In the middle of the Middle Kingdom

[click on an image to enlarge]

Introduction
Hong Kong

Mid-Autumn Festival
The Island and Harbor
A seminar
The Peak and Central

Beijing

Orientation and night market
Tian'an Men, Forbidden City, Summer Palace
The Wall and Ming Tombs
Tian Tan and Tea

Xian

Tang Dynasty Show
Great Goose Pagoda and the Wall
Terracotta Warriors
Shaanxi Museum

Chongqing and pandas

Note: Bridges of Chongqing

Chang Jiang

Yangtze 1
Fengdu and the river
The Gorges and Mini-Gorges
Three Gorges Dam

Yichang
Shang'hai

Jade Buddha
Museum
Yu Gardens
The Bund and Pudong

Shang'hai Expo
Coming Home

Thursday 23 September - to Hong Kong

This time we had a domestic plane first, leaving Sydney at 1030 and met the international flight in Brisbane in the afternoon. The Hong Kong Press Council paid my return airfare and we were able to "buy" Cath's through frequent flyer miles. Our flights to and from HK and thence to and from China were booked through Cathay Pacific, an airline I enjoy flying with (although not as much as Emirates). Basically we flew through the day to get to HK about 2000, local time. It was the usual tedium of airline flight, although not as attenuated as a trip to Europe. Still the Brisbane-HK leg was long enough for four movies and two meals.

I have been to HK before, but not left the airport. So this was a novel experience. The cab from the airport to the hotel we'd booked in Causeway Bay on "the Island" was a revelation. The airport has been constructed on reclaimed land 30 km northwest of the city and the tollways took us over three large bridges, through two tunnels, past a huge container port, and a plethora of relatively new high rise apartments in a variety of designs. The population density, and the multiplicity of designs, impressed me. As did the fact that the park opposite the hotel was replete with lights and lanterns, the last night of the city's celebration of the mid-Autumn festival. Quite fortuitously we'd lobbed right in the midst of a major festival - a fact of which we should have been somewhat aware of since we'd seen the same festival being marked in Hurstville at the beginning of the week.

Victoria Park, opposite the Park Lane Hotel, was the centre of a "carnival", which meant a display of lanterns in shape of Chinese creatures and symbols. Some were a celebration of the culture (masks of Peking Opera characters for example) and others of the rich mythology of the literature and language (dragons; cranes; peacocks). And then there were the lanterns representing the arts - ceramics particularly. The park was crowded with families showing their kids around (rather like the Christmas windows on Boulevarde Haussmann); and with Gen Y couples on dates or in small gangs. Serendipity, such as finding a carnival replete with symbolic lanters, is lovely when it works out.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Friday 24 September - Hong Kong

We walked around the Causeway Park area after breakfast to little benefit. Most of the shops were only just starting to open by 1030, and the area was populated more with malls and gallerias than with the sort of shopfront or market stalls we'd been hoping for. The thing I noticed most was the use of bamboo for scaffolding: whole buildings kept erect and builders' platforms built out of seemingly thin lengths of grass! Amazing. In search of a more familiar Hong Kong we hopped onto one of the Hong Kong bus tours - the tourist buses that circle a city, allowing passengers to alight at various stops and rejoin a succeeding bus. We'd found these useful in Barcelona and Madrid in 2004 and it was an interesting experiment to see how it would work in Hong Kong. (We later saw a similar bus in Shanghai but not in any other city. The way things are moving in China I expect that they will soon catch up.) The bus tour included routes on the Island and, separately through Kowloon, on the north side of the harbor. The area around Causeway Bay and Central is largely commercial, with lots of shops. Here we learned something of the literal nature of Chinese names: one of the streets sloping up from Central, hosting impromptu markets, translates as "Stone Slab Street". We were to discover dozens of examples of such precision in naming. There are residential buildings both north and south of the main roads, many on the side of the hill leading up to the top of Victoria Peak. The "Mid-Level Escalators", a series one-way escalators (they go down to the business district in the morning until 1030 and then uphill for the rest of the day) cover about 800 meters of distance (and rise about 200 meters) linking the residences on the side of the hill to the commercial area. There is also a funicular railway (with four intermediate stops) linking the mid-levels to the top of the Peak - a ride we'd take later in the week. The number of new and impressive buildings was amazing - many residential but more than a few commercial as well. The variety and inventiveness of the architecture was another theme that would surface throughout the tour - and in the major Chinese cities even more so than in Hong Kong as far as architectural beauty was concerned. For now we were content to suss out the geography of the Island and make our way to the ferry terminals for a trip across the harbor to Kowloon. While we'd originally thought of doing a part of the Kowloon-side tour, we ran out of time and instead took the ferry back to complete the Island loop. By late afternoon it was time to take a cab to Kowloon to book into the Royal Plaza Hotel that the HK PC was using, the front entrance to which was at the back of Grand Century Place, a huge shopping mall fronting onto the narrow, market-ridden Kowloon streets.

That left us with enough time for a cup of tea, some rest and the ironing of the bag-of-fruit before the conference dinner, in a private room in the Royal Plaza, a sumptuous eight courses, supplemented by a red wine from Chile. There was only one other Anglophone guest, Bob Pinker of the UK. We were at the "main" table with the HKPC Chair, the honored guests from Taiwan and the mainland, and various academic guests. The fun table seated the members of the HK PC, who seemed to be enjoying their own company, while we main-tablers discussed serious issues, like the global reach of Rupert Murdoch and the impact of the mainland government's many press arms on press freedom in Hong Kong.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Saturday 25 September - Hong Kong - conference

This day was taken up with the Tenth Anniversary seminars. These were conducted in one of the lecture halls in the nearby City University of Hong Kong campus. Cath stayed behind in the hotel room to look after herself, not being silly enough to commit to eight hours of seminar hell - especially on the 49th anniversary of her birth. The first session starred the Pros from Dover, Bob Pinker and me, discussing the activities of our own Councils and how they contribute to the development of press ethics. Far too technical and boring for a general audience. For the other papers and commentary on the papers, as well as the discussion section of the session, we were each supplied with our own individual translator. Everyone but us was expected to be bilingual (or even trilingual - English, Mandarin and Cantonese {which is still used in HK} - although speakers of Mandarin could apparently understand the Cantonese and vice versa). The audience, in addition to members of the HK PC and academics from many of the eight universities in the city-state, consisted of journalism students and numbered about 100. Not much to say for this session except that we seemed to be appreciated.

After morning tea, the second seminar dealt with the new media and two (apparently self-contradictory) phenomena: citizen journalism and animation news. The latter is an East Asian thing - you might have seen the Taiwanese broadcast on the recent election in this format (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ_s6V1Kv6A), which is supposedly excused by the fact that such footage is used when "real" footage of an incident is not available for a visual medium like television. The election animation demonstrates that this is a crock: there was plenty of film available of Julia, Tony, Bob Brown and others; they just decided it would be more entertaining to use the animated footage. The "news" question is: is this really news? It puts words and actions into the mouths and bodies of characters representing real people and pretends to be a reflection of reality. In fact, for some east Asians (and some young European-Australians) animated footage may be more real than live action footage. It is at best a simulation of the news, not the news itself. The other phenomenon looked at in the session was the rise of the 'citizen journalist', i.e. non-professional writers who observe events reporting on them, largely for self-generated websites - blogs as news reports. There seem to be more of these, and many more influential such sites, in Hong Kong than there are locally. The two phenomena (when taken together - and they were not so taken at the conference) raise an interesting question: if more citizen journalists were to report on news events wouldn't that lessen the need for animation news? If every witness were a potential reporter, each armed with mobile phones capable of being still or movie cameras, won't there be live footage (albeit of dubious quality) and live reporting (albeit of an even more subjective nature) of every event - obviating the need for animation news. On the other hand, if animation is preferred to real footage of the event (reality augmented by the animator's imagination) then citizen journalists will go the same way as professional journalists and Cartman will anchor the news.

Having just recovered from the previous evening's feast we were ready for another. The conference lunch was held in a huge public restaurant that lived on the top storey of the university building on the same campus on which we were already situated. Again 8 or 9 courses came and went, including a whole steamed fish dish that the water swore was "barramundi". This wasn't my idea of travelling tucker - we like to eat much lighter while moving around and our hosts didn't believe in stinting. Fortunately it would be last time we had this particular problem on the trip.

The afternoon session was a workshop in a computer lab in a different part of the campus. While we were waiting for our hosts to set up and start the discussion - on the future of the HK PC and what guidance they could glean from the experience of older councils - I was able to bodge up a computer connection and follow, through the AFL online site, the final minutes of the grand final - the one that ended in a draw. Again the technical discussions on issues like inaccuracy, sources or funds, and privacy are best left in Vegas, under Rule Number One.

I was able to struggle back to the hotel by 6 and spend a pleasant evening with Cath doing nothing.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Sunday 26 September - Hong Kong

Reaching the mid-levels (of Victoria Peak - the hill on which the buildings went up and up) we then walked in heat along the plateau to the Peak Train, the funicular linking the mid-levels to the top of the hill. We did the full tourist thing, including the rooftop viewing platform above the "train station", looking north across the harbor to Kowloon, and north-west to reclaimed lands on which the airport and the local Disneyland were built; to the south side of the Island, with its own settlements; and east to the largely undeveloped (smaller) islands in the mouth of the harbor. Stunning views of a rapidly developing (and already crowded city) impacted by a heat haze that made the views all the more mysterious. Thence, avoiding the tourist-trap shops and cafes in the tower, we walked across the way to a relatively new Galleria, with its own coterie of tourist-trap shops and cafes. We settled on Cafe Deco, a Hong Kong institution now with an outlet on the Peak, and featuring a diverse menu of food from around the world: Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Australian beef, NZ specialities and much more. I had a tasting plate (fajita roll; Japanese duck; laksa salad; lox on naan) washed down with a Tsing Tao (the local light-alcohol beer became a staple of our lunches - a sensible choice given its low sugar content, compared with Coke and other options available).

After lunch we took the train down and walked to the nearby park and thence along the Queensway, via stairs and walkways, to Pacific Place, a local mall. The things that drew our attention were, again, the variety of the architecture, the density of the living and, something we'd noticed but not commented much on, the weird trams that ply a route east-west along the Island. Looking like something out of a Harry Potter movie, they were a cross between trams and double-decker buses, only attenuated in the width dimension. From the mall, we walked to the Wan Chai Computer Centre - two narrow-corridored levels of everything geeky from phones through computers through audio equipment and software. Set out like a north African bazaar, with hundreds of small individual shops that specialise in different gear: here an Apple outlet; there a games shop; down the way just speaker and headphones; yonder all things Windows; and around the corner a place with all the bits only a nerd would want. The things we were particularly interested in were the iPad, the iPhone 4, cordless headphones, and the new Asus mini. (Sadly for Cath the new Mac Air didn't get launched till three weeks later.) What we (or rather I) ended up purchasing was my very own 3G iPad, at a price that was better than available at home. This was greatly assisted by the exchange rate that prevailed throughout our stay: the dollar hovered close to equilibrium with the US dollar - rising the whole time that we were overseas. I rarely seek to get new gadgets but this was one I desperately wanted.

We then took the train to Monkok - a little less crowded than in the morning - and to a different station, this one in front of the mall, and we walked over/through streets and markets (a covered walkway linking the subway station to the mall) to explore the Grand Century Place a little, and pick up some water. We vegged out in the hotel room, a little exhausted.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Monday 27 September - Hong Kong to Beijing

Beijing International is another airport, with a long walk to immigration and passenger train to take you from the terminal you came in at to the terminal where your baggage is. There we were met by Harry, the first of a succession of English-speaking guides who would not trust us with their "real" name. I guess we round-eyes are likely to steal their souls were we to know the Mandarin version of their name. Harry was not our designated guide but had met us because Lily was otherwise engaged. He deposited us with Mr Zhou, our Beijing driver, who drove us to the Marriott Courtyard Beijing in the Chongwen District. This had a similarity with our just vacated HK hotel: it abutted a mall (the New World Arcade), though on this occasion the mall didn't overwhelm the hotel in size. The Courtyard was a good hotel just past its prime and situated close to the main sights - Tian'an men seemed close enough for an afternoon walk since we were free. It was further away than it looked. On the way, on Chang'an Avenue, a block or two shy of our target, we met two young women, "art students" who have an "exhibit" of their work. Now Cath has been taking lessons in Chinese brush painting for most of this year so this interested her more than somewhat. The "exhibit" was on the fifth floor of an office building near Tian'an men. Soon we were joined by a third artist, the one with the patter, a young gay man. We were well aware that this was probably a con and in all likelihood this was no exhibition of their own work but one of those places where tourists could be inveigled by students or internal tourists hired on commission into buying commercially produced artworks. Nonetheless, some of the artwork was very good indeed and Cath bought three pieces. (Later in the tour we were to see similar artwork for sale at some of the commercial outlets - the prices being charged were similar to, or even greater, than that we had paid - and some of the pieces we didn't see elsewhere.)

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Tuesday September 28 - Beijing

Be in the lobby by 0830 we were told. There, after breakfast, we were met by Lily, our guide for Beijing. A youngish woman, married with a 13 month-old daughter, who lives with husband in apartment near 2nd Ring Road, Lily turned out to be an informative and helpful guide. She maintained a good rapport with Mr Zhou, who was a steely-eyed missile-man when behind the wheel of the car. Given the Beijing traffic he needed to be. His skills were one of the things that impressed us greatly - and he turned out to be the best driver we had. Lily was also the best guide, constantly supplementing the information given at the sites with running commentary on matters of interest as the car moved along. More than any other guide she gave us data on Chinese life and answered our questions - cost of housing, life in Beijing (and its expansion), modern developments, and so on. Spoiled us a bit, really, because our subsequent guides were either more reticent, more likely to spout the party line, or less able to understand our vernacular and thus our questions.

The morning's activities were an exploration of the incredible Forbidden City, starting with the huge square called Tian'an men. This quasi-open space - a city block wide and a longer city block deep - has resonance now for what occurred there in 1989 when Chinese reformers, encouraged by the success of Gorbachev in Russia, thought they could elicit analogous reforms in China. For all the economic changes that have occurred before and since, there is no indication that the current leadership would not react in exactly the same way today as their predecessors did 21 years ago. Tian'an men is in the middle of the city and surrounded by monumental buildings: the Great Hall of the People to the west and the National Museum to the east; on the south is the entrance to the Forbidden City on which sits a huge picture of Mao Zedong above which is the balcony from which the PRC was proclaimed and from which the leadership takes the salute during May Day and National Day parades - with rows of boxes below the balcony and on either side of the picture for the senior dignitaries. To the north of the square are the remains of the gates that used to be a part of the Ming city walls - forming a sort of archway on either side of the wide main street - again Chang'an Avenue.

Being only a couple of days before National Day (October 1), there were a large number tour groups, many of them Chinese groups from the provinces, in the square. A long line was already forming outside Mao's Mausoleum in the northern part of the square. Elsewhere groups gathered around the Heroes' Memorial and the huge special floral displays in the centre - the flowers specially erected for National Day. In a clear and creepy reminder of 1989, the flagpoles flew Chinese and Russian flags, the latter because Premier Medvedev was in town - a Russian leader far less likely to inspire freedom protests. Lily explained the significance of the various buildings and some of the history of the place and took us thence through an underground passage to the entrance into the Forbidden City complex, under Mao's portrait.

Built in 1420 during the Ming Dynasty, it was here that 24 emperors lived and ruled for near to 500 years. We walked along what seemed like a long passageway, through another small gateway and along further to a huge set of gates in the wall around the Palace complex itself. This was the main entrance (The Meridian Gate) and it led into a large courtyard with five central bridges over the 'golden water'. But this was just an outer courtyard. The seats of power, where the Emperors met those whom they saw, was through another huge gateway, the Gate of Supreme Harmony, and led to an even bigger courtyard dominated by the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the major hall of the complex. This is the courtyard in which that magnificent scene in The Last Emperor, of the three-year-old Puyi being venerated by thousands, was shot. The centre gate of each wall and the central aisle up to each successive building was for the emperor alone. The risers to each of the various halls was engraved with symbolic dragons - representing the emperor - with steps on either side for his sedan chair lackeys to use. There were statues of various guard animals (dragons, lions, deer and, my favorite, a dragon-turtles), large bronze cauldrons that held the palace's fire fighting water (essential given the wooden buildings), equally huge bronze incense burners and some official paraphernalia, including the imperial grain measure. Behind the main hall was the somewhat smaller Hall of Middle Harmony (the emperor's robing room) and then the Hall of Preserving Harmony, where he would carry out state business with his mandarins. There was no entrance allowed into any of these halls by mere tourists unfortunately, so a succession of gawkers crammed up to windows and peered into the gloomy, but gaudily decorated, halls. They were roofed with golden tiles and decorated with a plethora of designs in bright colors (all but the Hall of Middle Harmony had been repainted for the 2008 Olympics; the HMH showed the state of the very faded original paint). Again the place was overrun with tourists and tourist groups, including several hundred identically attired school children, obviously on an excursion. We exited the official section of the palace through the northern gate, the Gate of Heavenly Purity into the imperial living areas and gardens. The one area where we could explore a little more closely was the Palace of Gathering Excellence: built around a central courtyard. This housed many of the emperor's concubines including, it is said, the Dowager Empress CiXi (whom I always knew as Tsu Hsi, but who has been the subject of the recent realignment of Chinese and English orthography in the reform of the Pinyin representations of word). There were a number of furnished rooms here that we could walk through and some memorabilia from the reign of the last emperor himself. The commentary from Lily returned again and again to certain themes: the use of the phoenix and the dragon for the empress and emperor, respectively; and the recurrence of symbols for longevity and happiness in the characters painted on the buildings. Here too in the gardens we first saw the large pitted grey rocks "from the south" that were the object of acquisition in imperial times, which were used as objects of meditation and contemplation. Leaving the Forbidden Palace complex was just like leaving any tourist trap around the world: you had to get past the official sellers of tat before you were accosted by the unofficial sellers, and by the touts selling watches and other cheap objects of doubtful provenance. "Hello", was their universal greeting for all round-eyes, which must severely piss off the French and Germans. We were driven to lunch at the Tongfulin Roast Duck Restaurant where we were seated in the main part of the restaurant, right next to the fish pond and were served their choice of five plates of slightly bland, but quite plentiful, food (but no duck). There were plenty of Chinese also eating there, although a tourist bus deposited a large occidental tour in another part of the place, as we were partway through the meal, so it was obviously a restaurant that was part of the same company that was running our tour. As was the case on most days, the guide and river also ate in the same restaurant, but not at the same table as us.

After lunch we were driven into the suburbs of Beijing to the emperors' Summer Palace. This is set in and around a beautiful, landscaped lakeside setting. Originally built by the early Qings (what we used to call the Manchu dynasty), it was twice rebuilt by the Dowager CiXi after ambassador Elgin had most of it destroyed in retaliation for offences against his people by the imperials during the Taiping Rebellion and again after the treaty powers looted it during the Boxer Rebellion. So the extent to which we were seeing anything of the original plan and the original buildings was moot. What we did get was an idea of the opulence that was the original complex and the supreme luxury that was provided for the imperial family. We walked through gardens and pavilions where the family lived to the Long Corridor, with more pavilions for concubines off to the side. The Long Corridor, a covered walkway of over 700 meters, is decorated with over 14000 painted scenes and marked with four "towers", along the way, one for each season. The Corridor linked the family living quarters with the entertainment rooms, including the birthday pavilion built on Longevity Hill and the boat pier at the western end. There also is the "marble" boat - wood painted to look like stone - from which the dowager fished (servants were charged with going underwater to ensure she caught fish when she engaged in this practice). These days "dragon boats" go across the lake from the western end of the Long Corridor to the south-eastern entrance to the palaces, near the seventeen-span bridge. That's how we ended our day of seeing the Ming and Qing follies, by boat across the lake to the exit.

The rather full first day in Beijing was rounded out by another drive to dinner served at the original, century-old Quanjude Roasted Duck Restaurant: this time with the whole Peking Duck show, including some courses before the duck and the full show of carving same. We were not the only westerners there but the restaurant was also replete with locals. After dinner we were whisked to the Liyuan Theatre in an hotel for the tourist version of the Peking Opera Show. The highlight was watching the stars putting on their make-up before the performance, especially the Buddha applying his make-up. We saw two brief performances: Autumn River, a two-handed song performance telling the story of a woman (played by a cross-dressing young man in the tradition of such troupes) chasing after her man and a lecherous riverboat-man seeking to help her; and Monkey King (WuKong) fights 18 warriors, an acrobatic comedy with little song, in which the Buddha charges the eponymous 18 to stop Monkey from making his way west to find enlightenment. Very touristy and not very much like real opera. Still it was a bit of 'culture' thrown in as a bonus and we had the joy of watching the others watching - some who'd paid extra for the pleasure and even more for the "food" there.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Wednesday September 29 - Beijing

Any idea that this was to be a relaxing holiday where we set our own schedule and decided on waking and sleeping time was destroyed on the second full morning of the Beijing leg: having had such a long and exhausting day on Tuesday, Lily told us to be ready for an 0830 start on Wednesday in order to get out of town to do make our visit to the Great Wall. So another relatively early start, with breakfast in the hotel, and an early exit. The part of the wall, which Lily continually described as "the brick wall", is about 60 km north of Beijing. So Mr Zhou had first to negotiate the city traffic and then the tollway traffic. Almost all the arterial roads in and out of Beijing are tollways, and they didn't seem to be cheap either. I suppose this was to encourage the use of public transport. If so, it was not working. Along the tollway that morning the traffic confined to first to one lane and then stopped altogether, by flotillas of escorted luxury vehicles, bearing local muck-a-mucks on their way to meet with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who were in China to introduce the idea of philanthropy to the emerging wealthy Chinese plutocrats. Also on the way we had our first factory visit (a Jade place). The guides are not paid a great deal and supplement their income by taking their marks to a variety of retail outlets, usually government-run, sometimes by associates of the same firm that runs the tours. The guides are apparently given a backhander for each mark introduced - but in most places no extra based on how much is spent (that is at the least the best that Cath and I could learn after extensive interrogation of various guides). Lily, and indeed all the guides we had along the way, at least asked us if we wanted to have a look at the various outlets. Somes, less scrupulous, guides apparently just go to the factories and say, "Here we are". These outlets will sometimes have a mix of items for sale but specialise in one particular art of craft: silk, embroidery, jade, painting or ceramics, and include a backroom tour on the making of intricacies of that craft. Rather like the glass factories on Murano. At the Jade factory we were taken on a tour of the back rooms, showing how the jade is polished (note the workers behind glass polishing an intricate jade ball of many layers) and shaped, and given a talk on the awesome qualities of jade and jadeite. Thence into the showroom where Cath was immediately fitted for a jadeite bangle (so healthy - and still we managed to decline) and we looked at the merchandise - mostly very expensive, especially for the agate (the light tan jade-like stone that most attracted me). In the end we bought a beautiful lacquered cloisonne black tile with a modern rendition of traditional Chinese ladies. Also seen along the way to the Wall: an abandoned DisneyWorld; three-quarters built when they ran out of money and never opened. The Chinese have a long history of good cultural choices.

Then we finally get to visit the awesome Juyong Guan section of the Brick Wall (a.k.a. the Great Wall of China). Juyong Pass is the nearest section of the Wall to Beijing and is a part of the Badaling section of the Wall. Although originally built over 2000 years ago, the surviving parts of the Wall are from the Ming Dynasty (about 500 years old). Of Juyong our schedule said: "Here you can enjoy the stunning views as you stroll along this seemingly endless piece of history, which winds its way into the far distance". The section we were at was anything but a stroll. Juyong Guan is a narrow pass with hilly inclines on either side. The Wall follows the contour of the hills up to the crests through a series of watchtowers. There were three such towers on the way up that we 'strolled', each separated by a series of steps, many worn and with no consistency of rise. So the 'stroll' became an arduous climb: first up an inclined pathway to the start of the first set of steps, then the climb: it was wide enough for most of the way to have one person climbing (holding onto the hand rail on the north side) and one person descending (holding onto the hand rail on the south), with barely room for a third to pass between. In places there was no room for a third. Thus we climbed to the first watchtower. There we decided against further climb for three reasons: on the next upward stage, there was a handrail only on the north side and I was wary of an unassisted descent; we were already tired from the first stage; and Cath's knee, still in recovery from its recent dislocation, was unlikely to survive further destruction testing. Coming down was hard: for Cath and her knee it was harder than the ascent, getting to the stage where she could lead with her left leg only because the jarring on the right was agony. I had my own issues, largely connected with the height we were at - going up, with my back to the drop was OK; going down facing the drop to the valley, not so much. On the way down we looked closer at chains of beribboned interlinked locks - placed here by newly wed couples seeking to ensure the success of their union. By the time we reached the base level, Cath had had enough; she just needed to rest her leg for a while. So I did a little more exploring on my own, through a barbican that surmounted the pass and surrounding area. Then we had to resist touts and tat sellers on the way back to the car.

Lunch that day was conveniently situated in a restaurant above a cloisonne factory, the Golden Palace. Because we had admired some cloisonne pieces at the Forbidden Palace, Lily offered us the chance to see cloisonne being made. This enamelware is based on shaped copper covered with strips of copper to form patterns. These are then polished back almost to the surface of the base copper and whole is covered in layers of enamel, with different colors in the areas created by the copper strips, and fired. The best of this work is very beautiful indeed, and incredibly intricate, with pieces from the very small to some huge plates and vases. Again, like at the Jade Factory, we were shown the workroom where the objects are put together and the kiln where they are fired, this time in same room as workers instead of seeing them behind a glass barrier. The merchandise available was good, with the "expensive" room having magnificent pieces - far more to interest us and in our price range than at the jade place. As a result we bought more there than we had earlier. Lunch on the other hand was very ordinary, a bain-marie service of bland food - made only slightly better by the beer and tea with the meal.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to yet another historical remnant of the Ming Dynasty: the Ming Tombs. To reach this Mr Zhou took us around the same roundabout we'd been around twice before that day; I suppose that three times are the charm. In the centre was an equestrian statue of Li Zicheng, a peasant general who ended the Ming Dynasty before himself being tossed out by the incoming Qing (Manchu) empire. The Ming Tombs are about 600 years old. There are 14 or so tomb complexes spread around the neighborhood. The one that is available for viewing is that of the Yongle emperor (Chengzu) and it is not his tomb itself, but buildings of the memorial complex. His actual resting place is under the hill behind the complex. There is a sacred walk from the front gate of the Ming Tombs area and spreading over about 10 km to Chengzu's complex. Only one of the actual resting places has been opened and some material from that tomb is now housed in the Hall of Eminent Favor of Chengzu. The complex is built like the Forbidden City in structure, with paths through gates to a hall that memorialises him and his time and contains remains from the other Ming tomb. One familiar name from the emperor's reign was the admiral Zheng He - he whose voyages have become misused by some weird occidental pseudo-historians who assert that China discovered the new world. The official line, more linked to the written history, show his routes west to India and Arabia but none to the east of China are shown here. On the way out, we discussed the local trees in detail with Lily and agree we are not botanists. She is happy to adopt our categories of plants: ground-cover, flower, shrub, tree, without the need for any more detail other than color and size. Thence Mr Zhou drove us back to our hotel, inevitably taking us one more time around Li Zicheng.

We were glad to be driven back to the hotel by this time - as we were both of us were extremely tired and very leg sore from our antics on the Brick Wall.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Thursday September 29 - Beijing and then to Xi'an

We entered this time through the South Gate to a three-level round altar where the emperor met the God of Heaven. It was round because the circle symbolises heaven; it was set in a large square are, symbolic of earth. The levels were for: the folks at the ground level; officials on first; the emperor alone on second; whilst the God had the top level to himself. On that top level there were nine circles of stone: with 9 slabs in the innermost, 18 in second, and so on out to a ninth circle of 81. I believe this represented the nine levels of heaven. Thence we walked north to the Imperial Vault of Heaven - where the spirit tablets of the gods were kept - within a circular courtyard with an echo wall that no longer echoes, and onwards, via the Sacred Way (or Vermillion Steps Bridge - Danbiqiao) to Quinian Dian, the tall round building at the northern end of the complex. Ironically, given its stated purpose of hosting the emperor's prayers for rain to facilitate a good harvest, it was once destroyed by lightning ("Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests was Ruined by Lightning," says one of the large displays in the next-door museum). Not being able to get into the pagoda-like Quinian Dian, we exited through a covered corridor to the nearby park, where Lily said that we had time to visit a teahouse, to observe a proper tea ceremony. Since she had been so good about how few factories we had visited, we were happy to oblige her on this occasion. The tea ceremony included instructions in how to hold the cup; how to pour the tea from one cup to another; and about the different teas available, whether a black tea like oolong with ginseng; the compressed pu'er tea; very aromatic jasmine with roses; a green tea with lychee; and a fruit tea that actually was all fruit and no tea. We honored the teahouse by buying some tea, which they packed in a way that would enable us to get it through Customs into Australia. We lunched on way to airport at the nearby Shan Chuan Zai (literally, "Between the mountain and the sea"), where the waiters were in period costume (Ming of course) and we had slightly more interesting fare, including beef in black pepper; duck soup; and braised cauliflower. With beer and tea, of course.

As we exited Beijing, we contemplated a couple of things we'd learned, aside from the similarity of the Ming showcases and the emphasis that the dynasty apparently put on longevity and happiness. We were never able adequately to work out what the weekly wage for an average worker was in Beijing but, knowing that the exchange rate was about RMB6.5 to $A1 (while the currency is known overseas as the Yuan, in China it is referred to as RMB or Ren Min Bi, the People's Money - 1 yuan is the same as RMB1), it was salutary to note that a two-bedroom apartment in good area cost around RMB3,000,000 (about $450,000). If I understood Lily correctly, it was a few years ago RMB5,000 per sq meters for such an apartment and it was now RMB30-40k per sq meters. That seems like a very rapid rise in value (and it is keeping the younger Chinese out of the property market). This was despite all the evidence we saw of an incredible building rate for new properties. We were to learn that this inflation was largely a product of the numbers moving to Beijing. Later guides boasted about how much affordable their cities were. We also talked about the weather. On Monday when we arrived we remarked at how clear the air looked, given all the talk about pollution in Beijing. On Thursday as we left we remarked at how smoggy it looked and noted the limited visibility. The other cities we visited seemed to be more at the smoggy, than the clear, end of the spectrum, and we cannot account for the clarity of the air on that first day. Finally we noted the traffic: either we had a good driver in Mr Zhou or the drivers of Beijing were uniformly excellent. Mr Zhou never seemed to have trouble merging lanes and rarely, if ever, used his horn. It was only later, after experience with drivers (and traffic) in other cities that we appreciated how good our man in Beijing was. The standard of drivers deteriorated as we went on, although the standard made a comeback in Shanghai. Similarly Lily spoiled us: none of out later guides was as good - although we never had a dud.

From Beijing we flew to Xi'an by China Eastern on an A320. The flight had been delayed so we arrived somewhat late in Xi'an (which as Chang'an had been the imperial capital in earlier times, particularly during the cultural height of the Tang Dynasty). Beijing was about the Mings all the time but Xi'an turned out to be about more than just the Tangs. We were met by Stephen, a young man who seemed more interested in his mobile much of the time, than in us, and by Mr Miao, our driver. (The drivers were universally referred to solely by the honorific and a family name and all had the same 1950s' crewcut. While they looked like Mr Zhou, none drove like him.). As the plane was late, Stephen suggested we miss the tour of the city wall planned for the afternoon and change the schedule so we visit the Tang Dynasty Show on the first night, rather than on the evening of the next day - which promised to be very busy and was, in any case, the Chinese National Day. We agreed. Our hotel was the Grand Mercure on Renmin Square, one of four hotels within an Accor property. It was not the most opulent of the pubs on the property but was a step up from the Beijing Courtyard. It was interesting to note that, in a country where the number "4" has some negative connotations, the fourth floor of the Grand Mercure had no residential rooms, only conference rooms and the room where breakfast was served. The dining rooms within the complex were in the other hotels on the property. We had only a few minutes to change into better clothes and head to the Show, south of the city, on the main street through the newer parts of the city, outside the extant city walls. The street seemed to be largely shopping malls, with western fashion houses well represented. Xi'an is by no means the size of Beijing (which Lily had described as the largest city in China) but it still had about 8 millions living within its area and was building a new subway system, with main north-south and east-west lines to service the growing numbers. We had a chance to have a meal with our show (at an extra cost of course - the show had been included in the cost of our tour) but, following our usual rule of avoiding meals at tourist sites, we declined. Nonetheless one drink was included in the price of the seats and tea kept on coming as well. It was about an hour before the show, in a purpose-built theatre where all the seats were around tables (and we were at the back of the front section of the auditorium). On stage a seven-piece female ensemble was playing traditional songs on traditional instruments. Despite our turning down dinner we ended up with dessert anyway: a plate of cakes (red bean and almond) as well as some taro and water chestnut jelly with sago. As we were digesting these and counting down to the show, the ensemble gave a rendition of "Click Goes the Shears" to our amusement, and the bemusement of most of the theatre. Others in the house appreciated the Chinese version of "Red River" that followed. The show itself was in four parts: a musical interlude with full orchestra; four dances (a ramie cloth dance; a sorcerer's dance; the rainbow costume dance; and a martial dance); there was a further musical interlude, this one featuring Gao Ming on the Pai Xiao, a three thousand year-old instrument not unlike the pan-pipes; and finally a clog dance, traditional for the mid-autumn festival - with actors as the Tang emperor and empress and court officials complementing the dancers. It was all very over-the-top and great fun. The music was pretty good and many of the pieces seemed to be quite authentic - or as authentic as modern versions of 1500-year-old material could be. Certainly they were played, with style, on traditional instruments. The costumes were incredibly colorful and the choreography may have borrowed somewhat from subsequent gymnastic advances but reflected much of the traditions of which I am aware. The show won points from me for its reflection of the elevated position in Tang culture that the women, particularly the courtesans, played. My only criticism is that few of the women represented the Tang appreciation of the fuller figure. It was a far more enjoyable piece of local 'folklore' than the "Beijing Opera Show".

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Friday October 1 - National Day - Xi'an

The first thing we noted was that there was no China Daily (the English-language newspaper) available in the hotel's breakfast room. Naturally I assumed it was because October 1 was Chinese National Day - the day on which Mao proclaimed the People's Republic. Turns out it was because the paper doesn't arrive until after breakfast. Second thing was the much greater variety of foods available at the breakfast buffet than we saw in Beijing - a testimony to a better, or bigger, or busier, hotel. That meant I was able to supplement my brekkie with things like fried and shredded pancake and steamed sweet potato, as well as a greater variety of fresh fruit - a different start. Again we met Stephen and Mr Miao at 0830 and drove south to the Great Goose Pagoda (or Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, as distinct from the Small Wild Goose Pagoda, nearby), a Tang Dynasty (652 CE) building in a walled enclosure and attached to a working lamasery, Ci'en Si. As a result there were monks and trainee monks in abundance within the walls. We entered from the south gate, past a Drum Tower and a Bell Tower (a common occurrence in China where towers housing the dawn bell and the dusk drum were constructed on opposite sides of a gate, or in a city wall) and storerooms, to a temple which contained a large gold Buddha (and other statues and sutras) brought back from the west by Xuanzang (whose fifteen-year journey was lampooned in Journey to the West, the book on which the series Monkey was based) and housed in a temple built by a Tang prince in memory of his late mother. The path leading up to the main temple was familiar, a tilted path replete with dragon symbols and bordered by stairs on either side. In front of the temple was a large bronze cylindrical urn in which worshippers placed burning incense. The resultant aroma was a little overwhelming. On either side of the temple were side-temples each with Buddhas, respectively, of health and wealth. There is also a hall containing a remarkable jade-and-paint frieze showing seven episodes on the life of Xuanzang. At the back of the complex is the large pagoda (64m high), square in shape with seven levels each progressively smaller than the one below it. Built as a storehouse and originally used for that purpose, it used to be climbable, but no longer: poorly compacted earth underneath one corner has induced a lean that has, in the modern age of insurance claims, made climbing too risky. Interestingly, a number of the small tomb markers on the side of the complex, marking the graves of earlier lamas, lean as well. We complete our tour with a brief visit to the museum/giftshop - naturally.

The next stop was the Zhongshan Gate (east gate) of the city walls. Now 12m high and around 14m wide at the top, the walls remain pretty much intact and run14 km in length around the inner city. This version of the wall was built in early Ming times (those Mings keep cropping up) on ruins of the old Tang palace. There were arrow towers every 120m along the wall, although not all survive in the area where we climbed up onto the wall and looked around. Depending on what source you consult there is some dispute as to whether the Ming walls were larger or smaller than those that enclosed the Tang city, but most agree that they are smaller than the original Chang'an walls. They are still very impressive, given their 600 years of aging. The gates are now used as thoroughfares for modern roads passing in and out of the city, without destroying the amenity of the walls - which host a marathon each year - three laps of the wall constituting the journey. The air was not clear the morning we took our stroll - indicative again of the poor air quality in many Chinese cities.

The afternoon was dedicated to the Qin Army (ie the Terracotta Warriors), housed in the area where they were discovered 30 years earlier - about 30 km east of Xi'an. At the Baozi Cun roundabout there is yet another equestrian statue of (I belive) General Li Zicheng - conqueror of Mings. In trying to verify his identity I looked at images on the Google Earth site and the best translation I can come up with from the Mandarin on the site describing the statue is "Awesome". I can only assume that, Chuck-like, this was Li Zicheng's nickname. At the roundabout we turned to today's factory: "Xi'an Art Ceramics & Lacquer Factor", the place with the missing "y". They are makers of terracotta models in a multitude of sizes of the warriors we were to see later that afternoon. They also made and fired other terracotta objects - including an ocarina-like Tao Xun - and lovely tiles, some of which we bought. Lunch was at the Lon Xi'an on the commercial site adjacent to the Terracotta Army museum site. Here we reverted to the standard bland fare. The whole of the museum complex was incredibly crowded for National Day. There were traffic jams on the tollway, especially for the buses returning to Xi'an to pick up more customers. Walking to the museum itself we passed the stand of Yang Xian ("The discover of terracotta warriors and horses - Yang Xian is selling his books with his autograph"), the farmer who says he found the army while digging for a well. Selling his john-hancock for money is his main source of income. The exhibit is divided into three covered exhibits. Pit 1 is the original one where they have found mostly destroyed figures, life-sized or larger (the statues appear to average about 1.8m in height, compared with the then average height of 1.6m) of Qin Dynasty infantrymen and archers, in battle formation, which symbolically guard the tomb of the first Qin emperor. That means that these figures are from about 200 BCE. His tomb is about 1.5 km away and is undisturbed. On the other side of the tomb, they found more pits from which they dug up the golden chariot and horses, a local treasure then down in Shang'hai for the Expo. The first pit is covered with a structure like an aircraft hangar and very large (about 14,000 sq meters). Even so it was very crowded - both in the pit with over 6,000 warriors, and in the viewing areas around it where about three-times the daily average of visitors have come on this national holiday. In pit 1 there are some partially whole warriors but the ones that are exhibited have been painstakingly put together by archaeologists - it took 50 archaeologists a-year-and-half to put together seven. They are only assembling whole warriors where they can definitively match pieces. Most of the excavated area in pit 1 is lined with broken terracotta: the serried ranks of the army were originally covered with wooden rooves, which have collapsed under the weight of the covering earth over a couple of millennia, crushing the figures beneath. Still there are thousands of them, with every face apparently different, even if the bodies are largely the same. Pit 3 is a much smaller hangar - it is where they have found the generals and the officers - the command centre for the army. They are in a similar condition to those in Pit 1. Pit 2 is wider than Pit 1 but not as long; it has the chariots, each with three men behind and two or four horses, and four archers, in front. This pit has by and large not been excavated: the wooden coverings remain over the buried figures, which have been identified largely by geophysics. The main reason for this is that, with the other pits, as soon as the figures were uncovered, the oxidation caused any remaining pigments on the figures - and all had been gaudily painted - rapidly to fade. They are leaving the cavalry covered in the hope that they can find a solution to this problem before uncovering them. Pit 2 also had display cases with re-assembled examples of each of the various classes of warrior so far found: infantryman, archer, cavalryman (with horse) and officer. It is hard to put into words how impressive and awesome the Qin Army is, as figures out of history, as an incredible piece of imperial creation to satisfy the ego of one man, and as a live archeological site. We could have stayed for days just staring at the figures, watching the activity in the pits and contemplating the sheer size of the find. Unfortunately, we had to move on. For the first time on tour, it started raining as we were walking from Pit 3 to Pit 2 and stayed raining for the rest of the time we were within the complex and as we took the long walk to exit, through a gauntlet of every sort of food and souvenir shop. On the way back to Xi'an, having noted the problems on the way in, Mr Miao took the road less travelled, avoiding the tollway. This enabled us to see something more of the countryside, and a few smaller satellite villages in the area. By the time we got back to the hotel, I was glad we didn't have to do the Tang Dynasty Show as it had been a pretty exhausting day. Not to mention that, only a couple of days after our Brick Wall exertions, we were still pretty leg sore.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Saturday October 2 - Xi'an, Chongqing and onto the River

This promised to be another busy day. We were up a little earlier and packed, breakfasted, mainly fruit today, and out by 0800 to head to Shaanxi History Museum for our first planned visit of the day. We arrived early and the museum was not due to open for a while, but Stephen did well by us, getting us past the lines for the 0830 opening, via the bookshop, and inside the museum a short half-head before the main field entered the race. Even with that head-start we were soon enmeshed in a reasonably large crowd: National Day starts in a week-long holiday for most Chinese. In the museum, Stephen escorted us all the way, pointing out the "National Treasures" and sometimes appearing to bypass what seemed to be more interesting, if not quite as rare, items. As we went along, one of us would deviate from the straight and narrow to look at things that caught our eye. The survey was pretty much in chronological order, starting with prehistoric and early dynastic periods, particularly bronzes of the Shang and Zhou. The Qin period was well represented by examples of the Army. As we got into the current era, we saw Han plates, early silks and some painting. There were naturally lots of Tang pieces, in particular the Sancai (three-color) earthenware pottery: camels and horses, demons and big-breasted Tang women as well as plates, jugs and vases. Glazed celadon pots from the Song and a small number of intricately designed Ming artefacts rounded out the tour, which had covered three large rooms over two floors. We bought a souvenir book of the museum, in part as an aide memoire, but also to thank the bookshop man for letting us in early.

And in particular the Tang    

We then were driven to the airport, where we had lunch at the airport restaurant and said goodbye to Stephen. We were taken by China Eastern Airlines to Chongqing - over the mountains south to the Yangzi River. There we were met by Ninny who was the most state-oriented guide we had on the trip. She talked up Chongqing, which she described as "the biggest city in China". Turns out she got to that figure by regarding all of the Chongqing municipality, which extended for about 300 km along and down the river, as being part of the "city", thereby inflating its population to 33 millions. The city itself, built on the hilly (very hilly) land on either side of the river valley, is large - and expanding - but not that large. It is primarily an industrial town, leveraging its position at the end of a navigable stretch of the river from Shang'hai. (The river is now called the "Yangzi" for its entire length, even though that was originally its name solely in the Shang'hai area. Mostly the people refer to it as simply Chang Jiang - the Long River.) Most of China's car manufacturing plants are in the city of Chongqing - and "laundry power" too. What I noted most was that it was a city (and, as we saw as we went downstream, a municipality) of bridges and tunnels. The sheer variety of bridges over the river was amazing and exhausting (see note "Bridges of Chongqing".). Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have been in heaven. (In fact, by the second day of the boat trip, so often were Cath and I talking about bridges that she started referring to me as "Brunel" and I to her as "Bradfield".) One bridge pointed out to us by Ninny was a dead-spit for the Sydney Harbor Bridge, with the exception of the missing pylons that so distinguish the Coathanger. Nearby it was the newly built Opera House, another monument of which the vainglorious locals were inordinately proud. Glowing green in the night, when we had the best view of it, it was said to resemble a sailing ship. Given the variety of really interesting architecture that we saw, this was not a prime example of Chinese creativity - despite the Chongqingian protestations. In addition to the bridges and cultural centres, there was a lot of building going on - a lot of it residential (we went through at least two new suburbs being constructed into the hillsides) and much of it industrial. Their main public transport is a monorail, which they were expanding in new directions. Ninny assured us that we wouldn't believe how good Chongqing was going to be in a year or two's time. We had been slotted to see a bit of the local zoo and visit a museum dedicated to Joseph Stilwell (WW2 admiral and head of allied forces). Given the time we landed and how long it would take us to navigate the city, we passed on the latter and took up the option of the zoo. There we were almost as big an attraction as the animals. In fact, we barely had time for the main event, which was the viewing of the pandas. They had eight Giant Pandas and we got to see each of them, and have our pictures taken with local children while seeing them. It was panda feeding time - it's always panda feeding time - so we got to see a large number of bulky black and whites eating leaves off bamboo (and to see one or two move from the sedentary). There was also time to visit the red pandas, although not time for Cath to hold and pet them. Nor were the local tigers on view - due to a recent birth in the family. It was a rushed visit but very worthwhile. On the way back from the zoo to dinner, we had a demonstration of how far the driving standard had deteriorated since Beijing. It is impossible to imagine Mr Zhou, and very difficult to see Mr Miao, getting involved in a road rage incident, let alone being the prime cause of it. But our Chongqing driver so enraged a local cab driver that the latter sped past us and heaved on the anchors, causing us to stop precipitately. He then exited his vehicle and proceeded to call into question the ancestry of our driver, who gave as good as he got. Made you wish for a Babel Fish as Ninny steadfastly ignored the exchange and provided no translation.

According to Ninny, and everyone else from the local area to whom we spoke, Chongqing is known for its hot weather, its hot women and its hot food. We got to assess the latter at dinner at a local Sichuan restaurant - chicken and peanut with chilli and other goodies, far more flavorful than we'd had previously, and getting close to spicy.

Thence we proceeded to the dock for embarkation on Yangtze 1, our home for the next few days. The vessel had five floors. There were sleeping berths on the first four. The top floor was a sundeck at rear (with small pool) and games room occupying the front portion. The fourth floor had a lounge (with cash bar) at the front and berths towards the rear. The centre of this and the lower floors was occupied by spiral stairs and a vestibule area in which various objects were offered for sale, except for the first floor (the entrance vestibule), which has an enquiry counter on one side and the business centre on t'other. On the third and second floors there were berths front and back. The first floor had the dining room towards the back and berths towards the front. We had a cabin on the port side towards the bow on the third floor. The bulkhead of our cabin abutted the bridge and the officers' wardroom, which occupied the foredeck on the third floor. Compact, and with two single beds, our cabin was nonetheless quite liveable, especially with the provision of a balcony on which we could sit and watch the river go by. One of the services offered (at a small additional charge) was massage. Cath took advantage of the situation to make a booking for right away and had a full-body going over, concentrating on her sore leg. She claims that the cure was miraculous. While this was going on I met Cathy, the English-speaking river guide. From her we learned that the boat's normal capacity is 216 and that there were 240 on board (the additional being children bunking in with parents). Of that number twelve were Aussies (5 couples + two teenage girls) and we were Cathy's charges for the trip. There were also 15 German-speaking tourists who formed a second coterie. The remainder were Chinese - a much larger proportion than normal - because of the National Day holidays. Cathy managed to corral eight of the Australians for an orientation and to let us know what to expect in the morning. After that we sat on the balcony and watched the river and marvelled at the size of Chongqing city, which seemed to consist of mile after mile of farmland and national park, as well as urban and suburban areas.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Note: Bridges of Chongqing
      

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Sunday October 3 - Cruising on Chang Jiang - and Fengdu

Breakfast on the boat was a buffet (as was lunch and dinner for all meals but dinner on the last night). Breakfast was a mixture of western and Chinese fare - with something for everyone. During the night we'd steamed down river as far as the city of Fengdu. Time for a word on the river: the construction of the Three Gorges Dam (of which more later) has had the effect of raising the level of the river for hundreds of kilometers behind it by up to 170 meters. This rise in the water level obliterated many villages and completely changed the character of Chang Jiang. What used to be rapidly running white water is now much more of a calm pond. Millions of citizens were moved - offered incentives to move to major cities like Shang'hai or offered new residences in rebuilt cities along the river. The original city of Fengdu is now well under the water, and a new Fengdu has been built on the far shore. Cathy handed us over to a local guide, Lilly, who conducted us on a tour of a remnant of old Fengdu - the "ghost city", on top of a hill overlooking the drowned settlement. Fengdu is the place where every soul is judged after death. There stand temples of several religious beliefs that have been warning people of misdeeds for many centuries since the Tang Dynasty. Lilly took us up the steps and over the bridges to the Buddhist and animist temples, explained the symbolism and the statuary and told us all sorts of ghost stories. We ended up in the judgment hall, surrounding by demons and with the various judges who would decide our fate. It would have been a little more entertaining had there not been half a dozen tourist ships stopped at the place at the same time and groups, with their amplified tour leaders giving a spiel in their different languages, all trying to show the same stuff to their tourists. We were worried about our ability to climb up to the ghost city and even more about Cath's ability to get back down, especially in the light of our Brick Wall experience. Nonetheless we made it up and down and had a good time with the mythologies. And with some of the Chinglish signs and even with some of the tourist tat shops at the bottom, including my favorite, "The Dawn Cultural Relic Duplication Factory".

After Fengdu, we had lunch aboard, with a large variety of good local food, much of it spicy enough, supplemented by a couple of options for occidentals, and cruised along the river until a stop at Shibao Zhai - now a fortress on an island, linked to the shore by a footbridge. The fortress was formerly a hill about 200 meters high but, with the rising of the waters, the surrounding village has been drowned. The hill has been reinforced by a wall built at the new water level. On the hill is a nine-storey red pagoda, with a series of internal stairs leading to the top where there is a hilltop temple. Those who took the optional tour (cost extra because it was not included in the boat package) said it was quite beautiful. Cath and I declined - more in need of a siesta and a relaxing afternoon than in another excursion - and nine floors of climbing. In the evening we attended the Captain's Welcome cocktails. Arriving late there was no room at the "Aussie table" for us, so we were standing at the side when invited to join a Chinese family's table. The pater familias turned out to be some kind of VIP - a party official or some such. We know this because one of the ship's senior officers hovered behind his chair the whole time, and because we were the only table that was served nibblies, rather than having to get up and get them ourselves. Why we were invited and why his family was so nice to us - he stayed quite aloof - we never did quite work out. That group didn't join the rest of us at lunch or dinner, so we assumed that they ate with the captain and his officers in the wardroom. His identity remains a mystery. Dinner followed the welcome, with the same sort of mix of foods as lunch. After dinner, we went to the bow of the boat on the fourth floor - the best observation point on the vessel - in front of the bar and observed the river, playing navigators with the lights, watching the passing traffic and the array of urban and sylvan areas (and their bridges) that continued to constitute Ninny's Chongqing city. But what was going through my head as I watched the river go by:

We love the Yangtze,Yangtze-Kiang,
Flowing from Yushu down to Ching-Kiang,
Passing through ChungKing, Wuhan and Hoo-Kow
Three thousand miles, but it gets there somehow.
Oh! Szechuan's the province and Shanghai is the port,
And the Yangtze is the river that we all support.

We had intended to avoid the evening's entertainment, a "Fashion show", with disco to follow. But we were too late leaving the front deck: the only exit was through the lounge area and we got caught by some of the others and shamed into being in the audience to support the two teenaged girls, who'd been dragooned into being in the show. The rest of the cast was the ship's crew, who have to do this every trip, the poor dears. There were both period and modern costumes and it was done in high camp style. The crew put on their bravest face. We didn't stay for the disco.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Monday October 4 - Cruising the Chang Jiang

When we woke up we could see out the window a boat attached to our port side. There was another inboard of us as well. We were parked outside the entrance to the White Empress City, another optional tour, which many of the locals took but we round-eyes tended to avoid. We'd been warned off it by Stephen in Xi'an, and again by Cathy on the boat. A couple of hours later we shoved off and headed east. We entered the first of the tree gorges - there are really four but four is an unlucky number so two are sort of combined to reduce the number to a numerologically acceptable three - Qutang Xia. Cathy guided us through the changed landscape - changed because of the rise of the river. I can imagine how much more awe-inspiring it would have been had we been 150 meters lower and the river running at its old rate. Even so, the steep cliffs on either side and the geological features provided more than enough interest as we made our way through the narrow passage in about 30 minutes.

After lunch, we had the day's planned excursion - from Wushan (not to be confused with Python's "Wuhan", which is downstream of the Three Gorges Dam and a much bigger city), the new Wushan, built to replace the old Wushan, which is now several dozen fathoms deep beneath the surface. New Wushan is still growing as country people move to the new city (somewhere over 100,000 population). We boarded smaller ferries for a trip up the Daning River, through the three Mini Gorges, under the direction of Jason, our local guide. Here, particularly in Longmen Xia (Dragon Gorge), the shore is much closer, but even here the rising water has dramatically changed the area. The slower voyage and closer approach allowed Jason to point out some of the natural caves in the cliff-faces, and some of the holes in the cliffs that have been used as burial places. As promised there was a troupe of wild monkeys, although a very tame troupe of quite small brown wild monkeys, and some breath-taking scenery. On the way back we were joined by George, the local translator into English of the illustrated book on the mini-gorges that was for sale on board. George was anxious to discuss the choice of words he had made and whether "grotesque" was an appropriate epithet for a particular usage. We assured him that it was. Jason also joined Cath and me for part of the return voyage for a quieter chat about the difficulties facing the local economy in times of dislocation and change, and his concerns (he must have been in his late twenties) with the youth of the area, who seemed only interested in social networking, games and drinking. He worried about the future and saw us (or probably more particularly Cath) as people to whom he could pour forth his burthened heart.

On return to our river cruiser, and setting off once more on Chang Jiang, we cruised through the spectacular Wu Xia, as the sun started to set on out last full day on board. Cathy took us through some of the history and the isolation of the area, an isolation that is now being addressed by highways. The most spectacular will eventually link Shang'hai with Chongqing. Up to now the river has been the easiest way, even though lots of freight is offloaded at Sandouping (the city nearest the dam site), trucked around the dam and then reloaded onto barges for the leg to Chongqing. The new freeway as far west as Wushan will soon be open, leaving only the leg from Wushan to Chongqing to be completed. We had an unnaturally clear day and were able clearly to see the Goddess Peak, a small outcrop of rock near, and often obscured by, two larger rocks. As we passed through the Wu Xia we finally left Chongqing.

Dinner this night was the Captain's Farewell and the only meal on board served to us. A banquet in name, and in character, it contained a number of good and spicy dishes, and made only a little allowance for round-eyes. We avoided the night's entertainment - a karaoke night - so we could get up to observe the ship's entrance into the locks beside the Dam. The five-lock system lowers the vessel 113 meters as it goes downstream, or raises it a similar distance. Over 1500 meters in length it is the world's longest lock system and we thought we'd want to see it. Itt is the complexity of the lock system, and the time it takes for smaller vessels to be raised that is the reason much freight is unloaded and reloaded at Sandouping.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Tuesday October 5 - Chang Jiang, and Yichang to Shanghai

We were due to enter the locks at 0030, so we set the alarm for 0115. At about 0300, the first gate opened. A group of us, including most of the Australians, had been standing around for close to two hours waiting for that occurrence. It took the vessel about 8 minutes to move into the lock and up to the second gate. It did so alongside a coal barge on our port side. The lock was barely wide enough for the twain. We had centimeters between us and the right wall and the barge was similarly close to the left. There was perhaps 30cm between us. The lock system allowed for a number of vessels inside each lock. So a couple more barges came in behind us and another passenger boat was third in line behind the coal barge. That boat's skipper - or helmsman - was not of the same calibre as ours. There was a loud crunch as he whacked the left wall near the first gate and much to-ing and fro-ing as he tried to get into the lock on a relatively straight trajectory. At this stage, still some time before the vessel would start falling, we gave up on watching from deck. We were in bed and almost asleep again by the time the boat starting sinking relative to the wall. We got another three hours sleep before the breakfast bell went off.

After breakfast, we disembarked at Sandouping and were loaded on to buses for the drive across the river to the dam. There, under direction of Jessie, our latest local guide, we were shown around the world's largest hydro scheme. There we were shown the dam, which now goes across the entire river. It has saved the downstream towns, which were formerly the subject of reasonably regular flooding, but has done so at the expense of the upstream communities that were drowned and/or forcibly relocated. A command economy achieve such marvels in relatively short periods of time this but the consequences are not a part of the discussion as we are shown the achievements, all the more impressive given the speed at which they have been accomplished. The dam, the locks alongside which, when seen from above, with the ships rising and falling, are incredibly impressive, the ship lift they are building at one end of the dam to lift smaller vessels over the dam without needing to go through the locks and the nearby tourist facilities are all interesting, but it is a very large industrial construction, all form and little beauty. The best thing there was a small observation hill from which the entire vista was visible - the dam, the town, even the hordes at the site - unfortunately in the week of national holidays there was little room on the stairway and lots of shoving at the look-out.

We piled back on the boat for the last leg of the boat trip, through Xiling Xia, "which is famous for its strangely shaped cliff faces". It's probably the least interesting of the gorges in terms of the steepness and beauty of the cliffs. There were some riverside roads and older bridges and more small resorts along the way. After all it is far closer to a major city, Yichang, than any of the other gorges. Cathy bravely took us through the highlights of the sights, as few as they were, but we were all pretty tired and a little rivered out. I perked up at one point - a village where the Chinese resistance to the Japanese advance up the river in WW2 had been particularly strong. I also admired a temple on the shore just west of Yichang but not much of the city itself as we came in.

After disembarkation at Yichang, the group was split up into our various parties of two or four - although eight of us came together again at the airport for the same flight to Shang'hai. Chin was the guide for Cath and me. He picked us up at the boat and offered us pearls and teahouses but, when we demurred, not much in the way of any real tourism, nor lunch. Instead it was straight to the airport. Cath and I sat in teashop at the airport and had really refreshing ginger tea. In the absence of a guide to do the work for us, I had to queue for the seats on the flight to Shang'hai, where we were met by Kenny (whose Mandarin name, Jin Ho, I also learned) and Mr Chou and driven to Holiday Inn Downtown Shanghai (Great Wall Wing). It was by far the most opulent of our hotels. Genuinely 5-star. As we drove into town, along the freeways and elevated roads that cross the city, we learned, naturally, that Shang'hai was the largest city in China. Kenny started negotiations about the factories to visit: he offered silk, teahouse and pearls. We said no to the teahouse. Then we spent a quiet night back on dry land.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Wednesday October 6 - Shang'hai

The Holiday Inn also had the best brekkie of the tour, with some lovely steamed buns to supplement other options, although I could still not come at congee. Kenny met us to convey us first to the Jade Buddha Temple where two rare jade statues of Sakyamuni Buddha are stored. The temple complex, which included the Zen Coffee Shop, was lovely enough, with its huge gold buddhas, but further into the complex, behind closed doors and paywalls, were the two eponymous statues, from Burma, in white jade, a 190cm sitting Buddha and a 96cm recumbent Buddha - and quite beautiful the two are. The temple itself is less than a century old and is right in the middle of town: the contrast between the peaceful temple, complemented by a large number of penjing (what then Japanese call bonsai) and connected to a working lamasery and the surrounding industrial city was quite stark. And there was of course an almost overwhelming stink of incense.

From there is was a drive to the silk factory, where we got a lesson in silk production, including the different threads derived from single and double cocoons. The latter were largely used to make quilts, which aare a staple of the factory, and created by stretching of successive layers of the thin silk. But what interested us was the more expensive silk clothing made from the single cocoon silk: shirts, scarves, ties and so on. We did well by Kenny in the amount we bought. Lunch was at the nearby Chongqing Cygnet, a Sichuan-style eatery with suitably spicy food. Unfortunately we were really early and had to wait for the kitchen to open. Thence to the People's Park, and the Shanghai Museum, with its collection of ancient Chinese Art. Kenny left us to our own devices, so we started at the top, with the jades, the furniture and calligraphy. The collection covered the whole history of China, from the bronze age to the Qing. Cath, with her current interest in Chinese art and calligraphy, was particularly taken with the latter room. Next floor down there was a survey of Chinese landscape painting. They asked that we refrain from photography in this room. Being good, law-abiding, Aussies, we did so - and were about the only ones not flashing away. The rest of our time we spent admiring the ceramics, particularly the Tang ceramics, which complemented the collection we'd seen in Xi'an. In particular the three-color ceramics were very abundant and quite alluring. Sancai pottery has quickly become a favorite of mine. We had no time for the bronzes, but I thought we'd seen enough in Xi'an.

The next stop on our whirlwind tour was the Yu Gardens, something like 30 pavilions, linked by a maze of corridors and bridges. It was like being back in North Africa and entering a medina. Like there you felt that, without a guide, you might never get out. The gardens are surrounded by a bazaar that is a magnet for touts. The bazaar has food stalls and touristy shops and was overcrowded when we walked through in mid-afternoon. What it would be like with a night-market in operation was something to contemplate. Kenny guided us through the internal gardens in the opposite direction, entering through the exit and proceeding against the flow of traffic to the "entrance". It was built for the provincial governor and his family originally in Ming times, when Shang'hai was but a small fishing port. It has been expanded subsequently and was restored last century. In essence it consist of pavilions for meetings and for contemplation, with a number of rockeries, featuring the same sort of weathered grey stones we'd seen in the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace. Artificial lakes had also been carved into the landscape. It was very beautiful and would have been more marvellous in the absence of the madding crowds.

Kenny did us a huge favor (with a catch) and took us to the Bund, the riverside suburb where the colonial powers had built their hotels and business houses in the early part of last century. The row of buildings in a variety of western designs still lines the street. On the opposite side of the road, along the Huangpu River (which flows into the Yangzi), is an elevated riverside walk, overlooking the river and the Pudong district opposite. Pudong is where modern Shang'hai, and its financial centre, is sprouting: an awesome array of new commercial towers in a variety of dazzling shapes, highlighted by the Pearl TV tower and numerous surrounding skyscrapers. These have all been built in the last twenty years and continue to grow at an astonishing rate. The river boasts more interesting bridges, a passenger terminal for ships and lots of traffic. I'm a sucker for cities built on harbors and Shang'hai centre, with its contrast of the (relatively) old and the exceedingly new, won me over immediately. Kenny did have an ulterior motive for the visit to the Bund: here was to be found the government-run Pearl Centre. This time the lesson was in the variety of pearls: of freshwater pearls and seawater pearls and how to tell them from phoneys. And a sales pitch, of course. The merchandise was amazing - and Cath loves pearls.

Dinner was another case of bland food (sad after many days of better fare) in a tourist restaurant built over a factory, this time an embroidery shop, where they had framed masterworks that were magnificent - and well out of our price range. Our last piece of "folklore" was an "acrobatic show" at the theatre in the Shanghai Centre. Again this was the tourist version but it was incredibly good. I expected a lot of tumbling and, instead, got a wide variety of individual and group acts: female contortionists, balancing acts, groups juggling (with hats), an individual juggling with increasingly larger vases, a comedy knife act and, as a finale, the sort of acrobatics I'd expected at the start. It was fun, entertaining, enlightening, astonishing and a good end to a long and exhausting day.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Thursday October 7 - Shang'hai Expo

This was our day free of guides with tickets for the Shanghai Expo. Could we navigate the Shang'hai subway system and survive a day with our five-word Mandarin vocabulary? In the end it was easy and pointed us to the fact that a self-guided tour of China was well within our grasp. We found the subway entrance, purchased tickets, got on and off the trains. Shang'hai's subway seems to be by the same people who did Hong Kong's, with identical methods of entry and egress, the same crowded nature of the trains and the same pushing and shoving. It was all very unorderly getting on and off, with those entering paying no heed to those trying to get off. There was a similar use of mobile phones as well - a universal public transport curse. The signage enabled us to walk easily to the Expo site and enter with no problems. We discovered that going to Expo is like going to Disneyland: there are huge queues for the popular rides and quite long waits - in the end we didn't visit the China, Russia or USA pavilions because we only had a day at the fair and the waits were up to four hours. After walking though the CSSC pavilion (they are an international sea-freight company and it was the closest pavilion to where we entered - on the side of the river that had the industrial and scientific exhibitions, rather than the Pudong side, where the national pavilions were grouped) - a pavilion where we looked at a bit of video about the company but decided not to go further into the pavilion, we lined up at the information and communications pavilion run by China Mobile. Eventually we were admitted, given a modern communications device (and a set of earphones to provide an English translation) and joined a couple of hundred others in a huge hangar where an audio-visual IMAX show took us through how to use the device and how communications would assist the future. Thence we all trooped into an interactive cinema, which took us further into the story and offered the hope of prizes at the end. We also got snowed on and had bubbles blown at us. Neither of us won a prize (admittedly we didn't digitally connect to the site later to see if we had) but we had some fun on the "ride". We walked a little further to a pavilion that dealt with the future of the city (and how to make cities liveable - in keeping with the expo theme, "Better City. Better Life"). There were a number of exhibits on the theme and some stunning examples of urban planning from around the world. Australia contributed some thoughts about energy futures - in Canberra of all places. The whole pavilion was thought-provoking and hopeful for the future.

At this stage, close to lunchtime, we decided to leave city side and journey to the Pudong side. This took three ferry rides to get us to the western end of the compound, where the major national exhibits were. The first place we came across was a performance area that was in the middle of "Shanghai Week" and had some kids theatre finishing and orchestral performance starting in a creative space. We moved on to a food joint yclept Uncle Fastfood. We were the only round-eyes in the place and there was little in the way of material to help us but we managed to get a meal and drink each - for a remarkably cheap price - under $15 between us and the staff helped us find a table in the crowded room. The meals consisted of four stacked plastic containers - with the meat dish, rice, steamed broccoli and a salty custard, respectively. I had a duck dish and Cath a chicken and peanut, with chilli.

Then it was time to visit a few pavilions. It was a question of balancing what looked interesting against the lines outside. There was a fair queue outside the Spain pavilion but we love Spanish creativity so we lined up. The inside was worth the wait: shaped like the caves at Altamira, the entrance was truly dark until the projection of images of Spanish life started on the left wall. The right wall was painted a la Altamira. Then flamenco music started and a dancer stood up and demonstrated the beauty of the dance form. Coming out of the cave we found the rest of the exhibit, all about families and cities. Quite entertaining. Australia was next. The pavilion in what was supposed to be ochre (for the outback) but has oxidised to be now a dark brown and wave-shaped was very popular but the line at the time we arrived was barely past the door. Once we got inside the numbers appeared larger, as we passed the barely-this-side-of-embarrassing 3D caricatures of our history and contemporary times, including an upside-down Bridge on the roof and an Olympic-torch-bearing Cathy Freeman, before finishing with Ranga PM. The crowds got thicker around the next corner and we were awaiting a theatre to empty before we could enter. Inside the theatre in the round when we entered we saw a vaguely embarrassing AV presentation on Australia and the future of our cities, which most of the Chinese, who comprised the majority of the crowd liked far more than we did. The film at least stressed the advantages available to Australia for a better future. Our other choices were not as good as our first two. The combined Caribbean pavilion was pretty anodyne and the Canadian offered much and delivered little after some interesting opening AVs. But we were really tired and footsore by this stage, so we looked at the outside of a number of other pavilions on our way to the subway that ran into the site. Then we walked back to our hotel for in room salad and cheesecake.

[click on an image to enlarge]  [return to top]

Friday October 8 through Saturday October 9 - Shanghai to Hong Kong to Sydney

[return to top]

return to Raves/Essays index

Introduction | Biography | Trip reports | History | Movies | ANZAPA

Published by
Jack R Herman
Sydney, December 2010

All material © Copyright Jack R Herman.
Email: jackr@internode.on.net

Disclaimer

Last updated: 5 December 2010