A Taste of China

Can one get an accurate impression of a country after visiting it for only a short period? Probably not, but Doris and I feel as though we know quite a bit more about China and its people, having just completed an eight-day tour of Shanghai, Beijing and Xi'an.

We started our visit in Shanghai, where I had two days of business meetings. Normally, I get to see very little of the cities to which I travel on business, and my sightseeing is typically limited to what I can observe from car windows while travelling between hotels and office buildings. So, Doris and I got to Shanghai on the Saturday before my business meetings began, with the objective of seeing the highlights of the City on Sunday.

Shanghai is known as China's business center, and it's experiencing phenomenal growth. Building construction seems to be going on everywhere. One startling statistic I heard from a Chinese friend of mine is that more skyscrapers are being built in Shanghai in one year than all the skyscrapers presently in existence on the island of Manhattan. Here are some photos that illustrate just how dense the forest of tall buildings is:

The skyscrapers aren't just numerous -- they're stylish, too…

Doris and I had a relaxing dinner on the "Bund," a beautifully lit area of restaurants and shops along the river. Here's a photo taken from our restaurant:

Our walk in this area after dinner was frequently interrupted by beggars, who exist in much greater numbers and are far more aggressive than panhandlers in Bangkok. After getting over the culture shock of this, we grew used to brushing them aside, although one man who had been pestering me to let him give me a shoe shine got my undivided attention when he squished a dollop of polishing cream on my shoe as I was trying to get away! I wasn't too pleased and ordered him to wipe it off. I stopped him from doing more than just a quick clean, since I was sure he otherwise would claim he had rendered a service for which I owed money.

Shanghai is very international and cosmopolitan, and one of our favourite areas is the "French concession" area of the city, which consists of many European-style boutiques and restaurants. Some of the streets look as though they would fit well in Paris…

Although quite a few foreigners now live in Shanghai, Doris and I were surprised at how often people stopped us on the street to say hello and ask us where we were from, took photos of us, or sometimes asked if they could have their picture taken with us.

We had lunch in Yu Garden, a beautiful park with a tea house…

at which we sampled different teas...

and ate quail eggs and tofu...

and considered eating a few other things we never did succeed in identifying.

Speaking of eating, Doris joined me for a couple of business dinners, including one with almost the entire Ford China legal team, pictured (with me) below.

After three days in Shanghai, Doris and I flew to Beijing, the political center of China, visiting the Forbidden City…

We encountered many tour groups from across China. Our guide told us that tour organizers issue red caps to participants, because many participants are visiting Beijing for the first time from the countryside and easily become lost. Of course, I'm not sure how it's supposed to be easier to find people from your own group, when literally thousands of tourists are all wearing red caps.

Somewhere along the way, I got a tummy bug (virus? food poisoning? who knows?), so by the time we got to the acrobatics show we had booked for the evening, I wasn't feeling well at all. In retrospect, it probably wasn't a good idea to watch people somersaulting through the air when my stomach was trying to do the same thing. After about only 20 minutes of the show, I had to climb quickly past all the people in our row of seats and make a beeline for the bathroom. I will provide no further details of what happened next, other than to say I got to see the squat toilet (essentially a porcelain-lined hole in the floor) from an unplanned perspective. Fortunately, Doris got to stay in her seat and see the whole show…

The highlight of the Beijing area, though, was the Great Wall. It's truly mammoth and awe-inspiring and requires much more climbing than we had imagined. We could numb you with statistics, but the most impressive are that the Wall was built over a span of about 2,000 years and is roughly 4,000 miles long. Beyond that, we'll let the following pictures do the talking:

We also visited the Summer Palace…

and Tiananmen Square, the political heart of Beijing, which is bordered by the building housing the Chinese Communist Party Congress, the Mao Zedong mausoleum, etc.

Interestingly, our Chinese guard gave us a blank look when I asked her about the infamous student democracy push that occurred on the Square in 1989. She told us quietly that she had heard about this only from foreigners, because the Chinese government treats this as a forbidden topic, and no information on the subject appears in Chinese media. This put into perspective the comments of another guide in the Forbidden City, who tried to persuade us that complete freedom of speech is allowed in China. Without getting too political, I'll also note here that everyone I asked for an opinion about Chairman Mao told me the same thing: Mao is still revered as a great revolutionary and founder of modern China, but the Cultural Revolution was a disaster.

The last stop on our tour was Xi'an, China's oldest city and home of the terra cotta warriors—roughly 7,000 life-sized soldiers cast out of clay and buried by an emperor over 2,000 years ago to guard him in the afterlife. The pictures below are rather dark, because the displays are all indoors, and the light coming in through the museum windows was very limited, since we visited on a day when rain was coming down in sheets.

Here's a picture of Doris standing with the warriors, illustrating that the figures actually are life-sized. From the photos above, you might think they're miniatures. And no, Doris didn't scale the walls and stand among the actual warriors. These imitation versions are on display in the museum's souvenir shop.

Interesting sidelight: our tour guide told us that the Chinese government compensated the three farmers who discovered these buried treasures in 1974 with the equivalent of only one yuan each in today's currency (equal to roughly 13 cents)--which was double their daily wage! One of the three farmers is still living. We met him at the museum in which the warriors are displayed, and he autographed a guide book that we bought. According to our guide, he has become quite wealthy through this activity.