tongshan: where provinces collide and history yawns
so i ended up in tongshan district after missing my connection to suzhou. great. just great. it's one of those places you'd blink past on a map if it weren't for the ridiculous name. turns out it's basically xuzhou's forgotten annex with provincial schizophrenia - borders anhui to the south and shandong to the north. which means if you wander off the main road you might accidentally enter a different province. neat.
i just checked and it's 11.2°C right now, feels like 9.68, hope you like that kind of thing. the weather app keeps screaming about "temperate monsoon" which is fancy speak for "miserable if you forgot your jacket." if you get bored, the cities in anhui and shandong are just a short drive away - though honestly? might as well stay here and watch paint dry.
someone told me that tongshan used to be called pengcheng county until some yun/ming/qing bureaucrats decided to chop it up like vegetables. then in 1733 they pulled a "tongshan" out of nowhere - literally translates to "copper-filled hill" because of some island in weishan lake. which sounds way more exciting than it actually is. probably just a rusty spoon or something.
the administrative divisions are a joke - 8 subdistricts and 20 towns. that's like naming every cul-de-sac a separate kingdom. shitun, zhangji, heqiao... they sound like characters from a bad k-drama. no famous food either. i asked around for local specialties and got shrugged shoulders. guess everyone's too busy avoiding provincial border patrol to cook.
no big shots born here either. not a single celebrity or historical badass to brag about. just regular people doing regular things. which... fair enough. the vibe is basically rurban - rural enough to see chickens pecking at trash, urban enough to pretend you're not in the middle of nowhere.
fun fact: it got dissolved in 1952, brought back in 1953, then made a proper district in 2010. that's more administrative drama than a soap opera. and someone whispered that tangshan in hebei keeps getting mixed up with this place. like anyone would mistake copper hills for earthquake ruins.
so yeah. here i am. in tongshan. where the hills aren't copper, the food isn't famous, and the most exciting thing is crossing imaginary provincial lines. if you come here, bring a jacket. and maybe a sandwich. don't say i didn't warn you.
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