Picture a traditional oriental scene of someone carrying items, perhaps a farmer, or a trader, and you’ll most likely visualize a carrying pole balanced on shoulders, with loads on either ends of the pole. When I was in China, this was a less common way of carrying things.
While you do see people using polythene bags, people with baskets on their backs was a more common sight, especially in rural China.
Yes, you read it correctly. Baskets on their Backs. Here is a close-up of a back basket. It’s deep and has string tied to it, shoulder-width apart.
In a crowded market, these ladies were only two out of several with baskets on their backs. I even saw a young child in the basket. At that point I realised I had not seen a single pushchair in this busy market.
You can see people with baskets on their backs in the city too. I spied this person carrying an enormous rice cooker on his back in Chengdu.
In the reference book The Dairy of Left-Behind Children, there were accounts of the children trekking through the mountainous paths to fetch water. They carried their buckets in these baskets. The buckets held 15-20 L of water. For even heavier loads, the baskets were lined with metal, as you can see from this picture of a construction worker.
In my book, Secrets of the Great Fire Tree, I described, on several occasions, Kai and other characters carrying baskets on their backs. They carried water, clothes and even their lunch.
In my article about my retail experience in China, I mentioned about how the vendors came and set up stall on the ground. Here the basket doubles up as a table to display the rabbit on sale.
Even when the load is too bulky for the basket, some find alternative ways to carry their load, as you can see from this picture I snapped while passing through a town.
Although I did see little children being carried in these baskets while I was out there, I did not want to take pictures of them. So I haven’t got one to show you, but carrying people in these back baskets is not limited to children. I came across this video recently, of an elderly couple, where the wife has mobility problems and her husband carries her around in a basket on his back. A real-life story of one of Aesop’s Fable.
In a later post, I will talk about the mountainous area and the barriers to ever day things we take for granted, like getting to and from school/ work. I’m giving you a sneak preview because, at 2.40 min you can see people with baskets on their backs, climbing up the mountain, just going about in their everyday lives.
Baskets on their Backs. For a long time, this was the title of my Middle-Grade book. I had chosen this because it was such a common sight in rural China, the setting of my book. Eventually I changed it to Secrets of the Great Fire Tree because it gave more of an essence of the story. The book will be published by Aurelia Leo in May 2019.
