DR in China

25/9

2006-10-22T17:17:00.000+10:00

So here I am in China. It looks like an airport. It is not welcoming but I don’t suppose anywhere is at 12.30 am.

As though to presage hassles ahead, some of the airport ATMs will not take my card, so I have no money.

Taxi drivers want to take me somewhere but I have nowhere to go. I tried hard to get a late arrival at the hostel I’m staying at but we just weren’t on the same wavelength. Seeing a sign on the escalator that says “Do not reach out of elevator” makes it clear why.

26/9

2006-10-22T17:09:00.000+10:00

Fuzhou Lu, Shanghai

Nothing beats the first ride into a new country. There is a true magic in watching another place unfurl before you.

From the airport, the bus passes through Pudong, a sprawling sister city for Shanghai. But even though it is new, it has been worn in. It doesn’t look like anywhere I’ve ever been before. Shanghai itself is a like a cleaner Chennai. But Chinese.

Nanjing Donglu, Shanghai

I say cleaner but all I mean is that the streets are better kept. From a distance, it is hard even to make Shanghai out in the smog, although, in fairness, the weather is foggy, so it is not all pollution.

The view from my hallway, Captain Hostel, Shanghai

*

Even the hustlers cannot spoil strolling on the Bund. This is the epitome of the mystic East for me, although of course it is famous for being the centre of Western interests in China. For me, it is the waterfront playground of Fu Manchu and other thugs, doing their dirty deeds in the shadows of the edifices of Western power.

On the Bund, I am picked up by Chong, who says he wants to practise his English. This is more or less feasible and I never have learned how to shrug off a persistent local. How rarely they turn out to be genuine though. I don’t think I should be surprised. Why would anyone be all that interested in befriending a tourist? If they are curious, they have TV.

Chong

Chong thinks it is a good idea to go to the Old Town. I was going anyway so I don’t mind so much that he tags along. He suggests taking tea in a teahouse he knows. I’m not keen but I can’t think of a kind way to say no. I like to stroll around, to take in place and people. I don’t need or want a guide. That spoils it for me. The Old Town is extremely commercialised and packed with mostly Chinese tourists. I don’t know how much of it is really old and how much is renovated or simply imagined (more than a little is my guess) but it is impressive and different. The buildings, all flare and frills, are like nothing I’ve seen before.

Teahouse, Old Town, Shanghai

Chong’s “teahouse” seems to be an international pearl exhibition centre. I simply say that it doesn’t look like the kind of place I’d enjoy. He is more upset than you’d expect from someone whose suggestion of a place to stop for a cup of tea has been knocked back. Soon after, he says he must be getting home for lunch. He says something about how very expensive the taxi will be now he has walked all this way with me. Bye, I say.

Old Town, Shanghai

Subtle street sign, Nanjing Donglu, Shanghai

Two of my dormmates are at home in the hostel. One, an Englishman called Dave, has been in China for five months teaching English. I don’t think he has left the building except to buy beer all day. Maybe not all week. He seems utterly defeated by life. He makes desultory conversation but he’s overshadowed by Mark, a young Swiss lad. Who is barking. He cannot keep a single sentence on a straight track, telling endless stories, which veer from drinking with friends to his need to take a shower with a woman — any woman. I begin to understand why Dave is drinking so much.

27/9

2006-10-22T17:05:00.000+10:00

Jade Buddha temple, Shanghai

Reclining Buddha

The mystery is how China ever became communist. Even the monks at the Jade Buddha temple are turning a pretty penny. The juxtaposition of statues of the Buddha and souvenir stalls is alarming.

Prayers for the dead in Jingan temple

French Concession, Shanghai

On Huaihai Lu, everyone is buying or selling. Mostly watches and bags. Every five paces a friendly voice cries Helloooooo, you want watch? Bag? DVD? My granny? I smile and say no. One of the few phrases I have learned in putonghua is wo bu yao. I don’t want it. The only guy who doesn’t want to sell me anything is the sweet potato baker. He is on the run from the street inspectors. Huaihai Lu is a flash shopping street in the middle of the French Concession. It’s a beautiful district of villas and 1930s tenement blocks, lining shady boulevards. Although the area was never very French, it has a laidback midi feel. It looks rich. Many of the shops are chic boutiques. To support them, someone must have money. Shanghai is more affluent than I had expected. In India, there was a huge gulf between the middle class and the poor majority. Here it seems that rampant capitalism is pulling everyone along. No wonder there are so many people laughing and smiling on the streets. It must be a great time to live here, as the shackles of Maoist austerity are pushed aside.

28/9

2006-10-22T17:00:00.000+10:00

Shanghai from Jinmao Tower

From the 88th floor of the Jinmao Tower. I have a panoramic view of smog. I could probably see the whole of Shanghai from up here if it weren’t smothered in a brown blanket.

Des res, Shanghai

The chaotic, hornhonking, whirling mass of cars, buses, trucks and scooters is responsible. The streets are insane, much better to be whisked around in a taxi than to try to walk across. The crossings are patrolled by traffic assistants, who try vainly to prevent the Shanghainese from running in front of cars, or the cars from considering the red lights advisory. There seems to be a law that cars have right of way if they are turning through a crossing, although I suspect it is only the law of the jungle.

Fangbang Lu

If you dodge the cars, you must contend with the scooter¬–bike cavalcade, which rushes across the crossing about two seconds before a green light. Bikes often ignore traffic signals altogether, and you’ll only get a mass of them where they think someone in authority might be looking or at busy junctions where even the intrepid Shanghai bicyclist fears to pedal.

29/9

2006-10-22T16:55:00.000+10:00

"Scenic" West Lake, Hangzhou

It is lonely sometimes to be on your own when you are travelling, particularly in a place where just about no one speaks English. So I was pleased to meet up with Jann, a German student who is in my dorm, in the Captain Hostel’s bar. The bar has a fantastic view of Pudong, whose skyline is ablaze with light at night. One of the skyscrapers becomes a screen for ads. A few drinks become a lot of drinks later in the concourse of our floor. Half the hostel turned up. Inevitably, someone had a guitar.

Tai chi in the park

So I caught the train to Hangzhou with a hangover that would make a whale wince. I talked for an hour with Jian, a Chinese woman who was taking her parents to Hangzhou for the weekend. She is pushing the region because she wants them to move down from Shaanxi province. She said she liked Shanghai because of its clean air. I let her talk about herself and her love of shopping (easily indulged in Shanghai). She had a beautiful smile. A lot of Chinese women are attractive — they run counter to the stereotype, in all sorts of size and shape of face: Westerners’ problem has always been in any case not that we cannot tell one Asian from another but that we cannot easily remember them again. (This is simply because we use eyes and nose as primary distinguishing features but Asians are more readily distinguished — and distinguish each other — by hairline and shape of face.)

Orioles Singing in the Willows Park, Hangzhou

Pagoda in the West Lake, Hangzhou

The Chinese have a belief, it seems, that everything is improved by music, particularly horribly tuneless mushy RnB and pseudoclassical of a Jean Michel Jarre plays Mantovani type. So the view of Hangzhou’s West Lake, a beautifully scenic stretch of water backdropped by mountains, one of Chinese tourists’ favourite destinations, is accompanied by something Vangelis probably knocked up in the bath one Sunday night. Even the train journey is punctuated by music, which is at least a distraction from the symphony of hawking, squawking, mobile phoning, shouting and begging that ensures my head is still throbbing at Hangzhou. The view is pretty, but it is foggy, so I will have to try again in the morning.

Fine weather for boating

30/9

2006-10-22T16:50:00.000+10:00

A shop, Hangzhou

Wushan is Chinese tourist heaven and something close to hell on Earth for anyone sensitive to loud noises and crowds. Rows of food stalls sell unidentifiable meat on a stick. In some places I know it is chicken because of the many chickens hanging from the stall. I have cause once more to think about why you don’t see many dogs around the place. India is swarming with mangy street dogs but here, bar a few pets, there are no dogs at all. Perhaps they shoot them. Perhaps they do the same to beggars, because I have not seen too many of them either. But China is poor — the flash shops and new developments don’t change that. Take a bus (the Chinese, like the Indians, would consider what we think a full bus luxuriously spacious, with room for at least another 50 people) and you realise that. In rich countries, people do not take public transport because they don’t find it convenient. In poor ones, they don’t have any option.

Off Wushan is an “old street”, a row of restored (or downright fake) Qing houses. Like Yuyuan in Shanghai, this is a tourist trap, but all the same it is fascinating to wander through, to see what is on sale (all sorts of tat but also giant roots in jars, tea of a bewildering variety of types, fake antiques, jewellery and the ubiquitous watches: “hellooooo, Rolex”).

*

I am taking a boat to Suzhou this evening, which is a curious time, I suppose, for a service that is fundamentally for tourists to leave. I will only have an hour or two to see the scenery. There won’t be much. On the train to Hangzhou, all I could see were endless, very flat fields, some paddy, with lonely farmers (wearing those wide, conical hats, to my delight) and the sprawling towns of northern Zhejiang. These were interesting to look at for two reasons. First, the contrast between the enormous tenement blocks, sometimes in groups of a dozen, two dozen identical blocks of what must have been hundreds of flats, and the cute houses, featuring a central spire sort of thing (I don’t know what they’re called but they look very much like the small spire of a country church in Iceland, except with windows). Second, the glimpses of country life I had from my seat: a bicyclist lugging a huge load of wood, old men playing cards, boats on a canal. It was a countryside oddly bereft of livestock, but I think this is because this is largely a cereals-growing area and has little pasture. Maybe it was just an artefact of where the railway passes: whenever you have only a small glimpse of another place you must try not to read too much into it — if a man strikes a dog, it doesn’t mean all Chinese are cruel to animals; if another shoves his wife along a path, it doesn’t mean all men treat women roughly; and so on. Mind you, the stuff about “face” seems to be just so much bollocks. I’ve seen several raging arguments in the street of a kind you just don’t often see back home. In one case, a man threw a small wooden chair at a woman, enraged for a reason that escaped me. Why he was even carrying it — this was the kind of chair you might sit on at primary school or in church — was a mystery, but then so much is.

Could you all please excuse me, I have a boat to catch

My cabin on the boat to Suzhou

If you could not guess for yourself, Hangzhou downtown is not a good place to be in a hurry on a Saturday afternoon. There are about half as many cabs as people waiting for them, so I walked the length of Yan’an Lu to get to the boat dock. At least I proved an entertainment for the locals, some of whom found me highly amusing, collapsing into giggles. Still, here I am, surrounded by squawking, overexcited Chinese, about to cruise the Grand Canal in a boat just the other side of seaworthy. But it’s the Grand Canal! To me, this is one of the magical parts of China, an enormous project to link the north and south, used since the seventh century to move people and goods through the major population centres of eastern China.

The Grand Canal at Hangzhou

*

I think the shoeshine man may have cursed my shoes. A ragged but not wholly done-in man approached me near my hostel in Shanghai. He gestured with his shoeshine brush. No, no, I said. I don’t want it (although I had become confused about the words for want — yao — and please — qing — so what I was saying was “I not please”, which I suppose could be interpreted as “I’m not inviting you” (but not by him). He sprayed some gunk on my shoes and I said no, no. So he held up two fingers and I said okay. I couldn’t, surely, deny this man the chance to earn 40¢. So he polished the shoes and even glued them in a couple of places that they were becoming loose. He finished and I fished out the two kuai. He was outraged and wrote on the palm of his hand 2–0–0. I said no, you have to be kidding, you said two. No, two tens, he said, 20, but with the glue… But if the Chinese mean 20, they say 20. I said, no way, you can have the two. He was insistent. Look, he gestured, I used glue. I do not know where he was buying glue that cost 180 kuai for two squirts (although it’s done a good job holding my shoes together). I held out two hands, one with the two kuai, the other making a zero. You can have two or nothing, I said. I made as though to walk away. He was furious, spitting with rage. I was tired of this, because I do have a sense of “face” and I don’t like people shouting at me in the street. So I gave him three and turned away. He muttered something ugly sounding and held up his little finger in a way that made it clear this was the Chinese fuck-you. So I said fuck you too and was gone.

The thing is though, my sturdy, comfortable shoes almost overnight became painful to walk in and I developed a blister, which has been inconvenient given how much walking I’ve been doing. To my horror, I find the sole of my shoe has nearly worn through, a disaster in a country whose biggest shoe size would barely fit the average Westerner. My feet are not average and it’s hard enough finding shoes in Brisbane. So I’m praying to Buddha, the Tao, six types of dragon and my ancestors that my poor shoes hold up.

1/10

2006-10-22T16:45:00.000+10:00

Suzhou downtown

How best to celebrate one’s national day? Well, I wouldn’t know, the English being so scared of being mistaken for chauvinists that we do not have one, but for the Chinese, the answer is simple: shop. I wish I could join them: a big supermarket would be nice. But I can’t even buy a bag of plums. I try twice but I am weary of haggling and my inner tightwad will not pay more than I would back home.

Even the constant drizzle doesn’t put off the locals. More people than I have ever seen in one place gather in Suzhou’s shopping streets. I plan to see some sights but it’s no use in this fog.

Suzhou downtown

Because it’s a week’s holiday for the Chinese, my travel plans are rooted. There is no train to Yantai until the sixth, and then I can have a standing ticket. Standing for 16 years doesn’t appeal. So I book a flight to Beijing. They’re going cheap because of massive overcapacity so I can get there for a bit more than a hundred bucks. Perhaps I will carry on to the terracotta warriors but in any case, I can’t say I’m dismayed to be taking a short flight rather than a long train journey.

Daoist temple, Suzhou

Scary Daoist god

The Literature God plus two

2/10

2006-10-22T16:33:00.000+10:00

Canalside, Suzhou

Once the drizzle and fog lift, Suzhou reveals itself as a pretty town, shot through with canals and sleepy back alleys. Here you can sit by the water and listen to the orioles sing. Early in the morning, I went to the Garden of the Master of the Nets. I had been woken up by a small German child, who did not seem to mind that I did not answer all her questions. I understand German quite well if it’s spoken slowly but a small child’s rapid-fire inquisition is too much of a stretch. I was glad to have gone early because the garden is small and was quickly filled by tour groups. Given how few Europeans you see on the street, it’s amazing how many are actually on holiday here.

Views of the Master of the Nets Garden, Suzhou

If by garden you are thinking grass, trees and flowers, by the way, you need to adjust your image. Chinese formal gardens are harmoniously arranged collections of buildings, courtyards, ponds, rockeries and bushes. Still, it was quite attractive, and the big pond in the middle made a stunning view. I will be looking at a couple more, at least.

Couple's Garden, Suzhou

The contrast between the smaller gardens, such as the Master of Nets Garden and the Couple’s Garden, and the Humble Administrator’s Garden is striking. Where the former two feel intimate, showing a careful use of limited space, the latter sprawls. It is a major attraction in Suzhou, with a flash ticket office, and attracted huge holiday crowds. Having plodded through the old city to get to it (about 5 km from my hostel, plus I had walked a fair bit round and about in the morning), I was quite leg-weary, although with travel and hostels for later in the week sorted out, I was in too good spirits to get too annoyed with the Chinese for walking in front of my camera on each occasion I saw a good photo or for barging me aside when they saw one or even for yelling at each other (for people whose major religions centre around the quest for peace, the Chinese sure do like to pump up the volume).

Views of the Humble Administrator's Garden, Suzhou

Sheqian Jie, Suzhou

The best thing about my day was that I found a veggie restaurant with a waitress who spoke some English. She brought me an enormous amount of food for 20 yuan. The way to a man’s heart is without question through his stomach, so I now officially love Suzhou.

Bridge, Suzhou

3/10

2006-10-22T16:26:00.000+10:00

Pan Men, Suzhou

I had planned to visit Zhouzhuang today but instead I have chosen to do nothing much. I woke up far too early and I feel tired. Why early? It turns out I am sharing with a couple of young Germans, who had a long, loud conversation at sixish. I don’t do sixish.

I had a boring evening. My previous night’s drinking partner, a Pole called Slavko, had been stricken all day with a hangover. Well, with brandy at 15 kuai a bottle, there’s a real temptation to overindulge. Also, his friends, who had been friendly the night before, had obviously tired of my company, because they spent the evening speaking Polish. On TV was pingpong, which is not and never will be a spectator sport.

Ruigang Pagoda, Suzhou

I am trying to get a coffee. I am in a pizza shop that promises espresso and other delights. But I am learning that what is promised and what is delivered are not always the same thing. I ask for a coffee with milk. The waitress asks the cook do they have it (I’m guessing that’s what she asked — she might have been saying “Let’s fuck with the foreign devil”). The cook says no, it seems. But I can have cappuccino. I wait for 15 minutes. The waitress comes back. There is no cappuccino. But I can have coffee with milk.

*

View of Suzhou from Ruigang Pagoda

Pan Men, Suzhou

At Pan Men, the last remaining city gate, there are performances of pingtian — Suzhou-style ballad singing. A man and a woman play traditional instruments that in effect, if not in looks, are like banjos — deeper, hers higher and more intricate. They duet in the local Wu dialect, incomprehensible to me and, I think, most of the Chinese tourists. It’s oddly affecting, the singers’ voices ache with yearning and sighing longing. Pan Men is superbly packaged — a tourist precinct that encloses several sights in the southwestern corner of town. For those who like a taste of history, it is perfect. In a pavilion in a small garden in the precinct, an old man — perhaps 60 — is talking to two young girls, who are listening attentively. I can’t help wondering what he is telling them.

*

I am sorry to be leaving Suzhou. If I had more time, I would spend longer here. I am not tired of it. I cannot say it is particularly friendly because I am isolated and insulated by language and wealth. This latter idea started me thinking about the people who live down the muddy back alleys of the old town. Because I thought about the man who had the Couple’s Garden built so that he could live in seclusion in his island right in the middle of old Suzhou. Life looks hard there because, I suppose, I associate dirt and brokenness with hard living. In the West, if a place is falling apart, that is a sure sign that it is rough. What can their lives be like though, these people who live and die in Suzhou? Do they spend all their days playing mah jong or cards in their front rooms or out in the street? They seem happy: I see lots of people laughing. And of course they are in their element. They know how things work, who is who.

Old Town, Suzhou

What kind of people are they? It’s impossible to penetrate the barrier of language and culture to get any idea. I simply cannot imagine. It’s easy enough to resist the temptation to think them lacking in compassion because they have no manners (and there are so many people in the West that have neither). Harder to imagine how they can construct complex thought in their spare, unnuanced language. I was never quite convinced by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, yet it is hard to imagine what thought even is without words to think it is. Even feelings are strongly mediated by language, in that we must think about them if we are to know what they are.

You wonder what they make of their world. Does it frustrate them that crossing a road requires weaving and bobbing to avoid cars, scooters and bikes, which come from all directions regardless what the signals show? Do they crave peace in their noisy cities? Does the rapid change, which must be ripping, apart their world, making it almost each day harder to interpret, scare them or enliven them? (We have all heard that it is a Chinese curse that one should live in interesting times.) The change seems wild and unevenly applied — some have become rich, others have remained dirt poor. The countryside has moved to fill massive cities (even Suzhou — “the Venice of the East” — has large industrial districts that must have attracted many from the land), but with wages so low, the rural poor have simply become the urban poor.

Canal, Suzhou

Tonight in the vegetarian restaurant, I see an old lady — at least in her 80s — out with a crowd of family members. She is having the time of her life and they are loving it along with her. This time of year is big for families, already central in Chinese people’s life, and on the day of the Moon Festival — a couple of days from now — those who are away from their home feel a deep yearning for it. Today I spoke to my children on the phone. I understand yearning. Whatever I do or don’t know about people, I know what it is to yearn. I am like China, restless and difficult. But I am finding that whenever China seems hard, I turn a corner and it becomes easier.

I do not pretend to understand the people who live in Suzhou. I will not think when I have finished my trip that I know “the Chinese”. I am only seeing the tourist towns, a glimpse of a particular face of China. And after all, I have known Englishpeople all my life and I do not pretend to understand them either. But I see the mother wiping her child’s nose in the street, the father on the bus carefully keeping his daughter from catching herself on the straps of my pack, and I renew my faith that whatever else we are, at base we are human beings, the same mass of fear, confusion and deep reserves of love under the layering of language, colour and way of life that makes us seem different.

4/10

2006-10-22T16:20:00.000+10:00

Shanghai intersection

I always enjoy coming back to a place. Even a brief acquaintance will have made it familiar. You have figured out the transport and know where some of the roads go. Sights are comforting: ah, you say, there’s good old Jinmao Tower. It is almost as though you have always known the place.

Pudong

Shanghai is different though. It’s swarming with Chinese. It is nearly impossible to walk along Nanjing Donglu; people are taking up every inch of pavement and spilling into the road. Even in the pedestrianised section, it is a battle to make headway. Every three paces someone shoves a card with pictures of handbags or watches into my face. “Bag?” they yell. “Shoes, watch?” And then more quietly, “Massage?”

The Bund, Shanghai

But does anyone say “Gaffer tape?” Oh no. I have no idea where I’d find it. The Hualian supermarket has a stunning range of dry biscuits — although nothing that looks like you’d feed it to something with fewer than four legs — scissors, pencils (which I buy for C although they are not particularly distinctive, but hey, they are made in China) and a ton of other stuff, but no tape of any kind. I know, I know. Why didn’t I pack gaffer tape?

5/10

2006-10-22T16:17:00.000+10:00

Tiananmen Square

An American is baying in the lounge by the boarding gate. Do they even know how to talk normally? Another bays on the bus from Beijing Capital airport into town. He is with a woman who must be a guide of some sort. She laughs at what she must be taking as jokes (or wants him to think she is understanding as jokes), and touches his arm, rather intimately. I wonder whether she is hoping to get herself a Western husband. Do the Chinese do that? A couple of times people have asked me how easy it is to go to Australia for Chinese but they have barely seemed interested in the answer. Maybe they are being polite in some way.

I have not yet seen anything of Beijing because no sooner have I arrived but I must make plans to leave. That is how it is here. You don’t just turn up at the train station and get a ticket, not unless you want to stand up for 12 hours. (Even then you are unlikely to get a ticket if you do not book ahead.)

*

The street food in Beijing looked more edible but I was feeling listless and couldn’t rouse up the energy for bargaining. In India, a street vendor will not let you walk away without buying what they have to offer. If you suspect that what they have would cost a local five rupees, you will pay 10. You can probably get the local price if you keep going for a long session of haggling (but 10 rupees is 30ish Australian cents, so you could just not bother). But here the vendor seems to believe that if the price must be reasonable, they will let you go. Either that or I’m misjudging the prices. But it can be ridiculous. I know that a pedicab will cost a local two yuan a kilometre (it says so on the side of the cab). But you say “Take me to Longdong Street” and once you have made the driver realise which street you mean, he will say 20 yuan. What the fuck! It is 2 km, tops, if he goes the long way. So maybe you say 10 yuan. A taxi would be 10. The guy looks at you like you have just suggested that he present his dear old mum for one up the bum. He thinks hard. Eighteen, he says. Ten, you say. You begin to walk away. But there’s the thing: he lets you go. There is no way he can find anyone who will pay 18 yuan. He will have to do three trips, likely, to make the 10 you offered. But he would rather kill himself right there than let you pay only twice what the softest local would pay.

It is the same with anything with prices not marked. A bunch of grapes in Shanghai, with prices marked, 1.5 yuan. In Suzhou, no prices, 17 yuan. No, I say, not 17. Greengrocers would live in mansions at those prices! Okay, he says, 15 and it’s a bargain. A slice of melon from a street vendor; that’s a cheap snack, right? No. That’s five yuan. Just less than an Australian dollar. I say, maybe five mao. The vendor is horrified. Five mao for this wonderful slice of melon. The luowai must be crazy. But I point at the pile of change on her cart. It is all small, mao and five-mao coins. What can you do? It has ever been this way: you are going to pay for being white. You know it, they know it. But how much should you bargain over pennies before you either say, actually, I just want a slice of melon at just about any price and I cannot be doing with this, or I will not even begin this process, keep the melon, I’ll just buy one from a Carrefour if I pass by one?

*

Honour guard for the national flag, Tiananmen Square

I was talking late at night with the travel agents at the Far East Hotel. The girl says she is from Guangzhou and that she is 22. She might be. She might also be 32 or even 42. It’s impossible to tell. The guy says he is also 22. I suppose he could be. He is trying to learn better English so that he can study in London, so I am sitting and talking with him for a while. He says he speaks putonghua with a southern accent because his mother was from the south. Of course, I cannot tell. His English is very bad. The girl’s is better; she has learned not to lose her final consonants. She doesn’t want to go to London; she would prefer to go to Canada, to “Wincowa”. It takes me a while to work out that she means Vancouver. The guys says he is taking his girlfriend to Tianjin tomorrow for the Moon Festival. He likes the beach, he says. Yes, I’m thinking, you and several hundred thousand others will be loving the beach tomorrow.

6/10

2006-10-22T16:04:00.000+10:00

Forbidden City, Beijing

Frieze, Forbidden City

The Chinese do things big (except for anything you need to sit in or pass through). The scale of the cities, their freeways and malls is massive. So I am not surprised at how big Tiananmen Square and its monuments are. But expecting them to be big does not stop them from being breathtaking.

Forbidden City

Dragon, Forbidden City

Sadly, a lot of the Forbidden City is being renovated. But I suppose that is apt. Sometimes China seems to be just an enormous building site.

Did you say you support the Roar?

Decorated roofline

It still gives me pause to think. Here, within Beijing, the emperors built their own private city. It is an enormous demonstration of power (and its consequent ability to command resources). One thinks of the Saxon kings of England, who built wooden halls and had to ride from town to town to retain the loyalty of their people (and to get the food that would support their court).

Yes, we are enjoying our visit

Forbidden City alleyway

Mao understood what he was. Not a primus inter pares but an imperator. It is notable that his portrait hangs over Tiananmen, and that it is his tomb, not that of any of the previous emperors, that stands at the centre of the Chinese world. Some day soon, they will need to replace his picture with one of Milton Friedman.

Tiananmen at night

The palaces of the Forbidden City seem forlorn and musty. You cannot wander through them so you press your nose up against the windows and peer in at the relics, dusty and faded. These places don’t look comfortable to live in but of course the floors would have been covered and the walls decorated. I suppose they would also have been kept fresh. The emperors rarely left the Forbidden City, and little of China was allowed in. What did it mean to them to rule China? What did China mean?

I think I can understand though. To live in seclusion, with your pleasures brought to you, that doesn’t sound so bad. The ritual and pageantry must have created a comforting routine.

But it seems too massive, too cold. Hermits take to small cells because they are comfortable in a limited world. The emperors escaped the frightening, big, bad world, but into a city of their own, which seems to lack heart, for all its grandeur.

A girl stops and talks to me in Tiananmen Square. I am wondering what she will try to sell me. But she doesn’t have anything to sell, and when, after walking a couple of streets with me, she goes into a teashop, she doesn’t ask me to go in with her. This is how it is in China (or India or anywhere else that we are much richer than most of the local people). You want to learn about the place, meet the people, but when you do, you so often get burnt that you become too wary to trust anyone. But Miguel, a Colombian guy in our dorm, is telling us about the scam that girls run on Nanjing Donglu. A pretty girl will chat with you and say hi, and will chat with you and take you for a coffee. The girl then orders a shot of whisky that costs 4000 yuan. The barman, her boyfriend, will settle for all the cash you have rather than break your leg. A similar scam works in Soho (so I’m told — I never go for drinks with strange women).

City moat, Beijing

7/10

2006-10-22T15:46:00.000+10:00

Lion at the Lama Temple

Today I have visited three temples. The first was the Lama Temple, a large Tibetan Buddhist complex, quite closely connected with Emperor Qianlong. I have often had cause to think about Qianlong, to imagine his mincing footsteps in places I have walked, or his watching the troops parade in the armour that is displayed in the Forbidden City.

The Bell Tower at the Lama Temple

Decorated ceiling tile at the Lama Temple

Lama Temple

Qianlong was a major figure in the Qing dynasty, ruling for much of the 18th century. He strongly encouraged arts and letters, and, it seems, Buddhism. There are plenty of worshippers at the temple. I suppose Tibetan Buddhism, with its ritual and Buddhas for every reason (masses of them, connected with every sphere of life), appeals to the Chinese, who were traditionally polytheists. Certainly the Lama Temple is faring better than the Confucian temple that is in the same district. It is being heavily renovated. The third temple is dedicated to China’s oldest god, money. The Oriental Plaza is an enormous shopping mall. I am walking through it to reach the downtown district and have stopped for lunch.

Lama Temple

The other day, walking through Tiananmen Square, I thought, as I think all must who go there, of the demonstrators, whose peaceful protests were so viciously crushed by the army. That people are willing to die for freedoms we take absolutely for granted is even for the cynical something stirring. They will have democracy soon. It is to be hoped that it comes peacefully, with those in power realising that they can remain powerful simply by shifting systems. You wonder, looking at the glitzy shops in the Oriental Plaza, if the protestors would think this worth dying for. The communists did not, after all, build a workers’ paradise (and I think the workers’ idea of paradise and theirs were rather different) but neither have we.

Nanheyan Lu

Wangfujing Dajie, Beijing’s Oxford Street (or Queen Street, to be more parochial) is less overexcited than I thought it would be. Perhaps everyone is shopped out after six days of holiday. Beijing is more pleasant than I expected. There are ultrabusy roads but there are shady avenues and quiet alleys. And not so quiet ones. To get back home, I will be walking through Dazhalan Jie, which is a long stretch of silk shops, hairdressers, phone places, restaurants and just stuff, in a street not much than a car and a half’s width. It defines bustle.

Wangfujing Dajie

First Department Store, Wangfujing Dajie

St Andrew's, Wangfujing Dajie

Dazhalan Jie

I have stopped for 10 minutes in the park that runs along the city wall, while my camera battery is recharged. I had found a relatively peaceful spot but a Chinese family have stopped for a snack. A festival of lipsmacking ensues. At least no one has yet felt the need to clear their throat. Whatever else the Chinese do well, they lead the world in hawking up phlegm. On the bus into Beijing from the airport, a man behind me had something in his nose (judging by the snorting, about three tons of wet sand). Next time I come, I’m bringing handkerchiefs, and demonstrating that a minute’s blow can save an hour’s snort.

The street where I stayed, Beijing

8/10

2006-10-22T15:26:00.000+10:00

Temple of Heaven

Panjiayuan market

The fine drizzle of the morning gives way to torrential rain and I am glad I took a taxi to Panjiayuan flea market. I am even gladder it is undercover. It offers an astonishing array of tat. It is paradise for the marketlovers among us: I imagine Lindy would think she had died and gone to heaven. For me, choice implies indecision. How could I choose from among the Buddha heads, beads, porcelain, carved wood, posters, paintings, chopsticks and many other more less tempting bits of rubbish? I did see some small Chairman Mao statuettes that I liked but no one was tending the stall. So I bought a painting for Lindy, which is probably destined for our toilet (maybe even the downstairs one).

Beijing back street

Temple of Heaven

Decorated rafters at the Temple of Heaven

Temple of Heaven

Frieze at the Temple of Heaven

Entrance to altar for worshipping heaven

The central altar at the Temple of Heaven

Temple of Heaven

It is strange to be able to walk the path reserved for the emperor at the Temple of Heaven. You expect to see a statue of Ozymandias among the cypresses. The temple is gorgeous, a worthy place to worship heaven. It’s only a pity you cannot walk inside. What is peculiar to realise about the sights here is that few are in use, whereas in Europe, most, particularly religious ones, are still inhabited or functional. Westminster Abbey is, after all, a church, and so is St Paul’s. And if our palaces are not inhabited, they are at least open.

Temple of Heaven

Doorway at Temple of Heaven

Decorated doorway at the Temple of Heaven

Tiantan Lu

Beijing — and other Chinese cities are nearly as bad — is a walker’s nightmare. Pavements come and go, are sometimes blocked rather than adorned by trees, are bike parks, places of business and dumps for building materials. The paving can be uncomfortable or impossible to walk on. In many streets, it is easier to walk in the bike lane.

*

So when I am walking back from Jingshan Park, I see Jing, the girl who had walked with me the other evening, walking with another guy. I still don’t know what the scam is, but I have seen other girls with other European men around Tiananmen Square, so I guess there is one. I could, I think, be a thief but never a scammer. I do not think I could hold my fellows in such contempt. Because you must surely be contemptuous of them to affect kindness when you mean harm (if only of an economic kind). At least a mugger never pretends to like you but simply expresses power over you, which makes a mugger little worse than the government, which also coerces money from you, and possibly a little better, since the government, like the scammer, pretends to have your interests at heart or to be interested in you, which amount to the same thing.

9/10

2006-10-22T15:09:00.000+10:00

The Great Wall

View from the Wall

Gate tower on the Great Wall

The Great Wall

At least the guards in the watchtower at Badaling would have had wonderful scenery to look at. Sadly, it was too foggy for my poor camera but you have to be here anyway. I compromised for my Great Wall experience. I have come to the most touristy part but I did not take a tour. I got up at dawn and walked through the wakening hutong to get to Qianmen subway and then took a bus from Deshengmen. It was very easy and going early meant arriving before the hordes. The Wall is amazing but not so much for its monumental size (it is not particularly high but very long) but because it looks so puny against the mountains it runs through. And the symbolism is fantastic — here China holds back the world. As we know, it didn’t work. The barbarians simply bribed there way in.

As I sit looking out at the Wall, schoolgirls from Nagoya demand a picture with me. I pose with all three. They show me their photo books, a colourful collision of friends, kanji, crayoning and pop stars. I smile at the thought that when I am dust, a Japanese grandma will be showing the grandkids my picture. Who was he, grandma? Igirisu no popstar!

Japanese girls on the Wall

A hutong

Behind the broad boulevards lurk the hutong. Turn a corner or two and you are walking down an alleyway four feet wide. Doors open onto courtyards or the back alleys of houses that would long ago have been pulled down in the UK or Australia. This seems a harder, poorer Beijing (although other hutong around the Bell Tower are shady lanes that shout “we are wealthy”, and feature many houses with plaques recording the rich men who have lived there: generals, courtiers, artists, nobility), and I am struck by that curious problem a visitor has. You do not want to look like you have come to gawp, but there you are, come to gawp. I do my explorer stride, walking purposefully (although I have no purpose). I hope to pass as colour rather than an intruder. The locals eye me like so much shit the gods have dumped in their backyard. Somewhere I hear laughter that is not entirely kind, the walls of the fetid back lane seem to be closing in, and I quicken my stride.

Nanxinhua Lu

A posh hutong

A not so posh hutong

10/10

2006-10-22T14:57:00.000+10:00

Strange name for an alley

The Bell Tower, Beijing

Lee, my dormmate, is having a lie-in. He’s earned it: he has spent the past two days haggling at the silk market. Given that he only has a few days in Beijing, this displays a mindboggling desire for knockoff shirts. Lee and his buddy Patrick are going RTW in 10 months. They have a spreadsheet that shows them where they will be and for how long. This all sounds great; maybe a couple of months in China, three months in India, three in Europe, couple in South America? No, these guys are doing the world. Five days in India, ten minutes in Amsterdam, a day in the UK. Lee complains that all of Asia has been the same: subtly distinct but much of a muchness. This is doubtless so but must impress you more that way if you are only in places very briefly and do not spare the time to soak in much flavour. Lee is a nice guy though, maybe a bit too nice. He doesn’t cuss (he is the only person I have ever met who says “shoot” and “freak”, which is sweeter than it sounds). And I don’t knock his plans: there are lots of ways to enjoy tourism (or travelling if you insist on calling it that). Some enjoy making it a trial of endurance, in which they try to spend as little as possible (these people I do not like — there is nothing more boring than traveller dicksizing over how small one’s budget is, or how one hitched from Lhasa to Chengdu and didn’t even give the lorry driver a few dollars towards his petrol, or how one beat some poor soul down to two yuan for that fake Cultural Revolution bag, and it gets worse: these are the fuckers who will “forget” their wallet when they have a beer with you or “borrow” 10 dollars of local currency and leave town without repaying it, and if anyone is going to steal your belongings in a dorm, the ethical, green as grass, peace-loving hippy is your man).

Sicheyuan doors

Me, I brought plenty of money, so I can take a taxi if I want to and I need not sweat every yuan. I don’t claim to be doing anything more than scratching the surface of a large, diverse country, but I am having a taste, sitting here in Tiananmen Square, enjoying the hazy autumn sun, on a beautiful day in Beijing, while Lee dreams of haggling his man down to a price he can get excited about telling the folks back home about.

Hutongs from the air

The Drum Tower, Beijing

The bell that once kept time for Beijing

Actually, I have been thinking about bargaining and why it is, if the locals love it so much, they do not spend much time doing it. The answer is clear. Price-setting works just as it does in any market. The seller is a profit-maximiser and wants as much as they can get for the goods. The buyer puts a value on the goods, and considers the opportunity cost over other uses for the money. So the seller wants A, the buyer wants to pay B. The market works on information. If the seller has good information about B, they will set A fairly close to it: it is no use expecting large profits if you know that the buyer does not value your goods highly enough to provide them. But with Europeans, the seller does not have good information about B. If they are very used to tourists, they know that it can be quite high. But here is the thing. With locals, each buyer’s B will be in a tight range, because each buyer knows what the goods are “worth” (and knows what a reasonable value for A would be). But Europeans do not know what the goods are “worth” and their own judgements can take a huge range. The seller does not know where on that range you will be, so bargaining consists of the seller’s naming a price at the top end of the conceivable range as they see it. For a local, this is close to A, and the buyer can say no, I’ll pay A, and the haggling is over. For the European, this can be very far from A, and worse, the European doesn’t even know what a good value for A would be! It is also hard to judge opportunity costs because they are not clear on what else they would do with the money. In most places, Lindy’s method of bargaining has worked well. She states her A, the price she will pay, and lets the seller take it or leave it. Here, she might need to allow a small adjustment upwards, because this permits the seller to feel they have squeezed extra profit from you.

The view from the Bell Tower

11/10

2006-10-22T14:49:00.000+10:00

Gatehouse, Xi'an city walls

I have been walking around Xi’an. Quite literally, because it is possible to climb up onto the city walls and circumambulate the city. I have come halfway, from the South Gate to the North Gate, and I think that is enough. There is not that much to see bar tenements, building sites and skyscrapers, and I am tired after a rough night on the train. I caught a cold from a taxi driver in Beijing (I had wondered why he kept talking in a whisper and now I know: his throat was painfully sore) and no matter how I tossed and turned, I couldn’t find a comfortable way to lie in my sleeper. Still, it is nice to walk on a fresh though foggy morning. I could have bicycled, but me and bikes do not get along very well. Anyway, Europeans mostly look ridiculous on the Chinese-sized bikes. And I like to walk — there is something elemental in it; it feels to me as though I was made to walk and keep walking.

Xi'an city walls

North Gate, Xi'an city walls

*

When I am fantasising about how the world could be better, I imagine that we will not drive cars into towns and watch films but will gather and entertain each other with whatever abilities we have. (If any. I don’t have any ability to entertain, not even to tell funny stories.) So I like it when I am in a hostel and someone gets out their guitar, or starts to sing. Or maybe I just like to drink to the point of not minding what songs they are singing.

Decorative work on doors at the Great Mosque, Xi'an

Great Mosque, Xi'an

12/10

2006-10-22T14:42:00.000+10:00

Yes, we are the scariest pottery EVAH!...

The emperor built an army to keep out whatever he felt would disturb his afterlife (I don’t know what: spirits, the ghosts of his enemies — or maybe he just wanted a grave that was an exercise of his power). But whatever it was, he could not keep out the hordes of tourists that go to see his pottery warriors. He would have considered me a barbarian, although I think he would reconsider his view if he learned that I am literate (although not in a language he would consider matters) and have seen a world he could not even imagine existed. Maybe that wouldn’t change his view. I am thoroughly vulgar after all.

... and we are fierce clay horses

*

At the bar, Tiger is showing us card tricks. When the Chinese can speak English, or are confident they can, they are friendly and good people. Any hassles you have with them seem only to be outcomes of their reserve and the difficulties of communication. Tiger makes us play a huge game of paper, scissors, rock, six-handed, to work out who should drink a glass of beer. He has his own rules for deciding who has won but they work well.

We are all drunk. I’ve been lucky in Xi’an to meet some great people, who have been easy to laugh with. Heavy drinking helps but people are intrinsically interesting, if they let themselves be.

We do not want to get hammered

13/10

2006-10-22T14:36:00.000+10:00

Traffic contests for road space in Xi'an

I am not coherent. As a speaker, when I speak, I am not able to get my ideas in line. I just have too much conflicting stuff, too many questions, not enough answers. I do not know whether what I am saying is pleasing or just stupid. It does not help that I take the worst view of it that I can: that he is not talking to me because I said something off (and not because he just can’t think of anything to say), that she ate in another place because she finds me boring (and not that she did not even know that I would have liked company).

And I am so fluent a writer! I don’t consider though that what I write is equally confused. Or, rather, I do but I think that it will somehow be more charming, or ignorable.

It is an interesting conflict to be away for a short time. I wish it were longer, so that I could see more, be free, go further, have more experience of the whole thing, yet I miss my family enough that I will be very pleased to go home in a couple of days. I often find I have conflicts like that: I am not one kind of person, one kind of thing. It means that I am not good at any of the things I should try to excel at (or at anything at all — and what a terrible thing for a person to be no good anything: no wonder I want to become a fantastic poker player).

Anyway, I didn’t like Xi’an at first. It is bananas, the definition of it. Traffic is a snarling mass, with people seemingly hellbent on destruction crossing wherever the urge takes them. It is not quite so easy to find what you want as in Beijing, say, and not as attractive as Suzhou. But it grew on me, because the hostel is lively, the attractions are interesting, and the people, as they have throughout China, have seemed genuinely warm and decent.

South Street leading up to the Bell Tower, Xi'an

I do not have any special insight into China and I won’t invent one. I know only a tiny bit more about it than I did before I came, and I can’t claim to have understood it. But I have appreciated it. It is endlessly fascinating, always a new little something to see (and you do not write in your journal about the small child pissing in Tiananmen Square, the excitement of the crowd at the flag-lowering ceremony there, the woman practising her kung fu in a Xi’an back street, how beautiful the girls handing out leaflets about a whisky brand are, how filthy the river just outside Xi’an is, the shy smile of a girl on the bus from the Great Wall, the delight of the hawkers who added an Aussie 20¢ and 10¢ coin to his foreign coin collection — previously consisting of an American quarter, the women with big flags on poles waving flies from the meat, the smell of sewers that is everywhere in Shanghai or how weird it is to visit an archaeological dig — such as the one at Banpo — that is housed inside a huge hangar-like museum).

14/10

2006-10-22T14:25:00.000+10:00

Whoosh — the maglev into town gets up to 430 kmh, which barely gives the Chinese time to hawk up a good phlegm before they have to detrain at Longyang Lu. It is quite exciting, particularly when it tilts alarmingly. Here is China in a nutshell: yesterday I bump around the backstreets of Xi’an in a bus that I thought would fall apart if it encountered an even moderately deep pothole; today I ride an ultramodern train, which does a journey six times as long in a twentieth of the time.

View from the maglev

The contrast is what has made China fascinating. The third world collides headlong with the futuristic. It is like someone threw a city of the future at Chennai and saw what stuck. Louis Vuitton is two doors down from a street kitchen that offers minced unmentionable in a steamed bun for a yuan; the huge new untenanted shopping plaza at the Terracotta Warriors is home to a stall selling dog furs and a pack of pomegranate sellers; you rise from Shanghai’s modern and efficient subway into a honking, shrieking world of enormous colour and vitality.

Fuzhou Lu