China Dairy, 2008 - Shanghai, China
Shanghai, China
Where I stayed
China
Shanghai, May 9-12, 2008
Shanghai, the central city of the central kingdom of the world, is overwhelming in its power and contrasts. This is what Margaret and I quickly concluded when we arrived from Toronto (via Vancouver).
Pudong is Shanghai’s newest borough. Almost three million people, where 16 years ago were only rice fields, PuDong makes Toronto look old and dirty to us. In fact, despite China’s weak central government – almost invisible on the streets of Shanghai – the entire city has many superb public services.
Arriving at PuDong's new airport, our bus heads down a new toll-road expressway in whose centre median flash by the 430-km/h Maglev trains. Shanghai’s eight metro lines include two brand new ones opened in December. The wide Pudong streets are spotless, thanks to the street-sweepers in orange jump suits employed by the local borough, with long brooms worthy of a Moscow babushka. The metro cars are spotless, due to a sweeper moving up and down the train scooping up any stray scrap of paper.
Despite vast fleets of buses and taxis (which seem to outnumber the private cars) with driving habits that make Montreal drivers look like Sunday school teachers, I saw no hint of any accidents. The countless expressways and multi-lane major arteries in all parts of Shanghai are incredibly safe. One collision yesterday between a bus and a truck, in which no one was killed, was page 3 news in the Shanghai Daily we read.
We see bicycle lanes everywhere. Along the major arteries of Pudong, they are cordoned off with neat green chains between perfectly placed pylons (why doesn’t Toronto do this?), perhaps to protect the (usually) law-abiding bus drivers from the anarchist cyclists.
We see an explosion of construction, or the demolition of buildings that seem to have been built just last month, to make way for still newer construction. The city has about 13 million permanent residents, and perhaps six million migrant workers drawn by the boom. Margaret's wry comment that there "is nothing in Shanghai older than me except in the museum" has some merit. Even the gymnasts in one of Shanghai's top rated shows are retired in their early twenties because after that their bodies are not supple enough to perform the unimaginable, but still mesmerizingly beautiful, routines on a daily basis. In China keeping the body supple seems to be a national obsession. Across from our Shanghai hotel, not only do store staff do their famous morning Tai Chi and callisthenics on the plaza in front, but dance classes keep practising in the plaza all day and late into the night.
In the Shanghai Daily I read a story on China's new "transparency" regulation in force May 1. It requires disclosure of information to the public. A public opinion survey showed 77.5% of people wanted most to see the salaries -- and assets -- of public officials. Going Ontario one better.
This prosperous city somehow makes money. Its 2007 budget was 210 billion Yuan (US$29.2 billion). No annual property tax. A small municipal income tax, plus sales taxes and corporate taxes. They must make a lot by leasing their land (people own their condos, but the city owns the land) to investors building a new building, it seems, every few minutes.
We see construction cranes everywhere. Hoardings around demolition sites for the latest skyscraper, or is it for the latest expressway tunnel or metro line? (They are building one new line per year.) Across from our hotel the 6-story housing built 15 years ago looks dilapidated already by comparison.
Yet the future-is-now breakneck gleaming growth of Pudong looks nothing like much of the old city of Shanghai.
Alleyways festooned by what our guide calls China’s national flag -– laundry –- have a third-world appearance. The Shanghai princesses in the latest fashions, raised in one-child families, jostle on the sidewalks with migrant workers who let their children pee on those sidewalks. Crowds throng entire narrow streets lined with millions of tiny shops, while a tour bus honks in the vain hope of clearing a path. Yes, millions of tiny shops, it appears. Even metro station mezzanines are lined with dozens of tiny shops. How do all these people make a living in such tiny spaces? Oh, and despite its mostly excellent public services, you still can’t drink the tap water.
Transportation is so cheap. Entering the metro station, I touch our destination station on a touch-screen ticket machine and it sells me a ticket to anywhere downtown or in the inner suburbs for only four Yuan (60 cents). A taxi from the downtown to our hotel across the river in PuDong costs only 18 Yuan (about $2.70).
China's best surprise is its friendly people. Margaret had been nervous: how can you relate to a seething giant mass of 1,300,000,000 people? One family at a time, as it turned out. On our second full day in China, our free Sunday in Shanghai, we start our exploring. At the subway station across from our hotel we get on a brand new Metro line. Who knew Chinese celebrate Mother's Day too? Children and adults are carrying elaborate Mother's Day bouquets. Across the aisle in the crowded subway car is a mother serenely holding a bouquet in one hand. She holds her son's hand with the other, while her granddaughter leans her head on her shoulder. Some people in the crowd stare at us a little, but still we feel almost at home, among people just like us.
Our local guide in Shanghai tells us he can tell what neighbourhood of Shanghai a person lives in by his accent. Pudong and the downtown seem totally bilingual. The metro cars have signs in Chinese and English, and a recorded message in Chinese and English announces the next stop, and re-announces it as we enter. This is for those who are standing where they can’t see the cute little animated map showing the next station by a blinking red light, which a line of dots keeps passing as the virtual train zips around the map to show the direction of travel. (A few people even get seats, including the elderly Chinese – but not us elderly tourists - to whom everyone yields their seat.) But the bilingual ads along the metro station walls are sometimes in Chinglish.
Meanwhile, one of our tour group goes off on a pilgrimage of his own. His parents were stationed in Shanghai in the 1930s when the Japanese invaded. They let the foreigners stay, even after 1939. But after Pearl Harbour they were all interned as enemy aliens, whole families, including his parents and his two older siblings (he himself was born just after the war.) So he goes to see the "concentration camp"— actually a commandeered high school – where they lived for those years. It isn't the same; it has been converted to luxury condos renting for $3,000 to $5,000 a month.
Chinese are fearless in traffic, drivers and pedestrians alike. We see hundreds of fathers and mothers on bikes or scooters with a child on the back or front, driving between buses and taxis and cars with no fear. On an old Shanghai street, cars mount sidewalks when necessary to pass a delivery truck, but children on the sidewalk stand their ground. Cars dodge them. Even with only 12 in our group, we have both a tour guide and a driver for our little bus: driving in Shanghai is a job for professionals.
Shanghai will stay in my mind forever. Street vendors selling everything imaginable, everywhere. Hordes of people in the subways, in the parks. Hordes of people in the streets talking on their cell phones while dodging fast traffic, even on traffic islands in the middle of mad intersections where stylish young women in their stilettos speeding on their motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, and the odd, terror-stricken western tourist somehow avoid getting hit.
On our last night in Shanghai we went to the famous downtown shopping street, Nanjing Road. Mostly high-end western brand-name merchandise, but still a huge variety. Then we found a basement food court where we could experiment with the menu: four restaurants, one of which was Kentucky Fried Chicken, which we passed up. There we met our one and only spook: we thought it might be a mall security guard who wandered around but kept coming back with his eye on us, the only westerners in sight. Was he just bored? Did he know he was spooking us? That morning we had been further off the western tourist path, in an older commercial district around Shanghai's oldest Buddhist Pagoda. Far from the downtown, where the merchants spoke little English, we must have looked like visitors from another planet, but still we had never felt nervous.
Hangzhou, May 12 - 13
To grasp China, imagine Europe if the Roman Empire had never fallen. Imagine a Europe where everyone speaks Latin as well as their local language. (There are at least seven major Chinese languages besides Mandarin.) Imagine a culture stretching unbroken for more than 5,000 years. Imagine Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt being not an older world, but just part of our own history. Imagine Roman engineers having built a grand canal from Hamburg in Germany past Paris to the west of France back in 500 AD. Imagine more than half that canal still carrying large freight boats today. Imagine popular movies about Roman heroes from 500 AD.
Each of our seven local guides was impressively proud of their city. China is far too large to be other than a series of local republics or kingdoms. The typical province of China has 60 million people, the size of France or Britain. People identify with their city, or perhaps their province.
Hangzhou’s serene and magnificent West Lake with its renowned gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has inspired poets for many centuries. Marco Polo saw it around 1280 AD, along with Suzhou, and told Europe he had seen paradise on earth. We walk past pavilions and islands on causeways whose gardens have every tree shaped as though by an artist. They are surrounded on three sides by ranks of hills, which in turn are covered (on closer inspection) by terraced rows of tea-leaf shrubs. Elsewhere are mulberry bushes for the silk worms.
We saw a silk museum which explained the life-cycle of the silk worm (just as shown in every grade one class in Canada), but also the history of silk production in China which dates from their prehistory.
Tourism is hugely big business in the Yangtze Delta around Shanghai. But we were surprised who 90% of the tourists are -- other Chinese. Even on the causeways of HangZhou's West Lake, where between the pavilions we find a few tourist shops selling high-quality tourist junk, it's mostly to the Chinese tourists.
Again, such friendly people. On HangZhou's West Lake, where everyone was taking photos, half a dozen different Chinese tourists asked Margaret to pose with a couple of their group in front of some famous scene, putting their arms around her as though she were part of their family. Why, out of all the westerners in the tour group, did the Chinese tourists pick out her to be photographed with? She says she's still wondering whether they were simply acknowledging her beauty, or whether she bears an accidental resemblance to some famous painting of the White Snake Lady or some such figure from Chinese mythology. ;) Since everything in China has a negotiable price, she wondered if she should start charging.
(Postscript: much later, we read an article where a similarly puzzled western tourist got a Chinese guide to be unusually frank with her. "You have to understand that westerners are so rare in China, you are almost as rare as pandas" she explained. The penny dropped. "Wow, I was a panda" said Margaret.)
Everyone takes pictures. When we again see yet another photogenic child, and sign a request for permission for Margaret to snap a picture, not only is it never refused, but they love to help pose the child.
We learned a great deal from our guides. They made the difference between sightseeing and understanding. Chinese say "Travelling 10,000 km is like reading 10,000 books," or perhaps it's "Travelling 1,000 km is better than reading 10,000 books." Either way, it's true.
Many historic buildings at West Lake were destroyed by the Japanese between 1937 and 1945, and later "restored" or re-created. By 1940, strong resistance in occupied areas made a victory seem impossible to the Japanese. This frustrated them and led them to employ the "Three Alls Policy" (kill all, loot all, burn all.) In Japanese documents, the policy was originally referred to as "The Burn to Ash Strategy."
Much of what we are seeing is reconstruction, because so much of China's heritage was destroyed either by the Japanese or during the Cultural Revolution. Since they didn't have the luxury of requiring authentic restorations, restoration does not mean, in China, what it means to us. But why not re-create? Some of their greatest scenes of natural beauty are not in fact natural, but were built like Hangzhou's West Lake constructed from 800 to 1090 AD.
We were on a boat on Hangzhou’s West Lake at 2:30 when the quake hit Wenchuan. No tremors in Hangzhou. We knew nothing of the quake for over six hours until we watched the evening news.
Our hotel's TV has BBC World (which calls it the "Chinaquake"), NewsAsia from Singapore (which calls it the Sichuan Quake), CCTV9 (China Central TV's English channel which calls it the Wenchuan earthquake), TV5Asie (French), DW-TV (Deutsche Welle, German), and CNN. All are covering the quake except CNN which is more interested in counting Hillary Clinton's delegates. CCTV gives very frequent updates and live news conferences with uncensored blunt questions, but has given up for the moment on trying to count bodies.
The death toll seems likely to reach 100,000. They say the disaster is well beyond the scope of any municipal or provincial construction teams, so the central government is coordinating municipal and provincial construction teams from the six neighbouring provinces. (Note there are no national construction teams.)
Suzhou, May 13 - 15
In 2,500-year-old Suzhou, we are in a different world than Shanghai. It has 200 gardens, and 8,000 bridges over its various canals. No buildings over six stories in the old city. Beside the two or three lane streets you see a row of manicured shrubs or a bed of red azaleas, then the bicycle lanes, and then sometimes a small canal. Getting off the tour bus, the street vendors ask us if we want to buy "Chapeaux?" Touring a 1180-AD garden (restored in 1958), half the foreign tourists are French, which makes sense. SuZhou has a very French sensibility, from its world-famous gardens to the soft, sweet accent (says our tour guide) spoken by the locals.
It's hard to understand the overtones. For example, our guide explained the symbolism in one garden. The Chinese word for mirror sounds the same as the word for peace, although written with a different character. Same for the words for vase and tranquility. Same for clock and eternity. So a garden with a clock, mirror and vase is a visual metaphor for eternal peace and tranquility.
We saw an embroidery workshop where they make what look like paintings, with almost microscopic stitching, a craft which they began 2000 years ago, and have developed 71 different stitches.
On our last night in Suzhou Margaret finally got around to having a back-and-foot massage that the Chinese are so fond of. It was from a very cute young woman (she looked about 19) in a cheap store front a block from our hotel. Although she spoke no English, none was generally necessary. Although she was typically slim, she had extremely strong hands, no doubt from several years' experience if she had finished school at 15 as most do. Margaret was blown away -- she had never felt anything like it. She wanted to adopt the masseuse and bring her home with us. She gave her a big hug and paid her $15 (the posted fee was only $5, for a session that lasted an hour and 20 minutes.) There was a reflexology chart on the wall and a pocket copy, and when Margaret twitched at a sensitive point on one foot she showed her the chart and pointed to the heart on it. Of course this is not western-scientific, but still it has Margaret wondering if her heart is a sore point?
Driving from SuZhou to Shanghai's HongQiao airport along the Shanghai - Suzhou - Nanjing toll-road Expressway, we find one of the very few major roads with no lanes beside it for mopeds and bicycles. But still, between the four lanes in each direction is a median strip full of carefully manicured shrubs in a serrated pattern, and more red azalea beds. It's called the HuNing Expressway for short. "Hu" is universally known as the short word for ShangHai, "Ning" for Nanjing.
Up the Long River, May 15 - 19
Pride everywhere. Even our young woman guide in little Yichang (barely 500,000 people) was strongly proud of her city, where we boarded our cruise ship for the trip up the Long River, the Chang Jiang (the river westerners call the Yangtze).
At the giant Three Gorges Dam our tour of the facility was led by a remarkable fellow. His small village upstream had had to relocate, and they had chosen to move to Sandouping, the town beside the dam. Such families got a new house and a year's salary, and compensation for the loss of their orange groves (they could buy land for new orange groves if they wished), but as the son he was offered a dam job, which he jumped at.
For years, he told us, he ran a jack-hammer, breaking up the big stones from the giant holes blasted out of the bedrock. Understandably, he decided to learn English and become a tour guide. He had a great incentive, since those jobs are scarce. He had the best English of anyone we have met in the last week.
He is a natural comedian, in a hard-rock style he said he learned from watching American jail-break movies, which suited his tall muscular build. He broke all the stereotypes with great gusto. He told us "I am not a member of the Communist Party, so I can say what I like." He said there were few young women in SanDouPing for the dam workers to pair up with, since 95% (he said) of the dam workers were male. But he said he regretted nothing -- he had helped China create a miracle with his bare hands, he said, and he was genuinely proud.
The Three Gorges themselves, and the Lesser Three Gorges up a smaller tributary, are still the world-class scenic treasure they have always been. With sheer rock cliffs rising 1,000 metres almost straight up in places, the loss of 60 metres due to the rising river level is no problem. And the Red Tower at the west end, with its iron cannons guarding the exit as they have for millennia (it is said one man could stop 1,000 invaders from coming upstream, back in the days when Sichuan was a separate kingdom), still stands guard many hundred metres above the river, in a scene found on the back of our ten-Yuan notes (think two-dollar bill).
With over one million people having to relocate from the river banks as a result of the Three Gorges Dam raising the water level about 60 meters, many historic sites and historic inscriptions on the stone walls of the gorges -- many over 1,000 years old -- had to be moved or recreated higher up.
Nine o'clock on Saturday night must be special in WanXian, a city of about 200,000 that knows how to party. As we went past, they were playing loud music on speakers in a downtown plaza echoing across the river. At nine o'clock a computer imitation of Big Ben sounded the full-hour chimes followed by nine "bongs," followed by a brief announcement by a woman's voice, fireworks, and more dance music.
In discussions on our ship, many people comment on the generation gap. The new generation are ostensibly not interested in politics nor in religion, but very interested in the future of China.
And the definition of the "New China" is shifting, we notice. Sometimes it still starts in 1949, "the year China stood up." But increasingly it starts with Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the "Father of the New China." Even the Three Gorges Dam is now attributed to a plan he wrote in 1919, quite a stretch.
Some people still refer to Deng Xiao Ping, the "founder of the open policy." But then they have to refer to Mao who is still then labelled "70% correct and 30% incorrect" as Deng Xiao Ping first said. One person even told us, while discussing Chinese idioms and the expression "to have a soft ear" meaning being overly susceptible to persuasion: "For example, during the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao had a soft ear for his wife."
Someone else explained to us that Chairman Mao's "incorrect" episode was not confined to the Cultural Revolution. It started in the summer of 1957. The "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend" campaign had been too successful. In July 1957, Mao ordered a halt to the campaign. The Hundred Flowers Campaign was then turned on its head, used to silence critics. It was followed by the "Great Leap Forward" which was another incorrect episode.
But on the whole it seems simpler to avoid such topics and simply refer back to the man everyone loves, Dr. Sun Yat Sen whose picture now outshines Mao's. Although Deng Xiao Ping is the real father of today's China, we have seen only one big picture of him: a riverbank town had a school which had been built about 20 years ago with help from a school in GuangDong (Canton) after GuangDong had been the first of the New Economic Zones. They required a giant portrait of their hero on the school wall as a condition of their aid.
Chinese are tenacious, especially street vendors. Our Yangtze cruise is the only time our Canadian group is submerged in hundreds of American tourists. On a shore excursion we are led through a row of makeshift stores but have no time to shop, being on our way to a motorized sampan ride through the Lesser Three Gorges. Margaret looks at an item in Store 34, and the owner fixes her gaze on her: "you come into my store later, okay? Store 34, remember me." Several hours later, heading back to the cruise ship, we again run the gauntlet of the row of buzzing, in your face, vendors. (Surely someone is getting a kickback for directing us this way). Margaret is no longer wearing the same jacket, but the woman in store 34 isn't fooled, searches her out, chases her down, and grabs her from the crowd. The social director of the cruise ship -- a handsome blond American refugee from a TV cruise show -- is, for some reason, hovering in the shop too. As the high-pressure sales pitches pile up, Margaret appeals to him for help, but far be it from him to interfere with local "retailers." He just stands there flashing the same Crest white-strip smile he used to varying degrees of effect on the cruise ship. It's an unwritten rule: our own tour guide will tell us what an item is worth, but not within earshot of the local merchant.
This being an American-owned cruise ship, we get only CNN and the excellent Singapore-based NewsAsia, which keeps us up to date on the earthquake. We feel guilty for enjoying ourselves at such a time. We all heard about the miracle baby: 100 hours post-quake she was pulled from the rubble, as was her mother, whose dead body had sheltered her infant. The mother had left this text message on her cell phone: "If you survive the earthquake, remember I love you."
One day our tour was met by a class of about eight sweet girls in their school uniforms, aged nine or 10, standing by a metre-high photo of the earthquake's devastation, collecting money for girls their age in the earthquake zone. They did well.
Among all the stories of collapsed buildings, everyone notes the 900 schools. Hints abound of substandard construction, and threats of severe punishments for anyone responsible. The head of the party's discipline committee, described in the Chinese media as the country's top anti-corruption official, was on the scene very quickly, vowing that those responsible for substandard school construction will be punished severely. We saw a demonstration on TV of poor materials used in one school. I'm not talking of western media, but the China Daily and CCTV-9, their official English-language channel, which carried live questioning of top officials by skeptical reporters.
Chinese people love and value their children more than anything. It is not credible that the schools issue would be covered up. I have a report in the China Daily of the top official in the Beichuan county government crawling out of the ruins of his own collapsed county building, and start assigning rescue work within 10 minutes. It wasn't just schools.
In Canada hundreds of workers die on the job and no one is accountable. In China when people are accountable they can be executed. A happy medium would be nice.
ChongQing, May 19
Many children in China start learning languages, and more than one foreign language, as young as age four. So we've been told, but you don't believe it until you see it. At the ChongQing Zoo we went to see the panda bears (the Chinese word for them is "cat bears" because they have the personality of cats.) We saw more cute Chinese kids than pandas. One girl had just turned five. Margaret asked her granny for permission to photograph her, which as always was granted with a broad smile. The girl loved the game, playing peek-a-boo behind her granny's legs.
Margaret asks how old? Granny holds up four fingers. "No, No" signs the girl with a horizontal wave of her hand. Holding up her own fingers, she counts out, in perfect and unaccented English. "One, two, three, four, five." Photographs completed, the girl smiles and says "Thank you very much." As her final flourish, as the little show-off walks away she calls out in Russian "Do svedanya" (Bye-bye.)
After that, watching a 10-month-old panda scamper to the top of her tree and loll backwards nibbling leaves was almost an anticlimax.
ChongQing is unique, but then everywhere in China is unique. One of China's big four cities, over 10,000,000 people, it's the only one in the interior. Unlike the exploding coastal centres like Shanghai, its economy is booming but not overheated. The minimum wage and basic old age pension here is 160 Yuan per week, or about $24.00, which will feed a person for a week. You can buy a nice condo here for $75,000 (Canadian).
Yet the city looks not unlike Shanghai, with new towers and more new construction everywhere. But we will see only five of China’s 15 biggest cities, all different. One difference in ChongQing's appearance is due to it being a city of hills upon hills: no bicycle lanes. The scooters and mopeds compete with the taxis, buses and other vehicles. As our guide said "only two groups ride bicycles in ChongQing: athletes, and stupid people."
Like everywhere in China, ChongQing has its own unique local history, we find out. It was the wartime capital during WWII. This meant that Claire Channault's famous "Flying Tigers" were based here -- the mercenaries he originally recruited for China's Air Force, plus the next wave of Americans who volunteered to fight the Japanese even before Pearl Harbour.
It was also the end-point for a group of famous heroes I totally missed hearing about: the "Hump" airlift. After the Japanese took Burma, ChongQing was as landlocked as Berlin in 1948-9 when the Berlin airlift saved it. But in the case of ChongQing from 1942 to 1944, the airlift was over the Himalayas, from Assam in northeast India. Over that period, about 1,500 planes were used; half of which did not survive. Its motley group of pilots held reunions in later years, and claimed to have taken part in the greatest feat of heroic aviation in military history. I don't know how to compare them with the pilots of the Battle of Britain, but I am not about to dispute their claim.
The most dramatic earthquake video we've seen, shown in the west too, was by a wedding photographer in WenChuan who was filming five weddings in front of a temple just as the quake hit. He keeps filming a bride as she looks in horror at the temple collapsing behind her for about 10 seconds until she stands, dirty but unharmed, in a mound of rubble.
Flying from the ChongQing airport, at 2:28 the whole country stands still for three minutes, as it has every day for the last three days, a period of national mourning. Very impressive and moving.
Xi’an, May 19 - 21
Xi'an has fewer people but more history. Its numerous stints as China's capital date back to 221 BC, when the first Qin Emperor first unified China, built the Great Wall, standardized the Chinese language's written characters and its legal code, and so on. And he also had the usual mausoleum built during his lifetime, like the ancient Egyptians. Unlike his predecessor kings of Xi'an, he did not plan to have an army buried alive with him to protect him in the afterlife. In a step which no doubt won favour with his armed forces, he created what we know today as the Terracotta Warriors: thousands of plaster-cast models, each with a different face taken from his real army.
They were also buried with their swords, which are still sharp 2,200 years later, because they were made of chrome-plated bronze to prevent rusting. And here we thought we in the west had invented chrome-plating in 1937.
The museums we visited were fascinating. In one of them we saw the first Hibachi: an iron cooking stove virtually identical to a modern Hibachi barbeque, dated to 25 AD.
China's only full empress (not counting the Empress Dowager Cixi) was from here: Wu Zetian, back around 700 AD. She made many changes for the benefit of women, which did not long survive her.
The Expressway to the Terracotta Warriors is lined with beautiful willow trees. As usual, they have a double meaning. They have been a symbol of Xi'an for over a thousand years. Some emperor started planting them because the word for willow sounds like the word for return home (or something like that), and it was part of a civic pride campaign for Xi'an people to return home.
Tai’an, May 21 - 23
After a lifetime of being just plain Margaret, she is now a goddess, having been to heaven -- the summit of Mount Tai, known as China's holiest mountain.
Climbing Mount Tai is part of the Chinese character, a little like the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Until 20 years ago, it had to be done on foot. Our guide first climbed it at age four with his grandmother, who took eight hours to make the ascent, stayed overnight and walked down the next day, once each year.
Thankfully they built a road 20 years ago part-way up. Buoyed by the pervasive sweet smell of the Scholar Trees, we take a cable car part of the rest of the way. The final segment still takes an hour on foot, and at 33 degrees C (92 F) this was arduous. We got sunburnt in heaven. But the view, the entire experience, is so magical it was worth it.
China's automatic priority, whether in ancient gardens or new high-tech zones, is beauty. Is it because they are so crowded together, that they compensate by landscaping every square inch? On the new road to Tai'an we see the new interchanges beautifully landscaped, with exquisite flower beds, shrubs and ponds inside the curved on-ramps and off-ramps.
Yet even Tai'an, the small historic city nestled in the shadow of Mount Tai, has a high-tech zone on its southern outskirts, with a brand new university featuring a stadium with a dazzling curved roof.
The variety of TV channels in our hotels continues. In Tai'an we’re near Qufu where Confucius lived in 500 BCE, and his great-grandson Mencius and his other followers. Many Japanese are Confucians. Many Japanese businesses invest in the Tai'an area. So we have Japanese channels on our TV including a Japanese English-language channel.
The very impressive Tai'an Ramada is being made still more impressive by alterations. Our room has been touched up with some work in the bathroom, whose door jam is adorned with a sticker reading "DO NOT USE IT, PLEASE." Use what? The door? The bathroom? We gingerly check all the fixtures. They all seem to work. Still, we get a laugh from our group at dinner that evening when we relate our dilemma. (It seems every hotel on the tourist circuit has recently been bought up by some western chain. Since westerners are proverbially unable to fathom how low Chinese bottom-line prices really are, one wonders how rich the original Chinese owners of these hotels have become.)
No account of a trip to China can be complete without a note on the hardest thing for westerners to adapt to: Chinese washrooms. We called a washroom "the Happy House" (better to laugh than to weep), and graded them from a zero-star through five-star. One-star had only squat toilets (at ground level), were strictly BYOP (bring your own toilet paper), had no doors on the stalls, and were so smelly it was hard to breathe. Two-star were clean but otherwise the same. Three-star had doors, and one western-style sit toilet in a stall marked for the disabled, which we quickly decided included the culturally disabled. Four-star even had one toilet paper dispenser, in the washbasin area, for those whose supply had run low. Five-star were western-style, found mostly in hotels and other tourist establishments. Zero-star defies description and is what Margaret faced during her climb of Mount Tai. When we got off the cable car and looked at the long stairway from the South Gate of Heaven to the North Gate, she decided a pit stop was unavoidable. It was the dreaded zero-star. She said she thought her tombstone would read "died of suffocation in a Happy House halfway to Heaven."
Jinan, May 23 - 25
In JiNan -- the "city of springs and parks" -- we were swarmed by a Grade nine class, out with their teacher collecting signatures on a giant wall poster scroll to send to their fellow students in the earthquake zone. They refused money: they were not collecting donations. But they were so eager for a western signature that they hugged us, took our pictures, and gave us yellow armband scarves.
China's greatest treasure, even greater than its beauty, is its people. A 12-year-old girl with quite decent English overheard Margaret having language difficulties in a Jinan department store, and volunteered as her translator until she was done (in a huge shopping plaza underneath a magnificent new central park, both about nine years old.) A 6-year-old "little Empress" posed for our photo in a pose like a movie star. Most of these kids were out with their grannies. Even in 3.4-million-strong Jinan, many parents have gone to Beijing or Shanghai during the week to find good jobs.
Chinese know their history -- of China. Jinan's Baotu Spring is the best of its 72 springs. First written about 3,543 years ago, its clear water is of the highest quality. The large volume feeds a small river leading to yet another beautiful small lake with a pavilioned island in the middle. This one is dedicated to the extraordinary poetess Li QingZhao (1084-1151), and we saw a statue of her. The most famous lines of China's most famous poetess, which it seems almost every school child knows, include a lament on those who, in the 1127 rush to escape Manchu invaders, thought more of saving their lives than of defending their emperor:
"Alive we need heroes among the living
Who when dead will be heroes among the ghosts.
I cannot tell how much we miss Xiang Yu
Who preferred death to crossing the River"
Xiang Yu had lived more than 1,300 years earlier (232 BC – 202 BC), yet was still the metaphor for honour: he died rather than retreat in disgrace. To this day he is still an early example of a Chinese tragic hero. History is long in China.
So is their history with national minorities, of which the Manchu are the second largest. As everyone repeats to us: China is 92% Han Chinese, 8% in the 56 national minorities with special privileges. They are exempt from the one-child policy, so that 8% will grow. They have quotas at universities, so they can enter with lower marks than Han Chinese, and get various free services and preferential economic development and aid. Remarkably, we heard no hint of resentment of these special privileges.
More incredible landscaping: on the new Jinan - QingDao Expressway, beside the paved lanes were five rows of trees, each row different, all landscaped, ranging from shortest on the inside to tallest at the edge of the expressway land.
JiNan has a 60-metre-high Gold Buddha on the dominant hillside overlooking the downtown, set in the Thousand Buddhas Park. Most of the thousand Buddhas had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. So they "restored" the Park by building one giant new Buddha, only eight years ago.
Chinese people celebrate a lot. It's Saturday (moving day), so many firecrackers go off to celebrate a family having moved into a new apartment -- and to scare away ghosts. Weddings in restaurants feature masses of fresh flowers. (Still, they almost all smoke, even in restaurants.)
Beijing, May 25 - 29
Beijing is under renovation. But it will all be finished in time for the Olympics.
Well, not all. But they are already starting to put giant tinfoil-wrap around the construction sites of new buildings that will be unfinished and closed-in, shutting off the dust and sending perhaps a million migrant workers home.
As we arrived at our Beijing Sheraton hotel, I got another laugh from our group as we looked around the modernistic four-story atrium, when I said "Ho, hum, yet another awe-inspiring lobby." In a country where so many things are larger than life, even awe has its limits.
The giant Olympic media centre will be ready, shaped like a dragon's head, with the world's largest TV screens on all sides of the top of the building and more than half its width. At the other extreme, so will the hutongs (alleyway neighbourhoods) of the old city's northwest quarter, all getting brand-new public toilet buildings in each block, while the friendly residents re-roof their homes and reconstruct anything else that comes to mind, trying to keep up with the new gated condos on the fringe of the -- well, not quite yuppified, but certainly upscaled old district.
Even Beijing is full of lakes and parks in unexpected places. Along the 3rd Ring Road Expressway around Beijing we saw what looked at first glance like trees of flowers. At second glance, they were identical pots of flowers on tree-shaped pole stands, eight rows high. Absolutely beautiful. The red, yellow, orange, and purple beds of flowers along the road to the Olympic stadium are not just a special for the Olympics, they are the norm.
China doesn't just put parks in every spare square metre of land -- they use them, in large groups, many of them young-looking seniors (women retire at 55, men at 60), others regular folks on their day off. Dancing, singing, "relaxing their hearts," and my two favourites: Tai Chi Rouli ball (a cross between tennis and juggling) and ribbon dancing (a hobby so beautiful it has become an Olympic sport).
Even China is running out of cheap labour, our guide says. Beijing's No. 1 Cloisonné factory used to have 700 employees, who lived in the company-owned housing all around it. Now it has fewer than 100, and the housing is converted to condos. The price of the skilled hand-craft work is too high for most buyers to pay. The number one job choice for graduates is a railway job, paying 10,000 Yuan a month. Next is a bank job, then an electric company job, then a public servant, then a doctor, then a teacher. The average wage in Jinan is 6,000 Yuan a month. Wal-Mart pays only 700-Yuan a month, minimum wage, in China as everywhere else.
I see Beijing's subway managers have found a source of revenue Toronto might copy: ads on the exit signs. On the YongHeGong station platform, a plan of the station shows you where the exits are, and the signs to Exit B tell you that this is the exit for the Aodong Law Firm, the Everhonest Certified Public Accountants firm, and the Huijia Law Firm. Perhaps this helps pay for the beautiful music (not Muzak) filtering through the station.
The Chinese are world masters of food. We ate many wonderful mystery dishes. If only someone had given us a full description of what we were eating. Carp is the favoured, even hallowed fish of China appearing repeatedly through the centuries in Imperial architecture and art treasures. Its appearance however on the lazy susan, anatomically complete, as the gastronomic highlight of the evening meal, was not always greeted with reverence or relish by the western diners.
But they haven't limited themselves to traditional foods. Watch for cans of Lulu Almond Drink to appear on Canadian shelves before long. And then there's Hot Coke with Ginger. Margaret saw it on the menu of a simple restaurant in Beihai Park overlooking the beautiful lake, and took a chance. It was a big mug of hot Coca-Cola with about an inch of finely shredded fresh ginger floating on top: extremely refreshing and delicious.
Conclusion
What was most impressive about China? The ancient visual poetry of Mount Tai? The grandeur of Beijing, sprouting more ultra-modern architecture at every corner? But these are worlds as different from each other as both are from Canada. How can you compare?
Egypt has been the Nile, for millennia. Much of China has always been its Long River that we call the Yangtze. People at one end of it speak a different language than at the other, but its vast natural beauty, and its vital commercial role in transporting goods, put it at the centre of China's past and future. Northern China is the part north of the Long River, southern China to the south. In 609 AD they built the Grand Canal, linking the Yangtze at least 1,400 km to China's northern centre of Beijing, then just inside the Great Wall (it became capital of all of China only under Kublai Khan in 1279). Before long China will complete a channel sending water from the Yangtze basin -- perhaps even from the lake above the Three Gorges Dam -- about 1,400 km to thirsty Beijing. And when that Dam's power comes on line, it will provide 5% of China's electricity -- that's power for 70 million people, twice Canada's population. I will never forget the pride of our hard-rock dam guide at having "helped build a miracle with my bare hands."