BENEATH THE WALL...

Ni-Hao!  That's Chinese for "Hello!"

I’ve been around.  REALLY around.  Some people like baseball, some like scuba diving - I like to travel.   And I’m always being asked, "what was is like?" after I’ve been somewhere.  So I thought the easiest way to tell everyone would be to write it all down and let eveyone read it whenever they want.

I've had the pleasure of spending three weeks in The People’s Republic of China, a fascinating land of great beauty and diversity.  Most tourist agencies go to great lengths to describe the "wonders of the land" in the various brochures they hand out.   I won’t (well, maybe a little).   Instead, I’m going to describe some of the interesting things that happened in the trip.  Hold on to your silk robe and get out your chopsticks, we’re off!

THE TRIP

My basic itinerary was Hong Kong, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Xi’an, Guilin, and back to Hong Kong.  Total time in China was 19 days.   Travel between the cities was by China Airways and train.

TRAVELING AROUND

In case you didn’t know, China used to be good friends with the Soviet Union (must be a communist thing), and as such, they bought lots of stuff from them, including airplanes. China Airways flies a lovely little passenger jet called the Tupolov 154. It was summer time when I was there, so as I walked across the 100 degree F tarmac to board this example of modern Russian aeronautical engineering, I was only a little bit hot, and a little more curious. At the top of the steps I was greeted by a smiling stewardess who said, "Velclom abload!" and handed me a nice little Chinese fan. "Soo-ven-ear!" I thought that was nice, then she said, "And air conditioner." Turns out that "modern" Russian aircraft designers don’t know about air conditioning. There was none. So I baked inside a Russian tin can while waiting for takeoff. Of course, they forgot to remove the "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" pin from the landing gear before pushing the plane back.. A loud CRUNCH followed by lots of shaking was the result and I spent an extra hour in the oven waiting for the landing gear to be fixed before continuing on my way.

Welcome to China....

TOURING AROUND

Everywhere I went, I was provided an English speaking guide.  Now, when I say "English," don’t get the impression that it was the same "English" you and I speak.  The Chinese are taught a slightly different version of "Official" English.  Some words are not taught, some have different meanings. Throw in the accent and you can understand how difficult it was to understand.  Some of the guides did speak a bit better than the others though.  However, ALL of them had a really distracting habit.  It went something like this:  We would approach a site to see and the guide would point at it and say, "This is a PAGODA.  PAGODA.  PAGODA.  It is five hundred years old.  FIVE HUNDRED.  This means it is old. OLD.  It is old because it was built a long time ago. Five hundred years.  FIVE HUNDRED.  It is an old PAGODA.  PAGODA.  We will now go see a TEMPLE. TEMPLE."  Try listening to this for two weeks! (two weeks! two weeks!)

Now for a short note on each of the cities I visited.

HANGZHOU (pronounced hahng-jhoe)

A picturesque little country town with a tiny population of only 1.2 million.  Famous for the West Lake and the Pagoda of the Six Harmonies. (PAGODA! PAGODA!)  Rolling green hills, beautiful lake, interesting countryside.

SHANGHAI (pronounced as it reads)

The biggest construction zone I've ever seen.  Over 700, repeat, seven HUNDRED skyscrapers under construction.  And I don't mean twenty-story buildings, I mean 50 - 60 story high monstrosities.  There are over 13 million people living in Shanghai, it’s the second largest city in China.   A shoppers paradise, more stores than you could possible care to visit, and great prices on most everything.

BEIJING (bey-jhing)

Simply massive.  The major roads are over 100 METERS wide.  A cornucopia of temples, tourist sites, and attractions.   Most notable are the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven. Tiennemen Square, famous for the 1989 uprising, is HUGE!  You could pick a small American town, drop it in the square, and wonder where it disappeared to.  Rent the movie "The Last Emperor" to see what the Forbidden City is like.  I spent four days in Beijing, and only saw a tiny part of it.

XI’AN (she-ahn)

Called "The Eighth Wonder of the World," Xi’an is the site where the emperors from 12 dynasties are buried and where the famed "Terracotta Warriors" are located. Xi’an was the capital of China for over one thousand years.  Two thousand years ago it had a population of over one million people and for almost 1500 years Xi’an had the distinction of being the largest city on the planet Earth.

GUILIN (gwee-lin)

Simply beautiful. One of the most picturesque places on the planet Earth. A vast area of incredible limestone peaks rising up from flat ground to hundreds of meters and back down again and again. Just incredible.

Now notes on the sights and sounds.

FOOD (pronounced fooood)

Do you like Chinese food?  Guess what they eat LOTS of in China! Actually, there are four primary types of Chinese food, Mandarin, Cantonese, Sichuan, and Mongolian.  Each is as individually unique from each other as French is from German.  Best of all, lunches everywhere and half of the dinners were included in the tour.  So I scarfed on lots of Chinese food.  All in all, the food everywhere was tasty, plentiful, and safe to eat.  The only thing that I could say bad was that if you go to China, eat Chinese because they don’t have a clue on how to cook Western.  I ate Western food one time and wish that I hadn’t.  One special remark I must make is that Chinese wine is superb.   But don’t take my word for it, our group only drank six bottles of it at one dinner!

PEOPLE

A billion of ‘em!  Everywhere I looked, people, people, and more people!  And almost all of them were riding bicycles.  This may sound strange, but bicycles have the right of way in China.   Anybody in a vehicle of any kind had to yield to a bicycle.  I can’t tell you how many times the driver mashed the brakes to avoid a bicyclist who just wheeled out in front of the bus without looking.  The biggest surprise about the people was the vast differences in the faces.  I has expected to see lots of the typical "round-face" Orientals.  Not so!  The faces in China were as varied as any western city I’ve been to.  Oriental, yes, but NOT all the same.  A truly wonderful thing to see.  Everyone I spoke to was generally very friendly, unfortunately, only a few spoke English ("Official" English at that).   Communication was probably the most difficult thing about the whole trip.

SHOPPING

BOY HOWDY!!!!  You want GREAT shopping??  Look no farther! Fantastic prices on silk, jade, carpets, semi-precious stone carvings, and a wonderful type of brass pottery called cloisonné. Chinese craftsmanship is excellent in all marks.  Durable, detailed, low cost.  You just can’t go wrong.  For those nosy busy bodies out there, my credit card company is still doing cartwheels in joy at how much I ran up.

FACE

Yes, "face," as in "losing face" - which is the worst thing that could happen to a Chinese.   People go to great lengths to not embarrass themselves or another, and I don’t mean something big like splitting the seam of your pants when you bend over. Even the most minor social "fo-pa" is avoided like the plague. Must have something to do with having a population of over a billion.  Anyway, I brought this up to tell a short story of what happened to my tour group at the Xi’an airport.  We arrived at the airport an hour before our flight.  Our guide collected up the tickets, then went off to get our boarding cards (guides do that in China).  Half an hour passed, and there had been no sign of him at all.  At twenty minutes before departure we were a bit concerned because we hadn’t even checked our bags in yet.  At fifteen minutes prior, I went looking for the guide and found him hiding behind the counter at the tourist agency desk!  It seems he had forgotten to reconfirm our tickets and our seats had been canceled.  He didn’t know how to tell us without admitting he had made a BIG mistake, so he hid instead, hoping the problem would just go away!  (Like we’d not notice the plane leaving without us?)  Anyway, I smoothed it out by saying it was not a problem, the guide bowed about forty-seven times and got us seats on the next plane two hours later.  Everything was fine - until I went back to the group and told the German couple what happened... I won’t go into details, but sufficed to say, in China, face is everything!

THE SITES

There were about five primary sights I wanted to see on the trip. They were The Great Wall, The Forbidden City, The Temple of Heaven, the mountains of Guilin, and the Terracotta Warriors of Xi’an. Coincidentally, these are the most popular tourist sights. Here’s a short blurb on each.

THE GREAT WALL

HUMONGOUS.  A two hour drive north of Beijing and some 12,000 kilometers long, the Great Wall spans the entire northern border of the ancient boundaries of China.  The first section was built in 447 BC.  Contrary to popular belief, it is not one long continuous wall.  There are branches and side forks, in one area there are two sections that run parallel. Most of the Wall is in crumbled ruins, but the People's government saw the "cultural" value of the Wall and now maintains several sections for the annual multiple millions of tourists to walk on (for a small non-capitalistic fee, of course).  Another stroke of PR by the Chinese tourist agencies is to get everyone to believe that the Wall is the only man-made object visible from the Moon.  Well, don’t believe it, ‘cause it ain’t true!   The Wall isn’t even visible from orbit.  It may be LONG, but it’s only five meters wide, too small to be seen from 200 miles up.  Still, it is a sight to behold from down here.  No trip to China would be worth it if you don’t climb the Great Wall.

THE FORBIDDEN CITY

Seat of Imperial power in Beijing for 1000 years.  A warren of 9,999 rooms (nine is a special number to the Chinese) inside a massive compound where only the most exalted and special of guests were allowed.  The inner compound was exclusively for the Emperor, his wives, concubines, and eunuchs.  Nobody else was allowed in - on punishment of death.  The whole complex is so large that you could put an entire town INSIDE.  Imagine a house as big as town!

THE TEMPLE OF HEAVEN

A beautiful round, three tiered temple that ONLY the Emperor was allowed to pray in, and he only used it twice a year! As planting seasons approached, the Emperor went to the Temple of Heaven and prayed for good harvests. There are three pavilions, each more lavish than the other, culminating in the Temple itself. Blue roof tile with red walls and gold and green trim, this site is a must see for any visitor to Beijing.

THE MOUNTAINS OF GUILIN

Simply one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places on Earth. Millions of years ago the area was a limestone seabed. The sea dried up and erosion has carved the limestone into fantastic peaks and crags that are covered with verdant green foliage. A winding river transverses the area, making every sight you see one of incredible beauty and serenity.

THE TERRACOTA WARRIORS

China gets it’s name from the first emperor named Qin, pronounced "chin".  He united the country by conquering the three major warring kingdoms.  He then set about creating the time famous bureaucracy that made up the Chinese government for so long.  Qin also standardized the money and the written language, which is still used in much the same form today.   All in all, Qin was the founder of the Chinese society as history sees it. He ruled for 40 years.  Before his death, he ordered a tremendous burial complex be built for him, including almost 100,000 life-sized clay sculptures of an entire army.  Some 60,000 were completed before his death.  Qin, however efficient of a ruler, was not popular.  Within months of his death, the population revolted and burned everything to the ground. The Terracotta Army laid buried for 2000 years until a farmer dug one up while digging a well in 1974.  Now Xi’an is a major archeological site with a profitable tourist trade on the side.

LAST THOUGHTS

Well, that was my trip to China.   Overall, I enjoyed it.  The sights were fascinating, the shopping great, the photography fantastic.  I’d go back to Beijing and Guilin, there was plenty more to see there.  I hope you enjoyed reading about it, and if I could recommend going there, I would, even if it is just to see what a truly different culture is like.  In closing I’ll say, China is a very large country.  VERY LARGE.  VERY LARGE.   It is large because it has lots of land.  LAND.  LAND.  It has many interesting things to see.  SEE.  SEE...

See ya next time! 

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