China Update
What follows are a few notes on a recent four-week trip in China. It was undertaken independently, and without booking anything in advance or having a fixed idea of a route. I made it up as I went along.
I flew into Beijing, and travelled by gaotie (high-speed train) to Shenyang, Changchun, and Dalian in the northeast; by ferry south across the Yellow Sea to Yantai in Shandong; on by gaotie to Qingdao, Huang Shan (for the Huizhou towns a bus ride away), Changsha in Hunan, and Wuzhou in Guangxi, then on to Macau and by high-speed ferry to Hong Kong.
I wanted to revisit a few places of which I’m fond, and some I’d never got round to seeing despite nearly forty years of on-off travel and living and working in the country.
It’s not likely that many here will travel in this way, although it’s perfectly possible even without Mandarin and indeed has never been easier, and is the only way to discover what China is really like, how much things actually cost, proper Chinese food, etc. Likely few will want to visit these particular cities, certainly those on the mainland, since none make the first-time visitor's greatest hits list. But before I offer a few notes on each I will first say something about the general state of foreign travel in China at the moment; what’s good and bad, and what’s changed.
I should add that this was leisure travel, so I didn’t feel obliged to note the last detail of every alternative, and I’ll only be mentioning what I experienced.
Information
I carried a 20-year-old edition of Frommer’s China (full disclosure: I was involved in producing it), partly because I wanted to see how it had held up, and partly because I knew it to be thoroughly well researched. Of course, all the practical information was of no use at all, but the cultural and historical material remained accurate and worthwhile, and the pointed opinions of various authors just as valid and as entertaining to read.
The Internet knows nothing, and to look at all these ‘I’ve got you covered’ ‘Ultimate Guides’ is to be certain of being misled.
Google Maps in China is just a general guide to what’s where, and where you’re standing. It’s fine (as much as it ever is) for navigating on foot, or monitoring your taxi’s route, but contains no public transport information, and if you can get it to reveal the location of metro stations it typically has them marked as permanently closed. It almost looks as if there’s been a campaign of deliberate disinformation.
Baidu maps may well be better, but you’ll need to be able to enter and to recognise Chinese characters. If there’s an English interface I didn’t discover it. No doubt there’s an app which may be more foreigner-friendly, but will likely also be offering a back door into your phone (as WeChat/Weixin does).
Route services such as RomeToRio have no clue about where the trains go or when. The Chinese rail system’s own English-language interface has been completely unresponsive every time I’ve looked at it recently.
Things change quickly. Practical information is best obtained locally.
Internet and phones
Getting a Chinese SIM is possible, but involves facial scans and ID scans, etc. I haven’t bothered for a few years, and would argue that an e-SIM is the answer. I’ve twice used Airolo in China with no problems at all (there are many other options). You can’t use it for voice calls (except VOIP) but only data, but on the other hand you appear to be in Singapore, so all Internet services blocked by China’s Golden Shield are fully open.
On a laptop you’ll need a VPN. I’ve found WiTopia to be consistently effective, and if you do buy a Chinese number you can also use it on your phone.
Otherwise forget Google services of any kind, familiar Western media and social media, and much more.
Free wi-fi is standard in Chinese hotels. In coffee shops, fast food outlets, etc.but you may need Weixin to complete the connection.
Transport
Rail
The question by now is not ‘Where do the high-speed (gaotie) trains go?’, but ‘Where don’t they go?’ And as you travel on them you’ll see further construction underway.
They have transformed travel in China. Where it was once routine for a trip between cities to be overnight (or longer), what was once 14 hours is now six, and three hours times 300 km/h, which is the typical speed, will get you a long way, in daylight and with views of the countryside often from elevated track.
The arrival of on-line booking means that almost no one goes to a ticket office any more, which is good news since I never waited more than five minutes to book a ticket, and mostly considerably less. On arrival at one of the cavernous new gaotie stations I simply walked round to the ticket office and booked my train out the next day or two days later (or, on one occasion, the same day). It’s quite possible to book and pay for a series of tickets within the same railway bureau’s area at any station within that bureau, so I once booked Shenyang to Changchun, and Changchun to Dalian, all in Shenyang. It may now be possible to book seats on any train nationally—although that certainly used not to be the case. I didn’t enquire.
Typically gaotie (that’s a contraction of gāosù tiělù, 高速铁路, high-speed iron road—gao rhymes with cow, followed by two syllables tee-eh) stations are mostly on the fringes of cities, which if of any established size may put you a good distance from where you might want to be.
But on the other hand no city of any size is without a large, complex, and modern metro system which will take you anywhere, and the new suburb around the station will typically sport several comfortable brand new hotels, unless far-flung indeed. So you may either book your ticket on arrival, then find a hotel, or wander into a hotel, and return to book your ticket.
The downside of all the on-line booking is that all the little ticket offices around town that used to make ¥5 commission on selling you a ticket are now shut. So you'll be booking at a station, one way or another.
You still have the alternative to take the original vastly slower trains, which usually still run to the old and more centrally located city stations and are considerably cheaper. Sometimes gaotie make it to those old stations, too, trundling slowly along older lines for the last few kilometres (Beijing and Qingdao would be two examples).
Note that ticket booking offices almost always have separate entrances from the main station (Beijing South is the only exception I know of). You must exit the building and find a different way in, often on a different floor, but they are always signposted in English. You will need your passport to book. You’ll need it again when you enter the station (where your luggage will be X-rayed and you will be wanded), and yet again when you enter the platform. In a few stations the regular gates can now also deal with passports, but mostly it’s local IDs only. You’ll need to go to a human at one end of the row of barriers or the other, who will occasionally allow you to place your passport on his scanner, but will mostly do it for you.A light goes green, and in you go. You’ll need it one more time to exit the station on arrival.
You have a choice of second class (perfectly comfortable, not inferior in any way to what you have at home, and better than that for many), first class (two seats either side of the aisle, rather than three and two, but twice the price), and business class (just five independent pods in a screened off compartment. Triple the price, I imagine, and sometimes comes with a VIP waiting area at the station, too.) It’s a gamble, but first class is often worth paying for simply because it may be largely empty. The Chinese are chair-kickers to a man; they hold conversations on mobile phones at volumes which render the use of the phone unnecessary; they hold video calls and play videos without the use of headphones. A crowded second-class carriage is like a slot-machine arcade or Japanese pachinko parlour moving at 300 km/h. Bring your own headphones to gain some relief.
If you later decide to spend an extra day or two because you like a place, but have already booked, you may exchange your ticket for a small fee (¥35 when I did it, having decided to spend an extra day in Shenyang).
English is sometimes spoken, but a translation app will do you just as well. The Chinese themselves often reach for these before you do.
Food on board is nothing that you would want to put in your mouth, and certainly not for the prices asked. Shop at bakeries and groceries, and buy fruit from street stalls, before you leave for the station.
Metro
The metro services of the main cities are nearly identical. There are touch screens for purchasing tickets, which are typically ¥2, and an English menu option. Some just deal with recharging stored value cards or phone apps, or will only sell tickets for electronic payment, but the presence of coin and note slots will tell you which. Choose your destination (optionally choose a line, then the destination), then number of tickets, and drop the money in. The smallest note accepted is ¥5, and largest ¥20. Change is given. In most cases you receive a card for tapping to open the gate, and feeding into a slot when you exit on arrival. In some cases (similar to Bangkok) it’s a plastic token, but the same arrangement—tap in, slot out.
Your bags will be x-rayed and you’ll be wanded before every ride.
Signage is bilingual everywhere. Announcements are bilingual both on platforms and on trains. You really have to work at it to get lost or get off in the wrong place whether above ground or below.
Note that provision of lifts is erratic, as is provision of escalators in more than one direction. Even in the newest stations there's a good chance you'll have at least some stairs to deal with.
Taxis
Taxis remain mafan (troublesome). They are almost always electric, but fewer in number because everyone’s using ride-share apps. The big one is Didi Dache, which has an English-language version I looked at, but in the end didn’t bother with because it wanted too much information, required a local phone number, or some such problem. You may succeed where I couldn’t be bothered.
The big question remains whether they’ll start the meter or not. And the answer is, if you emerge from a big foreign-brand hotel and they’re waiting for you, or if you emerge from an airport or railway station, or major sight like the Forbidden City, the answer is typically no. They want to shove their hands deeply into your pocket instead. Always move away from these places before flagging something down, and insist the meter is started. But in runs out to gaotie stations, for instance, it may be locally accepted that there’s a fixed price. Ask your hotel reception what it is (and whether otherwise the taxis use the meters).
Never go with anyone who approaches you and says, ‘Hello. Taxi!’
Not ever.
Alighting in Wuzhou in Guangxi Province, some distance out of town, I was accosted by a number of drivers, but just followed the (bi-lingual) signs to the bus terminal, and caught a bus to the centre of town for ¥2. From a disinterested party in town I learned that the price for the station run by taxi/app hire was generally agreed to be ¥40. A few days later, having decided where I was going next, I returned to the station by bus, and then talked to drivers.
¥50. No. ¥45. No. ¥40. OK.
Taxis were not numerous, but when I wanted to return to catch a train to Macau I saw a car with the Dide Dache logo on the side. How much to go the gaotie station? Use the app. I don't have the app. Oh. ¥40 then.
What you need in these situations is knowledge, and where you don’t have knowledge you shouldn’t get involved.
I considered a taxi from my hotel in Beijing to Beijing Station, and flagged one down. He wanted to know where I was going. If you’re asked that question before you get in then you should just abandon that car straight away. It won’t end well. But I told him anyway. ¥50, he said, about triple what it should have been. I took the metro. ¥2.
Hotels
It remains the case that 99% of the time, in 99% of China, there are more hotel rooms available of every grade than there is demand. There is no need to book, and you’ll pay less—sometimes a great deal less—if you don’t.
If you’re looking for genuine five-star luxury, and to a certain extent four-star comfort and service, as far as China is able to provide this, your best bet is still to choose a familiar Western or Asian luxury brand (Peninsula, Shangri-La, Mandarin Oriental). At the top end these guarantee that the best price you’ll find is on their own websites. But lower down the scale some of these familiar brands are merely locally operated franchises.
Twice this year I was told at reception, ‘The best I can do is price X. OK, well slightly lower price Y. But if you look on Booking or Hotels or Ctrip you’ll find it cheaper than I can offer.’ And this turned out to be true. I booked through one of them, waited five minutes, and was given a room at the lower price.
But in general the English-language booking sites are to be avoided not only for hotels but for all services. If you're booking in English you're going to be taken for a ride.
With hotel sites, however numerous the entries appear to be they are only showing you a very limited selection of the available hotel stock; the price is typically higher than you can bargain for yourself over the counter; the photographs are usually unrepresentative; the hotels pushed at you are not those best for you, but those offering the booking engine a bigger cut.
The scope for bargaining over the counter is not as great as it was because of competition between on-line booking services, but you still have scope to save the commission at least. I typically haggled 20–25% off this year, sometimes only 10%, but once I went from ¥919 down to ¥400—possibly at least in part the result of declining to be put in a higher quality of room and ending up with a lower, but still very acceptable, one. I didn't ask. In several other cases I not only paid less but received a room upgrade, too.
If you want reasonable comfort from four-ish star down to two-star the best thing you can do is look for the newest hotel. Chinese hotels suffer terrific wear and tear and their freshness fades swiftly, with building owners and managements very reluctant to spend money on maintenance or soft refurbishment once the property is open. The photographs on-line stay as fresh as ever, of course. Once you’re getting a price you like the sound of from reception, your next action should be to inspect the room. Refurbishing lobbies but leaving rooms untouched is a popular hotel ploy.
You should hint at staying more than one night, if that’s your plan, because it also increases your chances of getting a better rate. But with Chinese hotels the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and you may find your immaculate room is poorly sound-proofed (especially now most rooms have wooden(ish) floors), is right next to construction behind the building, or has some other problem.
So show up, and if you arrive by gaotie you’ll typically find there are several new hotels near the station. Regardless, they tend to be in clumps wherever they are. In addition to the longstanding jingji (economy) chains with fairly fixed prices (such as Home Inn, etc.) there are now chains of four-ish star hotels with smart, fresh rooms and where service is very willing, if not always entirely to the point.
A room I had this year was next to the linen cupboard, and the fuwuyuan (any kind of service worker) made a joyfully chatty early start. I mentioned to reception that I’d caught a bad cold and was thinking of staying a couple more nights while I got over it, but (pause while they gave me a bottle of warmed mineral water—hot water is the Chinese universal panacea) while this wasn’t a complaint, and I was happy the fuwuyuan were happy, would they mind just suggesting they not shout up and down the corridors in the morning? A few minutes later there was a knock at my door. The receptionist had brought me some ear plugs.
You can expect wooden floors (laminate at the lower end, parquet at the higher) and often wood-panelled walls; electric controls for everything; a voice-activated assistant that will operate everything for you (if you have Mandarin, and which otherwise you should switch off, unlikely as it may be that you'll say the wake word); wireless phone charging at the bedside; smart modern bathroom (shower only); and food delivery robots. These may trundle into your lift while making a request that you don’t interfere with them because they are working. And most of these facilities can be found right down to two-star level. There’s always a giant television screen, but typically with no English channel save CCTV/CGTN which you won’t want to watch anyway.
I’ve become quite a fan of Orange Crystal hotels because I particularly liked the one in Shenyang, but others in Qingdao and Changsha were also good, although the latter was fading slightly as it was five years old. The ubiquitous Atour hotels are nearly as good.
It should go without saying that if you have a voice-activated assistant in the room, and are on any sort of mission with a political, diplomatic, or commercial aspect, you should under no circumstances discuss anything secret in your room.
The rise of Meituan (food delivery—the drivers put the bagged food into the robot in the lobby and it brings it up to you) means that many hotels at this level have ceased to run restaurants except for breakfast service, which is often included. It would be odd if you didn’t find dozens of restaurants within a few minutes’ walk, however.
As in the past, prices are higher and room supply smaller during the Chinese New Year, and the May and November holidays, but another side-effect of the gaotie network is that the middle classes (a small percentage of the population but very numerous) take weekend breaks. This is mainly a problem at warmer seaside southern destinations in the cooler months, and at mountain resort areas in the summer (otherwise summer is not seen as being a time to travel, even by that portion of the population that has much in the way of discretionary holiday). You'll still find rooms, but there will be less choice and prices higher.
You can certainly pay in cash. Foreign credit cards remain not an option outside of the biggest hotels where you’re going to be paying much more anyway (and you are left open to exchange rate issues where you end up paying 7% more because you are charged in a distorted idea of your own currency). If you want a receipt, but don’t have Weixin, expect momentary puzzlement, and allow a few minutes for this to be sorted out, and your receipt to be either emailed to you or printed. You’ll be asked for your company name, or if you just want to use your own name. You probably don’t care about the name so long as you have the receipt, but the Chinese system requires something. Can be up to ten minutes to sort this out.
Eating Out
If you're on a tour you'll never get any idea of the immense variety of Chinese food, how familiar dishes should actually be prepared, or what meals actually cost.
Almost everywhere has picture menus in which dishes are also named in something resembling English, although there'll typically be an attempt to get you scan a Weixin QR code. Nevertheless, everywhere has something in print, and you can resort to camera translation via Google Translate or similar, but it's rare to need to go this far. And there's always using translation functions to ask questions, or simply pointing at food on a neighbouring table, but again, this is rarely necessary.
There are myriad small restaurants at street level specialising in particular dishes, or the food of particular regions, or just a collection of the popular, called jiachang cai. But to eat well with little effort simply locate the nearest shopping mall--these are in every town--and you'll probably find a food court in the basement, typically with a system in which after you've wandered round choosing what you want, you pay at a central point. But there'll also often be a floor of clean and comfortable restaurants, with greeters waving picture menus at you outside. A meal for two will likely be in the ¥60 to ¥80 range. At street level it's easy to eat for ¥30, or much less for a simple one-bowl dish or a portion of some kind of dumplings.
There are now coffee shops everywhere, with major Chinese chains competing with the likes of Starbucks. Luckin Coffee is significantly superior, in my opinion. But like many restaurants most of their business is take-away. People order on apps even if present, and just wait for their numbers to be called. There's a production line at a furious pace in which coffees are produced, a cardboard cup-holding base inserted into a smart carrying bag, the coffee capped, its sipping hole also capped, inserted into the bag and placed next to a number. A constant stream of Meituan or similar riders arrive to do pick-up, scan a QR code, and disappear. Given that a latte is around ¥30, or the price of many kinds of meal, you can see here direct evidence of China's high Gini coefficient: the middle class, a small percentage of the population but numerically numerous, adopting the consumption of Western product (including all the vile concoctions of coffee, sweeteners, and colourants that Western coffee shops produce), and indicating by doing so that they've arrived and can afford it. An Americano ranges from ¥11 to perhaps ¥23. When ordering you do have to emphasise that you want no sugar or syrup (assuming you have adult taste buds) as adding it tends to be regarded as the default. And if you don't have Weixin or the relevant app, expect it to take a moment or two to get someone's attention and pay in cash. There is cash (as at screen-driven fast food restaurants), but it's now in a plastic bag in a draw somewhere and someone has to find it. Again, try to keep small notes and coins to use in these circumstances.
Lattes are even offered on trains, for a price that may be closer to ¥40, but will be merely lukewarm milky coffee. Avoid buying anything on trains.
And there are, of course, Chinese chains that are producing similar tea-based abominations with all sorts of additional ingredients well beyond bubble tea.
General Changes
There are cameras everywhere, and facial scans (you’ll see yourself on a little screen sometimes) at metro entrances and elsewhere are common. The government knows where you are at all times, in the sense that the data is there, but not in the sense that it has any interest at all or is actually watching you. But if you do something to attract its attention, it will know where you’ve been and where you are.
Forget all the nonsense ever written here about leaving your passport safely in your hotel room and carrying a photocopy. Chinese law requires you to carry it at all times, and these days without it you won’t get anything done.
You need it to buy railway tickets and museum tickets. You’ll need again to get into platforms and into museums. You’ll need it again when you exit stations. Indeed, your ticket is connected to your ID, and the system is far more interested in where you are than whether you paid or not. It knows you did.
Despite what you may recently have read, there’s been a backlash and all businesses are required to accept cash as well as electronic payment (Weixin, Alipay). Only once in four weeks did I have a business (a coffee shop) tell me it didn’t accept cash. I explained why it most certainly would (the government requires it) but it isn’t necessary to be able to do this. What is wise is to break larger notes whenever the opportunity arises, and to hang on to smaller notes so you can hand especially smaller businesses the exact cash. Many now have to go ferreting about in a drawer to find a plastic bag with odd notes and coins, and sometimes employees start searching their own pockets to find the right change. There is absolutely nowhere where you can’t pay cash.
Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures, and entirely new to China, is that people leave you alone. Those who have never visited, and to some extent those who have only visited in tour groups, may find this observation odd. But in the 80s large crowds would gather round you to stare, and up until recently being hooted at, or pointed out loudly to others, was something that happened several times a day, and could render travelling in China very tiresome.
I used to say that a good day was when I got to the end of it without hearing a single ‘Lao wai!’ (foreigner!) and without anyone beginning a conversation (eventually, after staring, mouth agape) with ‘Ei? How come you speak Chinese?’ Typically this was achieved by going into the countryside, through a sort of cultural sound barrier, to somewhere where it hadn’t occurred to anyone that there was anything to speak other than their local language and Mandarin with a bad accent. The accent of anyone from more the two villages away would be different, so a foreigner’s bad accent was only to be expected.
This year such a day was common, and I had many conversations that had gone on for several minutes before I would be asked, simply for information rather than in a tone of amazement, how come I spoke Mandarin so well? (I don’t speak it well, but I do speak it functionally. I enjoy the language’s structure—despite what you’re always let to believe there are few that are simpler—and I enjoy using it and learning new terms as I go. But there’s no need for it in China at all, and you can get by perfectly well with common sense, mime, and translation apps.)
All buses and taxis are electric now, which is to say that even in rural areas I didn’t travel in one that wasn’t.
And something’s been done about litter on a heroic scale. Every single corner of China was once covered in rubbish, with the tattered shred of cheap plastic bags hanging from trees and fences. China isn’t now Japan by any means, but it has cleaned itself up to a remarkable degree.
The last time China’s cities weren’t hideous was a century ago, when the historic buildings all still stood, but there were no paved roads save for a few in foreign enclaves, and no sanitation: picturesque for the eyes but utterly malodorous. Since then they’ve simply gone through several stages of transition to different forms of hideousness, from the hideous six-storey utilitarian apartment blocks of Soviet style. to the inside-out bathroom ugliness of the 90s, to modern suburbs with a jumble of grubby modernity. The last is an improvement, but against a very low bar.
And the Chinese’ complete indifferent to the welfare of others with whom they do not have a connection is still painful to see. They walk out of warm hotel lobbies into -3ºC and leave the door open; they park exactly across the one place pedestrians might pass; the push onto metro trains and buses before anyone can alight; and while all of them hold high-tech devices the invention of the headphone seems to have passed most users by.
But just as littering seems to have been brought under control to a degree, so has smoking. The most popular spot to smoke was once beneath a no smoking sign, especially indoors or in a lift. No more. Did I mention cameras were everywhere? In four weeks I only twice saw people smoking indoors. This is a great improvement.
And finally it may be of interest that in some parts if you're 65 or over, and in others if you're 70 or over, then public local transportation and museum entrance are free. The effort required to convince low-level employees of the metro system that you are actually qualified by age may be more effort than the ¥2 saved is worth, but entrance fees, e.g. to a well-preserved village or scenic area may often be well over ¥100.
Presently I'll post a few notes on Beijing, Shenyang, Changchun, Dalian, Yantai, Qingdao, villages near Huang Shan, Changsha, Wuzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong, although this may take a while.
What follows are a few notes on a recent four-week trip in China. It was undertaken independently, and without booking anything in advance or having a fixed idea of a route. I made it up as I went along.
I flew into Beijing, and travelled by gaotie (high-speed train) to Shenyang, Changchun, and Dalian in the northeast; by ferry south across the Yellow Sea to Yantai in Shandong; on by gaotie to Qingdao, Huang Shan (for the Huizhou towns a bus ride away), Changsha in Hunan, and Wuzhou in Guangxi, then on to Macau and by high-speed ferry to Hong Kong.
I wanted to revisit a few places of which I’m fond, and some I’d never got round to seeing despite nearly forty years of on-off travel and living and working in the country.
It’s not likely that many here will travel in this way, although it’s perfectly possible even without Mandarin and indeed has never been easier, and is the only way to discover what China is really like, how much things actually cost, proper Chinese food, etc. Likely few will want to visit these particular cities, certainly those on the mainland, since none make the first-time visitor's greatest hits list. But before I offer a few notes on each I will first say something about the general state of foreign travel in China at the moment; what’s good and bad, and what’s changed.
I should add that this was leisure travel, so I didn’t feel obliged to note the last detail of every alternative, and I’ll only be mentioning what I experienced.
Information
I carried a 20-year-old edition of Frommer’s China (full disclosure: I was involved in producing it), partly because I wanted to see how it had held up, and partly because I knew it to be thoroughly well researched. Of course, all the practical information was of no use at all, but the cultural and historical material remained accurate and worthwhile, and the pointed opinions of various authors just as valid and as entertaining to read.
The Internet knows nothing, and to look at all these ‘I’ve got you covered’ ‘Ultimate Guides’ is to be certain of being misled.
Google Maps in China is just a general guide to what’s where, and where you’re standing. It’s fine (as much as it ever is) for navigating on foot, or monitoring your taxi’s route, but contains no public transport information, and if you can get it to reveal the location of metro stations it typically has them marked as permanently closed. It almost looks as if there’s been a campaign of deliberate disinformation.
Baidu maps may well be better, but you’ll need to be able to enter and to recognise Chinese characters. If there’s an English interface I didn’t discover it. No doubt there’s an app which may be more foreigner-friendly, but will likely also be offering a back door into your phone (as WeChat/Weixin does).
Route services such as RomeToRio have no clue about where the trains go or when. The Chinese rail system’s own English-language interface has been completely unresponsive every time I’ve looked at it recently.
Things change quickly. Practical information is best obtained locally.
Internet and phones
Getting a Chinese SIM is possible, but involves facial scans and ID scans, etc. I haven’t bothered for a few years, and would argue that an e-SIM is the answer. I’ve twice used Airolo in China with no problems at all (there are many other options). You can’t use it for voice calls (except VOIP) but only data, but on the other hand you appear to be in Singapore, so all Internet services blocked by China’s Golden Shield are fully open.
On a laptop you’ll need a VPN. I’ve found WiTopia to be consistently effective, and if you do buy a Chinese number you can also use it on your phone.
Otherwise forget Google services of any kind, familiar Western media and social media, and much more.
Free wi-fi is standard in Chinese hotels. In coffee shops, fast food outlets, etc.but you may need Weixin to complete the connection.
Transport
Rail
The question by now is not ‘Where do the high-speed (gaotie) trains go?’, but ‘Where don’t they go?’ And as you travel on them you’ll see further construction underway.
They have transformed travel in China. Where it was once routine for a trip between cities to be overnight (or longer), what was once 14 hours is now six, and three hours times 300 km/h, which is the typical speed, will get you a long way, in daylight and with views of the countryside often from elevated track.
The arrival of on-line booking means that almost no one goes to a ticket office any more, which is good news since I never waited more than five minutes to book a ticket, and mostly considerably less. On arrival at one of the cavernous new gaotie stations I simply walked round to the ticket office and booked my train out the next day or two days later (or, on one occasion, the same day). It’s quite possible to book and pay for a series of tickets within the same railway bureau’s area at any station within that bureau, so I once booked Shenyang to Changchun, and Changchun to Dalian, all in Shenyang. It may now be possible to book seats on any train nationally—although that certainly used not to be the case. I didn’t enquire.
Typically gaotie (that’s a contraction of gāosù tiělù, 高速铁路, high-speed iron road—gao rhymes with cow, followed by two syllables tee-eh) stations are mostly on the fringes of cities, which if of any established size may put you a good distance from where you might want to be.
But on the other hand no city of any size is without a large, complex, and modern metro system which will take you anywhere, and the new suburb around the station will typically sport several comfortable brand new hotels, unless far-flung indeed. So you may either book your ticket on arrival, then find a hotel, or wander into a hotel, and return to book your ticket.
The downside of all the on-line booking is that all the little ticket offices around town that used to make ¥5 commission on selling you a ticket are now shut. So you'll be booking at a station, one way or another.
You still have the alternative to take the original vastly slower trains, which usually still run to the old and more centrally located city stations and are considerably cheaper. Sometimes gaotie make it to those old stations, too, trundling slowly along older lines for the last few kilometres (Beijing and Qingdao would be two examples).
Note that ticket booking offices almost always have separate entrances from the main station (Beijing South is the only exception I know of). You must exit the building and find a different way in, often on a different floor, but they are always signposted in English. You will need your passport to book. You’ll need it again when you enter the station (where your luggage will be X-rayed and you will be wanded), and yet again when you enter the platform. In a few stations the regular gates can now also deal with passports, but mostly it’s local IDs only. You’ll need to go to a human at one end of the row of barriers or the other, who will occasionally allow you to place your passport on his scanner, but will mostly do it for you.A light goes green, and in you go. You’ll need it one more time to exit the station on arrival.
You have a choice of second class (perfectly comfortable, not inferior in any way to what you have at home, and better than that for many), first class (two seats either side of the aisle, rather than three and two, but twice the price), and business class (just five independent pods in a screened off compartment. Triple the price, I imagine, and sometimes comes with a VIP waiting area at the station, too.) It’s a gamble, but first class is often worth paying for simply because it may be largely empty. The Chinese are chair-kickers to a man; they hold conversations on mobile phones at volumes which render the use of the phone unnecessary; they hold video calls and play videos without the use of headphones. A crowded second-class carriage is like a slot-machine arcade or Japanese pachinko parlour moving at 300 km/h. Bring your own headphones to gain some relief.
If you later decide to spend an extra day or two because you like a place, but have already booked, you may exchange your ticket for a small fee (¥35 when I did it, having decided to spend an extra day in Shenyang).
English is sometimes spoken, but a translation app will do you just as well. The Chinese themselves often reach for these before you do.
Food on board is nothing that you would want to put in your mouth, and certainly not for the prices asked. Shop at bakeries and groceries, and buy fruit from street stalls, before you leave for the station.
Metro
The metro services of the main cities are nearly identical. There are touch screens for purchasing tickets, which are typically ¥2, and an English menu option. Some just deal with recharging stored value cards or phone apps, or will only sell tickets for electronic payment, but the presence of coin and note slots will tell you which. Choose your destination (optionally choose a line, then the destination), then number of tickets, and drop the money in. The smallest note accepted is ¥5, and largest ¥20. Change is given. In most cases you receive a card for tapping to open the gate, and feeding into a slot when you exit on arrival. In some cases (similar to Bangkok) it’s a plastic token, but the same arrangement—tap in, slot out.
Your bags will be x-rayed and you’ll be wanded before every ride.
Signage is bilingual everywhere. Announcements are bilingual both on platforms and on trains. You really have to work at it to get lost or get off in the wrong place whether above ground or below.
Note that provision of lifts is erratic, as is provision of escalators in more than one direction. Even in the newest stations there's a good chance you'll have at least some stairs to deal with.
Taxis
Taxis remain mafan (troublesome). They are almost always electric, but fewer in number because everyone’s using ride-share apps. The big one is Didi Dache, which has an English-language version I looked at, but in the end didn’t bother with because it wanted too much information, required a local phone number, or some such problem. You may succeed where I couldn’t be bothered.
The big question remains whether they’ll start the meter or not. And the answer is, if you emerge from a big foreign-brand hotel and they’re waiting for you, or if you emerge from an airport or railway station, or major sight like the Forbidden City, the answer is typically no. They want to shove their hands deeply into your pocket instead. Always move away from these places before flagging something down, and insist the meter is started. But in runs out to gaotie stations, for instance, it may be locally accepted that there’s a fixed price. Ask your hotel reception what it is (and whether otherwise the taxis use the meters).
Never go with anyone who approaches you and says, ‘Hello. Taxi!’
Not ever.
Alighting in Wuzhou in Guangxi Province, some distance out of town, I was accosted by a number of drivers, but just followed the (bi-lingual) signs to the bus terminal, and caught a bus to the centre of town for ¥2. From a disinterested party in town I learned that the price for the station run by taxi/app hire was generally agreed to be ¥40. A few days later, having decided where I was going next, I returned to the station by bus, and then talked to drivers.
¥50. No. ¥45. No. ¥40. OK.
Taxis were not numerous, but when I wanted to return to catch a train to Macau I saw a car with the Dide Dache logo on the side. How much to go the gaotie station? Use the app. I don't have the app. Oh. ¥40 then.
What you need in these situations is knowledge, and where you don’t have knowledge you shouldn’t get involved.
I considered a taxi from my hotel in Beijing to Beijing Station, and flagged one down. He wanted to know where I was going. If you’re asked that question before you get in then you should just abandon that car straight away. It won’t end well. But I told him anyway. ¥50, he said, about triple what it should have been. I took the metro. ¥2.
Hotels
It remains the case that 99% of the time, in 99% of China, there are more hotel rooms available of every grade than there is demand. There is no need to book, and you’ll pay less—sometimes a great deal less—if you don’t.
If you’re looking for genuine five-star luxury, and to a certain extent four-star comfort and service, as far as China is able to provide this, your best bet is still to choose a familiar Western or Asian luxury brand (Peninsula, Shangri-La, Mandarin Oriental). At the top end these guarantee that the best price you’ll find is on their own websites. But lower down the scale some of these familiar brands are merely locally operated franchises.
Twice this year I was told at reception, ‘The best I can do is price X. OK, well slightly lower price Y. But if you look on Booking or Hotels or Ctrip you’ll find it cheaper than I can offer.’ And this turned out to be true. I booked through one of them, waited five minutes, and was given a room at the lower price.
But in general the English-language booking sites are to be avoided not only for hotels but for all services. If you're booking in English you're going to be taken for a ride.
With hotel sites, however numerous the entries appear to be they are only showing you a very limited selection of the available hotel stock; the price is typically higher than you can bargain for yourself over the counter; the photographs are usually unrepresentative; the hotels pushed at you are not those best for you, but those offering the booking engine a bigger cut.
The scope for bargaining over the counter is not as great as it was because of competition between on-line booking services, but you still have scope to save the commission at least. I typically haggled 20–25% off this year, sometimes only 10%, but once I went from ¥919 down to ¥400—possibly at least in part the result of declining to be put in a higher quality of room and ending up with a lower, but still very acceptable, one. I didn't ask. In several other cases I not only paid less but received a room upgrade, too.
If you want reasonable comfort from four-ish star down to two-star the best thing you can do is look for the newest hotel. Chinese hotels suffer terrific wear and tear and their freshness fades swiftly, with building owners and managements very reluctant to spend money on maintenance or soft refurbishment once the property is open. The photographs on-line stay as fresh as ever, of course. Once you’re getting a price you like the sound of from reception, your next action should be to inspect the room. Refurbishing lobbies but leaving rooms untouched is a popular hotel ploy.
You should hint at staying more than one night, if that’s your plan, because it also increases your chances of getting a better rate. But with Chinese hotels the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and you may find your immaculate room is poorly sound-proofed (especially now most rooms have wooden(ish) floors), is right next to construction behind the building, or has some other problem.
So show up, and if you arrive by gaotie you’ll typically find there are several new hotels near the station. Regardless, they tend to be in clumps wherever they are. In addition to the longstanding jingji (economy) chains with fairly fixed prices (such as Home Inn, etc.) there are now chains of four-ish star hotels with smart, fresh rooms and where service is very willing, if not always entirely to the point.
A room I had this year was next to the linen cupboard, and the fuwuyuan (any kind of service worker) made a joyfully chatty early start. I mentioned to reception that I’d caught a bad cold and was thinking of staying a couple more nights while I got over it, but (pause while they gave me a bottle of warmed mineral water—hot water is the Chinese universal panacea) while this wasn’t a complaint, and I was happy the fuwuyuan were happy, would they mind just suggesting they not shout up and down the corridors in the morning? A few minutes later there was a knock at my door. The receptionist had brought me some ear plugs.
You can expect wooden floors (laminate at the lower end, parquet at the higher) and often wood-panelled walls; electric controls for everything; a voice-activated assistant that will operate everything for you (if you have Mandarin, and which otherwise you should switch off, unlikely as it may be that you'll say the wake word); wireless phone charging at the bedside; smart modern bathroom (shower only); and food delivery robots. These may trundle into your lift while making a request that you don’t interfere with them because they are working. And most of these facilities can be found right down to two-star level. There’s always a giant television screen, but typically with no English channel save CCTV/CGTN which you won’t want to watch anyway.
I’ve become quite a fan of Orange Crystal hotels because I particularly liked the one in Shenyang, but others in Qingdao and Changsha were also good, although the latter was fading slightly as it was five years old. The ubiquitous Atour hotels are nearly as good.
It should go without saying that if you have a voice-activated assistant in the room, and are on any sort of mission with a political, diplomatic, or commercial aspect, you should under no circumstances discuss anything secret in your room.
The rise of Meituan (food delivery—the drivers put the bagged food into the robot in the lobby and it brings it up to you) means that many hotels at this level have ceased to run restaurants except for breakfast service, which is often included. It would be odd if you didn’t find dozens of restaurants within a few minutes’ walk, however.
As in the past, prices are higher and room supply smaller during the Chinese New Year, and the May and November holidays, but another side-effect of the gaotie network is that the middle classes (a small percentage of the population but very numerous) take weekend breaks. This is mainly a problem at warmer seaside southern destinations in the cooler months, and at mountain resort areas in the summer (otherwise summer is not seen as being a time to travel, even by that portion of the population that has much in the way of discretionary holiday). You'll still find rooms, but there will be less choice and prices higher.
You can certainly pay in cash. Foreign credit cards remain not an option outside of the biggest hotels where you’re going to be paying much more anyway (and you are left open to exchange rate issues where you end up paying 7% more because you are charged in a distorted idea of your own currency). If you want a receipt, but don’t have Weixin, expect momentary puzzlement, and allow a few minutes for this to be sorted out, and your receipt to be either emailed to you or printed. You’ll be asked for your company name, or if you just want to use your own name. You probably don’t care about the name so long as you have the receipt, but the Chinese system requires something. Can be up to ten minutes to sort this out.
Eating Out
If you're on a tour you'll never get any idea of the immense variety of Chinese food, how familiar dishes should actually be prepared, or what meals actually cost.
Almost everywhere has picture menus in which dishes are also named in something resembling English, although there'll typically be an attempt to get you scan a Weixin QR code. Nevertheless, everywhere has something in print, and you can resort to camera translation via Google Translate or similar, but it's rare to need to go this far. And there's always using translation functions to ask questions, or simply pointing at food on a neighbouring table, but again, this is rarely necessary.
There are myriad small restaurants at street level specialising in particular dishes, or the food of particular regions, or just a collection of the popular, called jiachang cai. But to eat well with little effort simply locate the nearest shopping mall--these are in every town--and you'll probably find a food court in the basement, typically with a system in which after you've wandered round choosing what you want, you pay at a central point. But there'll also often be a floor of clean and comfortable restaurants, with greeters waving picture menus at you outside. A meal for two will likely be in the ¥60 to ¥80 range. At street level it's easy to eat for ¥30, or much less for a simple one-bowl dish or a portion of some kind of dumplings.
There are now coffee shops everywhere, with major Chinese chains competing with the likes of Starbucks. Luckin Coffee is significantly superior, in my opinion. But like many restaurants most of their business is take-away. People order on apps even if present, and just wait for their numbers to be called. There's a production line at a furious pace in which coffees are produced, a cardboard cup-holding base inserted into a smart carrying bag, the coffee capped, its sipping hole also capped, inserted into the bag and placed next to a number. A constant stream of Meituan or similar riders arrive to do pick-up, scan a QR code, and disappear. Given that a latte is around ¥30, or the price of many kinds of meal, you can see here direct evidence of China's high Gini coefficient: the middle class, a small percentage of the population but numerically numerous, adopting the consumption of Western product (including all the vile concoctions of coffee, sweeteners, and colourants that Western coffee shops produce), and indicating by doing so that they've arrived and can afford it. An Americano ranges from ¥11 to perhaps ¥23. When ordering you do have to emphasise that you want no sugar or syrup (assuming you have adult taste buds) as adding it tends to be regarded as the default. And if you don't have Weixin or the relevant app, expect it to take a moment or two to get someone's attention and pay in cash. There is cash (as at screen-driven fast food restaurants), but it's now in a plastic bag in a draw somewhere and someone has to find it. Again, try to keep small notes and coins to use in these circumstances.
Lattes are even offered on trains, for a price that may be closer to ¥40, but will be merely lukewarm milky coffee. Avoid buying anything on trains.
And there are, of course, Chinese chains that are producing similar tea-based abominations with all sorts of additional ingredients well beyond bubble tea.
General Changes
There are cameras everywhere, and facial scans (you’ll see yourself on a little screen sometimes) at metro entrances and elsewhere are common. The government knows where you are at all times, in the sense that the data is there, but not in the sense that it has any interest at all or is actually watching you. But if you do something to attract its attention, it will know where you’ve been and where you are.
Forget all the nonsense ever written here about leaving your passport safely in your hotel room and carrying a photocopy. Chinese law requires you to carry it at all times, and these days without it you won’t get anything done.
You need it to buy railway tickets and museum tickets. You’ll need again to get into platforms and into museums. You’ll need it again when you exit stations. Indeed, your ticket is connected to your ID, and the system is far more interested in where you are than whether you paid or not. It knows you did.
Despite what you may recently have read, there’s been a backlash and all businesses are required to accept cash as well as electronic payment (Weixin, Alipay). Only once in four weeks did I have a business (a coffee shop) tell me it didn’t accept cash. I explained why it most certainly would (the government requires it) but it isn’t necessary to be able to do this. What is wise is to break larger notes whenever the opportunity arises, and to hang on to smaller notes so you can hand especially smaller businesses the exact cash. Many now have to go ferreting about in a drawer to find a plastic bag with odd notes and coins, and sometimes employees start searching their own pockets to find the right change. There is absolutely nowhere where you can’t pay cash.
Perhaps one of the greatest pleasures, and entirely new to China, is that people leave you alone. Those who have never visited, and to some extent those who have only visited in tour groups, may find this observation odd. But in the 80s large crowds would gather round you to stare, and up until recently being hooted at, or pointed out loudly to others, was something that happened several times a day, and could render travelling in China very tiresome.
I used to say that a good day was when I got to the end of it without hearing a single ‘Lao wai!’ (foreigner!) and without anyone beginning a conversation (eventually, after staring, mouth agape) with ‘Ei? How come you speak Chinese?’ Typically this was achieved by going into the countryside, through a sort of cultural sound barrier, to somewhere where it hadn’t occurred to anyone that there was anything to speak other than their local language and Mandarin with a bad accent. The accent of anyone from more the two villages away would be different, so a foreigner’s bad accent was only to be expected.
This year such a day was common, and I had many conversations that had gone on for several minutes before I would be asked, simply for information rather than in a tone of amazement, how come I spoke Mandarin so well? (I don’t speak it well, but I do speak it functionally. I enjoy the language’s structure—despite what you’re always let to believe there are few that are simpler—and I enjoy using it and learning new terms as I go. But there’s no need for it in China at all, and you can get by perfectly well with common sense, mime, and translation apps.)
All buses and taxis are electric now, which is to say that even in rural areas I didn’t travel in one that wasn’t.
And something’s been done about litter on a heroic scale. Every single corner of China was once covered in rubbish, with the tattered shred of cheap plastic bags hanging from trees and fences. China isn’t now Japan by any means, but it has cleaned itself up to a remarkable degree.
The last time China’s cities weren’t hideous was a century ago, when the historic buildings all still stood, but there were no paved roads save for a few in foreign enclaves, and no sanitation: picturesque for the eyes but utterly malodorous. Since then they’ve simply gone through several stages of transition to different forms of hideousness, from the hideous six-storey utilitarian apartment blocks of Soviet style. to the inside-out bathroom ugliness of the 90s, to modern suburbs with a jumble of grubby modernity. The last is an improvement, but against a very low bar.
And the Chinese’ complete indifferent to the welfare of others with whom they do not have a connection is still painful to see. They walk out of warm hotel lobbies into -3ºC and leave the door open; they park exactly across the one place pedestrians might pass; the push onto metro trains and buses before anyone can alight; and while all of them hold high-tech devices the invention of the headphone seems to have passed most users by.
But just as littering seems to have been brought under control to a degree, so has smoking. The most popular spot to smoke was once beneath a no smoking sign, especially indoors or in a lift. No more. Did I mention cameras were everywhere? In four weeks I only twice saw people smoking indoors. This is a great improvement.
And finally it may be of interest that in some parts if you're 65 or over, and in others if you're 70 or over, then public local transportation and museum entrance are free. The effort required to convince low-level employees of the metro system that you are actually qualified by age may be more effort than the ¥2 saved is worth, but entrance fees, e.g. to a well-preserved village or scenic area may often be well over ¥100.
Presently I'll post a few notes on Beijing, Shenyang, Changchun, Dalian, Yantai, Qingdao, villages near Huang Shan, Changsha, Wuzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong, although this may take a while.
Peter, the information you share is priceless -- thank you so much!
I look back on my 2010 trip to northern China with joyful memories of what I saw and did ... and dismay at my willingness to have gone well outside my comfort zone.
But I did -- with your help, -- and OMG, am I glad I did! 
I'm happy to learn that you got back to a country I know you treasure and can't thank you enough for sharing your insights, observations, and wisdom with other Fodorites.
Best wishes!
I look back on my 2010 trip to northern China with joyful memories of what I saw and did ... and dismay at my willingness to have gone well outside my comfort zone.
But I did -- with your help, -- and OMG, am I glad I did! I'm happy to learn that you got back to a country I know you treasure and can't thank you enough for sharing your insights, observations, and wisdom with other Fodorites.
Best wishes!
Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed reading your observations on a country I may never get to visit.
Beijing
Just a few observations. Nothing very illuminating.
I didn’t expect much but disappointment from a return to Beijing, a city in which I lived and worked on-and-off in the 90s and 00s, and which at that time, since my work was specifically to examine and explain it, I knew as well as anyone—and this claim not a casual bit of phrasemaking, but one I could bring evidence to defend.
China is a place to which it is impossible to return, because by then it has become somewhere else. Whatever you think you know to be true is false by the time you’ve disembarked from your return flight, even if it was right in the first place.
My main purpose on this occasion was to see a corner of the Forbidden City that had opened since my last visit, and perhaps to return to a few corners of the city of which I was once particularly fond, although I hadn’t chosen which at the time I arrived on a flight from Tokyo.
I chose to fly in to Beijing Daxing International to see the late Anglo-Iranian architect Zaha Hadid’s colossal terminal—the largest in the world, and although it’s probably possible to see a lot more while being processed for a departing flight, I spent quite some time gawping up at its vast interior spaces. For anyone with an interest in architecture it’s worth a metro trip south to see if you’ve arrived or will depart from Beijing Capital Airport instead.
I have a long multi-entry visa but there’s still a form to fill out, and still, after all these decades of independent travel in China, the same incredulity about the fact that you’re travelling alone—not only not in a tour group, but without any companion. I was questioned about that. Where did I plan to go? I mentioned (not using Mandarin) some anodyne destinations, as you should in these cases: Xi’an, Chengdu. Maybe Chongqing. All of these were options, but I didn’t go to any of them in the end. Your visa is for the whole country, in theory. But in fact you need extra permits for some parts, and will be forbidden entry to others. Whatever your plans, your answers should never include Xinjiang, Tibet, or anywhere else that has shown any signs of unrest, or indeed that is off the usual tourist treadmill.
But the airport processes people fairly efficiently, and the next task was to take two yikatong (stored-value Beijing metro cards) of some antiquity to the metro station and see if there was any value left on them. There are cash-accepting touch-screen machines with an English option if you just want to buy a single ticket, but live humans at a counter for enquiries such as this.
I had a little cash on me, but there are ATMs at the airport. Avoid the money exchange counters which have dismal rates compared to the fixed ones you’ll find at banks in town.
To my delight (although clearly poor past financial management) there was so much credit on these cards, which was then combined onto one card, that I didn’t have to purchase any further tickets or top up the whole time I was in Beijing.
Two changes of train brought me to Dengshikou, where I thought I’d try the Legendale Hotel, just because it is so grotesquely tasteless in a truly Trumpian style, right down to the golden bath taps, that its Macau ownership is obvious. I thought this would be a laugh.
As I approached a middle-aged woman came up and hissed, ‘Hello! Lady massaji.’ For all that China may physically change almost beyond recognition when you merely glance away for for a moment, some cultural constants remain.
Nor had the filthiness of the air improved, which for the next two days required a shovel to dig through, with an AQI of 230. Walking about was not recommended, but I’d brought some N95 masks with me.
I couldn’t bargain the room rate down to what I wanted, and although, to my surprise, there was a cheaper on-line price (to which staff cheerfully directed me), that day’s allocation was sold out, and the staff had no authority to match that price.
So a short walk half a block brought me to the gloomy tower of the ancient Peace Hotel, an early Chinese attempt to do something serious and Western, and now branded as a Novotel property. Same thing there: can’t go lower than x, but you’ll find x minus something on-line. Did, booked, was given an upgrade, and five minutes later was in a standardly tedious and only slightly battered four-star room of a decent size that could have been in just about any corner of China at any time in the last 30 years. The Legendale was murkily visible from my window.
Of course, in the hutong behind the Novotel to the north, there were plenty of new hotels or conversions of older buildings that would likely have been much cheaper and more interesting, had I just bothered to walk a little further. I knew this would be the case.
The Forbidden City now requires you to book on-line, but its website hangs at the booking screen. I asked the concierge at the Novotel Peace about my chances of getting in. Asking concierges anything in China is usually a complete waste of time, and he duly tried to sell me a ticket from the hotel’s allocation, which would have been something like ¥230, including an English-speaking guide (which is a disadvantage, not a benefit), whereas during off-season the entrance fee is only ¥40, and half that for those 60 or older. The Hall of Clocks and Watches and the Treasure gallery are an extra ¥10 each, or, again half for those qualified by age.
https://intl.dpm.org.cn/visit.html?l=en
But he did confirm that in fact there are tickets available on the day, advising me to get there no later than 8am for the 8:30am opening.
The ticket offices are on the west side of the open space immediately to the south of the Wu Men main entrance, and there are people to make sure you join the right line. There were very few foreign faces about.
The lines were short, the ticket windows opened promptly, and there was no problem in acquiring a ticket for instant entry. Just remember that everywhere in China now, no passport, no entry. And you are legally obliged to carry it anyway.
And there is no ticket. The system has attached your payment to your ID in its own mind, and when you get to the electronic scans (plus X-ray, wanding, etc.) at the entrance your passport is all they want to see.
I did make some detailed notes, which will eventually appear in an update to the Forbidden City coverage here.
But the newly opened buildings in the southwest corner weren’t of any particular interest although they did have an excellent display of furniture. And north from there, via the Hall of Martial Valour, which opened some years ago, it was now possible to walk almost all the way to the rear of the complex on a freshly opened axis, with optional turnings right back towards the Harmony Halls, the gardens, etc. There was a decent café halfway up, next to the ice houses. These I would have been particularly interested to see, having tracked down others just outside the northwest corner of the Forbidden City in the past. See here.
But, of course, they were closed that day.
The Yǔhuā Gé (雨花阁, Rain and Flowers Pavilion), part of the Tantric Buddhist Zhōngzhèng Diàn (中正殿, Hall of Rectitude) complex, with huge golden scampering dragons on its roof, remains inaccessible. Nor is anyone allowed near the Jiànfú Gōng (建福宫, Palace of Established Happiness), burned down in 1923, recently rebuilt without the slightest consultation with UNESCO, its modern interior by American architects, and for a while operating as a private club.
And there were cranes visible in the distance to the southwest, suggesting that the building of a brand new museum within the City walls was continuing—again without UNESCO clearance (which wouldn’t have been given anyway).
For more on the long history of mismanagement of the site, see here.
There was a special exhibition atop the Wu Men with its own extra entrance fee, but here they were unable to deal with anything other than a Weixin (or, presumably, Web) booking. It was on the history of the museum, so not particularly likely to be interesting (or honest).
Overall, although numbers of visitors are supposedly limited, the site was crowded to the point where it’s no longer possible to get a sense of mystery even in the former domestic quarters of concubines, the Qianlong garden, or other points off the main route taken by tour groups. I remember times past when on a November afternoon it was possible to have the site largely to oneself (or it felt like that), but these quieter spaces now seem noisier than the main axis due to the crowds being compressed into narrower spaces.
Still, I stayed until mid-afternoon, moving directly between favoured points but abandoning others. The Hall of Clocks and Watches remains essential, although there are no longer demonstrations of certain clocks twice a day. The video of my favourite, a British clock made by Williamson in 1780, with the figure of a man holding a calligraphy brush, who, when wound up, writes the eight characters 八方向化九土来王 (Bā fāng xiàng huà, jiǔ tǔ lái wáng) meaning ‘People come from everywhere to pay their respects to the emperor’, is no longer shown. It may be on the Internet somewhere, and if so is worth seeing.
After leaving through the Dong Hua Men I went over to see if an old walking route I favoured just to the southeast was still worth the effort. I’d seen the entire area (despite being in the Forbidden City buffer zone) pulled down and rebuilt once already (2002-5), but the Mahakala Temple or Pudu Si, up on a small hill, survived, although in 2007 it opened to the public for the first time in 80 years as the Beijing Taxation Museum. It had once been the home of the Prince-Regent Dorgon while he repaired the partly destroyed Forbidden City ready for the arrival of the first Qing emperor to rule from Beijing in 1644,
But it was now locked up again, and the statues of famous economists had been taken down. It’s still a quiet spot in a city that has few of those. Details of the walk and the temple here.
You can find a discussion of the complete failure to preserve Beijing, put in the context of the recent application for UNESCO World Heritage listing of its central axis, here (paywall, although no financial benefit to me).
I went to Beijing Station and easily booked a ticket to Shenyang for two days later.
The next day I went first up to the Da Shanzi 798 Art District, described here, to find it in something of a state of decay, with gift shops and coffee shops growing to outnumber the galleries, many of which were shut. The UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art has lost something of its edge since being taken over from its foreign founders by Chinese owners, but the original 798 Gallery was still there, with its Cultural Revolution-era slogans still spread across its East German Architecture. But no longer functioning as a gallery.
Overall much less fun to wander round than it used to be, but possibly livelier at weekends.
I took a metro south to the Shi Li He Tianqiao Market, just outside the Southeast Third Ring Road near metro Shi Li He.
I used to love the small markets selling Beijing’s traditional pleasures—flowers, birds, fish, and insects. But these were gradually shut down and driven out from the centre, and confined to this relatively far-flung site. It was still a pleasure to visit the insect market with its cacophony of cricket calls, and all the paraphernalia for pampering the insects, kept for their song, or for fighting against opponents at illegal backstreet gambling sites.
There were also the birds, and particularly various species of small, migratory ones such as the wutong and jiaozui, trapped on their passage down China’s coast, and taught to do tricks such as ‘fetch the balls’, in which they would streak up to the sky after a pellet despatched from a blowpipe and then after a second fired while they were in the air, bringing them back to an outstretched palm for a reward in flax seed.
This was history come to life—an ancient pastime still in progress—although the trapping of the birds was to be regretted, as was that of mynahs. Chinese demand threatened to make these go extinct in Nepal.
But there were no birds now, and someone told me that the trade was now banned. A good thing, but it made the market much less colourful. (And the usual meaning of ‘banned’ in China is ‘still going on somewhere after a few palms have been greased’.)
There were still quite a number of insect vendors about with polystyrene boxes full of creepy crawlies (or jumpies, in this case), and some of their stock sitting on cloths on top of water bottles to keep them warm and lively.
But the place was even more grubby and beaten up than I remembered, and depressing on a gloomy autumn afternoon.
I crossed to the inside of the Third Ring in search of lunch and caught sight of a modern two-story building with the 花鸟鱼虫 (flowers, birds, fish, insects) characters on the outside, and inside found corridors of very smart little shops selling antiques (‘antiques’, of course—this is China), but also all the same paraphernalia to do with these hobbies. But whereas hollowed-out gourd living quarters for a cricket would usually set you back only at best a few tens of kuai, here they were finely carved and went for ¥2–3000.
I ended up spending considerable time talking to shop owners about Chinese traditions and the general state of things. I caught sight of a tiny carved animal I thought might make a good present for my daughter, but couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be—a cat, or a rabbit. A rabbit, said one staff member firmly, although her boss promptly pointed out it was in fact a squirrel (a word I’d forgotten and had to look up—it’s 松鼠 ‘pine rat’). A high price was wanted, because they claimed it was ivory.
We can’t buy ivory things, I said, but she insisted it was old and therefore legal. In sight of her shop was another specialising in narwhal tusks, which was a surprise. It had large reproductions of government permits in its windows, clearly anticipating objections.
This is why you should walk everywhere. You never know what you’ll stumble upon.
That evening I did a small amount of work, needing photographs of Great Leap Brewing (which was like something out of a Hogarth print and eminently avoidable, I thought), and Nuoyan Rice Wine, in an old printing house, and well worth the visit. I managed to decline a flight of different rice wines but not a glass of a sparkling version, which was excellent.
Walking through the darkened hutong to reach these places reminded me of the Beijing I loved when I lived there, and in the process I came across a good roast duck restaurant with ordinary local pricing.
I also crossed Nan Luogu Xiang, a hutong I remember from when it was just starting to have one or two discreet cafés and bars, but now widened, paved, brightly lit, and lined with trinket shops; devoid of charm.
Two days was enough, and I left for Shenyang the next morning.
Just a few observations. Nothing very illuminating.
I didn’t expect much but disappointment from a return to Beijing, a city in which I lived and worked on-and-off in the 90s and 00s, and which at that time, since my work was specifically to examine and explain it, I knew as well as anyone—and this claim not a casual bit of phrasemaking, but one I could bring evidence to defend.
China is a place to which it is impossible to return, because by then it has become somewhere else. Whatever you think you know to be true is false by the time you’ve disembarked from your return flight, even if it was right in the first place.
My main purpose on this occasion was to see a corner of the Forbidden City that had opened since my last visit, and perhaps to return to a few corners of the city of which I was once particularly fond, although I hadn’t chosen which at the time I arrived on a flight from Tokyo.
I chose to fly in to Beijing Daxing International to see the late Anglo-Iranian architect Zaha Hadid’s colossal terminal—the largest in the world, and although it’s probably possible to see a lot more while being processed for a departing flight, I spent quite some time gawping up at its vast interior spaces. For anyone with an interest in architecture it’s worth a metro trip south to see if you’ve arrived or will depart from Beijing Capital Airport instead.
I have a long multi-entry visa but there’s still a form to fill out, and still, after all these decades of independent travel in China, the same incredulity about the fact that you’re travelling alone—not only not in a tour group, but without any companion. I was questioned about that. Where did I plan to go? I mentioned (not using Mandarin) some anodyne destinations, as you should in these cases: Xi’an, Chengdu. Maybe Chongqing. All of these were options, but I didn’t go to any of them in the end. Your visa is for the whole country, in theory. But in fact you need extra permits for some parts, and will be forbidden entry to others. Whatever your plans, your answers should never include Xinjiang, Tibet, or anywhere else that has shown any signs of unrest, or indeed that is off the usual tourist treadmill.
But the airport processes people fairly efficiently, and the next task was to take two yikatong (stored-value Beijing metro cards) of some antiquity to the metro station and see if there was any value left on them. There are cash-accepting touch-screen machines with an English option if you just want to buy a single ticket, but live humans at a counter for enquiries such as this.
I had a little cash on me, but there are ATMs at the airport. Avoid the money exchange counters which have dismal rates compared to the fixed ones you’ll find at banks in town.
To my delight (although clearly poor past financial management) there was so much credit on these cards, which was then combined onto one card, that I didn’t have to purchase any further tickets or top up the whole time I was in Beijing.
Two changes of train brought me to Dengshikou, where I thought I’d try the Legendale Hotel, just because it is so grotesquely tasteless in a truly Trumpian style, right down to the golden bath taps, that its Macau ownership is obvious. I thought this would be a laugh.
As I approached a middle-aged woman came up and hissed, ‘Hello! Lady massaji.’ For all that China may physically change almost beyond recognition when you merely glance away for for a moment, some cultural constants remain.
Nor had the filthiness of the air improved, which for the next two days required a shovel to dig through, with an AQI of 230. Walking about was not recommended, but I’d brought some N95 masks with me.
I couldn’t bargain the room rate down to what I wanted, and although, to my surprise, there was a cheaper on-line price (to which staff cheerfully directed me), that day’s allocation was sold out, and the staff had no authority to match that price.
So a short walk half a block brought me to the gloomy tower of the ancient Peace Hotel, an early Chinese attempt to do something serious and Western, and now branded as a Novotel property. Same thing there: can’t go lower than x, but you’ll find x minus something on-line. Did, booked, was given an upgrade, and five minutes later was in a standardly tedious and only slightly battered four-star room of a decent size that could have been in just about any corner of China at any time in the last 30 years. The Legendale was murkily visible from my window.
Of course, in the hutong behind the Novotel to the north, there were plenty of new hotels or conversions of older buildings that would likely have been much cheaper and more interesting, had I just bothered to walk a little further. I knew this would be the case.
The Forbidden City now requires you to book on-line, but its website hangs at the booking screen. I asked the concierge at the Novotel Peace about my chances of getting in. Asking concierges anything in China is usually a complete waste of time, and he duly tried to sell me a ticket from the hotel’s allocation, which would have been something like ¥230, including an English-speaking guide (which is a disadvantage, not a benefit), whereas during off-season the entrance fee is only ¥40, and half that for those 60 or older. The Hall of Clocks and Watches and the Treasure gallery are an extra ¥10 each, or, again half for those qualified by age.
https://intl.dpm.org.cn/visit.html?l=en
But he did confirm that in fact there are tickets available on the day, advising me to get there no later than 8am for the 8:30am opening.
The ticket offices are on the west side of the open space immediately to the south of the Wu Men main entrance, and there are people to make sure you join the right line. There were very few foreign faces about.
The lines were short, the ticket windows opened promptly, and there was no problem in acquiring a ticket for instant entry. Just remember that everywhere in China now, no passport, no entry. And you are legally obliged to carry it anyway.
And there is no ticket. The system has attached your payment to your ID in its own mind, and when you get to the electronic scans (plus X-ray, wanding, etc.) at the entrance your passport is all they want to see.
I did make some detailed notes, which will eventually appear in an update to the Forbidden City coverage here.
But the newly opened buildings in the southwest corner weren’t of any particular interest although they did have an excellent display of furniture. And north from there, via the Hall of Martial Valour, which opened some years ago, it was now possible to walk almost all the way to the rear of the complex on a freshly opened axis, with optional turnings right back towards the Harmony Halls, the gardens, etc. There was a decent café halfway up, next to the ice houses. These I would have been particularly interested to see, having tracked down others just outside the northwest corner of the Forbidden City in the past. See here.
But, of course, they were closed that day.
The Yǔhuā Gé (雨花阁, Rain and Flowers Pavilion), part of the Tantric Buddhist Zhōngzhèng Diàn (中正殿, Hall of Rectitude) complex, with huge golden scampering dragons on its roof, remains inaccessible. Nor is anyone allowed near the Jiànfú Gōng (建福宫, Palace of Established Happiness), burned down in 1923, recently rebuilt without the slightest consultation with UNESCO, its modern interior by American architects, and for a while operating as a private club.
And there were cranes visible in the distance to the southwest, suggesting that the building of a brand new museum within the City walls was continuing—again without UNESCO clearance (which wouldn’t have been given anyway).
For more on the long history of mismanagement of the site, see here.
There was a special exhibition atop the Wu Men with its own extra entrance fee, but here they were unable to deal with anything other than a Weixin (or, presumably, Web) booking. It was on the history of the museum, so not particularly likely to be interesting (or honest).
Overall, although numbers of visitors are supposedly limited, the site was crowded to the point where it’s no longer possible to get a sense of mystery even in the former domestic quarters of concubines, the Qianlong garden, or other points off the main route taken by tour groups. I remember times past when on a November afternoon it was possible to have the site largely to oneself (or it felt like that), but these quieter spaces now seem noisier than the main axis due to the crowds being compressed into narrower spaces.
Still, I stayed until mid-afternoon, moving directly between favoured points but abandoning others. The Hall of Clocks and Watches remains essential, although there are no longer demonstrations of certain clocks twice a day. The video of my favourite, a British clock made by Williamson in 1780, with the figure of a man holding a calligraphy brush, who, when wound up, writes the eight characters 八方向化九土来王 (Bā fāng xiàng huà, jiǔ tǔ lái wáng) meaning ‘People come from everywhere to pay their respects to the emperor’, is no longer shown. It may be on the Internet somewhere, and if so is worth seeing.
After leaving through the Dong Hua Men I went over to see if an old walking route I favoured just to the southeast was still worth the effort. I’d seen the entire area (despite being in the Forbidden City buffer zone) pulled down and rebuilt once already (2002-5), but the Mahakala Temple or Pudu Si, up on a small hill, survived, although in 2007 it opened to the public for the first time in 80 years as the Beijing Taxation Museum. It had once been the home of the Prince-Regent Dorgon while he repaired the partly destroyed Forbidden City ready for the arrival of the first Qing emperor to rule from Beijing in 1644,
But it was now locked up again, and the statues of famous economists had been taken down. It’s still a quiet spot in a city that has few of those. Details of the walk and the temple here.
You can find a discussion of the complete failure to preserve Beijing, put in the context of the recent application for UNESCO World Heritage listing of its central axis, here (paywall, although no financial benefit to me).
I went to Beijing Station and easily booked a ticket to Shenyang for two days later.
The next day I went first up to the Da Shanzi 798 Art District, described here, to find it in something of a state of decay, with gift shops and coffee shops growing to outnumber the galleries, many of which were shut. The UCCA Centre for Contemporary Art has lost something of its edge since being taken over from its foreign founders by Chinese owners, but the original 798 Gallery was still there, with its Cultural Revolution-era slogans still spread across its East German Architecture. But no longer functioning as a gallery.
Overall much less fun to wander round than it used to be, but possibly livelier at weekends.
I took a metro south to the Shi Li He Tianqiao Market, just outside the Southeast Third Ring Road near metro Shi Li He.
I used to love the small markets selling Beijing’s traditional pleasures—flowers, birds, fish, and insects. But these were gradually shut down and driven out from the centre, and confined to this relatively far-flung site. It was still a pleasure to visit the insect market with its cacophony of cricket calls, and all the paraphernalia for pampering the insects, kept for their song, or for fighting against opponents at illegal backstreet gambling sites.
There were also the birds, and particularly various species of small, migratory ones such as the wutong and jiaozui, trapped on their passage down China’s coast, and taught to do tricks such as ‘fetch the balls’, in which they would streak up to the sky after a pellet despatched from a blowpipe and then after a second fired while they were in the air, bringing them back to an outstretched palm for a reward in flax seed.
This was history come to life—an ancient pastime still in progress—although the trapping of the birds was to be regretted, as was that of mynahs. Chinese demand threatened to make these go extinct in Nepal.
But there were no birds now, and someone told me that the trade was now banned. A good thing, but it made the market much less colourful. (And the usual meaning of ‘banned’ in China is ‘still going on somewhere after a few palms have been greased’.)
There were still quite a number of insect vendors about with polystyrene boxes full of creepy crawlies (or jumpies, in this case), and some of their stock sitting on cloths on top of water bottles to keep them warm and lively.
But the place was even more grubby and beaten up than I remembered, and depressing on a gloomy autumn afternoon.
I crossed to the inside of the Third Ring in search of lunch and caught sight of a modern two-story building with the 花鸟鱼虫 (flowers, birds, fish, insects) characters on the outside, and inside found corridors of very smart little shops selling antiques (‘antiques’, of course—this is China), but also all the same paraphernalia to do with these hobbies. But whereas hollowed-out gourd living quarters for a cricket would usually set you back only at best a few tens of kuai, here they were finely carved and went for ¥2–3000.
I ended up spending considerable time talking to shop owners about Chinese traditions and the general state of things. I caught sight of a tiny carved animal I thought might make a good present for my daughter, but couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be—a cat, or a rabbit. A rabbit, said one staff member firmly, although her boss promptly pointed out it was in fact a squirrel (a word I’d forgotten and had to look up—it’s 松鼠 ‘pine rat’). A high price was wanted, because they claimed it was ivory.
We can’t buy ivory things, I said, but she insisted it was old and therefore legal. In sight of her shop was another specialising in narwhal tusks, which was a surprise. It had large reproductions of government permits in its windows, clearly anticipating objections.
This is why you should walk everywhere. You never know what you’ll stumble upon.
That evening I did a small amount of work, needing photographs of Great Leap Brewing (which was like something out of a Hogarth print and eminently avoidable, I thought), and Nuoyan Rice Wine, in an old printing house, and well worth the visit. I managed to decline a flight of different rice wines but not a glass of a sparkling version, which was excellent.
Walking through the darkened hutong to reach these places reminded me of the Beijing I loved when I lived there, and in the process I came across a good roast duck restaurant with ordinary local pricing.
I also crossed Nan Luogu Xiang, a hutong I remember from when it was just starting to have one or two discreet cafés and bars, but now widened, paved, brightly lit, and lined with trinket shops; devoid of charm.
Two days was enough, and I left for Shenyang the next morning.
"after all these decades of independent travel in China, the same incredulity about the fact that you’re travelling alone—not only not in a tour group, but without any companion." -- I remember that! But then, I've encountered that same kind of dismay in many places. Perhaps because I'm female? It really does seem unthinkable to many people.
Sounds like mostly a confirmation that much of what you loved about Beijing has disappeared. I'm glad there were some nice moments along the way, even so.
Sounds like mostly a confirmation that much of what you loved about Beijing has disappeared. I'm glad there were some nice moments along the way, even so.
Shenyang
More rambling of no particular significance. I didn't take notes.
I had no particular expectations of this city, the capital of Liaoning Province, but the northeast was the only area of China of which I had no experience. And, in a completist frame of mind, I wanted to see the tombs of the two Qing emperors who ruled the Qing empire before they incorporated China and began to rule from Beijing, having seen all the rest either at the Western or Eastern Qing tombs—both very worthwhile day trips from Beijing and both sites far superior to the Ming Tombs to which tour groups are bussed.
In passing here’s who they are and where they are (and reign dates):
Shùnzhì 顺治 1644–61 Eastern (first to reign from Beijing)
Kāngxī 康熙 1662–1722 Eastern
Yōngzhèng 雍正 1723–35 Western
Qiánlóng 乾隆1736–95 Eastern
Jiāqìng 嘉庆 1796–1820 Western
Dàoguāng 道光 1821–50 Western
Xiánfēng 咸丰 1851–61 Eastern
Tóngzhì 同治 1862–74 Eastern
Guāngxù 光绪 1874–1908 Western
Xuāntǒng 宣统 1909–12 Western
But Shenyang has:
Nurhaci 努爾哈赤 1616–26 (unifier of those clans labelled the Qing from 1636)
and
Tàizōng 太宗 (temple name), Huáng Tàijí 皇太極 or Abahai, 1626–43 (the first Qing emperor)
I also wanted to see the mansion from which warlord Zhang Zuolin ruled the Northeast from 1913 until his private train was blown up by the Japanese in 1928. His son Zhang Xueliang took over until the Xi’an incident of 1936 in which he participated in the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), forcing the Nationalist leader to have a meeting with Zhou Enlai to negotiate an alliance of the Nationalists and the Communists against the Japanese. These were key moments in post-Imperial Chinese history.
The point is the fairly obvious one that if you can do some reading before you visit, your experience of China will be all the richer. There is no reliable information to be had within the country itself.
As you approach any city on the new high-speed lines, you first encounter long rows of plain and monolithic towers of 30 or 40 storeys like the tombstones in a cemetery for giants. You'll also see towers halted mid-construction, just shells with no work going on at all, evidence of the precarious state of China's construction industry and that vast numbers of ordinary people have lost money.
The new Shenyang Bei station wasn’t too far out, and had already been surrounded with new construction.
Note that if the name of a station ends in a point of the compass
Dong east
Nan south
Xi west
Bei north
to take them in the traditional Chinese order, the chances are very high you’re going to a station that's brand new and peripheral.
Across the square outside the Shenyang Bei at least ten hotels were clearly visible, so I just made my way to one named Crystal Orange that seemed new enough, was impressed by the smartness of its lobby and the attentiveness of the reception staff, who made no fuss at all. I bargained about ¥100 off the price, was taken to the 19th (top) floor to see a room that turned out to be very solid and well equipped, and on being told that that was the room I’d be given, dropped my smaller bag and returned to the lobby to pay. A full breakfast was included, and that turned out be quite edible, but there were no other meal services.
I neglected to say earlier, I think, that the business of paying a deposit has now almost vanished, and I only had to do it twice. But having stated a number of days you intend to stay you pay the full cost in advance, and that’s that. Should you check out a day earlier, you ask for a refund, but in general it’s best to pay just for one night and see how it goes.
I was surprised on my way back up to note that someone had called the lift on the 15th floor to go up. There’s an infuriating habit in China of pressing both the up and the down buttons, so I thought that there would likely be no one there. But a metre-high white object with a screen on top and a few flashing lights trundled into the lift, asking me to give it space, and then rode up with me.
Every hotel I stayed in from then on had these machines, although it wasn’t until much later I saw exactly how they work. Widely introduced in the wake of Covid, they sit on charging stations in hotel lobbies. Food delivery drivers appear, enter a room number on a keypad on the top, open a door in the front to deposit the food, then alert reception. The robots are capable of calling the lift and choosing a floor, presumably by Bluetooth, and indeed you can see the screen on top counting the floors as it rides up. Whether they are also capable of ringing the doorbell at the room I don’t know. Perhaps in some cases. But otherwise reception calls up to alert guests that food is on the way.
I caught the metro out to a suburb where it was a long walk from the entrance of the Bei Ling (north tomb, more correctly the Zhao Ling) up to the tomb mound of Taizong, past a modern statue of the man; past rows of guardian animal statues seated and standing, taking turns to keep watch; past huábiǎo ornamental carved stone pillars originally deriving from boards on which people might leave messages to the emperors; through an ornate stone memorial gate called a páilou; and through courtyards and a soul tower, to the circular battlement around the mound. This was all entirely reminiscent of the Qing tombs outside Beijing, except that there was open-air karaoke on the way up, and a live band on the way back, as well as a café serving hot drinks that were very welcome against the chill. And there was the option to ride electric vehicles up the main axis rather than walk, and alternative entertainment in the form of pedalos on a lake.
Nevertheless it was all quite atmospheric, with few visitors, and the afternoon light was warm and yellow on the stone. Taizong was buried here in 1644 and his empress four years later.
Nurhaci’s tomb was 10km out of town and I abandoned any plan to visit that. The essential quality of a holiday is that how you spend your time is entirely up to you, and it follows that there is no such thing as a ‘must see’. I’m clearly not that much of a completist after all. I instead returned to the centre to visit Shenyang’s very own Gu Gong (Former Palace—the Chinese name for the Forbidden City), only to find it was closed for the day.
So I extended my stay at the Crystal Orange, changed my rail ticket to Changchun to two days later, and bought an extra ticket that would take me from Changchun to Dalian later the same day, as there was only one sight I wanted to see there.
The Gu Gong, from which the Qing ruled before their China takeover, turned out indeed to be the Forbidden City in miniature, with series of courtyards on several axes, some containing modest historical exhibitions. It was a weekend, and this was rather busier.
I’d noticed at the Forbidden City in Beijing large numbers of young women performing concubine cosplay, all dressed up as Manchu women with complicated clip-on hairpieces, either having their friends photograph them or being trailed by a professional photographer who directed their poses. And this was repeated here with several costume rental shops near the palace entrance.
The most striking building, quite different from anything seen in Beijing, was the Pavilion of Ten Kings, an octagonal hall with ten surrounding smaller buildings supposedly representing the banners (divisions) of the Manchu army. It was here that the regent Dorgon, younger brother of Taizong, planned the invasion of China and took it while the Shunzhi emperor, Taizong’s ninth son, was still only six years old. Dorgon ruled until the end of 1650.
I walked over to the Zhang Residence, a straightforward if rather large traditional courtyard house in front of a rather more interesting European-ish mansion, built in 1922, with the usual distortions and disproportions of that era’s Western imitations, which a sign labelled Chinese baroque. It still had furnishings from the period, and it was here that Zhang Zuolin supposedly died of his injuries the day he was blown up, and from here that Zhang Xueliang subsequently ran a shrinking portion of the Northeast.
Shenyang is in general a city of broad streets with a great deal of shopping, and looks prosperous, with various signs that it sees a lot of Russian visitors, although I only glimpsed one, who himself looked surprised to see me. There was a shop with all Russian snacks, however, imaginatively named ‘Russia’, and all the usual Western fast food outlets, Nike and Adidas shops, etc.
I ate steamed shaomai dumplings at a famousrestaurant, the Ma Family Shaomaiguan, that supposedly began life as a street stall in 1796, although now in an unappealing location tucked away up a flight of stairs in a modern building. They didn’t seem particularly fresh.
I was by now starting to wonder that no one had called ‘Halloooo’, or ‘Lao wai!’ or pointed me out to their friends, whispering behind their hands. This has been the norm in China for as long as I can remember. Was it because I was in the Northeast, where Chinese tradition says that people are more considerate? Was this stereotype based on truth? Or was it because of my increasingly grey hair, and a residual respect for age? Or had there been some sort of surprisingly effective education campaign? Perhaps in the warmer months there are Russians in large numbers, and familiarity has bred indifference.
But on to Dalian via Changchun next.
More rambling of no particular significance. I didn't take notes.
I had no particular expectations of this city, the capital of Liaoning Province, but the northeast was the only area of China of which I had no experience. And, in a completist frame of mind, I wanted to see the tombs of the two Qing emperors who ruled the Qing empire before they incorporated China and began to rule from Beijing, having seen all the rest either at the Western or Eastern Qing tombs—both very worthwhile day trips from Beijing and both sites far superior to the Ming Tombs to which tour groups are bussed.
In passing here’s who they are and where they are (and reign dates):
Shùnzhì 顺治 1644–61 Eastern (first to reign from Beijing)
Kāngxī 康熙 1662–1722 Eastern
Yōngzhèng 雍正 1723–35 Western
Qiánlóng 乾隆1736–95 Eastern
Jiāqìng 嘉庆 1796–1820 Western
Dàoguāng 道光 1821–50 Western
Xiánfēng 咸丰 1851–61 Eastern
Tóngzhì 同治 1862–74 Eastern
Guāngxù 光绪 1874–1908 Western
Xuāntǒng 宣统 1909–12 Western
But Shenyang has:
Nurhaci 努爾哈赤 1616–26 (unifier of those clans labelled the Qing from 1636)
and
Tàizōng 太宗 (temple name), Huáng Tàijí 皇太極 or Abahai, 1626–43 (the first Qing emperor)
I also wanted to see the mansion from which warlord Zhang Zuolin ruled the Northeast from 1913 until his private train was blown up by the Japanese in 1928. His son Zhang Xueliang took over until the Xi’an incident of 1936 in which he participated in the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), forcing the Nationalist leader to have a meeting with Zhou Enlai to negotiate an alliance of the Nationalists and the Communists against the Japanese. These were key moments in post-Imperial Chinese history.
The point is the fairly obvious one that if you can do some reading before you visit, your experience of China will be all the richer. There is no reliable information to be had within the country itself.
As you approach any city on the new high-speed lines, you first encounter long rows of plain and monolithic towers of 30 or 40 storeys like the tombstones in a cemetery for giants. You'll also see towers halted mid-construction, just shells with no work going on at all, evidence of the precarious state of China's construction industry and that vast numbers of ordinary people have lost money.
The new Shenyang Bei station wasn’t too far out, and had already been surrounded with new construction.
Note that if the name of a station ends in a point of the compass
Dong east
Nan south
Xi west
Bei north
to take them in the traditional Chinese order, the chances are very high you’re going to a station that's brand new and peripheral.
Across the square outside the Shenyang Bei at least ten hotels were clearly visible, so I just made my way to one named Crystal Orange that seemed new enough, was impressed by the smartness of its lobby and the attentiveness of the reception staff, who made no fuss at all. I bargained about ¥100 off the price, was taken to the 19th (top) floor to see a room that turned out to be very solid and well equipped, and on being told that that was the room I’d be given, dropped my smaller bag and returned to the lobby to pay. A full breakfast was included, and that turned out be quite edible, but there were no other meal services.
I neglected to say earlier, I think, that the business of paying a deposit has now almost vanished, and I only had to do it twice. But having stated a number of days you intend to stay you pay the full cost in advance, and that’s that. Should you check out a day earlier, you ask for a refund, but in general it’s best to pay just for one night and see how it goes.
I was surprised on my way back up to note that someone had called the lift on the 15th floor to go up. There’s an infuriating habit in China of pressing both the up and the down buttons, so I thought that there would likely be no one there. But a metre-high white object with a screen on top and a few flashing lights trundled into the lift, asking me to give it space, and then rode up with me.
Every hotel I stayed in from then on had these machines, although it wasn’t until much later I saw exactly how they work. Widely introduced in the wake of Covid, they sit on charging stations in hotel lobbies. Food delivery drivers appear, enter a room number on a keypad on the top, open a door in the front to deposit the food, then alert reception. The robots are capable of calling the lift and choosing a floor, presumably by Bluetooth, and indeed you can see the screen on top counting the floors as it rides up. Whether they are also capable of ringing the doorbell at the room I don’t know. Perhaps in some cases. But otherwise reception calls up to alert guests that food is on the way.
I caught the metro out to a suburb where it was a long walk from the entrance of the Bei Ling (north tomb, more correctly the Zhao Ling) up to the tomb mound of Taizong, past a modern statue of the man; past rows of guardian animal statues seated and standing, taking turns to keep watch; past huábiǎo ornamental carved stone pillars originally deriving from boards on which people might leave messages to the emperors; through an ornate stone memorial gate called a páilou; and through courtyards and a soul tower, to the circular battlement around the mound. This was all entirely reminiscent of the Qing tombs outside Beijing, except that there was open-air karaoke on the way up, and a live band on the way back, as well as a café serving hot drinks that were very welcome against the chill. And there was the option to ride electric vehicles up the main axis rather than walk, and alternative entertainment in the form of pedalos on a lake.
Nevertheless it was all quite atmospheric, with few visitors, and the afternoon light was warm and yellow on the stone. Taizong was buried here in 1644 and his empress four years later.
Nurhaci’s tomb was 10km out of town and I abandoned any plan to visit that. The essential quality of a holiday is that how you spend your time is entirely up to you, and it follows that there is no such thing as a ‘must see’. I’m clearly not that much of a completist after all. I instead returned to the centre to visit Shenyang’s very own Gu Gong (Former Palace—the Chinese name for the Forbidden City), only to find it was closed for the day.
So I extended my stay at the Crystal Orange, changed my rail ticket to Changchun to two days later, and bought an extra ticket that would take me from Changchun to Dalian later the same day, as there was only one sight I wanted to see there.
The Gu Gong, from which the Qing ruled before their China takeover, turned out indeed to be the Forbidden City in miniature, with series of courtyards on several axes, some containing modest historical exhibitions. It was a weekend, and this was rather busier.
I’d noticed at the Forbidden City in Beijing large numbers of young women performing concubine cosplay, all dressed up as Manchu women with complicated clip-on hairpieces, either having their friends photograph them or being trailed by a professional photographer who directed their poses. And this was repeated here with several costume rental shops near the palace entrance.
The most striking building, quite different from anything seen in Beijing, was the Pavilion of Ten Kings, an octagonal hall with ten surrounding smaller buildings supposedly representing the banners (divisions) of the Manchu army. It was here that the regent Dorgon, younger brother of Taizong, planned the invasion of China and took it while the Shunzhi emperor, Taizong’s ninth son, was still only six years old. Dorgon ruled until the end of 1650.
I walked over to the Zhang Residence, a straightforward if rather large traditional courtyard house in front of a rather more interesting European-ish mansion, built in 1922, with the usual distortions and disproportions of that era’s Western imitations, which a sign labelled Chinese baroque. It still had furnishings from the period, and it was here that Zhang Zuolin supposedly died of his injuries the day he was blown up, and from here that Zhang Xueliang subsequently ran a shrinking portion of the Northeast.
Shenyang is in general a city of broad streets with a great deal of shopping, and looks prosperous, with various signs that it sees a lot of Russian visitors, although I only glimpsed one, who himself looked surprised to see me. There was a shop with all Russian snacks, however, imaginatively named ‘Russia’, and all the usual Western fast food outlets, Nike and Adidas shops, etc.
I ate steamed shaomai dumplings at a famousrestaurant, the Ma Family Shaomaiguan, that supposedly began life as a street stall in 1796, although now in an unappealing location tucked away up a flight of stairs in a modern building. They didn’t seem particularly fresh.
I was by now starting to wonder that no one had called ‘Halloooo’, or ‘Lao wai!’ or pointed me out to their friends, whispering behind their hands. This has been the norm in China for as long as I can remember. Was it because I was in the Northeast, where Chinese tradition says that people are more considerate? Was this stereotype based on truth? Or was it because of my increasingly grey hair, and a residual respect for age? Or had there been some sort of surprisingly effective education campaign? Perhaps in the warmer months there are Russians in large numbers, and familiarity has bred indifference.
But on to Dalian via Changchun next.
Changchun
Changchun, capital of Jilin Province, is only about three hours northwest of Shenyang by gaotie, if I remember correctly (again: not working, not taking detailed notes), and a morning train dropped me there with plenty of time to view the Puppet Emperor’s Palace, and catch an afternoon train back through Changchun and on southwest to the Dalian on the tip of a peninsula projecting into the Yellow Sea.
The new Changchun Xi (West) was another vast palace of a station, largely empty. I found signs for left luggage only to discover that these were lockers requiring Weixin to operate, with no human behind a counter. It was a long walk down the main concourse to find a policeman on a podium (there are always plenty of police at stations), and he directed me yet further on to somewhere ‘behind the market’. I reached another policeman without spotting the place but he walked me to the right point.
I don’t have Weixin, I told him. This has become one of the most useful phrases of Mandarin you can learn. Wǒ méi yǒu Wēixìn. 我没有微信.
No problem, because the woman manning the small vegetable and fruit market in front of this set of lockers used her own phone to open a locker, asked me what time I planned to return, then hand-wrote a receipt for the right amount paid in cash. (And yes, with common sense and mime, let alone with a translation app, you can do all this yourself.)
Very solicitous, she insisted I store the receipt carefully, photograph the locker, and photograph the location of her shop to make sure I could find it again. The station was indeed truly cavernous, but I’ve been in travel journalism for several decades, I thought I could manage simple navigation. Nevertheless, I took a photo to make her happy. She also pointed me in the right direction to get a metro to the Palace.
To be clear: at every single railway station, bus station, and airport, there are always places to leave luggage, but they are increasingly automated. Nevertheless, there will always be a way to pay cash if you need to.
The Puppet Emperor’s Palace or Wěi Huáng Gōng 伪皇宫 turned out to be in a very bleak, dry corner of the city, and now to be overlooked on all sides by new towers. It was a long walk from the station around the perimeter to find the entrance to the very large compound.
The Puppet Emperor was, of course, Henry Aisin Gioro Puyi, the last Emperor of China, restored to an imitation of power in his ancestral homeland of Manchuria by the Japanese, who required a fig-leaf to cover their naked annexation of the territory. Those who’ve seen Bertolucci’s (slightly censored) The Last Emperor, partly shot there, will have seen some of its interiors. Information at the site insists the buildings are European with Chinese characteristics, whereas anyone who knows Japan will recognise the style and solidity of buildings from the period of Japan’s love affair with everything European. They are rather fine, and with a slightly Art Deco look.
Puyi (the Xuantong emperor) had ascended the throne in 1908 at the age of three, abdicated (an action taken by his two regents) in 1912, was restored to the throne by a warlord in 1917 for just 12 days, was expelled from the Forbidden City by another in 1924, and ended up, thanks to his English tutor, in the Japanese embassy in Beijing’s Legation Quarter, then in Tianjin.
The Japanese made him President of the newly-minted Manchukou (Manchuria) in 1932, and then emperor, until he was captured by Soviet forces in 1945.
The main building here was originally the Salt Gabelle (salt tax) Office, but finely furnished (although what you see now are replicas) and solidly panelled, with decorated ceilings and impressive chandeliers. It takes quite some time to visit audience chamber, bedrooms, living quarters for the emperor, empress, and concubines, offices, etc. in what is quite a labyrinthine site. As might be expected there are also exhibitions on the brutality of the Japanese occupation, but the atmosphere of Puyi’s time there is still palpable. I thought it well worth the visit, and a completion, for me, of the Puyi story.
I tried, as I did at other museums on this trip, to find a catalogue or souvenir brochure. But China is now sufficiently digitised to have largely given up on these, and enquiries at bookshops only lead to suggestions you scan a QR code or otherwise look on-line. The official site is:
https://www.wmhg.com.cn
but it doesn't load for me.
Changchun has other attractions, including other buildings from the period of Japanese occupation, but I didn’t investigate.
I arrived back at the station with about 90 minutes to spare. All stations unless very far out indeed have a choice of low-budget restaurants of the kind serving one-dish meals, and often with a KFC or McDonald’s to boot, for those who have no taste buds, imagination, or regard for their health.
I was strolling about considering the Chinese options when the market lady came running up, concerned that I was indeed lost and hadn’t found her shop again. I reassured her, went away to eat a cheap, hot bowl of noodles, retrieved my bags and caught my train.
Changchun, capital of Jilin Province, is only about three hours northwest of Shenyang by gaotie, if I remember correctly (again: not working, not taking detailed notes), and a morning train dropped me there with plenty of time to view the Puppet Emperor’s Palace, and catch an afternoon train back through Changchun and on southwest to the Dalian on the tip of a peninsula projecting into the Yellow Sea.
The new Changchun Xi (West) was another vast palace of a station, largely empty. I found signs for left luggage only to discover that these were lockers requiring Weixin to operate, with no human behind a counter. It was a long walk down the main concourse to find a policeman on a podium (there are always plenty of police at stations), and he directed me yet further on to somewhere ‘behind the market’. I reached another policeman without spotting the place but he walked me to the right point.
I don’t have Weixin, I told him. This has become one of the most useful phrases of Mandarin you can learn. Wǒ méi yǒu Wēixìn. 我没有微信.
No problem, because the woman manning the small vegetable and fruit market in front of this set of lockers used her own phone to open a locker, asked me what time I planned to return, then hand-wrote a receipt for the right amount paid in cash. (And yes, with common sense and mime, let alone with a translation app, you can do all this yourself.)
Very solicitous, she insisted I store the receipt carefully, photograph the locker, and photograph the location of her shop to make sure I could find it again. The station was indeed truly cavernous, but I’ve been in travel journalism for several decades, I thought I could manage simple navigation. Nevertheless, I took a photo to make her happy. She also pointed me in the right direction to get a metro to the Palace.
To be clear: at every single railway station, bus station, and airport, there are always places to leave luggage, but they are increasingly automated. Nevertheless, there will always be a way to pay cash if you need to.
The Puppet Emperor’s Palace or Wěi Huáng Gōng 伪皇宫 turned out to be in a very bleak, dry corner of the city, and now to be overlooked on all sides by new towers. It was a long walk from the station around the perimeter to find the entrance to the very large compound.
The Puppet Emperor was, of course, Henry Aisin Gioro Puyi, the last Emperor of China, restored to an imitation of power in his ancestral homeland of Manchuria by the Japanese, who required a fig-leaf to cover their naked annexation of the territory. Those who’ve seen Bertolucci’s (slightly censored) The Last Emperor, partly shot there, will have seen some of its interiors. Information at the site insists the buildings are European with Chinese characteristics, whereas anyone who knows Japan will recognise the style and solidity of buildings from the period of Japan’s love affair with everything European. They are rather fine, and with a slightly Art Deco look.
Puyi (the Xuantong emperor) had ascended the throne in 1908 at the age of three, abdicated (an action taken by his two regents) in 1912, was restored to the throne by a warlord in 1917 for just 12 days, was expelled from the Forbidden City by another in 1924, and ended up, thanks to his English tutor, in the Japanese embassy in Beijing’s Legation Quarter, then in Tianjin.
The Japanese made him President of the newly-minted Manchukou (Manchuria) in 1932, and then emperor, until he was captured by Soviet forces in 1945.
The main building here was originally the Salt Gabelle (salt tax) Office, but finely furnished (although what you see now are replicas) and solidly panelled, with decorated ceilings and impressive chandeliers. It takes quite some time to visit audience chamber, bedrooms, living quarters for the emperor, empress, and concubines, offices, etc. in what is quite a labyrinthine site. As might be expected there are also exhibitions on the brutality of the Japanese occupation, but the atmosphere of Puyi’s time there is still palpable. I thought it well worth the visit, and a completion, for me, of the Puyi story.
I tried, as I did at other museums on this trip, to find a catalogue or souvenir brochure. But China is now sufficiently digitised to have largely given up on these, and enquiries at bookshops only lead to suggestions you scan a QR code or otherwise look on-line. The official site is:
https://www.wmhg.com.cn
but it doesn't load for me.
Changchun has other attractions, including other buildings from the period of Japanese occupation, but I didn’t investigate.
I arrived back at the station with about 90 minutes to spare. All stations unless very far out indeed have a choice of low-budget restaurants of the kind serving one-dish meals, and often with a KFC or McDonald’s to boot, for those who have no taste buds, imagination, or regard for their health.
I was strolling about considering the Chinese options when the market lady came running up, concerned that I was indeed lost and hadn’t found her shop again. I reassured her, went away to eat a cheap, hot bowl of noodles, retrieved my bags and caught my train.
Dalian and Yantai
More rambling. Do not hope for useful detailed information.
It's probably apparent by now that while there are specific sights that interest me, I'm not interested at all in touring official notable locations, and gain as much pleasure from wandering the streets, stumbling across curiosities, and having simple interactions such as entering a post office and buying stamps.
I had thought to continue northeast to Harbin (Ha’erbin), the capital of Heilongjiang Province and the only remaining Chinese provincial capital I hadn’t visited, but the weather was already biting in Changchun, and I’d realised that I could catch a ferry south from Dalian to Shandong Province, cutting out a long loop of rail and a change of trains (and railway stations) in Beijing. So I doubled back on myself instead.
I’ve long had an interest in former treaty ports—those where the Qing were compelled to allow foreigners to reside and trade—and foreign enclaves more generally, having visited many of the dozens of them, most now long-forgotten. I was particularly pleased 25 years ago to track down the former British consulate in Tengchong, by the Myanmar border, a British cottage then hidden beneath a Chinese roof, and serving as a grain store in the middle of a marketplace.
Dalian, or Dairen, or Dalny, under successive Russian and Japanese control for use of the port at neighbouring Lüshun (Port Arthur), which was occupied by the Japanese, leased by them, returned to China, leased by the Russians who built a major warm water port and based a fleet there, occupied by the Japanese and transferred to them again, supposedly under the joint control of the Soviet Union and Japan from 1945, but back entirely under Chinese control from 1955.
But my interest this time lay not in the treaty port history, but in the Lüshun Museum, because it holds manuscripts from the Mogao cave-temple complex outside Dunhuang, 3000 kilometres away, acquired by Japanese archaeological expeditions in the early 20th century sponsored by one Otani Kazui, who had married into the Japanese imperial house. His collection ended up in Dalian and eventually back in Chinese hands after the Japanese surrender. The Chinese-language manuscripts are now in Beijing, but the ones in other languages and scripts, which, of course, remind everyone that the area was not, for most of history, Chinese territory, have remained tucked away. I spent a great deal of time travelling up and down the Gansu corridor and around Xinjiang for a book in the 1990s, and I've interviewed curators of museums in Paris and London specialising in documents and art from the area. This was an interesting loose end, not that I really expected this remote museum to be open or what I wanted to see on display.
I alighted at Dalian Bei (North) in the early evening, and again could see several hotels, one close on the left a four-star of decaying grandeur that had been open for many years. So I headed for a newer looking tower a little further away to the right, which appeared less new the closer I got, and the lobby and reception area turned out to be full of domestic clutter reminiscent of budget travel to Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, forty years ago.
Nevertheless, the room rate was so low it was hardly worth bargaining. But the lift was discouraging. There was only one, and the hotel, if that was the right word, was on three non-adjacent floors in what was otherwise a residential building (the residential floors reached by other lifts), which explained the odd arrangement of the lobby. So viewing a room took a while, but it turned out to be modern and smart, if small, with gloomy views down across the city and down to decaying buildings around, their roofs often only waterproof due to tarpaulins held down by bricks and other detritus. Despite all the new construction, a great deal of China remains like this.
There was again a voice-activated assistant, well-appointed bathroom (if, again, small), and electronic everything, despite this really being perhaps two-star accommodation. The ill-chosen pale carpets in the corridors were grey up the middle from the passage of many feet.
I returned to reception and checked in, then walked around to find dinner. But after that, finding myself near the four-star, I wandered in to find a gleaming but deserted lobby, with all outlets facing into it dark and shut, and a single gloomy fuwuyuan at reception. To my surprise a price only slightly higher than I was paying at the two-star was quickly negotiated, and the room turned out to be a great deal bigger, and surprisingly solid and modern.
I also found the deadness appealing. Really, the off-season Overlook Hotel had more life to it. So while I dislike changing hotels any more often than I have to, I thought I’d move the next day.
Also I'd read there was a top floor revolving restaurant.
Closed, was the reply. Only breakfast. But it doesn’t revolve then.
This seemed to add to the general gloom.
When I did arrive the next morning I was disappointed to find that the atmosphere of doom had disappeared. There were now five people behind the reception desk and the lobby was filled with middle-aged Russian women, who looked like they were in town to trade. Dalian is a centre for fabrics and fashions, and they were probably buying in bulk for resale across the border. But if these canny businesswomen thought the price was right, I was probably doing well.
I began a long metro ride down to Lüshun, although much of it was above ground through green hills and with occasional views of the sea. The station there turned out to have a gaotie problem—it was way outside the centre, but with its own metro link to take you downtown. And that there would be problems was immediately apparent from taxi drivers approaching (‘Hello! Taxi?’) even before I exited.
Once again, you must never go with these people.
It turned out, of course, that there were buses towards the museum, and several helpful people pointed me to the right stop, but others waiting there grumbled that there was only one service an hour. I had the time, and was happy to chat, but when a taxi driver came up canvassing for rides down town, door to door, for ¥20, and I saw one other passenger go for that price, I succumbed, too, and was dropped at the museum’s door.
This turned out to be a pair of Japanese-built neo-classical administrative buildings, one containing local history in the usual manner, beginning with bad dioramas of ape-men, to propaganda accounts of modern history. Outside was a giant monument to Soviet–Chinese Friendship, pointedly placed, celebrating the defeat of the Japanese, which dwarfed the older buildings.
The second building, featuring marvellous dark wood carpentry in beams and ceilings, contained some significant art. But, needless to say, the manuscripts I hoped to see were not on display, although someone at an information desk did admit the museum held them. Nevertheless, the Chinese bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, etc. were of high quality, and in beautifully engineered display cases that matched the building as a whole in style. Well worth the trip.
I contemplated pagodas and a few other sights the taxi driver had been pressing on me on the way in, but decided instead to return to Dalian proper. I walked out to the main road, and stood some time without attracting the attention of a taxi to return to the station. So I returned to the museum gate, and after a few minutes picked up one there.
How much to the metro station?
The driver looked at me, surprised.
We use the meter, he said, with an unvoiced duh!
I’d asked the driver on the way out about the likely return cost, in which he had no financial interest, and so might give me an honest answer. About ¥15 or ¥16 he said. And that was on the meter when we arrived back at the metro station, having chatted about the state of the economy and other matters on the way.
Back at the hotel I obtained directions to buy ferry tickets, which turned out to be available from offices just to the right of the station. There were several sailings a day, and a variety of seating options for the seven-hour trip south to Yantai in Shandong Province, but the thought of being trapped in an open area with smokers did not appeal, so I paid for a two-person cabin. I was told to report by 8:30am the next day for a courtesy bus down to the ferry port.
I spent the rest of the day simply enjoying early-20th-century Western-ish architecture, especially around Zhongshan Guangchang, including a very substantial main post office, that like main post offices everywhere now, as I've seen only this year from Macau to Baghdad, are eerily empty. But I bought a stamp to send a card bought in Beijing for older friends who do not willingly engage with email. I also discovered a small brick church that had been converted to a KFC. The staff were quite proud of its historic nature, without really knowing anything about it, and there were no signs. A floor had been inserted down the nave to create two storeys, but the upstairs was currently closed, which was a shame because the roof looked to be the original, and it would have been interesting to see the beams.
There was no foundation stone or corner stone to be seen. An on-line source of unknown credibility calls it the Dalian Xitong Japanese Christian Church and dates it at 1907. But the site offers not only photographs of its present state, but early black-and-whites from the time of its construction, together with a detailed and apolitical account of its various uses since 1949. Quite possibly accurate.
https://inf.news/en/history/93aa61293808cbc708e47284469ea39f.html#google_vigne tte
In the evening I asked for directions to the nearest shopping mall with food, and was directed to a tower about ten minutes’ walk away, where I duly found a floor of comfortable restaurants. I have no memory of what I ate, although I did have a chat with someone at the BYD showroom on the ground floor about electric car ownership in China, battery life, and cost comparisons between the local product and Teslas, including those made in China. The BYD cars are still cheaper. I've seen them (比亚迪汽车, Bi Ya Di Qi Che, in Chinese) and other Chinese electric vehicles in Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Arab world, and even Bhutan in the last couple of years. Drivers insisted the quality was high, the price lower, and that even then the vehicles came with all sorts of features that were extra on European models. The Chinese appear to be leaving the Europeans in the dust on EVs, and the Americans in the Europeans' dust.
The salesman seemed to think that he was on to a good thing. Although that's part of his job, of course.
I had a gloomy breakfast among Russian matrons in the non-revolving revolving restaurant, and where the chef refused to understand my Mandarin because it was coming from a non-Chinese face, in the classic way, a problem that I’d been experiencing quite infrequently on the trip so far.
Eventually light dawned. Oh! You can speak our national language.
Yes. Now may have two scrambled eggs, please.
The ferry, a ro-ro being loaded with large lorries as the bus arrived at the terminal, turned out to be fairly smart and modern with facilities of all sorts for children, and a free-to-enter model-making competition on its reception deck.
Dalian had already been a lot warmer and brighter than Shenyang and Changchun, and it was pleasant to be out on deck as the vessel nosed its way out of the port. The smokers seemed to be well under control (again, a novelty in China) with them all outdoors but easily avoidable in the ample space. It was noticeable, however, that despite a small forest of cranes for loading an unloading there were few other vessels to be seen and absolutely nothing seemed to be happening.
Some people attracted a crowd of gulls for what was a performance clearly well-known to all parties, with the birds hovering in an almost stationary flock, then wheeling frantically for tossed bread while participants took selfies for Xiaohongshu (a sort of Instagram with a strong travel element, packed with Chinese influencers and wannabes).
With the smokers under control I needn’t have made the investment in the cabin, and I’d been alarmed, when I checked in, to see a large television in the room, which any travelling companion would be bound to turn on, loudly, for the whole voyage. But the entire deck seemed largely deserted, and I had the cabin to myself, which had a chair and a table at a sort of oriel window. I was able to nap my way to Yantai, and I could also have had a shower in my private bathroom, had the mood taken me. This was a big improvement on rather sleazy ferries I'd take up the Yangzi, around the coast from Xiamen to Hong Kong, or, worst of all, from Beihai to Haikou, in the past.
At Yantai it was a fair walk from the dock to the city, but the typically vast station (here a huge arch over a central public space) was not far, and I secured a ticket for the next day. Yantai to Qingdao is an odd route which involves going inland then turning back to the coast again, and there's only one train a day. I walked a little further towards the centre and found a small jingji (economy) hotel apparently from a local chain. The manager was delighted to find, at 5pm, that he was going to get some extra income, discounted the already low price and gave me an upgrade straight away. The room was much like the others. I could optionally add breakfast in the morning for a cheap price, but when visiting a quite glamorous shopping mall across the road for dinner, I discovered a Tim Horton's, and decided to amuse Canadian friends by breakfasting there. The staff wore check shirts, but the café was empty. They were busy filling Meituan orders and there was a constant stream of drivers arriving, scanning QR codes, and departing.
I strolled over to the Yantai Museum, looking to find out more about Yantai’s treaty port history, and particularly how the Chefoo (now Yantai) Convention would be presented, an agreement struck in the wake of the Margary affair (too long to explain, involving the murder of an intrepid British consular interpreter who crossed China from Shanghai, although you could look here), which opened up various new treaty ports, confirmed the abolition of taxes on foreign imports, and dealt with extraterritorial privileges.
But, of course, the museum was closed for renovation. And when I asked for directions to any area of old European buildings I was directed instead to a warren of traditional housing with narrow passages between them, some houses apparently still in use, but others converted into trendy cafés with coffee at stratospheric prices, bookshops, souvenir shops, etc. But something of the original atmosphere was discoverable, and it was a pleasure to walk around.
I walked over the the shore again, as that was the place most likely to house buildings from the era of European occupation, and found some replicas of the common style of British colonial administrative buildings now operating as live music venues. I didn't feel I particularly wanted to put much effort into finding anything else. I returned to the hotel, collected my case, and caught the afternoon train.
More rambling. Do not hope for useful detailed information.
It's probably apparent by now that while there are specific sights that interest me, I'm not interested at all in touring official notable locations, and gain as much pleasure from wandering the streets, stumbling across curiosities, and having simple interactions such as entering a post office and buying stamps.
I had thought to continue northeast to Harbin (Ha’erbin), the capital of Heilongjiang Province and the only remaining Chinese provincial capital I hadn’t visited, but the weather was already biting in Changchun, and I’d realised that I could catch a ferry south from Dalian to Shandong Province, cutting out a long loop of rail and a change of trains (and railway stations) in Beijing. So I doubled back on myself instead.
I’ve long had an interest in former treaty ports—those where the Qing were compelled to allow foreigners to reside and trade—and foreign enclaves more generally, having visited many of the dozens of them, most now long-forgotten. I was particularly pleased 25 years ago to track down the former British consulate in Tengchong, by the Myanmar border, a British cottage then hidden beneath a Chinese roof, and serving as a grain store in the middle of a marketplace.
Dalian, or Dairen, or Dalny, under successive Russian and Japanese control for use of the port at neighbouring Lüshun (Port Arthur), which was occupied by the Japanese, leased by them, returned to China, leased by the Russians who built a major warm water port and based a fleet there, occupied by the Japanese and transferred to them again, supposedly under the joint control of the Soviet Union and Japan from 1945, but back entirely under Chinese control from 1955.
But my interest this time lay not in the treaty port history, but in the Lüshun Museum, because it holds manuscripts from the Mogao cave-temple complex outside Dunhuang, 3000 kilometres away, acquired by Japanese archaeological expeditions in the early 20th century sponsored by one Otani Kazui, who had married into the Japanese imperial house. His collection ended up in Dalian and eventually back in Chinese hands after the Japanese surrender. The Chinese-language manuscripts are now in Beijing, but the ones in other languages and scripts, which, of course, remind everyone that the area was not, for most of history, Chinese territory, have remained tucked away. I spent a great deal of time travelling up and down the Gansu corridor and around Xinjiang for a book in the 1990s, and I've interviewed curators of museums in Paris and London specialising in documents and art from the area. This was an interesting loose end, not that I really expected this remote museum to be open or what I wanted to see on display.
I alighted at Dalian Bei (North) in the early evening, and again could see several hotels, one close on the left a four-star of decaying grandeur that had been open for many years. So I headed for a newer looking tower a little further away to the right, which appeared less new the closer I got, and the lobby and reception area turned out to be full of domestic clutter reminiscent of budget travel to Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, forty years ago.
Nevertheless, the room rate was so low it was hardly worth bargaining. But the lift was discouraging. There was only one, and the hotel, if that was the right word, was on three non-adjacent floors in what was otherwise a residential building (the residential floors reached by other lifts), which explained the odd arrangement of the lobby. So viewing a room took a while, but it turned out to be modern and smart, if small, with gloomy views down across the city and down to decaying buildings around, their roofs often only waterproof due to tarpaulins held down by bricks and other detritus. Despite all the new construction, a great deal of China remains like this.
There was again a voice-activated assistant, well-appointed bathroom (if, again, small), and electronic everything, despite this really being perhaps two-star accommodation. The ill-chosen pale carpets in the corridors were grey up the middle from the passage of many feet.
I returned to reception and checked in, then walked around to find dinner. But after that, finding myself near the four-star, I wandered in to find a gleaming but deserted lobby, with all outlets facing into it dark and shut, and a single gloomy fuwuyuan at reception. To my surprise a price only slightly higher than I was paying at the two-star was quickly negotiated, and the room turned out to be a great deal bigger, and surprisingly solid and modern.
I also found the deadness appealing. Really, the off-season Overlook Hotel had more life to it. So while I dislike changing hotels any more often than I have to, I thought I’d move the next day.
Also I'd read there was a top floor revolving restaurant.
Closed, was the reply. Only breakfast. But it doesn’t revolve then.
This seemed to add to the general gloom.
When I did arrive the next morning I was disappointed to find that the atmosphere of doom had disappeared. There were now five people behind the reception desk and the lobby was filled with middle-aged Russian women, who looked like they were in town to trade. Dalian is a centre for fabrics and fashions, and they were probably buying in bulk for resale across the border. But if these canny businesswomen thought the price was right, I was probably doing well.
I began a long metro ride down to Lüshun, although much of it was above ground through green hills and with occasional views of the sea. The station there turned out to have a gaotie problem—it was way outside the centre, but with its own metro link to take you downtown. And that there would be problems was immediately apparent from taxi drivers approaching (‘Hello! Taxi?’) even before I exited.
Once again, you must never go with these people.
It turned out, of course, that there were buses towards the museum, and several helpful people pointed me to the right stop, but others waiting there grumbled that there was only one service an hour. I had the time, and was happy to chat, but when a taxi driver came up canvassing for rides down town, door to door, for ¥20, and I saw one other passenger go for that price, I succumbed, too, and was dropped at the museum’s door.
This turned out to be a pair of Japanese-built neo-classical administrative buildings, one containing local history in the usual manner, beginning with bad dioramas of ape-men, to propaganda accounts of modern history. Outside was a giant monument to Soviet–Chinese Friendship, pointedly placed, celebrating the defeat of the Japanese, which dwarfed the older buildings.
The second building, featuring marvellous dark wood carpentry in beams and ceilings, contained some significant art. But, needless to say, the manuscripts I hoped to see were not on display, although someone at an information desk did admit the museum held them. Nevertheless, the Chinese bronzes, ceramics, carved jade, etc. were of high quality, and in beautifully engineered display cases that matched the building as a whole in style. Well worth the trip.
I contemplated pagodas and a few other sights the taxi driver had been pressing on me on the way in, but decided instead to return to Dalian proper. I walked out to the main road, and stood some time without attracting the attention of a taxi to return to the station. So I returned to the museum gate, and after a few minutes picked up one there.
How much to the metro station?
The driver looked at me, surprised.
We use the meter, he said, with an unvoiced duh!
I’d asked the driver on the way out about the likely return cost, in which he had no financial interest, and so might give me an honest answer. About ¥15 or ¥16 he said. And that was on the meter when we arrived back at the metro station, having chatted about the state of the economy and other matters on the way.
Back at the hotel I obtained directions to buy ferry tickets, which turned out to be available from offices just to the right of the station. There were several sailings a day, and a variety of seating options for the seven-hour trip south to Yantai in Shandong Province, but the thought of being trapped in an open area with smokers did not appeal, so I paid for a two-person cabin. I was told to report by 8:30am the next day for a courtesy bus down to the ferry port.
I spent the rest of the day simply enjoying early-20th-century Western-ish architecture, especially around Zhongshan Guangchang, including a very substantial main post office, that like main post offices everywhere now, as I've seen only this year from Macau to Baghdad, are eerily empty. But I bought a stamp to send a card bought in Beijing for older friends who do not willingly engage with email. I also discovered a small brick church that had been converted to a KFC. The staff were quite proud of its historic nature, without really knowing anything about it, and there were no signs. A floor had been inserted down the nave to create two storeys, but the upstairs was currently closed, which was a shame because the roof looked to be the original, and it would have been interesting to see the beams.
There was no foundation stone or corner stone to be seen. An on-line source of unknown credibility calls it the Dalian Xitong Japanese Christian Church and dates it at 1907. But the site offers not only photographs of its present state, but early black-and-whites from the time of its construction, together with a detailed and apolitical account of its various uses since 1949. Quite possibly accurate.
https://inf.news/en/history/93aa61293808cbc708e47284469ea39f.html#google_vigne tte
In the evening I asked for directions to the nearest shopping mall with food, and was directed to a tower about ten minutes’ walk away, where I duly found a floor of comfortable restaurants. I have no memory of what I ate, although I did have a chat with someone at the BYD showroom on the ground floor about electric car ownership in China, battery life, and cost comparisons between the local product and Teslas, including those made in China. The BYD cars are still cheaper. I've seen them (比亚迪汽车, Bi Ya Di Qi Che, in Chinese) and other Chinese electric vehicles in Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Arab world, and even Bhutan in the last couple of years. Drivers insisted the quality was high, the price lower, and that even then the vehicles came with all sorts of features that were extra on European models. The Chinese appear to be leaving the Europeans in the dust on EVs, and the Americans in the Europeans' dust.
The salesman seemed to think that he was on to a good thing. Although that's part of his job, of course.
I had a gloomy breakfast among Russian matrons in the non-revolving revolving restaurant, and where the chef refused to understand my Mandarin because it was coming from a non-Chinese face, in the classic way, a problem that I’d been experiencing quite infrequently on the trip so far.
Eventually light dawned. Oh! You can speak our national language.
Yes. Now may have two scrambled eggs, please.
The ferry, a ro-ro being loaded with large lorries as the bus arrived at the terminal, turned out to be fairly smart and modern with facilities of all sorts for children, and a free-to-enter model-making competition on its reception deck.
Dalian had already been a lot warmer and brighter than Shenyang and Changchun, and it was pleasant to be out on deck as the vessel nosed its way out of the port. The smokers seemed to be well under control (again, a novelty in China) with them all outdoors but easily avoidable in the ample space. It was noticeable, however, that despite a small forest of cranes for loading an unloading there were few other vessels to be seen and absolutely nothing seemed to be happening.
Some people attracted a crowd of gulls for what was a performance clearly well-known to all parties, with the birds hovering in an almost stationary flock, then wheeling frantically for tossed bread while participants took selfies for Xiaohongshu (a sort of Instagram with a strong travel element, packed with Chinese influencers and wannabes).
With the smokers under control I needn’t have made the investment in the cabin, and I’d been alarmed, when I checked in, to see a large television in the room, which any travelling companion would be bound to turn on, loudly, for the whole voyage. But the entire deck seemed largely deserted, and I had the cabin to myself, which had a chair and a table at a sort of oriel window. I was able to nap my way to Yantai, and I could also have had a shower in my private bathroom, had the mood taken me. This was a big improvement on rather sleazy ferries I'd take up the Yangzi, around the coast from Xiamen to Hong Kong, or, worst of all, from Beihai to Haikou, in the past.
At Yantai it was a fair walk from the dock to the city, but the typically vast station (here a huge arch over a central public space) was not far, and I secured a ticket for the next day. Yantai to Qingdao is an odd route which involves going inland then turning back to the coast again, and there's only one train a day. I walked a little further towards the centre and found a small jingji (economy) hotel apparently from a local chain. The manager was delighted to find, at 5pm, that he was going to get some extra income, discounted the already low price and gave me an upgrade straight away. The room was much like the others. I could optionally add breakfast in the morning for a cheap price, but when visiting a quite glamorous shopping mall across the road for dinner, I discovered a Tim Horton's, and decided to amuse Canadian friends by breakfasting there. The staff wore check shirts, but the café was empty. They were busy filling Meituan orders and there was a constant stream of drivers arriving, scanning QR codes, and departing.
I strolled over to the Yantai Museum, looking to find out more about Yantai’s treaty port history, and particularly how the Chefoo (now Yantai) Convention would be presented, an agreement struck in the wake of the Margary affair (too long to explain, involving the murder of an intrepid British consular interpreter who crossed China from Shanghai, although you could look here), which opened up various new treaty ports, confirmed the abolition of taxes on foreign imports, and dealt with extraterritorial privileges.
But, of course, the museum was closed for renovation. And when I asked for directions to any area of old European buildings I was directed instead to a warren of traditional housing with narrow passages between them, some houses apparently still in use, but others converted into trendy cafés with coffee at stratospheric prices, bookshops, souvenir shops, etc. But something of the original atmosphere was discoverable, and it was a pleasure to walk around.
I walked over the the shore again, as that was the place most likely to house buildings from the era of European occupation, and found some replicas of the common style of British colonial administrative buildings now operating as live music venues. I didn't feel I particularly wanted to put much effort into finding anything else. I returned to the hotel, collected my case, and caught the afternoon train.
Qingdao
Seaside Qingdao spent time as a German enclave and the starting point for German expansion into Shandong Province, including construction of a railway line that eventually reached the provincial capital of Ji’nan. The Germans, greatly feeling the lack of any overseas empire comparable to that of the British, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, and keen to mark out a sphere of influence in China to match those of the British, French, and Japanese, clearly thought they were there to stay, and did some substantial building.
China’s late involvement in World War One (mainly by sending people to work in the French docks, freeing Frenchmen to fight) was supposed to be rewarded by the return to Chinese control of German-held territory, but was betrayed when the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which dealt with reparations after Germany’s defeat, rewarded Japan’s involvement by transferring it to their control instead. This led to the May Fourth Movement of demonstrations against colonialism and government weakness alike, and to the decision not to sign the treaty, leading eventually to a separate peace agreement in 1921, and the eventual return of to Chinese control in 1922.
Gaotie into Qingdao stop first at the new Qingdao Bei (North), but then slowly lumber along the original German-built line to the original German-built station, although the functional part of the station is now a long mock-European extension to one side, and the original building is a small but interesting railway museum. With its sturdy clock tower and stone arches, this is one of the many lost bits of Bavaria that visitors come to see.
When I went the fuwuyuan were surprised, and I had to insist that no, I wasn’t looking for the ticket office or to board a train, but had come to see the museum’s contents and the building itself. While propaganda eventually had its day, there was a lot of early photography of the construction of the line and of significant German and Chinese officials, and bits and pieces of railway paraphernalia, although no actual trains.
But on arrival in Qingdao, while noting a hotel that looked suitable a short walk to the left, I decided I’d try another Crystal Orange Hotel. I'd passed one in Yantai, wandered in, and been told enthusiastically by the reception staff that they had properties all over China (or perhaps just the east) including a brand new one in Qingdao.
The problem was to identify which would be the nearest metro station. The metro station information/ticketing counter had to phone a friend to ask, but the answer was a station on the same line, which seemed still too far away. But they weren’t in the business of giving information about any other line than their own.
I eventually got there with one change. It turned out that Qingdao was a popular weekend destination, and it was the weekend, so all they had to offer me was a family room with three beds, high up and with windows on two sides, and they were immune to much bargaining.
There were several other hotels nearby, but I stayed with the agreement that I’d be transferred to a standard room the next day. The breakfast wasn’t quite as good, but perhaps that was because the hotel was full, and so the experience was a bit of a bun fight, with push and shove at the buffet and the peace of the previous experience lost to people watching videos without headphones, and that itself almost drowned out by the sound of open-mouthed mastication.
Again there was no other food service, so I asked for information and was directed to a pedestrianised food street, the Taidong Xiaochi Jie, a ten-minute walk away. This was a long, colourful bedlam of a place with counters and small restaurants selling food from all over China: Lanzhou lamian or ‘pulled’ noodles; xiaolongbao soup dumplings from Shanghai; chou doufu stinky doufu from Shaoxing; rojiamou ‘Chinese burgers’ from Xi’an; Xinjiang-style kaorouchuan (kebabs, with lots of cumin), and so on, plus plenty of seafood, much of it still alive until ordered, and the bizarre and avoidable such as steamed starfish.
I ended up going here every night, chatting to vendors, stuffing myself, and buying cheap juzi (satsumas) from a stall on the way back, with the usual conversation:
Are they sweet?
A pointless question since it will always bring strong affirmation that they are.
Do they have seeds?
Some confusion. But we eventually worked out that the word I was using, guāzǐ 瓜子 was specific to edible seeds (pumpkin, watermelon, melon), and what I wanted to say was zhǒngzǐ 重子 for pips. In such small steps does the acquisition of Mandarin progress. Regardless the vendor tore one open so show there were no seeds and gave me a segment to try.
Sweet indeed. I bought a large bag and ended up carrying quite a few with me on to Huang Shan.
But I principally wanted to visit Qingdao order to see a church built by German architect Curt Rothkegel, and that because of his impact on Beijing, although now long-forgotten. The Gate of Martial Valour or Wǔyīng Mén 武英门 in the Forbidden City is linked to the Wǔyīng Diàn 武英殿 and Jìngsī Diàn 敬思殿 by raised walkways constructed by Rothkegel at the time when these halls became one of the earliest public museum exhibition spaces.
More visibly, the outer enceinte of the Zhengyang Men, more commonly known as the Qian Men, was completely torn down by Rothkegel, who also rebuilt the outer arrow tower after it had been burned down by the Boxers in 1900 during the Siege of the Legations. The white eyebrow-like decorative details familiar from many photographs are unique to that tower, and were added by Rothkegel during the rebuild just because he thought they looked nice. This key sight, thought so Chinese, and so essentially of Beijing, is partly a foreigner creation.
But I wanted to see what Rothkegel would do when constructing something of his own. The weather was comfortably warm and bright, and I set out on foot to the Protestant Christ’s Church, pausing to admire other solid Germanic buildings en route, and perhaps unwisely risking a photograph of one German administrative building that had become the local headquarters of the Public Security Bureau.
The Rothkegel Church was completed in 1910, and it is said that its survival into modern times was due to the forces that might have destroyed it not realising that it was a church, and indeed it could reasonably be mistaken for a small station. The style is a sort of Bavarian Arts and Crafts, with just hints of Jungendstil, and that wouldn’t look out of place next to some of Catalan modernist Antonio Gaudí’s earlier work. It was plain and solid inside, stained glass providing the only colour, and it was possible to climb the clock tower and see the original mechanism at work. I was atop the tower, ears covered, at noon when the clock chimed.
I was admiring the exterior a little more before moving on when a Chinese woman came up to me and asked, in decent English, if I were a Christian.
She was a new convert, but looking for further information in the wrong place.
I’m not, I said. I’m just interested in the architecture. And explained why.
She was solo on a weekend break from Shanghai where she was something superior in the local branch of a Swedish company, and fully acclimatised to the ways of Europeans. It was a pleasure to speak English for the first time in weeks, and we switched between that and Mandarin as we toured a list she had of other key German buildings, taken from Xiaohongshu, she admitted.
But she didn’t have the German governor’s mansion on her list, where I was heading next, and which turned out to be the best of all—a warren of reception rooms, offices, guest rooms, staff quarters, rooms for the governor’s family, etc. on four floors including a basement. The exterior was a mixture of stone and half-timbering with yellow-painted plasterwork, steep red-tiled roofs, and looking as if about four different buildings had been fused together. The interior was immensely dignified, with superb carpentry on stairs and balconies, and quirks, such as a little oriel window with stained glass looking down into the main hall, and as if lifted from Topkapi or some other Sultan’s palace.
Between buildings she insisted we ate shuijiao, boiled dumplings, which were filled with fish, which are a local speciality, and physically prevented me from paying. We decided after some debate with the restaurant owner that the fish in question was Spanish mackerel, which she said a friend brought fresh from the dock every day, although it was much lighter in taste than the mackerel from Norwegian waters I get at home. It took a satisfyingly long period of waiting for the dumplings to be hand-made and eventually produced, and they were delicious with a little vinegar.
Our final stop was the Catholic cathedral, perhaps not so interesting, although I found myself explaining to her the stations of the cross, and symbols in portraits that indicated which saint you were looking at—this mostly based on an interest in art history and the remnants of the religious upbringing I left behind with childhood.
Altogether the best day of the trip so far.
The next I also spent touring a garden estate further out with whole streets of solid mansions, but none of the three that could be entered had as much to offer as what had already been seen. The tree-lined suburban streets were full of Chinese photographing, or having themselves photographed in front of, the autumn foliage, and particular the sophoras.
Qingdao is, of course, Tsingtao in an earlier form of transliteration which is still the brand-name of China’s best-known beer, the Germans having built the country’s first brewery here. It can be visited, but I didn’t go.
The next stop would be the Huizhou architecture of Anhui.
Seaside Qingdao spent time as a German enclave and the starting point for German expansion into Shandong Province, including construction of a railway line that eventually reached the provincial capital of Ji’nan. The Germans, greatly feeling the lack of any overseas empire comparable to that of the British, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, and keen to mark out a sphere of influence in China to match those of the British, French, and Japanese, clearly thought they were there to stay, and did some substantial building.
China’s late involvement in World War One (mainly by sending people to work in the French docks, freeing Frenchmen to fight) was supposed to be rewarded by the return to Chinese control of German-held territory, but was betrayed when the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which dealt with reparations after Germany’s defeat, rewarded Japan’s involvement by transferring it to their control instead. This led to the May Fourth Movement of demonstrations against colonialism and government weakness alike, and to the decision not to sign the treaty, leading eventually to a separate peace agreement in 1921, and the eventual return of to Chinese control in 1922.
Gaotie into Qingdao stop first at the new Qingdao Bei (North), but then slowly lumber along the original German-built line to the original German-built station, although the functional part of the station is now a long mock-European extension to one side, and the original building is a small but interesting railway museum. With its sturdy clock tower and stone arches, this is one of the many lost bits of Bavaria that visitors come to see.
When I went the fuwuyuan were surprised, and I had to insist that no, I wasn’t looking for the ticket office or to board a train, but had come to see the museum’s contents and the building itself. While propaganda eventually had its day, there was a lot of early photography of the construction of the line and of significant German and Chinese officials, and bits and pieces of railway paraphernalia, although no actual trains.
But on arrival in Qingdao, while noting a hotel that looked suitable a short walk to the left, I decided I’d try another Crystal Orange Hotel. I'd passed one in Yantai, wandered in, and been told enthusiastically by the reception staff that they had properties all over China (or perhaps just the east) including a brand new one in Qingdao.
The problem was to identify which would be the nearest metro station. The metro station information/ticketing counter had to phone a friend to ask, but the answer was a station on the same line, which seemed still too far away. But they weren’t in the business of giving information about any other line than their own.
I eventually got there with one change. It turned out that Qingdao was a popular weekend destination, and it was the weekend, so all they had to offer me was a family room with three beds, high up and with windows on two sides, and they were immune to much bargaining.
There were several other hotels nearby, but I stayed with the agreement that I’d be transferred to a standard room the next day. The breakfast wasn’t quite as good, but perhaps that was because the hotel was full, and so the experience was a bit of a bun fight, with push and shove at the buffet and the peace of the previous experience lost to people watching videos without headphones, and that itself almost drowned out by the sound of open-mouthed mastication.
Again there was no other food service, so I asked for information and was directed to a pedestrianised food street, the Taidong Xiaochi Jie, a ten-minute walk away. This was a long, colourful bedlam of a place with counters and small restaurants selling food from all over China: Lanzhou lamian or ‘pulled’ noodles; xiaolongbao soup dumplings from Shanghai; chou doufu stinky doufu from Shaoxing; rojiamou ‘Chinese burgers’ from Xi’an; Xinjiang-style kaorouchuan (kebabs, with lots of cumin), and so on, plus plenty of seafood, much of it still alive until ordered, and the bizarre and avoidable such as steamed starfish.
I ended up going here every night, chatting to vendors, stuffing myself, and buying cheap juzi (satsumas) from a stall on the way back, with the usual conversation:
Are they sweet?
A pointless question since it will always bring strong affirmation that they are.
Do they have seeds?
Some confusion. But we eventually worked out that the word I was using, guāzǐ 瓜子 was specific to edible seeds (pumpkin, watermelon, melon), and what I wanted to say was zhǒngzǐ 重子 for pips. In such small steps does the acquisition of Mandarin progress. Regardless the vendor tore one open so show there were no seeds and gave me a segment to try.
Sweet indeed. I bought a large bag and ended up carrying quite a few with me on to Huang Shan.
But I principally wanted to visit Qingdao order to see a church built by German architect Curt Rothkegel, and that because of his impact on Beijing, although now long-forgotten. The Gate of Martial Valour or Wǔyīng Mén 武英门 in the Forbidden City is linked to the Wǔyīng Diàn 武英殿 and Jìngsī Diàn 敬思殿 by raised walkways constructed by Rothkegel at the time when these halls became one of the earliest public museum exhibition spaces.
More visibly, the outer enceinte of the Zhengyang Men, more commonly known as the Qian Men, was completely torn down by Rothkegel, who also rebuilt the outer arrow tower after it had been burned down by the Boxers in 1900 during the Siege of the Legations. The white eyebrow-like decorative details familiar from many photographs are unique to that tower, and were added by Rothkegel during the rebuild just because he thought they looked nice. This key sight, thought so Chinese, and so essentially of Beijing, is partly a foreigner creation.
But I wanted to see what Rothkegel would do when constructing something of his own. The weather was comfortably warm and bright, and I set out on foot to the Protestant Christ’s Church, pausing to admire other solid Germanic buildings en route, and perhaps unwisely risking a photograph of one German administrative building that had become the local headquarters of the Public Security Bureau.
The Rothkegel Church was completed in 1910, and it is said that its survival into modern times was due to the forces that might have destroyed it not realising that it was a church, and indeed it could reasonably be mistaken for a small station. The style is a sort of Bavarian Arts and Crafts, with just hints of Jungendstil, and that wouldn’t look out of place next to some of Catalan modernist Antonio Gaudí’s earlier work. It was plain and solid inside, stained glass providing the only colour, and it was possible to climb the clock tower and see the original mechanism at work. I was atop the tower, ears covered, at noon when the clock chimed.
I was admiring the exterior a little more before moving on when a Chinese woman came up to me and asked, in decent English, if I were a Christian.
She was a new convert, but looking for further information in the wrong place.
I’m not, I said. I’m just interested in the architecture. And explained why.
She was solo on a weekend break from Shanghai where she was something superior in the local branch of a Swedish company, and fully acclimatised to the ways of Europeans. It was a pleasure to speak English for the first time in weeks, and we switched between that and Mandarin as we toured a list she had of other key German buildings, taken from Xiaohongshu, she admitted.
But she didn’t have the German governor’s mansion on her list, where I was heading next, and which turned out to be the best of all—a warren of reception rooms, offices, guest rooms, staff quarters, rooms for the governor’s family, etc. on four floors including a basement. The exterior was a mixture of stone and half-timbering with yellow-painted plasterwork, steep red-tiled roofs, and looking as if about four different buildings had been fused together. The interior was immensely dignified, with superb carpentry on stairs and balconies, and quirks, such as a little oriel window with stained glass looking down into the main hall, and as if lifted from Topkapi or some other Sultan’s palace.
Between buildings she insisted we ate shuijiao, boiled dumplings, which were filled with fish, which are a local speciality, and physically prevented me from paying. We decided after some debate with the restaurant owner that the fish in question was Spanish mackerel, which she said a friend brought fresh from the dock every day, although it was much lighter in taste than the mackerel from Norwegian waters I get at home. It took a satisfyingly long period of waiting for the dumplings to be hand-made and eventually produced, and they were delicious with a little vinegar.
Our final stop was the Catholic cathedral, perhaps not so interesting, although I found myself explaining to her the stations of the cross, and symbols in portraits that indicated which saint you were looking at—this mostly based on an interest in art history and the remnants of the religious upbringing I left behind with childhood.
Altogether the best day of the trip so far.
The next I also spent touring a garden estate further out with whole streets of solid mansions, but none of the three that could be entered had as much to offer as what had already been seen. The tree-lined suburban streets were full of Chinese photographing, or having themselves photographed in front of, the autumn foliage, and particular the sophoras.
Qingdao is, of course, Tsingtao in an earlier form of transliteration which is still the brand-name of China’s best-known beer, the Germans having built the country’s first brewery here. It can be visited, but I didn’t go.
The next stop would be the Huizhou architecture of Anhui.
Xie xie ni. Appreciate understanding a bit more about China from your perspective.
Hongcun, etc.
Huang Shan Bei was again vast, but in the middle of nowhere in particular. Arriving late afternoon, I’d thought to spend one night near the station before tackling a bus out to Hongcun.
There was a tourist information desk on the way to the station exit, so I stopped to ask a few questions as there’s a lot to see in the area, with a cluster of ancient towns known for the well-preserved state of their Huizhou architecture—that style with high white walls with concave darkly tiled tops, that in clusters have a feathery look, visible in everything from Kung-fu Panda to the ridiculous Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but most importantly in Zhang Yimou’s masterpiece, Ju Dou (1990, and although banned in China the first Chinese film to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language film Oscar).
If you haven’t seen it, rent, buy, or stream it now.
I asked, which was the best town to head for?
Hongcun.
Which has the best architecture?
Hongcun. You can get a bus from the bus station in that direction.
But what about the best groups of pailou (memorial gateways)?
I don’t know. But you should go to Hongcun.
Isn’t She Xian supposed to be best for those?
I don’t know. The buses to Hongcun go from over there.
From which was possible to deduce that Hongcun would be a tourism maelstrom. I supposed I’d find out in the morning, but first I needed to check on train times and ticket availability and then cross to the other side of the station where there appeared to be a group of hotels.
I couldn’t find the way, so I wandered about asking directions.
Comically, the answer in one case was the classic, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ And although I chose to ignore that as simply defying sense, after about half an hour of walking back and forth across the immense frontage at two different levels, I had to conclude that this was true, with the only alternative presumably to get a taxi to drive me round there. But, as we’ve discussed, a major railway station well out of town is not the place to be talking to taxis.
So I gave up and went to the bus station, catching a bus that left almost immediately for Hongcun, and whose route would wind through other towns famous for their Huizhou architecture. At ¥30 it was something of a tourist price. But it was already getting dark, so little was seen. It was an electric bus though, which was impressive.
I was starting a head cold, so on arrival at the edge of the old town of Hongcun, I thought I would plump for a comfortable four-ish star hotel there, although it could be guaranteed that prices would be silly, rather than venture into the old town where there were said to be guesthouses in ancient buildings, but whose heating and general comfort would need inspecting. I was approached with the promise of a room for ¥150, but declined a further walk at freezing temperatures over uneven stone-flagged pavement with unknown results.
There was a row of three smart-ish hotels by the bus station, one of which was an Atour, a chain I’d seen all over the place and which my companion in Qingdao had recommended. It proved to have a smart modern lobby and a welcoming reception.
At 8pm my bargaining position should have been good, but the manager thought ¥919 was the right price for the foreigner. While we bargained good-naturedly he brought me a cup of warm water with honey. ¥800 was definitely his lowest price. Well, perhaps ¥750. I thanked him and prepared to check his neighbours. ¥400, he said.
This was rather more than I’d been paying, but it was bitterly chilly out, and I felt the need of somewhere warm and comfortable. The room turned out to be a match for those in the northeast in terms of solidity and comfort, although its location next to the linen closet proved to be a drawback.
The next morning, feeling like death, I said I’d want to stay a couple more nights, because I had developed a seriously bad cold, and felt a bit feverish. A bottle of heated mineral water was produced while the manager was sought for approval of further nights at the low rate (which included breakfast). The hotel was obviously very busy, but an extension was approved, and for that day I did nothing more than venture to a pharmacy in search of relief.
I would normally just sit it out, but I didn’t want to be immobilised for too long. However, detailed examination of the ingredients list on products recommended to me proved them not to be just simple symptom relief, but often with powerful ingredients of questionable relevance and not available without a prescription at home. And some contained pointless and harmful antibiotics. I returned empty-handed, only pausing to pick up biscuits and satsumas.
The day after, very well wrapped up against the bitter weather, I ventured to the old town which I entered for free on the grounds of antiquity, only to find that it was difficult to go anywhere because of the crowds descending from tour buses. There’s a famous photograph of a section of the village reflected in a pond crossed by a hump-backed bridge, but you’d now have as much chance of photographing the Taj Mahal people-free, and crossing the bridge was only achievable at a shuffle.
I managed to avoid the tourist conga-line by going round instead, but all the main routes were thronged, and lined with souvenir shops. Mansion interiors that could be visited were claustrophia-inducing, crammed with visitors. Chinese crowds lack patience or any consideration for others. There is no joy in being among them.
Back at the bus station I obtained details of how to reach Nanping, where Ju Dou was shot (the dou rhymes with toe) by local bus, and at 8am the following morning turned up to catch bus no. 1, which for ¥2 would take me most of the way there with a change.
By 8:20am it still hadn’t appeared, and I was checking with others waiting that I was in the right place when it finally trundled in, another smart, electric machine. I dropped my ¥2 in the slot and double-checked with the driver, only to be told that no, I needed bus no. 4. Did I have Weixin so he could refund me? No, but not caring about ¥2 I asked the small crowd behind me to let me descend so I could go and have a word with the ticket office, and was on my way when I was halted by a loud yelling behind me (which still didn’t include anyone yelling ‘Lao Wai!’), and looked back to find that the driver had passed ¥2 in notes to a lady who was now passing it to a different no. 1 that had just pulled up. On I got.
It was a bright clear day, the largely elderly group of passengers had had a little excitement added to their day by sorting the foreigner out, and we took a winding route through a number of smart modern villages constructed in the same Huizhou style, but rumoured to have older sections behind them.
At one point a lady of some unsteadiness boarded, hanging on tightly to the bars as she shuffled down the bus. No one looked likely to give up a seat for her, not even the comparatively youthful 50-something sitting next to me. So I got up to an instant chorus of dissent and hands pulling me back into my place, while the lady herself protested that she was getting off at the next stop.
How old are you anyway, asked my neighbour—she’s 76.
Younger than her, I said, so I should give up my place. But they weren’t having it.
After this the bus was all smiles, and the driver told me where to get off, what number bus to catch next, and when it would come, all corroborated by the timetable posted at the bus stop.
Nanping turned out to be ready for tourism, but not to be receiving any beyond a handful of independent travellers. The entrance ticket (free for me) included access to a few mansions, and more were open as independent enterprises. If there was anyone there when I entered, they were gone in a few minutes, leaving me in quiet contemplation of often fabulously carved beams and columns, a riot of tiny figures, and ancient furniture of museum quality itself. The narrow alleys between the high white walls were equally deserted save for a few DSLR-touting photographers, who quickly moved on. Influencer cosplay was not to be seen.
It really felt like being back in classical China.
Best of all was the mansion that played the role of the dye works in Ju Dou, equally deserted, and lined with photographs from the shoot, showing the lissome Gong Li, star of several of Zhang Yimou’s films, and supposedly his lover and muse at the time.
But I also enjoyed a stop at one private mansion (an extra ¥10) inhabited by an antiquities collector pleased to show me his collection and say what he’d paid for each piece. If you asked anyone in this town when a particular mansion was constructed they’d always mention not a Gregorian date but that of the emperor on the throne at the time—the Jiaqing emperor in this case (reigned 1796 to 1820).
Another man had opened his house as an antique shop, and we sat and chatted for while, although I'd made it clear I had no intention of making a purchase.
Look, he said, gesturing at an old woman passing the doorway. She’s 96!
There were only a few souvenir stalls and coffee shops, although some of the mansions had opened as restaurants that looked as if their interiors hadn’t bene updated for a century. Women washed vegetables in the small streams that ran down the side of many streets. Everything was remarkably intact with little sign of the ‘renovation’ that destroys so many of China’s historic buildings, and the lanes looked exactly as they did when Zhang filmed the scene of the terrifying boy with a cleaver, chasing the man who had spoken ill of his mother.
It was all immensely satisfying, and I felt I didn’t need to visit any remaining towns, but would return to Huang Shan Bei and head onward the next day. My only disappointment was that no one said the set phrase heard at every possible site of traditional architecture, from the cave houses of Shanxi, to the siheyuan courtyard houses of Beijing, and the vast tulou earth fortresses of Fujian: Cool in summer, warm in winter. This makes me smile every time I hear it.
I took two buses back again, chatting to a middle-aged Chinese woman who was also travelling solo—still a bit unusual. So I couldn’t help mockingly asking the same question I heard all the time: by yourself?
Oh, I’m a foreigner, she said.
Malaysian? I hazarded.
No, from Toronto.
She admitted to being originally from Tianjin, but the remains of our conversation were in English. Her approach was the same as mine: research ancient places and architecture from Chinese sources, then head out to discover them before anyone else could.
I’d done this with the lang qiao corridor bridges of Taishun, and the diao lou watchtowers of Kaiping (now, regrettably, UNESCO listed, and thus doomed). And it turned out she’d been to the same places at about the same time. We agreed that it was already too late for Huizhou places in general, but were both satisfied with Nanping. She’d ventured to some of the other towns, including to seem the many large pailou at She Xian, but didn’t strongly recommend a visit.
Altogether an excellent day.
The following morning I boarded the overpriced bus to Huang Shan Bei, and bought a ticket for to the Hunan capital of Changsha.
Huang Shan Bei was again vast, but in the middle of nowhere in particular. Arriving late afternoon, I’d thought to spend one night near the station before tackling a bus out to Hongcun.
There was a tourist information desk on the way to the station exit, so I stopped to ask a few questions as there’s a lot to see in the area, with a cluster of ancient towns known for the well-preserved state of their Huizhou architecture—that style with high white walls with concave darkly tiled tops, that in clusters have a feathery look, visible in everything from Kung-fu Panda to the ridiculous Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but most importantly in Zhang Yimou’s masterpiece, Ju Dou (1990, and although banned in China the first Chinese film to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language film Oscar).
If you haven’t seen it, rent, buy, or stream it now.
I asked, which was the best town to head for?
Hongcun.
Which has the best architecture?
Hongcun. You can get a bus from the bus station in that direction.
But what about the best groups of pailou (memorial gateways)?
I don’t know. But you should go to Hongcun.
Isn’t She Xian supposed to be best for those?
I don’t know. The buses to Hongcun go from over there.
From which was possible to deduce that Hongcun would be a tourism maelstrom. I supposed I’d find out in the morning, but first I needed to check on train times and ticket availability and then cross to the other side of the station where there appeared to be a group of hotels.
I couldn’t find the way, so I wandered about asking directions.
Comically, the answer in one case was the classic, ‘You can’t get there from here.’ And although I chose to ignore that as simply defying sense, after about half an hour of walking back and forth across the immense frontage at two different levels, I had to conclude that this was true, with the only alternative presumably to get a taxi to drive me round there. But, as we’ve discussed, a major railway station well out of town is not the place to be talking to taxis.
So I gave up and went to the bus station, catching a bus that left almost immediately for Hongcun, and whose route would wind through other towns famous for their Huizhou architecture. At ¥30 it was something of a tourist price. But it was already getting dark, so little was seen. It was an electric bus though, which was impressive.
I was starting a head cold, so on arrival at the edge of the old town of Hongcun, I thought I would plump for a comfortable four-ish star hotel there, although it could be guaranteed that prices would be silly, rather than venture into the old town where there were said to be guesthouses in ancient buildings, but whose heating and general comfort would need inspecting. I was approached with the promise of a room for ¥150, but declined a further walk at freezing temperatures over uneven stone-flagged pavement with unknown results.
There was a row of three smart-ish hotels by the bus station, one of which was an Atour, a chain I’d seen all over the place and which my companion in Qingdao had recommended. It proved to have a smart modern lobby and a welcoming reception.
At 8pm my bargaining position should have been good, but the manager thought ¥919 was the right price for the foreigner. While we bargained good-naturedly he brought me a cup of warm water with honey. ¥800 was definitely his lowest price. Well, perhaps ¥750. I thanked him and prepared to check his neighbours. ¥400, he said.
This was rather more than I’d been paying, but it was bitterly chilly out, and I felt the need of somewhere warm and comfortable. The room turned out to be a match for those in the northeast in terms of solidity and comfort, although its location next to the linen closet proved to be a drawback.
The next morning, feeling like death, I said I’d want to stay a couple more nights, because I had developed a seriously bad cold, and felt a bit feverish. A bottle of heated mineral water was produced while the manager was sought for approval of further nights at the low rate (which included breakfast). The hotel was obviously very busy, but an extension was approved, and for that day I did nothing more than venture to a pharmacy in search of relief.
I would normally just sit it out, but I didn’t want to be immobilised for too long. However, detailed examination of the ingredients list on products recommended to me proved them not to be just simple symptom relief, but often with powerful ingredients of questionable relevance and not available without a prescription at home. And some contained pointless and harmful antibiotics. I returned empty-handed, only pausing to pick up biscuits and satsumas.
The day after, very well wrapped up against the bitter weather, I ventured to the old town which I entered for free on the grounds of antiquity, only to find that it was difficult to go anywhere because of the crowds descending from tour buses. There’s a famous photograph of a section of the village reflected in a pond crossed by a hump-backed bridge, but you’d now have as much chance of photographing the Taj Mahal people-free, and crossing the bridge was only achievable at a shuffle.
I managed to avoid the tourist conga-line by going round instead, but all the main routes were thronged, and lined with souvenir shops. Mansion interiors that could be visited were claustrophia-inducing, crammed with visitors. Chinese crowds lack patience or any consideration for others. There is no joy in being among them.
Back at the bus station I obtained details of how to reach Nanping, where Ju Dou was shot (the dou rhymes with toe) by local bus, and at 8am the following morning turned up to catch bus no. 1, which for ¥2 would take me most of the way there with a change.
By 8:20am it still hadn’t appeared, and I was checking with others waiting that I was in the right place when it finally trundled in, another smart, electric machine. I dropped my ¥2 in the slot and double-checked with the driver, only to be told that no, I needed bus no. 4. Did I have Weixin so he could refund me? No, but not caring about ¥2 I asked the small crowd behind me to let me descend so I could go and have a word with the ticket office, and was on my way when I was halted by a loud yelling behind me (which still didn’t include anyone yelling ‘Lao Wai!’), and looked back to find that the driver had passed ¥2 in notes to a lady who was now passing it to a different no. 1 that had just pulled up. On I got.
It was a bright clear day, the largely elderly group of passengers had had a little excitement added to their day by sorting the foreigner out, and we took a winding route through a number of smart modern villages constructed in the same Huizhou style, but rumoured to have older sections behind them.
At one point a lady of some unsteadiness boarded, hanging on tightly to the bars as she shuffled down the bus. No one looked likely to give up a seat for her, not even the comparatively youthful 50-something sitting next to me. So I got up to an instant chorus of dissent and hands pulling me back into my place, while the lady herself protested that she was getting off at the next stop.
How old are you anyway, asked my neighbour—she’s 76.
Younger than her, I said, so I should give up my place. But they weren’t having it.
After this the bus was all smiles, and the driver told me where to get off, what number bus to catch next, and when it would come, all corroborated by the timetable posted at the bus stop.
Nanping turned out to be ready for tourism, but not to be receiving any beyond a handful of independent travellers. The entrance ticket (free for me) included access to a few mansions, and more were open as independent enterprises. If there was anyone there when I entered, they were gone in a few minutes, leaving me in quiet contemplation of often fabulously carved beams and columns, a riot of tiny figures, and ancient furniture of museum quality itself. The narrow alleys between the high white walls were equally deserted save for a few DSLR-touting photographers, who quickly moved on. Influencer cosplay was not to be seen.
It really felt like being back in classical China.
Best of all was the mansion that played the role of the dye works in Ju Dou, equally deserted, and lined with photographs from the shoot, showing the lissome Gong Li, star of several of Zhang Yimou’s films, and supposedly his lover and muse at the time.
But I also enjoyed a stop at one private mansion (an extra ¥10) inhabited by an antiquities collector pleased to show me his collection and say what he’d paid for each piece. If you asked anyone in this town when a particular mansion was constructed they’d always mention not a Gregorian date but that of the emperor on the throne at the time—the Jiaqing emperor in this case (reigned 1796 to 1820).
Another man had opened his house as an antique shop, and we sat and chatted for while, although I'd made it clear I had no intention of making a purchase.
Look, he said, gesturing at an old woman passing the doorway. She’s 96!
There were only a few souvenir stalls and coffee shops, although some of the mansions had opened as restaurants that looked as if their interiors hadn’t bene updated for a century. Women washed vegetables in the small streams that ran down the side of many streets. Everything was remarkably intact with little sign of the ‘renovation’ that destroys so many of China’s historic buildings, and the lanes looked exactly as they did when Zhang filmed the scene of the terrifying boy with a cleaver, chasing the man who had spoken ill of his mother.
It was all immensely satisfying, and I felt I didn’t need to visit any remaining towns, but would return to Huang Shan Bei and head onward the next day. My only disappointment was that no one said the set phrase heard at every possible site of traditional architecture, from the cave houses of Shanxi, to the siheyuan courtyard houses of Beijing, and the vast tulou earth fortresses of Fujian: Cool in summer, warm in winter. This makes me smile every time I hear it.
I took two buses back again, chatting to a middle-aged Chinese woman who was also travelling solo—still a bit unusual. So I couldn’t help mockingly asking the same question I heard all the time: by yourself?
Oh, I’m a foreigner, she said.
Malaysian? I hazarded.
No, from Toronto.
She admitted to being originally from Tianjin, but the remains of our conversation were in English. Her approach was the same as mine: research ancient places and architecture from Chinese sources, then head out to discover them before anyone else could.
I’d done this with the lang qiao corridor bridges of Taishun, and the diao lou watchtowers of Kaiping (now, regrettably, UNESCO listed, and thus doomed). And it turned out she’d been to the same places at about the same time. We agreed that it was already too late for Huizhou places in general, but were both satisfied with Nanping. She’d ventured to some of the other towns, including to seem the many large pailou at She Xian, but didn’t strongly recommend a visit.
Altogether an excellent day.
The following morning I boarded the overpriced bus to Huang Shan Bei, and bought a ticket for to the Hunan capital of Changsha.
Changsha
I had originally thought to travel from Huang Shan to Shaoxing, a medium-sized city in Zhejiang Province just southeast of Hangzhou, in order to re-visit the Master Calligrapher’s Native Place, the Bridge in the Shape of the Character for Eight, and various sites connected with China’s greatest 20th-century writer, Lu Xun.
I’d then carry on south round the coast to re-visit the earth fortresses of the interior of Fujian Province, and the coastal city of Quanzhou, with its assorted evidence of ancient maritime connections with the Arab world, all also previously seen.
But it was a long way to go east with the eventual intention of reaching Macau, far to the southwest, and which would require a certain amount of doubling back and at least one very long ride. And I had the sudden idea that another gap in my China knowledge was the birthplace of Mao Zedong, at Shao Shan outside Changsha, and I should visit if only to urinate (mentally) on that mass murderer’s memory. It was also roughly in the right direction.
At one point Shao Shan was a tourism hotspot, not least since at times of very little discretionary travel the work unit (state employer) would likely organise a paid-for trip sooner or later. In more recent times there was a sudden revival of so-called red tourism to revolutionarily relevant sites, which put Shao Shan back on the map, although there was danger there for the current regime in the suggestion of nostalgia for earlier, more straightforward times. The only safe form of criticism of the current regime lies in calling for a return to more hard-line Communist values, against which the Party leadership cannot take action because it claims legitimacy on the basis of the Mao-led revolution, as much as on imaginary claims that it, and its 'system', are uniquely responsible for China's threadbare modern economic success. No one can say, except in the most heavily qualified and officially approved way, that Mao 'made mistakes'.
Changsha Xi was once again a cavernous, but for the first time also extremely busy station, thronged with passengers, and so also with plenty of ‘Hello! Taxi!’ nonsense. I also noted it had its own maglev line to Changsha airport, although a taxi driver told me the ride was only a few minutes and the trains did not get up that much speed (over 400 km/h is possible when this technology wants to, such as in the case of the line from Shanghai’s Pudong Airport to an inconvenient spot on the fringe of Shanghai).
I’d decided I would try another Crystal Orange hotel, which was of course a mistake. The best policy is to pick whatever’s usefully placed near a metro station and is as new as possible. The location of the hotel was miss-located on Maps, and I ended up walking a great deal further than I’d intended. I prefer to walk as much as possible, but preferably not with a case. And Changsha was big, loud, and noisy beyond anything I’d seen since leaving Beijing.
When I finally found the location it was still a 15-minute walk from a metro station, and having been open for five years was showing some signs of wear and tear in the common areas, as happens quickly in China. But the room was fresh, and nevertheless, I stayed.
As I'd walked I'd been vaguely surprised at the quantity of restaurants serving Xiang cai—Hunanese food, because I don’t care particularly for its straightforward burn as opposed to the hot and numbing style of Chuan cai (Sichuanese food).
But Changsha, of course, is the capital of Hunan. Duh. Should have chosen somewhere else, perhaps.
After checking in I followed directions some distance to a mall with floors of restaurants and ate 米粉肉 or mifenrou, steamed pork in rice flour, very tender. It's a dish I rather like, but from Jiangxi Province.
On the way back through the darkened but still very busy streets I came cross a side turning to a warren of alleys with breweries, bars, and a pizza restaurant, suggesting both an expat market and a lively middle class. And then further on another of the same, but with an alarming number of bars with live music in the form of acoustic guitar-wielding singer-songwriters, and some self-consciously trendy restaurants.
A small black-and-white kitten unexpectedly emerged from a pile of bicycles and mewed loudly and pitiably at me, obviously hungry. Endless videos forced on me by social media of individuals coming across lost animals, rescuing, cleaning and feeding them, and then the animals growing up into faithful companions came to mind. But there was nothing I could reasonably do for this little creature, and I was both glad and worried when it wasn’t there when I passed again. This has clearly stuck with me.
The next day was bright and reasonably warm—much more so than the Huizhou area—and the first stop was the Hunan Provincial Museum, which turned out to be a vast modern edifice a good long walk from my hotel through an unexpected street-level ‘antiques’ market, with a lot of interesting small things, and no doubt prices significantly more affordable than those of Beijing.
All the customers appeared to be Chinese. And indeed, during my stay in Changsha while I may have inferred the presence of a resident foreign contingent, I only caught a glimpse of three young Americans entering a bar (they were audible from some distance away)—the last foreigners I was to see before reaching Macau about a week later.
The museum is best known for its display of items from the 2nd century BCE tombs at Mawang Dui, in Changsha’s eastern suburbs, including a major trove of manuscripts and the well-preserved corpse of the wife of the chancellor to the Prince of Changsha, superbly lit and displayed at the bottom of a recreation of the tomb excavation. This was very popular, especially with school groups, and indeed the museum was busy with people who would just come and stand in front of you while you were looking at something they'd also decided they wanted to see. Some patience was necessary.
Needless to say, one main floor was shut. But there were others with items from the museum’s permanent collection, and excellent special exhibitions of Buddhist statuary, etc. Altogether one of China’s better museums, and I spent the whole morning there.
I'd asked the hotel reception f the taxis used the meter in Changsha. The answer was an enthusiastic yes, although the truth is that few operating at this level are regular takers of taxis, and so they often really have no idea.
But it was a long walk from the museum to I he original main station in the centre of town, or a couple of changed of metro, so I took one there, with no difficulties at all.
I wanted to buy a ticket to Wuzhou in Guangxi Province, but this took a while as the ticket seller had never heard of this relatively obscure riverside town, and although others waiting to buy tickets heard me and joined in shouting the name, we went through a Three Stooges-style Luzhou? Suzhou? Xuzhou? conversation before a successful purchase.
I decided to leave the next day, and abandon Mao as not being worth the effort of a 90km each way day trip to see absurd hagiography and perhaps red tourism was alive and well and there would be hoards of tourists. As many as fifty million dead at his hands, and yet officially celebrated (even the Party admits to 25 million in the Great Leap Forward alone). But the most you'll hear is, he 'made some mistakes.
But I did make a half-hearted attempt to get to the memorial to Lei Feng, another red tourism site, although the conversation at the metro station information desk as to what would be the nearest station, after a long ride far out to the west, was far from encouraging. Again, a friend had to be phoned. The Lei Feng Memorial seemed unknown. Perhaps red tourism was again in recession.
Lei Feng was a soldier to whom, after his death in an accident, a story was attached and widely publicised of his probably fabricated diary’s account of an entirely selfless approach to supporting the revolution. Everyone was exhorted to be like Lei Feng, ‘a little screw in the revolutionary machinery that would never rust’. It’s a sad reflection on Chinese society today that anyone who does something selfless may be labelled a Lei Feng, as this is seen as out of the ordinary.
When I emerged at the relevant station I asked a fuwuyuan at the turnstile, who looked like he should have long ago retired, which exit to take and which bus. He was eager to tell me. At his age the whole Lei Feng business probably had a lot more resonance.
But when the recommended bus appeared the driver denied he was going anywhere near the memorial, and when, after a half an hour sitting in the sunshine watching the world go by, the alternative bus he suggested still hadn’t come, I considered that even if it did I’d likely now arrive just as the museum closed. I had rather expected time might run out like this, and didn’t mind.
So I returned to the metro station, and on the platform was accosted by the same fuwuyuan.
You're back then. Did you see it?
Actually no. The driver of the bus you mentioned said he didn’t go there.
I live round there. It’s only a ten-minute walk from the stop.
No problem, I said. I’m just doing what I happen to feel like, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t achieve much.
This was a thought that seemed to appeal to him as much as that of a foreigner having the first idea who Lei Feng was.
I admit I had pizza that night in one of the trendy restaurants I’d discovered. I just felt like a change. The base was quite authentic, and convincingly moist, although the toppings occasionally came in varieties certainly unknown to Italians, even beyond Hawaiian, which I mentioned was something of which no Italian has ever heard, nor would dream of putting in his mouth.
In the morning a taxi was easily found, and the meter started, the driver seemingly happy to have a relatively long run. He reckoned his BYD, a relatively old model, could do 250km on a single charge, but he rarely did more than 200km in a day now because everyone was using ride-share apps. He thought about 60% of the cars on the road now were electric, and pointed out to me that these were indicated with green-trimmed number plates, and they did indeed seem to be numerous.
Many taxis run 12 hours through the day with one driver, and 12 hours through the night with another, but he simply put his on charge for the night, and according to his maths, which he explained in detail, powering it cost a small fraction of running an ICE car.
It should be mentioned, perhaps, that these observations about electric vehicles are in no way intended to bolster China's green credentials, for as the world's largest polluter, and by some counts now cumulatively the biggest ever, and with its opening of a new coal-fired power station a week (several of which I saw from trains) it has absolutely no such credentials at all. But the introduction of electric vehicles is impressive, although they are powered by burning some of the world's filthiest coal. It's a slap in the face to all those who say, without evidence, and merely because they want to hang on to their existing SUVs, that electric vehicles are inadequate. They clearly aren't (and I drove one all over the south of France earlier this year), and the change can be made.
I settled down for the trip to Wuzhou, changing once en route in Guangzhou. But the high-speed stations have the same arrangements for transit as those at international airports (everywhere except the US), where passage to a different platform is via a separate tunnel with only a single scan at the platform entrance and no need to go through other security again.
It may be thought that I didn’t achieve very much in Changsha. There isn’t a great deal to do there, but even so I certainly didn’t do everything there was.
A holiday is just doing what you like, and it doesn't matter in any way what the official attractions are or what others think you should be doing. Don't be a checklist tourist, or an Instagram-driven (Xiaohongshu-driven) sheep. Think for yourself. Enjoy the day-to-day and street-level ways in which your destination is different. Look in supermarkets, for instance (and find all sorts of entirely unidentifiable snacks and those you can identify but can't imagine putting in your mouth; and entertaining knock-offs of familiar brands from wine to Oreos—something I can't imagine putting in my mouth even when not fake). Walking around will lead you to discover all sorts of curiosities, backstreet temples, odd businesses, etc. and gain you some understanding, away from the '5000 years of culture' nonsense, what life in China is really like. Particularly if this is the way you travel elsewhere, please take away from these rough notes that it is no less possible, nor significantly harder, to do the same in China.
But by all means take a tour if it pleases you.
Wuzhou next.
I had originally thought to travel from Huang Shan to Shaoxing, a medium-sized city in Zhejiang Province just southeast of Hangzhou, in order to re-visit the Master Calligrapher’s Native Place, the Bridge in the Shape of the Character for Eight, and various sites connected with China’s greatest 20th-century writer, Lu Xun.
I’d then carry on south round the coast to re-visit the earth fortresses of the interior of Fujian Province, and the coastal city of Quanzhou, with its assorted evidence of ancient maritime connections with the Arab world, all also previously seen.
But it was a long way to go east with the eventual intention of reaching Macau, far to the southwest, and which would require a certain amount of doubling back and at least one very long ride. And I had the sudden idea that another gap in my China knowledge was the birthplace of Mao Zedong, at Shao Shan outside Changsha, and I should visit if only to urinate (mentally) on that mass murderer’s memory. It was also roughly in the right direction.
At one point Shao Shan was a tourism hotspot, not least since at times of very little discretionary travel the work unit (state employer) would likely organise a paid-for trip sooner or later. In more recent times there was a sudden revival of so-called red tourism to revolutionarily relevant sites, which put Shao Shan back on the map, although there was danger there for the current regime in the suggestion of nostalgia for earlier, more straightforward times. The only safe form of criticism of the current regime lies in calling for a return to more hard-line Communist values, against which the Party leadership cannot take action because it claims legitimacy on the basis of the Mao-led revolution, as much as on imaginary claims that it, and its 'system', are uniquely responsible for China's threadbare modern economic success. No one can say, except in the most heavily qualified and officially approved way, that Mao 'made mistakes'.
Changsha Xi was once again a cavernous, but for the first time also extremely busy station, thronged with passengers, and so also with plenty of ‘Hello! Taxi!’ nonsense. I also noted it had its own maglev line to Changsha airport, although a taxi driver told me the ride was only a few minutes and the trains did not get up that much speed (over 400 km/h is possible when this technology wants to, such as in the case of the line from Shanghai’s Pudong Airport to an inconvenient spot on the fringe of Shanghai).
I’d decided I would try another Crystal Orange hotel, which was of course a mistake. The best policy is to pick whatever’s usefully placed near a metro station and is as new as possible. The location of the hotel was miss-located on Maps, and I ended up walking a great deal further than I’d intended. I prefer to walk as much as possible, but preferably not with a case. And Changsha was big, loud, and noisy beyond anything I’d seen since leaving Beijing.
When I finally found the location it was still a 15-minute walk from a metro station, and having been open for five years was showing some signs of wear and tear in the common areas, as happens quickly in China. But the room was fresh, and nevertheless, I stayed.
As I'd walked I'd been vaguely surprised at the quantity of restaurants serving Xiang cai—Hunanese food, because I don’t care particularly for its straightforward burn as opposed to the hot and numbing style of Chuan cai (Sichuanese food).
But Changsha, of course, is the capital of Hunan. Duh. Should have chosen somewhere else, perhaps.
After checking in I followed directions some distance to a mall with floors of restaurants and ate 米粉肉 or mifenrou, steamed pork in rice flour, very tender. It's a dish I rather like, but from Jiangxi Province.
On the way back through the darkened but still very busy streets I came cross a side turning to a warren of alleys with breweries, bars, and a pizza restaurant, suggesting both an expat market and a lively middle class. And then further on another of the same, but with an alarming number of bars with live music in the form of acoustic guitar-wielding singer-songwriters, and some self-consciously trendy restaurants.
A small black-and-white kitten unexpectedly emerged from a pile of bicycles and mewed loudly and pitiably at me, obviously hungry. Endless videos forced on me by social media of individuals coming across lost animals, rescuing, cleaning and feeding them, and then the animals growing up into faithful companions came to mind. But there was nothing I could reasonably do for this little creature, and I was both glad and worried when it wasn’t there when I passed again. This has clearly stuck with me.
The next day was bright and reasonably warm—much more so than the Huizhou area—and the first stop was the Hunan Provincial Museum, which turned out to be a vast modern edifice a good long walk from my hotel through an unexpected street-level ‘antiques’ market, with a lot of interesting small things, and no doubt prices significantly more affordable than those of Beijing.
All the customers appeared to be Chinese. And indeed, during my stay in Changsha while I may have inferred the presence of a resident foreign contingent, I only caught a glimpse of three young Americans entering a bar (they were audible from some distance away)—the last foreigners I was to see before reaching Macau about a week later.
The museum is best known for its display of items from the 2nd century BCE tombs at Mawang Dui, in Changsha’s eastern suburbs, including a major trove of manuscripts and the well-preserved corpse of the wife of the chancellor to the Prince of Changsha, superbly lit and displayed at the bottom of a recreation of the tomb excavation. This was very popular, especially with school groups, and indeed the museum was busy with people who would just come and stand in front of you while you were looking at something they'd also decided they wanted to see. Some patience was necessary.
Needless to say, one main floor was shut. But there were others with items from the museum’s permanent collection, and excellent special exhibitions of Buddhist statuary, etc. Altogether one of China’s better museums, and I spent the whole morning there.
I'd asked the hotel reception f the taxis used the meter in Changsha. The answer was an enthusiastic yes, although the truth is that few operating at this level are regular takers of taxis, and so they often really have no idea.
But it was a long walk from the museum to I he original main station in the centre of town, or a couple of changed of metro, so I took one there, with no difficulties at all.
I wanted to buy a ticket to Wuzhou in Guangxi Province, but this took a while as the ticket seller had never heard of this relatively obscure riverside town, and although others waiting to buy tickets heard me and joined in shouting the name, we went through a Three Stooges-style Luzhou? Suzhou? Xuzhou? conversation before a successful purchase.
I decided to leave the next day, and abandon Mao as not being worth the effort of a 90km each way day trip to see absurd hagiography and perhaps red tourism was alive and well and there would be hoards of tourists. As many as fifty million dead at his hands, and yet officially celebrated (even the Party admits to 25 million in the Great Leap Forward alone). But the most you'll hear is, he 'made some mistakes.
But I did make a half-hearted attempt to get to the memorial to Lei Feng, another red tourism site, although the conversation at the metro station information desk as to what would be the nearest station, after a long ride far out to the west, was far from encouraging. Again, a friend had to be phoned. The Lei Feng Memorial seemed unknown. Perhaps red tourism was again in recession.
Lei Feng was a soldier to whom, after his death in an accident, a story was attached and widely publicised of his probably fabricated diary’s account of an entirely selfless approach to supporting the revolution. Everyone was exhorted to be like Lei Feng, ‘a little screw in the revolutionary machinery that would never rust’. It’s a sad reflection on Chinese society today that anyone who does something selfless may be labelled a Lei Feng, as this is seen as out of the ordinary.
When I emerged at the relevant station I asked a fuwuyuan at the turnstile, who looked like he should have long ago retired, which exit to take and which bus. He was eager to tell me. At his age the whole Lei Feng business probably had a lot more resonance.
But when the recommended bus appeared the driver denied he was going anywhere near the memorial, and when, after a half an hour sitting in the sunshine watching the world go by, the alternative bus he suggested still hadn’t come, I considered that even if it did I’d likely now arrive just as the museum closed. I had rather expected time might run out like this, and didn’t mind.
So I returned to the metro station, and on the platform was accosted by the same fuwuyuan.
You're back then. Did you see it?
Actually no. The driver of the bus you mentioned said he didn’t go there.
I live round there. It’s only a ten-minute walk from the stop.
No problem, I said. I’m just doing what I happen to feel like, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t achieve much.
This was a thought that seemed to appeal to him as much as that of a foreigner having the first idea who Lei Feng was.
I admit I had pizza that night in one of the trendy restaurants I’d discovered. I just felt like a change. The base was quite authentic, and convincingly moist, although the toppings occasionally came in varieties certainly unknown to Italians, even beyond Hawaiian, which I mentioned was something of which no Italian has ever heard, nor would dream of putting in his mouth.
In the morning a taxi was easily found, and the meter started, the driver seemingly happy to have a relatively long run. He reckoned his BYD, a relatively old model, could do 250km on a single charge, but he rarely did more than 200km in a day now because everyone was using ride-share apps. He thought about 60% of the cars on the road now were electric, and pointed out to me that these were indicated with green-trimmed number plates, and they did indeed seem to be numerous.
Many taxis run 12 hours through the day with one driver, and 12 hours through the night with another, but he simply put his on charge for the night, and according to his maths, which he explained in detail, powering it cost a small fraction of running an ICE car.
It should be mentioned, perhaps, that these observations about electric vehicles are in no way intended to bolster China's green credentials, for as the world's largest polluter, and by some counts now cumulatively the biggest ever, and with its opening of a new coal-fired power station a week (several of which I saw from trains) it has absolutely no such credentials at all. But the introduction of electric vehicles is impressive, although they are powered by burning some of the world's filthiest coal. It's a slap in the face to all those who say, without evidence, and merely because they want to hang on to their existing SUVs, that electric vehicles are inadequate. They clearly aren't (and I drove one all over the south of France earlier this year), and the change can be made.
I settled down for the trip to Wuzhou, changing once en route in Guangzhou. But the high-speed stations have the same arrangements for transit as those at international airports (everywhere except the US), where passage to a different platform is via a separate tunnel with only a single scan at the platform entrance and no need to go through other security again.
It may be thought that I didn’t achieve very much in Changsha. There isn’t a great deal to do there, but even so I certainly didn’t do everything there was.
A holiday is just doing what you like, and it doesn't matter in any way what the official attractions are or what others think you should be doing. Don't be a checklist tourist, or an Instagram-driven (Xiaohongshu-driven) sheep. Think for yourself. Enjoy the day-to-day and street-level ways in which your destination is different. Look in supermarkets, for instance (and find all sorts of entirely unidentifiable snacks and those you can identify but can't imagine putting in your mouth; and entertaining knock-offs of familiar brands from wine to Oreos—something I can't imagine putting in my mouth even when not fake). Walking around will lead you to discover all sorts of curiosities, backstreet temples, odd businesses, etc. and gain you some understanding, away from the '5000 years of culture' nonsense, what life in China is really like. Particularly if this is the way you travel elsewhere, please take away from these rough notes that it is no less possible, nor significantly harder, to do the same in China.
But by all means take a tour if it pleases you.
Wuzhou next.
Wuzhou
There’s no particular reason why you should have heard of this town on the West River in Guangxi Province—the province immediately west of Guangdong Province which is the one to which Hong Kong is attached. And there’s no particular reason why you should go there.
I first visited in 1988, after a few weeks of backpacking, eager to reach Hong Kong where there was Western food, Chinese food of edible quality, no one shouting ‘Lao wai!’ or spitting, and chocolate.
It seemed highly improbable at the time, but Wuzhou had a direct hovercraft service to Hong Kong, and the only reason to go to Wuzhou was to catch that.
The second time, in 1992, when I was there for the same purpose, the river had burst its banks and the usual foreigner-friendly hotel was full. But in those days foreigners had to be looked after, and so the staff vacated some of their own accommodation to make way for our group of four.
Wuzhou was of significance as a treaty port, even back in the early 20th century boasting steamer services from Hong Kong, and trade in goods carried in both Chinese and British bottoms to reach the interior. This competed with the furiously expensive narrow-gauge line the French had built from Haiphong (in modern-day Vietnam) to Kunming, with a spur to the Guangxi border en route to Nanning, although this was never completed.
To France’s frustration it was still cheaper to use the British boats on the West River, and the majority of trade to nearby provinces continued by that route.
I expected there would be transport problems getting from the station into town. Wuzhou had previously had no rail connection, and was typically reached by backpackers using buses from Guilin or Yangshuo (both eminently avoidable, but that’s another story).
But now there was Wuzhou Nan station, on the high-speed line to the provincial capital of Nanning, which was indeed well to the south as its name suggested, and not, as yet, embraced by a new suburb although the city was already reaching out to it.
There were hello taxi people everywhere after I’d been to the ticket office and checked how often there were trains to Zhuhai, the gateway to Macau. I’d decided to slow down for my last few days, but hadn’t yet decided quite how I’d divide the time between Wuzhou and Macau.
The main point was to revisit the old British consulate on top of a hill overlooking the confluence of the Gui and the Xi Rivers, and perhaps wander the few streets of late-19th and early 20th-century shop-houses that were still intact from the days when there was a small foreign contingent, mainly of consular officials, customs workers, and missionaries, but enough to support the usual club, etc.
I followed signs to the bus station in the basement, and discovered I could get into town for merely ¥2, with a departure due in about ten minutes. This dropped me on what was now Zhongshan Lu in the heart of the older part of town, called Wanxiu. Even on my last visit I’d seen that the city had expanded massively to the west to surround Zhu Shan, the hill with the consulate, and far beyond. Wanxiu was now almost a suburb itself. But I wanted to stay in the old part.
I settled for a convenient two-star hotel with a room in more familiar style than the all-electric ones I had been staying in elsewhere, with breakfast included—a much more limited one but with an excellent congee/zhou rice porridge, although nothing resembling coffee.
The view down from the room was to decaying buildings clearly slated for demolition, and there was a distant view of the chunky concrete port building which was still offering a few passenger ferry services when I was last there perhaps 15 years ago, but these seemed now to have ceased, rendered irrelevant by new highways and the gaotie line.
The streets below were loud and bustling with many Chinese tourists, and seemed to have become another weekend destination, again thanks to the high-speed line. There were many restaurants with touts eager to drag you in.
I was in the mood for Cantonese food, and although the hotel reception thought I should be eating Guangxi food (I couldn’t name any dishes, if that exists), pointed me towards what they said was an excellent restaurant for Yue cai, which is the proper name for food from the south.
But all the dishes were tripe or other innards, and I’d been hoping for a perfectly straightforward sweet-and-sour chicken or pork, which is to say something little like you’re served at home, being large pieces of meat only lightly dusted with flour, fried until crispy, and served with a light, usually darker red sauce. Nothing you need sunglasses to look at, and with a subtle flavour.
Several other restaurants also seemed to be serving tripe, and the rest snails, clearly marketed as a local delicacy. But I eventually came across a rather bare-bones Chuan cai (Sichuan) restaurant, and entered knowing this would be a mistake. Unless in one of the larger cities, always eat the local dishes. In Guangzhou you may order Chuan cai, but you’ll be lucky if it has any heat at all. On the other hand order Yue cai when you’re in Sichuan province and expect it to be spicy.
It was inauthentic, but edible.
I strolled around the brightly lit pedestrianised area of older building, all very much tidied up since my last visit, finding a ‘European’ restaurant that seemed to have nothing familiar on its menu, and admiring other premises on the ground floors of the equally ‘European’ residential blocks, although many ‘restored’ to within an inch of their lives. Many other people were also out for an evening stroll.
But I also came across one old building that had been converted into a smart hotel, and that turned out to only have opened two months earlier.
A pleasant-smelling pale wood room, with modern bathroom, and electronic everything in the by now seemingly commonplace way, in a hotel hoping for four stars eventually, and only a few kuai more expensive than the place I was in. Full that evening (they were very apologetic) but with rooms opening up the next day (Sunday) as the weekend holidaymakers departed.
The West River (Xi He) is heavily bunded, a process started by the original foreign residents but now toweringly concrete, and there were markers indicating flood levels of astonishing height, well above the riverside walkways at any level.
The broad river, which oozes along rather than flowing (there are no rivers in China fit for swimming, let alone drinking), had lines of long black barges of considerable size constantly chugging in each direction, which had been the case on every previous visit. There was still a pagoda atop a hill on the opposite bank, and altogether the view remained appealing.
I crossed the bridge over the Gui, walked round the base of Zhu Shan to the find stairs up, and climbed through parkland to reach the former consulate, a low brick building matching in style other former consulates across China, and still furnished more or less in the style of the time, with three or four rooms open to visitors. It was all very Victorian (although Wuzhou became a treaty port in 1897, this building dates from 1903, two years after Victoria’s death), with what looked like the original floor tiles still in place, although the dark-red shutters now stood out amid improbably mustard-yellow walls of the surrounding verandah.
There were lots of influencers having themselves photographed in front of it, and in front of a squat pagoda opposite which long pre-dated the consulate, and looked as if it had been rebuilt many times.
Nearby, a former Bible teaching college of the same period rather dwarfed the consulate, and there were other buildings originally belonging to the Imperial Customs, which was run by foreigners for the benefit of the court, and later the Republic, and which brought in a lot more revenue than when it had been left to corrupt domestic officials. But beyond that the town’s museum had several items worth looking at.
I took a meandering route back over a different bridges, found some lunch, and then, moved hotels. In Wuzhou, check-out time was 2pm.
Having discovered from the new hotel reception that the agreed price for the run to Wuzhou Nan station was ¥40, I attempted to find a taxi to take me there to buy my ticket, as I’d now decided to stay just a couple more nights, and then move on. But there were no taxis to be found.
So I caught the same bus back, ambling along and then across the river, and through new suburbs back to the station in 45 minutes.
Finding a ride back into town was much easier, although drivers thought they’d ask for ¥50. I paid ¥40. Knowledge is everything.
Are you here working? asked the driver.
Just visiting.
I thought you were a professor, he said.
Er.. Why?
Because you’re carrying a book.
Such are the times in which we live, world-wide.
I did very little the next day except go for a long walk along the river, and spend time catching up with some work in one of those teahouses that produces brews involving fruit and other odd ingredients, a chilled one of which was actually quite refreshing, although again the price of a one-bowl meal.
Leaving the next morning, the hotel reception, which had consistently enquired after my well-being and what I had been up to, thought I’d find a cab on Zhongshan Lu where the bus had dropped me when I originally arrived.
As mentioned in my first post, I found a Didi Dache driver there, who was happy to take me for the agreed price.
Wuzhou Nan is sufficiently far out, and with not a vast amount of passengers, so there isn’t much there in the way of food. But I had fruit and pastries bought in town, and the journey to Zhuhai was not a long one.
There’s no particular reason why you should have heard of this town on the West River in Guangxi Province—the province immediately west of Guangdong Province which is the one to which Hong Kong is attached. And there’s no particular reason why you should go there.
I first visited in 1988, after a few weeks of backpacking, eager to reach Hong Kong where there was Western food, Chinese food of edible quality, no one shouting ‘Lao wai!’ or spitting, and chocolate.
It seemed highly improbable at the time, but Wuzhou had a direct hovercraft service to Hong Kong, and the only reason to go to Wuzhou was to catch that.
The second time, in 1992, when I was there for the same purpose, the river had burst its banks and the usual foreigner-friendly hotel was full. But in those days foreigners had to be looked after, and so the staff vacated some of their own accommodation to make way for our group of four.
Wuzhou was of significance as a treaty port, even back in the early 20th century boasting steamer services from Hong Kong, and trade in goods carried in both Chinese and British bottoms to reach the interior. This competed with the furiously expensive narrow-gauge line the French had built from Haiphong (in modern-day Vietnam) to Kunming, with a spur to the Guangxi border en route to Nanning, although this was never completed.
To France’s frustration it was still cheaper to use the British boats on the West River, and the majority of trade to nearby provinces continued by that route.
I expected there would be transport problems getting from the station into town. Wuzhou had previously had no rail connection, and was typically reached by backpackers using buses from Guilin or Yangshuo (both eminently avoidable, but that’s another story).
But now there was Wuzhou Nan station, on the high-speed line to the provincial capital of Nanning, which was indeed well to the south as its name suggested, and not, as yet, embraced by a new suburb although the city was already reaching out to it.
There were hello taxi people everywhere after I’d been to the ticket office and checked how often there were trains to Zhuhai, the gateway to Macau. I’d decided to slow down for my last few days, but hadn’t yet decided quite how I’d divide the time between Wuzhou and Macau.
The main point was to revisit the old British consulate on top of a hill overlooking the confluence of the Gui and the Xi Rivers, and perhaps wander the few streets of late-19th and early 20th-century shop-houses that were still intact from the days when there was a small foreign contingent, mainly of consular officials, customs workers, and missionaries, but enough to support the usual club, etc.
I followed signs to the bus station in the basement, and discovered I could get into town for merely ¥2, with a departure due in about ten minutes. This dropped me on what was now Zhongshan Lu in the heart of the older part of town, called Wanxiu. Even on my last visit I’d seen that the city had expanded massively to the west to surround Zhu Shan, the hill with the consulate, and far beyond. Wanxiu was now almost a suburb itself. But I wanted to stay in the old part.
I settled for a convenient two-star hotel with a room in more familiar style than the all-electric ones I had been staying in elsewhere, with breakfast included—a much more limited one but with an excellent congee/zhou rice porridge, although nothing resembling coffee.
The view down from the room was to decaying buildings clearly slated for demolition, and there was a distant view of the chunky concrete port building which was still offering a few passenger ferry services when I was last there perhaps 15 years ago, but these seemed now to have ceased, rendered irrelevant by new highways and the gaotie line.
The streets below were loud and bustling with many Chinese tourists, and seemed to have become another weekend destination, again thanks to the high-speed line. There were many restaurants with touts eager to drag you in.
I was in the mood for Cantonese food, and although the hotel reception thought I should be eating Guangxi food (I couldn’t name any dishes, if that exists), pointed me towards what they said was an excellent restaurant for Yue cai, which is the proper name for food from the south.
But all the dishes were tripe or other innards, and I’d been hoping for a perfectly straightforward sweet-and-sour chicken or pork, which is to say something little like you’re served at home, being large pieces of meat only lightly dusted with flour, fried until crispy, and served with a light, usually darker red sauce. Nothing you need sunglasses to look at, and with a subtle flavour.
Several other restaurants also seemed to be serving tripe, and the rest snails, clearly marketed as a local delicacy. But I eventually came across a rather bare-bones Chuan cai (Sichuan) restaurant, and entered knowing this would be a mistake. Unless in one of the larger cities, always eat the local dishes. In Guangzhou you may order Chuan cai, but you’ll be lucky if it has any heat at all. On the other hand order Yue cai when you’re in Sichuan province and expect it to be spicy.
It was inauthentic, but edible.
I strolled around the brightly lit pedestrianised area of older building, all very much tidied up since my last visit, finding a ‘European’ restaurant that seemed to have nothing familiar on its menu, and admiring other premises on the ground floors of the equally ‘European’ residential blocks, although many ‘restored’ to within an inch of their lives. Many other people were also out for an evening stroll.
But I also came across one old building that had been converted into a smart hotel, and that turned out to only have opened two months earlier.
A pleasant-smelling pale wood room, with modern bathroom, and electronic everything in the by now seemingly commonplace way, in a hotel hoping for four stars eventually, and only a few kuai more expensive than the place I was in. Full that evening (they were very apologetic) but with rooms opening up the next day (Sunday) as the weekend holidaymakers departed.
The West River (Xi He) is heavily bunded, a process started by the original foreign residents but now toweringly concrete, and there were markers indicating flood levels of astonishing height, well above the riverside walkways at any level.
The broad river, which oozes along rather than flowing (there are no rivers in China fit for swimming, let alone drinking), had lines of long black barges of considerable size constantly chugging in each direction, which had been the case on every previous visit. There was still a pagoda atop a hill on the opposite bank, and altogether the view remained appealing.
I crossed the bridge over the Gui, walked round the base of Zhu Shan to the find stairs up, and climbed through parkland to reach the former consulate, a low brick building matching in style other former consulates across China, and still furnished more or less in the style of the time, with three or four rooms open to visitors. It was all very Victorian (although Wuzhou became a treaty port in 1897, this building dates from 1903, two years after Victoria’s death), with what looked like the original floor tiles still in place, although the dark-red shutters now stood out amid improbably mustard-yellow walls of the surrounding verandah.
There were lots of influencers having themselves photographed in front of it, and in front of a squat pagoda opposite which long pre-dated the consulate, and looked as if it had been rebuilt many times.
Nearby, a former Bible teaching college of the same period rather dwarfed the consulate, and there were other buildings originally belonging to the Imperial Customs, which was run by foreigners for the benefit of the court, and later the Republic, and which brought in a lot more revenue than when it had been left to corrupt domestic officials. But beyond that the town’s museum had several items worth looking at.
I took a meandering route back over a different bridges, found some lunch, and then, moved hotels. In Wuzhou, check-out time was 2pm.
Having discovered from the new hotel reception that the agreed price for the run to Wuzhou Nan station was ¥40, I attempted to find a taxi to take me there to buy my ticket, as I’d now decided to stay just a couple more nights, and then move on. But there were no taxis to be found.
So I caught the same bus back, ambling along and then across the river, and through new suburbs back to the station in 45 minutes.
Finding a ride back into town was much easier, although drivers thought they’d ask for ¥50. I paid ¥40. Knowledge is everything.
Are you here working? asked the driver.
Just visiting.
I thought you were a professor, he said.
Er.. Why?
Because you’re carrying a book.
Such are the times in which we live, world-wide.
I did very little the next day except go for a long walk along the river, and spend time catching up with some work in one of those teahouses that produces brews involving fruit and other odd ingredients, a chilled one of which was actually quite refreshing, although again the price of a one-bowl meal.
Leaving the next morning, the hotel reception, which had consistently enquired after my well-being and what I had been up to, thought I’d find a cab on Zhongshan Lu where the bus had dropped me when I originally arrived.
As mentioned in my first post, I found a Didi Dache driver there, who was happy to take me for the agreed price.
Wuzhou Nan is sufficiently far out, and with not a vast amount of passengers, so there isn’t much there in the way of food. But I had fruit and pastries bought in town, and the journey to Zhuhai was not a long one.
Not much more of this rambling now.
Macau
There’s now a gaotie station right on the border of the once walled-off former Portuguese enclave, and which is effectively Macau’s own railway station. The Chinese system as a whole does well with offering English as well as Chinese signage, and it might be expected that it would be even better at what is still maintained as an international border, Chinese also having to go through ID inspections, security checks, and customs.
But on the platform at Zhuhai Station there was no signage to say which exit to take, and nothing at ground level, either. I had to ask directions and began a long walk along the station’s frontage with nothing in sight. Eventually I did see Chinese signs saying ‘To Macau’ (Aomen 澳门 in Chinese) which led back through the station’s ground-floor shopping, along an improbably narrow alley and up an escalator, although there was finally a sign in English to confirm this was the right route.
I proceeded down long passages, through security checks, and finally, several minutes and a long walk later, to the immigration counters, only to be told that this particular crossing was not for foreigners. Go back along the passage, and up those stairs (no lift or escalator).
It’s not far, said the official.
It turned out to be a long walk which somehow managed to take me through security checks twice more, and I ended up in the shopping area I’d been in before, the signage once again petering out. So I asked in a shop, and was pointed towards a large open area, where eventually I caught sight of a sign saying Aomen, but pointing away from the border.
I went to check at at police post, but there was no one there, and eventually made for one of several line-ups that eventually disappeared into a warren of metal fencing. I asked someone who appeared to be supervising which was the line for foreigners, and received a pitying reply.
Just take any one.
Through that process a border building was finally approached with signs pointing to passages at right and left. But everyone was going right. Through security again, down a further warren of passages and finally to a long row of immigrations counters, but they all seemed to be automatic and incapable of scanning foreign passports. I encountered a young Russian couple, resident in Shanghai and down for a few days’ break, the woman’s face a picture of perplexity.
Your face, I said, looks like what’s happening inside my head, and she laughed.
We saw a counter across the crowds and were now waved off in the opposite direction to the one in which we'd been sent before, to the far end of the hall, where eventually we found a previously un-signposted line for non-Chinese non-residents. It wasn’t too long, and eventually we were through.
The Macau border has always been chaos, but it now seems worse than ever, with the large volumes making the crossing.
By this time I just wanted to get to my hotel, which, a rare move, I’d actually booked in advance, having spotted a special offer and made comparisons across different sites in different languages. So having changed my remaining ¥RMB into Macau patacas in some passage during the crossing (the rate was bad, of course, and you should never change in these places, but I’d seen no earlier options for exchange and I did want some cash to get me away from the border) I simply got in a taxi. This was effectively the West, with rules that had to be obeyed at least most of the time. The meter was started and I was taken straight there.
The driver was actually Macanese, but spoke Mandarin (Cantonese is the norm here and in Hong Kong) and lamented the changes, and particularly the state of the economy, but he was prepared to live with it all.
The girls-and-gambling enclave of Macau, long belonging to financially far weaker Portugal, served by frequent fast ferries—hydrofoils then catamarans—and helicopters, a short trip across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, has long been the weekend break destination for dissipated Hong Kong people keen on pleasures forbidden at home by a more straight-laced British administration.
In the 80s and early 90s, when I was first there, it was like a little piece of Mediterranean coastline that had somehow got lost, and to a welcome degree much cheaper than Hong Kong. It was possible to have a romantic weekend in an ancient pousada with creaky shutters and bougainvillea at the windows. The two outer islands could be reached intermittently by rickety local buses to small and sleepy villages still entirely engrossed in fishing and agriculture.
The old town of low-rise European buildings with Portuguese overtones was dominated by one of the most hideous buildings ever constructed, the Lisboa Hotel, a concrete wedding cake of a place in yellow and white, famous not only for its casino but for a circular indoor walkway around its perimeter ceaselessly circled by smartly dressed and leggy mainland prostitutes, who would hiss ‘Qu?’ at anyone who showed interest (Go?—as in go with me to a room upstairs, for the right price?) But visible foreigners were largely ignored, and this parade was something of a tourist attraction in its own right.
Unlike in Hong Kong, where the British lease on most of the territory was due to expire in 1997, Portugal owned all of Macau in perpetuity, but it tried to hand it back after Portugal's dictatorship was overthrown and democracy installed in 1974, and as part of a general programme of decolonisation.
Mao was having none of it.
The handover eventually took place in 1999, two years after that of Hong Kong, the residents having long recognised that this was inevitable, and making little protest. But major changes began even before that date, with land reclamation and massive construction in the Inner Harbour, later accompanied by new bridges, an airport, and the filling in of the gap between the two islands, gradually filled with casino hotels belonging to major names from Las Vegas and from the Asia luxury hotels, the monopoly held by one Macanese magnate having come to an end (although he responded by constructing the Grand Lisboa next to the original, a vast glass and steel tower in the shape of a giant lotus, and a new strong contender for the title of world’s most hideous building).
There were no more minor backstreet casinos still offering local gambling games like fantan, in which bets are placed on whether the number of buttons remaining in a sub-set drawn from a larger pile, when those are whittled down in groups of four, would be none, one, two, or three. This was working man’s gambling, free of the glitz. Overall the enclave lost much of its seedy charm, with ferry services now principally running to the shiny new casino area of Cotai, which became the new centre of gravity.
When Deng Xiaoping was seeking to reassure rattled residents of Hong Kong at the time of the signing of the handover agreement with the British, he said they would have ‘the same [horse]racing; the same dancing’. And this, at least, turned out to be true, although nothing else promised to Hong Kong did. In Macau the licensed brothels and casinos continued to operate although such things were banned in the rest of China.
I thought that for what might be my last ever visit I’d stay somewhere grotesque and in tune with the sub-tropical Vegas aspect of the enclave, and found a room for a decent price at the five-star Grand Emperor—not as sprawlingly grotesque as the Grand Lisboa, and more traditional, but with interiors to the taste of Trump, all white, gilt, gold paint, giant mirrors, and fake crystal. Shimmer, shimmer; bling, bling. But the room was large and comfortable with a marble bathroom in the traditional way, and handy for walking away from the glitz and into the hilly warren of the old town that remained. The Internet worked without the need for a VPN.
There was a famous brothel on the 10th floor, but no sign of its influence anywhere else, the lobby typically busy with matronly mainland tour groups, which certainly suggested a lower price point available, and a general state of decline for a place that clearly thought itself more for the high rollers.
I’d seen all Macau’s many sights many times on leisure and work trips, so for two days I did nothing more than treat myself to proper Western breakfasts, and stroll the winding narrow streets looking into little boutiques and cafés, eating dan ta (egg tarts, which originated here at least in their Asian form) at the backstreet bakery supposedly producing the best (Margaret's Café e Nata). The tarts were piping hot, with wonderfully flaky and crumbly casings and rich vanilla-infused egg fillings.
I found lesser-known backstreet churches, and enjoyed all the signage in Chinese and Portuguese, which still seemed wonderfully exotic. I came across no one able to speak Portuguese, and there’d been a revolution at ground level in which there was now a preference, including at the Grand Emperor’s reception desk, for speaking Mandarin rather than English.
Many service-level jobs were taken by people from the Philippines or elsewhere in Asia.
There were still very few other visible foreigners about, and a general air of stagnation. Macau is now quite expensive, and Hong Kong people can now cross the border to the mainland’s Shenzhen with ease, and pay higher prices than in the rest of the mainland but still significantly less of those and China. There are direct services on Hong Kong’s MTR metro system. There are those who go shopping there, go nightclubbing, or just go for a haircut.
And all this business is lost to Macau, which now looks instead north to mainlanders who come in large numbers to find the foreign without the long flight, and all the electronics, jewellery, fashions, etc. they also go to Hong Kong for, because such imported luxuries are still cheaper in the two Special Administrative Regions, and they can be sure of finding the genuine articles rather then fakes.
Forgetting I was now somewhere reasonably normal, I asked at reception where to buy ferry tickets, and was met with puzzlement. Just book on-line. And, of course, in Hong Kong and Macau the websites are in English, foreign credit cards are accepted, and while not without hiccups, everything works. I noticed though, that while after the construction of the Cotai Strip, the newly reclaimed land between the islands of Coloane and Taipa where most of the new casinos were built, ferry services from Hong Kong were re-routed to predominantly service a new dock there, now they were mostly back serving the Inner Harbour at the old town, further suggesting a collapse in business.
I did make a point of having dinner at the Clube Militar, a Portuguese club in a building dating back to the late 19th century, with a solid charm, and where on Sundays you can find the remnants of the Portuguese community at lunch.
I don’t particularly care for Portuguese food, but this is a favourite spot, with its snowy linen, and an excellent African Chicken, to be washed down with a glass of crisp vinho verde.
Needless to say, the African Chicken, to which I'd been looking forward, was off the menu.
But I made do with a chicken with almonds, followed by a chocolate tart.
To reach Hong Kong I considered taking the very long bridge crossing the Pearl River Delta, that now connects it with Macau and Zhuhai. Entertainingly, as you exit Macau territory, buses switch from driving on the left to driving on the right, just for the crossing. But then switch back to the left again as Hong Kong is reached, an utterly pointless exercise.
But taking the bus involves hauling the luggage off to pass through customs, so, feeling thoroughly relaxed after a couple of days of doing very little, and that gently, I boarded a high-speed catamaran. I'd arrived sufficiently early to allow for emigration and customs procedures that took only moments, and so was ushered onto a earlier service that left almost immediately, weaving through myriad islands to the terminal at Shun Tak on Hong Kong Island.
There were hundreds of empty seats.
Macau
There’s now a gaotie station right on the border of the once walled-off former Portuguese enclave, and which is effectively Macau’s own railway station. The Chinese system as a whole does well with offering English as well as Chinese signage, and it might be expected that it would be even better at what is still maintained as an international border, Chinese also having to go through ID inspections, security checks, and customs.
But on the platform at Zhuhai Station there was no signage to say which exit to take, and nothing at ground level, either. I had to ask directions and began a long walk along the station’s frontage with nothing in sight. Eventually I did see Chinese signs saying ‘To Macau’ (Aomen 澳门 in Chinese) which led back through the station’s ground-floor shopping, along an improbably narrow alley and up an escalator, although there was finally a sign in English to confirm this was the right route.
I proceeded down long passages, through security checks, and finally, several minutes and a long walk later, to the immigration counters, only to be told that this particular crossing was not for foreigners. Go back along the passage, and up those stairs (no lift or escalator).
It’s not far, said the official.
It turned out to be a long walk which somehow managed to take me through security checks twice more, and I ended up in the shopping area I’d been in before, the signage once again petering out. So I asked in a shop, and was pointed towards a large open area, where eventually I caught sight of a sign saying Aomen, but pointing away from the border.
I went to check at at police post, but there was no one there, and eventually made for one of several line-ups that eventually disappeared into a warren of metal fencing. I asked someone who appeared to be supervising which was the line for foreigners, and received a pitying reply.
Just take any one.
Through that process a border building was finally approached with signs pointing to passages at right and left. But everyone was going right. Through security again, down a further warren of passages and finally to a long row of immigrations counters, but they all seemed to be automatic and incapable of scanning foreign passports. I encountered a young Russian couple, resident in Shanghai and down for a few days’ break, the woman’s face a picture of perplexity.
Your face, I said, looks like what’s happening inside my head, and she laughed.
We saw a counter across the crowds and were now waved off in the opposite direction to the one in which we'd been sent before, to the far end of the hall, where eventually we found a previously un-signposted line for non-Chinese non-residents. It wasn’t too long, and eventually we were through.
The Macau border has always been chaos, but it now seems worse than ever, with the large volumes making the crossing.
By this time I just wanted to get to my hotel, which, a rare move, I’d actually booked in advance, having spotted a special offer and made comparisons across different sites in different languages. So having changed my remaining ¥RMB into Macau patacas in some passage during the crossing (the rate was bad, of course, and you should never change in these places, but I’d seen no earlier options for exchange and I did want some cash to get me away from the border) I simply got in a taxi. This was effectively the West, with rules that had to be obeyed at least most of the time. The meter was started and I was taken straight there.
The driver was actually Macanese, but spoke Mandarin (Cantonese is the norm here and in Hong Kong) and lamented the changes, and particularly the state of the economy, but he was prepared to live with it all.
The girls-and-gambling enclave of Macau, long belonging to financially far weaker Portugal, served by frequent fast ferries—hydrofoils then catamarans—and helicopters, a short trip across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, has long been the weekend break destination for dissipated Hong Kong people keen on pleasures forbidden at home by a more straight-laced British administration.
In the 80s and early 90s, when I was first there, it was like a little piece of Mediterranean coastline that had somehow got lost, and to a welcome degree much cheaper than Hong Kong. It was possible to have a romantic weekend in an ancient pousada with creaky shutters and bougainvillea at the windows. The two outer islands could be reached intermittently by rickety local buses to small and sleepy villages still entirely engrossed in fishing and agriculture.
The old town of low-rise European buildings with Portuguese overtones was dominated by one of the most hideous buildings ever constructed, the Lisboa Hotel, a concrete wedding cake of a place in yellow and white, famous not only for its casino but for a circular indoor walkway around its perimeter ceaselessly circled by smartly dressed and leggy mainland prostitutes, who would hiss ‘Qu?’ at anyone who showed interest (Go?—as in go with me to a room upstairs, for the right price?) But visible foreigners were largely ignored, and this parade was something of a tourist attraction in its own right.
Unlike in Hong Kong, where the British lease on most of the territory was due to expire in 1997, Portugal owned all of Macau in perpetuity, but it tried to hand it back after Portugal's dictatorship was overthrown and democracy installed in 1974, and as part of a general programme of decolonisation.
Mao was having none of it.
The handover eventually took place in 1999, two years after that of Hong Kong, the residents having long recognised that this was inevitable, and making little protest. But major changes began even before that date, with land reclamation and massive construction in the Inner Harbour, later accompanied by new bridges, an airport, and the filling in of the gap between the two islands, gradually filled with casino hotels belonging to major names from Las Vegas and from the Asia luxury hotels, the monopoly held by one Macanese magnate having come to an end (although he responded by constructing the Grand Lisboa next to the original, a vast glass and steel tower in the shape of a giant lotus, and a new strong contender for the title of world’s most hideous building).
There were no more minor backstreet casinos still offering local gambling games like fantan, in which bets are placed on whether the number of buttons remaining in a sub-set drawn from a larger pile, when those are whittled down in groups of four, would be none, one, two, or three. This was working man’s gambling, free of the glitz. Overall the enclave lost much of its seedy charm, with ferry services now principally running to the shiny new casino area of Cotai, which became the new centre of gravity.
When Deng Xiaoping was seeking to reassure rattled residents of Hong Kong at the time of the signing of the handover agreement with the British, he said they would have ‘the same [horse]racing; the same dancing’. And this, at least, turned out to be true, although nothing else promised to Hong Kong did. In Macau the licensed brothels and casinos continued to operate although such things were banned in the rest of China.
I thought that for what might be my last ever visit I’d stay somewhere grotesque and in tune with the sub-tropical Vegas aspect of the enclave, and found a room for a decent price at the five-star Grand Emperor—not as sprawlingly grotesque as the Grand Lisboa, and more traditional, but with interiors to the taste of Trump, all white, gilt, gold paint, giant mirrors, and fake crystal. Shimmer, shimmer; bling, bling. But the room was large and comfortable with a marble bathroom in the traditional way, and handy for walking away from the glitz and into the hilly warren of the old town that remained. The Internet worked without the need for a VPN.
There was a famous brothel on the 10th floor, but no sign of its influence anywhere else, the lobby typically busy with matronly mainland tour groups, which certainly suggested a lower price point available, and a general state of decline for a place that clearly thought itself more for the high rollers.
I’d seen all Macau’s many sights many times on leisure and work trips, so for two days I did nothing more than treat myself to proper Western breakfasts, and stroll the winding narrow streets looking into little boutiques and cafés, eating dan ta (egg tarts, which originated here at least in their Asian form) at the backstreet bakery supposedly producing the best (Margaret's Café e Nata). The tarts were piping hot, with wonderfully flaky and crumbly casings and rich vanilla-infused egg fillings.
I found lesser-known backstreet churches, and enjoyed all the signage in Chinese and Portuguese, which still seemed wonderfully exotic. I came across no one able to speak Portuguese, and there’d been a revolution at ground level in which there was now a preference, including at the Grand Emperor’s reception desk, for speaking Mandarin rather than English.
Many service-level jobs were taken by people from the Philippines or elsewhere in Asia.
There were still very few other visible foreigners about, and a general air of stagnation. Macau is now quite expensive, and Hong Kong people can now cross the border to the mainland’s Shenzhen with ease, and pay higher prices than in the rest of the mainland but still significantly less of those and China. There are direct services on Hong Kong’s MTR metro system. There are those who go shopping there, go nightclubbing, or just go for a haircut.
And all this business is lost to Macau, which now looks instead north to mainlanders who come in large numbers to find the foreign without the long flight, and all the electronics, jewellery, fashions, etc. they also go to Hong Kong for, because such imported luxuries are still cheaper in the two Special Administrative Regions, and they can be sure of finding the genuine articles rather then fakes.
Forgetting I was now somewhere reasonably normal, I asked at reception where to buy ferry tickets, and was met with puzzlement. Just book on-line. And, of course, in Hong Kong and Macau the websites are in English, foreign credit cards are accepted, and while not without hiccups, everything works. I noticed though, that while after the construction of the Cotai Strip, the newly reclaimed land between the islands of Coloane and Taipa where most of the new casinos were built, ferry services from Hong Kong were re-routed to predominantly service a new dock there, now they were mostly back serving the Inner Harbour at the old town, further suggesting a collapse in business.
I did make a point of having dinner at the Clube Militar, a Portuguese club in a building dating back to the late 19th century, with a solid charm, and where on Sundays you can find the remnants of the Portuguese community at lunch.
I don’t particularly care for Portuguese food, but this is a favourite spot, with its snowy linen, and an excellent African Chicken, to be washed down with a glass of crisp vinho verde.
Needless to say, the African Chicken, to which I'd been looking forward, was off the menu.
But I made do with a chicken with almonds, followed by a chocolate tart.
To reach Hong Kong I considered taking the very long bridge crossing the Pearl River Delta, that now connects it with Macau and Zhuhai. Entertainingly, as you exit Macau territory, buses switch from driving on the left to driving on the right, just for the crossing. But then switch back to the left again as Hong Kong is reached, an utterly pointless exercise.
But taking the bus involves hauling the luggage off to pass through customs, so, feeling thoroughly relaxed after a couple of days of doing very little, and that gently, I boarded a high-speed catamaran. I'd arrived sufficiently early to allow for emigration and customs procedures that took only moments, and so was ushered onto a earlier service that left almost immediately, weaving through myriad islands to the terminal at Shun Tak on Hong Kong Island.
There were hundreds of empty seats.
Finally…
Hong Kong
I first visited Hong Kong in 1988, and have been more than 40 times since then, mostly for work. I also lived there for a few months in 2000.
As I reported at length for the Sunday Times back in 1998, one year after the handover, for the visitor there was no apparent change at all. Some coats of arms had come down from buildings. The red pillar boxes had been painted green. But life seemed to go on as normal.
Despite the repression of recent years this remains true, although there’s more to see with the addition of the museums in West Kowloon, for instance. There’s been more land reclamation along the north shore of Hong Kong Island which some complain has made the waters of Victoria Harbour more choppy, and the historic Star Ferry terminal on the island side has been torn down with the ferries redirected much less conveniently further west.
The site of Hong Kong’s original international airport at Kai Tak has been redeveloped. There are more MTR (metro) lines, which stretch all the way across the border to Shenzhen now, and there’s a gaotie station with trains that will take you all the way to Beijing in daylight, rather than the 24 hours it used to take. The construction of the very long bridge to Zhuhai and Macau is part of making the Pearl River Delta (with three competing airports) into a single giant manufacturing and distribution area.
To speak Mandarin in shops once earned you a sneer, but mainland Chinese are now everywhere, and Hong Kong’s always sharp commercial instincts were already adapting in the run-up to 1997. Now while Cantonese remains the language of choice, Mandarin can be widely used. As well as English, of course, although some say that Hong Kong's younger generation is now less adept than its forebears.
'How can we remain in international city?' one resident asked me, although whether the authorities' forced changes to public education, removing non-patriotic ideas from the classroom (anything that questions the official narrative), has played any part in this was unclear.
There are still foreigners of all sorts and conditions absolutely everywhere, as visitors, workers, and expats.
Again I found that my Octopus stored-value card had loads of credit, and there was no need to top-up while I was there. In fact I also used it for some shopping, as can be done. For those unfamiliar, Hong Kong still operates with its own currency, the Hong Kong dollar, which is tightly linked to the US dollar in value. There are bank machines everywhere (ATMs) that take just about any card ever invented, and your foreign credit card is also accepted absolutely everywhere. The Hong Kong visa regime remains entirely separate from that of the mainland, and most visitors from developed nations require no visa in advance at all.
My main purpose was to see just about the last remaining friend I have there, the rest having left, and to indulge in a bit of nostalgia for much better times past. So I’m not going to be much use as a tour guide. But all the original sights for which Hong Kong is famous are still there.
I found that there were very few rooms available, and that my usual haunts (when not working) were all full. So I reluctantly booked a Best Western in the Causeway Bay area, which alarmingly had some sort of special offer when all others seemed to be too busy to need any promotional activity. I loathe Best Western everywhere, although this building lacked the standard North American blandness, but had classic Hong Kong elements: tiny lifts, tiny rooms, and an attempt to make the claustrophobia-inducing glamorous with the use of shiny mosaics and chandeliers, empty picture frames, etc. Easily the worst value for money I had on this trip.
There were so few guests that the breakfast buffet was suspended, and the staff very eager for me to order à la carte (for a fixed price). Probably had I been patient and just showed up at my usual hotels, I would have got in. Gone are the days when it was standard for me to have a double-corner suite at The Peninsula, sadly.
In town every available space was covered in posters advertising participation in the forthcoming ‘election’. The authorities having made it unpatriotic and therefore illegal to disagree with them, the only candidates standing were Beijing-approved. So their need was to get a decent turn-out to show that the people of Hong Kong also approved of having their civil liberties curtailed and how they were being governed. For this the authorities offered assorted incentives.
(In the end the turn-out was pathetic, only a tiny percentage more than at the previous election, and numerically fewer. A big thumbs down. Foreign journalists were summoned—something commonplace in the mainland but a first for Hong Kong—and threatened if they reported that the low turn-out had anything to do with the authorities’ lacklustre yet thoroughly authoritarian response to the fires. Which meant, of course, that even those who hadn’t made a connection now saw that there might be one, although the turn-out was aways going to be poor anyway.)
One day we drove north to the border with the mainland—like that of Macau still operating as if an international one, although increasingly porous for Hong Kong people and mainland Chinese alike.
Hong Kong’s greenness is as aspect of the enclave that's often overlooked, although it has a number of excellent long-distance walks across the New Territories and various outlying islands, and much empty space, some of it populated by wild cows. The concrete paths have an air of 1960s British civic worthiness, but everything is lush and green, and in this case there were pretty views across water to mainland developments.
The route north passed the burned-out shells of the towers at Tai Po, a dismaying sight, whose flames had only been doused the previous day or the day before. Turn-offs to that area were blocked by police cars, and there were large coaches with black-out windows. Suppressing any form of public demonstration was more important than anything else.
I took an MTR round to the south side of Hong Kong Island to Horizon Plaza, a 2o-something-story tower of outlet stores, and where it had long been possible to pick up Paul Smith or Vivienne Westwood for low prices. The usual way is to take a lift to the top floor, although that is all traditional Chinese furniture, and then walk down, do a loop, and walk down again.
But about half the spaces now seemed shut or shuttered, and some of those that were open seemed to have stock little different to that of my last visit, about 18 months earlier. Economically things are not great in Hong Kong, and many spoke of the exodus of those taking up Boris Johnson’s offer of easier access to permanent residence in the UK—one of the very few decent things that tousle-headed buffoon did while in office.
I’d certainly recommend taking ferries to outlying islands for coastal walks and seafood fresh from the water, as well as a ride up to the Peak for the views, and visits to some excellent art museums, although I did little of this. I did wander the streets of Causeway Bay and still rather raucous Wan Chai.
And I did spend the best part of the day at the new Palace Museum, about the only thing open on a Monday, and in addition to the displays of items from the Forbidden City (how’s that for bookending a tour?) to a mostly much higher standard than can be found in Beijing, there was an exhibition of Mughal treasures, another of Chinese silk fabrics of all eras and from all parts of the country, and a major one of Egyptian treasures, which was heavily attended. I spent the best part of a day there.
The M+ museum of Chinese 20th century and contemporary art (a Herzog and de Meuron building) nearby is also worth your time, especially the Sigg collection that forms most of the museums’ holdings.
We lunched at the Yacht Club one day (which is still the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, although you wonder how much longer that will be permitted—is it unpatriotic?) and again drove to Kowloon and beyond and took a narrow winding and often one-way route to the top of hills overlooking the forest of towers, like bristles on a brush, and then continued to a high point overlooking the harbour as the sun set.
It’s a crassly obvious remark, but the sun has certainly set on Hong Kong, although the experience for the visitor remains much the same.
Hong Kong
I first visited Hong Kong in 1988, and have been more than 40 times since then, mostly for work. I also lived there for a few months in 2000.
As I reported at length for the Sunday Times back in 1998, one year after the handover, for the visitor there was no apparent change at all. Some coats of arms had come down from buildings. The red pillar boxes had been painted green. But life seemed to go on as normal.
Despite the repression of recent years this remains true, although there’s more to see with the addition of the museums in West Kowloon, for instance. There’s been more land reclamation along the north shore of Hong Kong Island which some complain has made the waters of Victoria Harbour more choppy, and the historic Star Ferry terminal on the island side has been torn down with the ferries redirected much less conveniently further west.
The site of Hong Kong’s original international airport at Kai Tak has been redeveloped. There are more MTR (metro) lines, which stretch all the way across the border to Shenzhen now, and there’s a gaotie station with trains that will take you all the way to Beijing in daylight, rather than the 24 hours it used to take. The construction of the very long bridge to Zhuhai and Macau is part of making the Pearl River Delta (with three competing airports) into a single giant manufacturing and distribution area.
To speak Mandarin in shops once earned you a sneer, but mainland Chinese are now everywhere, and Hong Kong’s always sharp commercial instincts were already adapting in the run-up to 1997. Now while Cantonese remains the language of choice, Mandarin can be widely used. As well as English, of course, although some say that Hong Kong's younger generation is now less adept than its forebears.
'How can we remain in international city?' one resident asked me, although whether the authorities' forced changes to public education, removing non-patriotic ideas from the classroom (anything that questions the official narrative), has played any part in this was unclear.
There are still foreigners of all sorts and conditions absolutely everywhere, as visitors, workers, and expats.
Again I found that my Octopus stored-value card had loads of credit, and there was no need to top-up while I was there. In fact I also used it for some shopping, as can be done. For those unfamiliar, Hong Kong still operates with its own currency, the Hong Kong dollar, which is tightly linked to the US dollar in value. There are bank machines everywhere (ATMs) that take just about any card ever invented, and your foreign credit card is also accepted absolutely everywhere. The Hong Kong visa regime remains entirely separate from that of the mainland, and most visitors from developed nations require no visa in advance at all.
My main purpose was to see just about the last remaining friend I have there, the rest having left, and to indulge in a bit of nostalgia for much better times past. So I’m not going to be much use as a tour guide. But all the original sights for which Hong Kong is famous are still there.
I found that there were very few rooms available, and that my usual haunts (when not working) were all full. So I reluctantly booked a Best Western in the Causeway Bay area, which alarmingly had some sort of special offer when all others seemed to be too busy to need any promotional activity. I loathe Best Western everywhere, although this building lacked the standard North American blandness, but had classic Hong Kong elements: tiny lifts, tiny rooms, and an attempt to make the claustrophobia-inducing glamorous with the use of shiny mosaics and chandeliers, empty picture frames, etc. Easily the worst value for money I had on this trip.
There were so few guests that the breakfast buffet was suspended, and the staff very eager for me to order à la carte (for a fixed price). Probably had I been patient and just showed up at my usual hotels, I would have got in. Gone are the days when it was standard for me to have a double-corner suite at The Peninsula, sadly.
In town every available space was covered in posters advertising participation in the forthcoming ‘election’. The authorities having made it unpatriotic and therefore illegal to disagree with them, the only candidates standing were Beijing-approved. So their need was to get a decent turn-out to show that the people of Hong Kong also approved of having their civil liberties curtailed and how they were being governed. For this the authorities offered assorted incentives.
(In the end the turn-out was pathetic, only a tiny percentage more than at the previous election, and numerically fewer. A big thumbs down. Foreign journalists were summoned—something commonplace in the mainland but a first for Hong Kong—and threatened if they reported that the low turn-out had anything to do with the authorities’ lacklustre yet thoroughly authoritarian response to the fires. Which meant, of course, that even those who hadn’t made a connection now saw that there might be one, although the turn-out was aways going to be poor anyway.)
One day we drove north to the border with the mainland—like that of Macau still operating as if an international one, although increasingly porous for Hong Kong people and mainland Chinese alike.
Hong Kong’s greenness is as aspect of the enclave that's often overlooked, although it has a number of excellent long-distance walks across the New Territories and various outlying islands, and much empty space, some of it populated by wild cows. The concrete paths have an air of 1960s British civic worthiness, but everything is lush and green, and in this case there were pretty views across water to mainland developments.
The route north passed the burned-out shells of the towers at Tai Po, a dismaying sight, whose flames had only been doused the previous day or the day before. Turn-offs to that area were blocked by police cars, and there were large coaches with black-out windows. Suppressing any form of public demonstration was more important than anything else.
I took an MTR round to the south side of Hong Kong Island to Horizon Plaza, a 2o-something-story tower of outlet stores, and where it had long been possible to pick up Paul Smith or Vivienne Westwood for low prices. The usual way is to take a lift to the top floor, although that is all traditional Chinese furniture, and then walk down, do a loop, and walk down again.
But about half the spaces now seemed shut or shuttered, and some of those that were open seemed to have stock little different to that of my last visit, about 18 months earlier. Economically things are not great in Hong Kong, and many spoke of the exodus of those taking up Boris Johnson’s offer of easier access to permanent residence in the UK—one of the very few decent things that tousle-headed buffoon did while in office.
I’d certainly recommend taking ferries to outlying islands for coastal walks and seafood fresh from the water, as well as a ride up to the Peak for the views, and visits to some excellent art museums, although I did little of this. I did wander the streets of Causeway Bay and still rather raucous Wan Chai.
And I did spend the best part of the day at the new Palace Museum, about the only thing open on a Monday, and in addition to the displays of items from the Forbidden City (how’s that for bookending a tour?) to a mostly much higher standard than can be found in Beijing, there was an exhibition of Mughal treasures, another of Chinese silk fabrics of all eras and from all parts of the country, and a major one of Egyptian treasures, which was heavily attended. I spent the best part of a day there.
The M+ museum of Chinese 20th century and contemporary art (a Herzog and de Meuron building) nearby is also worth your time, especially the Sigg collection that forms most of the museums’ holdings.
We lunched at the Yacht Club one day (which is still the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, although you wonder how much longer that will be permitted—is it unpatriotic?) and again drove to Kowloon and beyond and took a narrow winding and often one-way route to the top of hills overlooking the forest of towers, like bristles on a brush, and then continued to a high point overlooking the harbour as the sun set.
It’s a crassly obvious remark, but the sun has certainly set on Hong Kong, although the experience for the visitor remains much the same.
What a fabulous write up. Thanks much for posting, really enjoyed your observations and it brought back some, still strong, memories of our trips in the 1980's.
If I may: trying to purchase tickets to the National Museum in Beijing, 1988, to see the terracotta warriors. Using various forms of sign language, they had me running back and forth across the entrance plaza to different booths. It's quite a large plaza, as you know. Finally, when I got back to the one where I started I made it clear I wasn't leaving until I got my ticket. That worked, but I'm sure they got a laugh out of watching me sprint.
Buying a plate of rice and veggies from a vendor, who was closing down for the day
He showed me an empty pot, and said, "Meo fan, meo fan".
I replied, "Bu yao fan".
He burst out laughing (who knew what I really said), and gave me a big plate of veggies.
Anyway, thanks again.
If I may: trying to purchase tickets to the National Museum in Beijing, 1988, to see the terracotta warriors. Using various forms of sign language, they had me running back and forth across the entrance plaza to different booths. It's quite a large plaza, as you know. Finally, when I got back to the one where I started I made it clear I wasn't leaving until I got my ticket. That worked, but I'm sure they got a laugh out of watching me sprint.
Buying a plate of rice and veggies from a vendor, who was closing down for the day
He showed me an empty pot, and said, "Meo fan, meo fan".
I replied, "Bu yao fan".
He burst out laughing (who knew what I really said), and gave me a big plate of veggies.
Anyway, thanks again.
Great update. It’s wild how unreliable Google Maps has become there; the "deliberate disinformation" feel is real. I’ve found that using an e-SIM to bypass the Great Firewall is the way to go for data.
That’s true. I wouldn’t recommend relying on a VPN, especially because most of the well-known ones don’t work properly in China.
