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China
has a lot on its delicately designed willow patterned plate just now.
This is a country in a frenzy of excitement with the start of the Olympic Games only days away. Everywhere there is evidence of work that has gone on ahead of the event - the building of
new airports, hundreds of miles of super new tree-lined highways, mushrooming skyscrapers – and the much talked about smog (not nearly as bad as we'd expected).
And while the thousands of special digital clocks count down the hours, the minutes and the seconds to the start of the Olympics on August 8, and while millions of Olympic baseball caps are paraded by excited Chinese on the streets, there are plenty of other things to occupy the minds of this vast country of 1.3 billion.
Not least is the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, and the continuing recovery operation after the recent earthquake, which killed 70,000 people, and the terrible floods, which resulted in the deaths of many others.
From all that's going on, it is obvious that
China
is hell bent on taking its place at the top table of world powers, and intent on not just catching up but overtaking the West on the military, commercial, financial and many other fronts in the shortest possible time.
The changes since we were last here in 1992 are amazing. Then the country was very slowly opening itself up to the outside world. Visitors were still regimented and their movements carefully monitored and controlled.
At that time the memory was still fresh of one brave student on Tiananman Square barring the way of a massive Chinese tank with its 100mm gun pointing at him and ready to blast him to oblivion.
Today Tiananmen Square is a happier place, with crowds of well dressed Chinese, some in designer clothes but none of the Chairman Mao smocks we saw before. As before, there are still crocodiles of well-behaved children in multi-colour peaked caps processing around it, now jostling with even more overseas visitors, all vieing for vantage points to picture each other posing in front of Chairman Mao’s giant picture on the front of the Forbidden City.
THE FORBIDDEN CITY: Home to 24
Emperors over 500 years.
Beijing
was the start of our journey. The first impression, apart from the burgeoning skyscrapers (there are now 36 five star hotels in this city alone), was the change on the roads. When we were last here, the roads were choked with bicycles, 10 or 20 abreast, some with two or even three passengers aboard.
Now the bicycles have largely disappeared and are replaced by cars (90% of them manufactured in
China
) speeding along six, eight and 10 lane highways, all enjoying the subsidised pleasure of driving on 50p a litre petrol. Surprisingly, perhaps because most of the vehicles are new, we only saw one lorry emitting any notable emissions.
Everything in
China
is, as it always has been, on a vast scale.
Tiananmen Square
was built to allow a crowd of a million to mass on this vast arena fringed by The Forbidden City, The Hall of the People and now the mausoleum housing the tomb of Chairman Mao.
The magnificent
Forbidden City
, dating from 1420, was home to 24 successive emperors who ruled as gods from here for almost 500 years until the 1920s, living in splendid isolation with wives, children, concubines, eunuchs and servants in their 9,999 rooms!
AWE INSPIRING: One of the vast squares
inside the Forbidden City.
Today
China
still does things on a big scale. For the Olympic Games, a huge amount of new building has taken place, with the Birdsnest stadium and Olympic Village dominant (but also very secure so it was not possible to get too near!).
The
Great Wall of China
is only a little over an hour’s drive from
Beijing. This 6,000 kilometre long structure is the only man-made thing on earth clearly visible from outer space, and today attracts tens of thousand of visitors to visit it, who delight in striding along its wide imposing causeway, perhaps imaging for a moment the approaching Mongolian hordes from the north.
The stretch of wall that we visited was quiet, exhilarating and almost sublime with its peaceful contours stretching away into the distance.
ON THE GREAT WALL
Not one marauding Mongol
or bothersome tourist
to be seen!
From here, it is only a couple of hours by air to
Xi’an
, once
China
’s capital and now best known for its terracotta army. The army of life-size figures was created around 2,200 years ago to provide protection in the afterlife for Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, and lay buried until its discovery by peasants digging a well in 1974 (we met one of them who now has a cozy job for life signing books at the Terracotta Army museum)!
Coming to
Xi’an
again was of particular interest to Pat. Her grandparents were missionaries in
China
, and worked in
Xi’an
long before the terracotta army was discovered. If only grandpa had dug a little deeper when tending his garden!
Unearthing the terracotta figures is an ongoing process. So far some 7,000 warriors, archers and horses have been recovered and pieced together again, but it is thought that a large number still wait to be unearthed. The Chinese do not hurry such things – this process will take many decades to complete.
ON PARADE AGAIN: Some of
the 7,000 life-size warriors.
SPECTACULAR VIEWS
The start of our journey through
spectacular countryside.
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ARMY ON PARADE: An overview of the
pit accommodating the Terracotta Army.
The first sight on entering the main hall where the terracotta army is on display is a breathtaking one. Here several thousand soldiers stand in serried ranks as if ready to march on any enemy.
It is only on closer inspection that one sees that some are headless, and a few are without arms, but for the most part they are intact and ready for action. At the rear of the hall there is a hospital pit where soldiers, archers and horses are in different stages of being restored ready to join those on the front line.
Another flight brought us to Chongqing in central
China.
Chongqing is a city with a population of 32 million (half the population of
Britain) but this is no cause for particular excitement or comment from the Chinese – many of their cities have 10 million plus inhabitants and are growing fast!
Chongqing
is a key port on the banks of the wide, fast flowing
Yangtze River
and was where we joined our cruise ship, which during the next five days would take us on through breathtaking gorges, misty mountains, bamboo groves and serene lagoons, with ancient tombs, temples and natural wonders dotting the shoreline.
We were, as it happened, the only English people on the boat and so had the added pleasure of getting to know a wide range of travellers from
Europe
,
America
and
Asia.
BYE-BYE BRIDGE: One of the hundreds
of bridges which must come down
as the water rises.
This stretch of The Three Gorges is also, of course, the site of the incredible and controversial Three Gorges Dam.
The project, now almost finished, is to complete a huge dam, fed by a reservoir 400 miles long, which has involved raising the river level by 575ft, and resettling over 1.5 million people who previous lived along the banks of the Yangtze and who have now been resettled in new houses in gleaming new cities (and in many cases
appeared very happy with their improved lifestyle).
Nearly 30,000 workers have been involved for 10 years on this huge project which, when completed in a few months time, will, hopefully, achieve three great aims – providing water for parched North China, providing some 20% of the country’s power needs, and preventing flooding to the lower reaches of the Yangtze, which has over the years caused the death of over a million people.
The only thing to mar this wonderful journey through the Gorges was seeing some floating debris, including a single pink child’s shoe, in the river. This had floated down in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake which had struck
Sichuan
Province some 200 kilometres to the west, a month before.
The final stop on our journey is Shanghai – also of great interest to Pat because her mother lived and worked here (in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank) in the Thirties, so there was a chance to visit some of her old haunts, although few survive because, for the most part, Shanghai is the epicentre of frenzied activity and change.
The Bund, the river-side line of vast colonial buildings (reflecting the power of the
British Empire and its influence at that time) remains, but on the other bank, where Pat’s mother picnicked in the thirties, and we wandered among run-down warehouses in the Nineties, the change has been extraordinary.
ON THE BUND: Pat on the famous Shanghai
Bund, lined by huge colonial buildings.
Today Pudong has been turned into a bustling area with over 100 skyscrapers and more going up every day, with over a third of the world’s heavy cranes at work in this small area. Yet everything is tastefully laid out with plenty of open spaces and trees everywhere. The soaring
Pearl
Tower
dominates the scene.
Shanghai
is the financial centre of the country, and is intent on taking over from
London
as the world’s leading financial centre by 2020.
The plethora of banks and financial institutions makes this dream seem a very real possibility.
Our journey was nearly over, but there was one last thrill. To get from downtown
Shanghai
to the vast new airport, whose terminals dwarf Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, we rode on The Maglev, the world’s fastest train, which reaches a speed of 430 km an hour and which covers the 30 kilometre journey in exactly seven minutes, 20 seconds.
The train and track, built at a staggering cost of $1.2billion, is based on an elevated electromagnetic levitation system that sees the train hovering minutely above the track, thus enabling it to travel at these huge speeds.
WORLD'S FASTEST: The
Maglev travels at 430km an hour.
This journey was rather like flying on land! The acceleration of the train pushes you back into your seat, and soon the speed dial tops 200, 300, 400 kilometres an hour, with the passing countryside just a blur, and the cars travelling on the adjacent high-speed roads appearing almost to be standing still.
But, despite all these amazing achievements, we must not forget that China still has a brutal regime with an appalling record of civil rights, an uncompromising line on Tibet, a supplier of arms to Darfur, one that vetoed applying sanctions against Mugabe’s despotic regime in Zimbabwe, and with all sorts of other contentious issues all bubbling away just below the surface.
The sadness is that even in the most populous nation on earth, its friendly, kindly and industrious people can do little or nothing to change these things.
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ONE FOR THE ALBUM: Richard and
Pat in the Gorges.
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