China by boat and train
The drive out from central Beijing reveals something of the vast scale of this city, and no doubt others. Just as it seems the buildings are starting to peter out and vegetation is starting to appear, another cluster of forty tower blocks springs up, and so on and so on for the first hour. Large parts of the city were flattened in the 1950’s, in the early years of the People’s Republic, to make way for taller construction, so there is very little “old” left, apart from carefully restored monuments, of which the Great Wall is among the oldest. The city is now laid out in a geometric grid, which makes for thousands of crossroads and tens of thousands of traffic lights, turning the shortest of journeys into a patience- and energy-sapping grind.
There is still some other ancient amongst the modern. Tiananmen Square is vast: the biggest city square in the world. Which is just as well as, even at 8:30 in the morning we queue for nearly an hour at an entry Security checkpoint to get in and there are dozens of other entry points. After queueing, we can stand between Mao’s mausoleum and the Great Hall of the People, on the spot where the previous week, Xi Qinping stood with Putin and Kim Jon Ung to watch a massive display of Chinese military might to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Great Japanese War, or as we know it, World War II. There is another long queue for entry to the mausoleum and Mao still seems to be widely lionised and revered, despite the known privations of the Great Leap Forward, in which up to 45 million died of starvation following the collectivisation of farming, and the Cultural Revolution, when the ideals and strictures of communist ideology were strictly reinforced. As foreigners, we are welcome to the country but not to discuss recent history or indeed visit the mausoleum. We can take pictures of pretty much anything, apart from the police and military, and are free to wander anywhere without a guide, if we choose. There is very little crime and the the streets are more or less safe.
In this spirit, the Forbidden City is no longer Forbidden, even to us foreigners so we enter the Gate of Heavenly Peace, beneath a portrait of Mao, on the distant side of the square. After Genghis Khan's Mongol invasion of China was repelled in 1368, the country was ruled by two dynasties until the founding of the republic: Ming founded by Zhu Zyuanzhang from 1368 to 1644, then Qing until 1912, when the last emperor, 6 year-old Puyi was forced to abdicate. The third Ming emperor Yongle is credited with the creation of much of old Beijing, including the beginnings of the Forbidden City, or “old palace”. A series of gates and halls enclosed within a 52m moat, were constructed from the late 14th century. Open to humble mortals since the civil war and revolution, the halls and squares are now thronged with tourists and guides. The curse of the selfie stick has now been replaced by the wired up tour guide, like Pied Pipers waving their various colour flags and blaring out a babel of commentaries through portable sound systems. Yongle also left the nearby Temple of Heaven, a three-tiered circular confection situated in a pleasant park, much frequented by locals, including young girls fully dressed in traditional decorated Qing costumes.
The Summer Palace, located on the shores of the two square kilometre Kunming Lake dates from a similar period but fell into disuse and disrepair until renovated by the Dowager Empress Xixi at the end of the 19th century, using funds diverted from the Chinese Navy after the end of the Brutish Opium Wars. Xixi’s corruption (she was known as the Dragon Lady) was one of the reasons contributing to popular uprising and the end of dynastic rule in 1911. The palace, lake and park are now a very popular leisure area for Beijing’s citizens.
We were also treated to a dumpling banquet to the accompaniment of traditional Tang dynasty dancing. Fourteen different varieties of dumpling comes out about as one-dimensional as you might expect, although there was the odd sweet one to catch the unwary. The dancing wasn’t bad, though.
Other meals are grabbed from convenience stores on the way, with a further frisson of excitement as you can never know for sure what you’re about to bite into or drink (Chinese herbal medicine liqueur anyone?). And on the way to the store, the usual south east Asia traffic rules apply: traffic lights are advisory only, particularly for traffic turning left or right, pedestrian crossings are to be ignored, especially by bikes and scooters, overtaking on the hard shoulder is fine if all the other lanes are taken, speed limits are suggested minima and traffic police are just there to stare and look imposing. On the upside, there are no tuk-tuks, at least not in Beijing but they were back in abundance in Xi’an.
We’re not paranoid, but we're being followed by robots. The first encounter was in a hotel corridor when a small black R2D2 approached, chatting away to itself in (presumably) Chinese. Standing our ground, the robot paused then edged around us, still chatting, and carried on its way. On the way upstairs later, the elevator doors slid open and a robot tried to get in. The doors closed too quickly and the robot sounded a bit less chatty and a bit more annoyed. Room service, apparently. Delivering orders to rooms throughout the hotel efficiently and without fuss. The shape of things...
If the third Ming emperor, Yongle, did all the heavy lifting in terms of construction in the 14th century, his predecessor Qin Sin Huang did more than his share over 1,500 years earlier in the 3rd century BCE. Qin is credited with having united seven separate kingdoms into a single country , which bears a corruption of his name to form China, of which the first capital of the Qin dynasty his home city Xi’an. This was an age of trade opening up between the east and the west and Xi’an became the start and end points of the Silk Road but is now more well known for another part of Qin’s legacy.
The summer of 1974 was hot and dry in the province of Saanxi: too hot and dry for the cultivation of the pomegranates and persimmons from which local farmers derived their living. So a group of them banded together to try and sink a new water well. Just a few metres down, they started to come across a lot of pottery fragments, so archaeologists were called. It soon became apparent that this was not just a load of abandoned pots and within just a few years, the rest of the world came to hear of what became known as the Army of Terracotta Warriors. It seems Qin had believed that he would rule China not just in this life but in the next as well and he therefore ordered the construction of thousands of life-size soldiers on full battle dress to accompany him on his journey. Just one of these figures has been recovered whole and intact: a kneeling archer known as Lucky Boy. The rest were painstakingly reassembled from pieces crushed by the fall of the chambers above them, and the process can take five years for each figure requiring the mapping and joining up of tens of thousands of pieces. Over 2,000 of the 8,000 figures recovered are now displayed in neat battle ranks in the three pits in which they were discovered. The effect ought to be breathtaking but the sheer fame and attraction of the figures is such that between 30,000 and 70,000 visitors a day pile into the relatively small site. Much pushing and shoving is required to get any kind of view and the overall effect is therefore disappointingly underwhelming. This is, of course, not to detract from the achievement of the original artists responsible for the creation of these 8,000 full-size mannequins, each with a different face, nor of the modern artists tasked with the painstaking reconstruction, it is just that any emotional effect for the visitor is sorely lacking.
Sunday morning in Xi’an and in the narrow lanes just off the main boulevard where our hotel is located, life is bustling and frenetic. The streets are crammed with food stalls and every imaginable sort of foodstuff, and some best not imagined, is being fried, grilled, boiled or roasted. Unidentified lumps of stuff are lined up on skewers or bubbling in pots of oily gloop. The incessant noise from beeping scooters is accompanied by the jet engine roar of gas burners. There are no street signs or road markings so it is unclear which way traffic is supposed to flow so when two cars meet, there is no room to pass and no room for pedestrians and scooters to squeeze round so things quickly back up and a 3D game of life-size Tetris, all carried out with good humour and none of the shouting and anger one might expect in London or Rome.
The population of the city of Chengdu in the south western province of Sechuan is 23 million humans and 200 pandas. However, visitors could be forgiven for thinking it’s the other way round because Sechuan milks ailuropoda melonoleuca for all its worth. The lampposts are disguised as bamboo stalks, pedestrian crossings are marked with paw prints, school buses are decorated with cartoon pandas and any pieces of street furniture which is vaguely round (litter bins, bike racks, bus shelters) are fitted with two black ears and two black eyes. The pandas – not strictly a bear, but close – has lived in the mountains round here for eight million years, but in the 1980s, came perilously close to extinction. The panda breeding centre was set up here and the six animals rescued from the wild has grown to a population of 200 and some are now being returned to the wild as well as to zoos around the world. With a wild population of 1,900, their status has moved from endangered to vulnerable. However, like the Terracotta Warriors, this centre allows in around 30,000 visitors a day. We arrive early to beat the crowds and the heat (“because it will be pandamonium later....boom, tish”) and are whisked by golf cart to the remote nursery and kindergarten pens before the young pandas retire indoors to escape the heat. This is closer to a zoo than, say, the orang utan centre in Borneo, and we watch the animals play, eat (20-30 kilos of bamboo per day) and snooze (because there is very little nutritional value in bamboo) from behind walls and screens, but even so, it is a much more pleasant experience than the Terracotta centre.
Afterwards, a brief cooler interlude in the old Qin dynasty pedestrian streets around the Wen Shu Buddhist monastery in Chengdu and lunch in a teak panelled and filigree screened locals’ bolt hole. Another type of noodles, steamed aubergine, pork dumplings, chilli beef and peanut chicken this time. Chopstick technique coming on nicely so we’re all going to be the size of houses.
...on a slow boat to China
All of our guides in China, one per city, have adopted English names to make things a bit easier for westerners. Alice, Betty, Luna and Charlie told us their Chinese names, but to be honest, it was in one ear and out of the other. Likewise the more upmarket Yangtse river boats. Ours was branded Victoria Jenna but is actually the Mei Wei Kaizhan. She is probably getting on a bit, but wearing it well and the service is comprehensive and excellent. Even the river is playing games: in Chinese, the 6,300km waterway from Tibet to Pacfic is called Chang Liang: Yangtse just refers to the shorter section to Shanghai.
We board late afternoon via a drab concrete pier among construction works on the waterfront of Qongqing, capital of Sechuan province and reputedly, at 32 million, China's most populous city. We are advised to watch departure from the sun deck and as night falls, Qongqing is transormed to a Vegas skyline of neon and lasers. The 700kms from here to Wi Chan in Hubei province takes a leisurely two-and-a-half days, with a number of pauses en route. This section of the Yangste, formerly one of the most difficult and dangerous to navigate, has been transformed by the construction of the Three Gorges dam between 1992 and 2008, now the largest in the world. The river is now much wider and deeper, with ocean-going freighter up to 8,000 tonnes now able to reach Qongqing. 400 million people live in the river basin, nearly a third of China’s population and 1.3 million of these were relocated as their original towns and villages were flooded. This being China, this was done without consultation, negotiation or appeal, although a number of historic or religious sites and monuments were dismantled and also relocated. We visit one of these on the second day, the Confucius temple on Shangghui hill, above the so-called City of Ghosts. This excursion reveals the biggest downside of cruising: herding kittens would be easier than marshaling a disparate group of languages, abilities and ages up a steep hill and back down again without taking all day about it. During a stopover early the next day while some of the passengers go on another excursion, we sneak ashore alone and ramble gently round the ancient city walls and pagoda of Kuizhou for a pleasant hour. Also relocated after the dam were the Yangtse’s population of river sturgeon, which at up to 3m in length, are too big to climb a fish ladder. They are now all kept in the downstream section: they have been fitted with GPS tags for tracking, making them the only fish with their own chips (“boom-tish” again).
The highlight of these cruises is the Three Gorges themselves, in which the river is chanelled between mountainous cliffs hundreds of metres high. We pass through the Huang (an engraving of the entrance to which is printed on the back of the 10 yuan banknote) and Wu gorges by day, but a vicious wind makes staying on deck challenging and slows down progress. Transferring quickly to a couple of smaller ferries at Badong allows for a more pleasant venture up one of the tributary rivers, the Shenong stream, buried deep within its own gorge. The third main gorge, Xi’lying, is sailed at night. The cruise ends one hour before Yi Chan as it would take too long to traverse the flight of locks around the Three Gorges Dam itself, so it’s back onto buses to visit the dam. The statistics are more interesting than the dam: 32 billion cubic litres of water held behind the 2.3km, 185m high wall, 32 gigawatts of electricity generation, two flights of five locks each 180m long and 34m wide and a single boat elevator, for vessels in a hurry. On a grey, damp morning, the experience is of miles and miles of concrete, with dozens of tour buses dropping the regulation tens of thousands of sightseeers. All a bit depressing and underwhelming. Onto another bus for another hour to be united with our luggage, which left the boat the night before, and another guide (briefly) to lead us to the next (and final) train and hand over the tickets. This last train, by the way, turned out to be the oldest and scruffiest but still gobbled up the 900 miles to Shanghai in six hours.
Journey's end: Shanghai
Because of the spectacular rise in property prices, brought on by the influx of foreign investment among other things, 90% of Shanghai's 23 million population live in apartments with no outside space. So what do they do for fresh air? Saturday morning and the city’s Luxing Park is full of people ballroom dancing to K-pop tunes, forming impromptu choirs and singing lustily along to boomboxes or simply sitting around playing man jong and Go. On Sunday morning, apparently, the park plays host to hundreds of concerned parents displaying photographs and CVs of their children, not because they are missing, but because they are touting on their behalf for likely spouses. Growing up in the dynamic and highly competitive city, young people don’t have time for socialising and dating. Shanghai is by far the most westernised city in China, not just because of the 200,000 foreigners who live here, but as a result of various wars and occupations by the British, French and Japanese. One bank of the Huang Pu river is full of old colonial buildings now housing upmarket hotels abd
banks: the Pudong side is a looming skyline of skyscrapers and futuristic tower blocks, including the Shanghai Tower, at 662m the second tallest building in the world. We watch night fall from the top observation deck, having been whisked up the 162 floors by the fastest lift in the world, although once again the views are limited by the vast numbers of tourists allowed in at once. And this area was all empty marshland in 1990; our guide shows us pictures. In the older parts of the city, the wide avenues and low rise buildings could be in London, Paris or Kyoto. Unlike aay Chinese city we have visited so far, Shanghai is very walkable. After a day with a guide seeing the main sights, we are left to our own devices for the last day and, having mastered the metro system (the hardest part was buying a ticket: under £2 for 24 hours), we walk for miles through markets, alleyways parks and shopping malls, where our lunch order included a chicken hot pot: the whole chicken’s foot came as a bit of a surprise.
On the last day with a guide, we have our longest “political” chat. Yes, Chinese still considers itself communist, but in its own specifically Chinese way. Entrepreneurs are encouraged, as is foreign investment. The shops and restaurants are full (with big queues outside the Apple and high end fashion stores) and there is plenty of choice, citizens can travel freely at home and abroad and living standards seem good, with a few Porsches and the odd Ferrari in evidence among the dozens of brands of Chinese electric cars (look out Tesla: they’re coming for you). Tax rates sound very similar to the UK if provision of social services is not as good. Clearly dissent is not allowed and access to foreign media, including websites, is heavily controlled. There are civil and human rights issues though we could not discuss those, but no signs of the corruption and repression of other former communist states. In short, would we choose to live here? Probably not, but could we live here if we had to? Yes.
On the whole, this has been an informative and enjoyable trip. The food has been better than expected (and very cheap) and travel is easy. Downsides are the sheer crowds at some attractions and the very limited amount of English spoken and written. Lessons learnt include come with a western eSim already set up and working on a phone armed with a Chinese contactless payment app, such as Alipay or WeChat also set up and working. Most of this tour could probably have been done without a guide but having one took any stress away. Our visas are valid for another two years....
By the way, long, long flight home as we avoid Russian airspace. I guess we won't be finding out more about sights and life there any time soon.
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