Rather, the ‘secret’ is an ingrained adherence to traditional Chinese health precepts, all but lost in today’s culture of health through medicine.

Together forever: Liang Shounian and Zhang Youzhen have been married over 80 years.

Confucius was too busy setting everyone straight morally to have much time for dialects on health. But one of his most pithy pronouncements concerned nutrition: Bu shi, bu shi. It reads like “Is not, is not”, but he was actually saying, in antiquated Mandarin, “Not time, don’t eat.” In other words, don’t eat food out of season. If you must have your tomato and cucumber salad two days after Christmas, do so at your own risk. To traditional Chinese doctors, vegetables are only nutritive if they’ve absorbed the qi of a natural environment and growing cycle. That bright green tomato, chemically enhanced, spray-painted pink then shipped cross-country in a refrigerated truck, is not just valueless but actually detrimental to your health, believe it or not.

The people of Rugao believe it, in any event, and stick to veggies like bai cai, bok choy, during cold months, and ku gua, bitter melon, in the summer. This makes it easier to buy local produce, which, although probably far from organic, has at least been raised close by enough to actually be ripe.

Not that there’s that much vegetable-eating going on in Rugao. Both breakfast and dinner usually consist of simple rice porridge, zhou. A stomach that has spent the night fasting is no gunny sack, and must be coaxed back to digesting. Sure, the continental admonition to breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and sup like a pauper has its merits, but throwing sausage, fried potatoes and coffee at your gut first thing in the morning is akin to rolling out of bed into a sprinter’s stance and trying to make like Ussain Bolt.

Born in 1906, Chen Xiufang still plays with her great-great grandson.

Softened rice, on the other hand, gives your stomach plenty of warm water to get things lubricated, and super-easy to digest nutrition. Naturally there’s a little pickle or preserved egg floating around in their zhou for flavor, Rugao ren are not Buddhist adepts, but nothing to throw a wrench in a sleepy stomach’s warm-up act.

A porridge repeat for dinner might leave you feeling like one of the three bears, but consider: the kidney’s hours of peak function fall between five and seven in the evening, when as luck would have it, everyone but those wacky continentals are at the dinner table. Again, the easy digestive properties of zhou aid the kidneys during their happy hour, whereas the greasy, spicy, sweet and salty gorging most of us indulge in during this time quashes the activity like a drunken stepfather at a slumber party.

Stomach ailments, constipation, insomnia, such modern-day complaints are virtually unheard of in this Chinese city that somehow manages to commit to simple fare. They treat themselves to some solid rice for lunch, but precious little meat on the side. Tofu is much more likely to make an appearance. Heaping portions of vegetables in season round out the biggest meal of the day for Rugao folk, who much like Spaniards, follow their noon repast with a siesta.

Yang Deying conspires with her great-grandson to trick his friend into eating an unripe melon.

But there is more to longevity in Rugao than diet. In nice weather, more sedate folk spend some time in the sun. But instead of laying prostrate and working on their tans, they prefer to let their lightly-clothed backs absorb the sunshine. According to Chinese medicine, this is an unparalleled way to fill the organs with energizing yang and reduce sluggish yin, preventing illness and enhancing endocrine function.

Deep breathing, from the stomach, is also kept in mind as a healthy habit in Rugao. We’ve advised before about the importance of adequate air intake, yet the citizens of Rugao are among the few wise and unhurried enough to take heed. No one’s sure why such widely ignored Chinese health practices are still followed in Rugao, but all can agree they’re to the people’s benefit.

Facial massage is another ostensibly useless yet respected activity in Rugao. A good traditional Chinese doctor can tell much about your overall health just from looking at skin tone of your face. Facial massage is a simple yet effective way to unblock qi points and promote all-around nerve health. Rubbing their hands together with Miyagi-like intensity, Rugao ren apply heated palm to cheek, gently circling and pressing.

The ears aren’t forgotten in these innocent self-massage sessions. Anyone who’s wondered at the occasional Chinese ear covered in tiny pieces of lumpy paper should know that nerves go thence to every point in the body, much as they do from the feet. Gentle kneading and squeezing of the lobes and outer ear is virtually akin to lying down and being worked over by a skilled pair of hands. Thus without aid of pricey specialists, rare medicines, or mountain air do the people of Rugao manage to outlast everyone on their side of the China Sea.

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