Tag Archives: China

Zhangjiajie, China

If you’ve watched the 2009 film ‘Avatar’ (you know, the one with the blue people) and marvelled at the spectacular otherworldly landscape of the alien planet then you’ll be interested to know that the landforms of Zhangjiajie National Park in Hunan province were the inspiration (although the pillars here don’t float in mid-air!). If you haven’t seen the film then you just need to know that this is some of the most incredible scenery we’ve ever seen.

Tianmen mountain

The hotel where we stayed is just around the corner from the cable car station to Tianmen Mountain. This is not technically a part of the National Park but it does offer some stunning views.

Tianmen mountain cable car station

The Tianmen mountain cable car is the longest in the world covering almost 7.5km and taking about 30 minutes to reach the summit

There was a steadily moving queue of tourists waiting to walk along the 60m section of the cliffside path which is floored with glass

Feeling brave standing on glass with 1,500m of thin air below us

Visitors tie red ribbons to trees to make a wish

Fantastic views from the Guigu cliffs at the eastern side of Tianmen mountain

There were lots of opportunities to dress in traditional costumes and have your photo taken with the view behind – for a fee obviously!

Most of the cliffside path is made from concrete. Our minds boggled at the engineering feat required to get all the concrete up the mountain and attached to the sheer cliff face.

Suspension bridge across a ravine and, in the background, the building at Yunmeng fairy peak

The view was just as beautiful from the western cliff and there were far fewer tourists on that section

Halfway back down the mountain we got off at the middle cablecar station and got into a shuttle bus for the drive up the road of 99 hairpin bends to the Tianmen Cave

Tianmen Cave is a huge opening through the mountain. We climbed the 999 steps to the top

The mountain is famous for a number of stunts attempted by daredevils. French climber Alain Robert who scaled the inside of the cave without ropes is commemorated by this bronze sculpture and a plaque. Other crazy people have tightrope walked up the cableway lines and flown through the cave in wingsuits!

Zhangjiajie National Park

If you can pronounce ‘Zhangjiajie’ such that a Chinese person will understand where you mean you’re doing much better than us. Every time we tried to explain to people we met afterwards where we had been we couldn’t make them understand and just ended up telling them that it was in Hunan Province… The karst scenery reminded us of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam although the pillars here are of sandstone not limestone, plus they’re a long way from the sea!

Our first day in the national park started with another cable car ride. The line up to the Huangshizhai area is much shorter than the Tianmen mountain one, but runs between the sandstone karsts and is breathtakingly beautiful

Enjoying the ride in the Huangshizhai cablecar

Another couple in our hotel who’d already visited advised us to take the clockwise path around the mountain top as the views get better – surely they couldn’t get much better than this?

The monkeys in Zhangjiajie National Park have learnt that visitors often carry their picnic in a carrier bag and will ambush and try to steal the contents of any carrier bag that they spot

The pine trees in Zhangjiajie are a variety of pinus massoniana and manage to grow in seemingly impossible places

We spotted this caterpillar on a fence post, I think he was returning from an appointment with the hairdresser!

Many of the viewing platforms were equipped with professional photographers who would take your family’s photograph in front of the scenery and supply an instant print or even a calendar

The views did indeed get even better the further we walked along the path

The final viewpoint before descending by cable car again is at Five Finger Peak

Signs around the park exhorting visitors not to smoke or litter read somewhat like Confucian aphorisms

After descending from Huangshizhai we took the path along the Golden Whip Stream which gave us neck aching views of some of the karsts from below

There was a large group of monkeys along the trail. We stopped to watch their antics for about 20 minutes

The sides of the Golden Whip Stream valley are dizzyingly high

There were lots of opportunities for sedan chair rides along the trail but it seems that there weren’t many customers as most of the carriers were asleep

On our second morning we made another early start but still had to wait for nearly 90 minutes in the queue for the Tianzi mountain cable car

These karsts are called the ‘Imperial Writing Brush Peaks’ presumably because of their narrow, pointed form

Local boy Marshal He Long was a military leader who supported Mao’s rise to power, he was named as one of the ‘Ten Marshals’ and is buried in this beautiful spot on the top of Tianzi mountain

A bird’s eye view of pine trees growing on the sandstone pillars

After a short bus ride we arrived at the Yuanjiajie area, one of the most heavily touristed areas in the park and for good reason

In this area there is a bridge of rock which formed naturally when the lower rocks fell away due to erosion and weathering

The mountain beyond the rock bridge has been designated as a lucky area to make a wish by attaching a padlock, the fence rails and even surrounding trees were covered with them

This is one of my favourite pictures showing the scale of the park: there is a viewing platform holding about 20 people on top of the cliff to the right of the picture – can you spot it?

This club-shaped karst has been renamed ‘Avatar Hallelujah Mountain’ in honour of the floating mountains in the ‘Avatar’ film

Naturally the viewing point in front of the ‘Avatar Hallelujah Mountain’ has a Mountain Banshee character model that you can pose with for a photograph!

Our final panoramic view of the Yuanjiajie trail

We arrived at Bailong Elevator just as it started to rain heavily which produced some atmospheric swirling clouds around it. The elevator itself is 330m high and attached to the side of the cliff. The walls of the elevator car are made of glass for vertiginous views as you descend!

Despite the high costs for park entrance fees and cable car tickets we thought that Zhangjiajie National Park was worth every penny. We had a tiring but unforgettable three days.

Wuhan, China

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Wuhan has been a major port on the Yangtze River for over 3000 years and has the layers of history which that suggests, from excavations of ancient tombs right through to the site of the 1911 Wuchang Uprising which sparked the nationwide Xinhai Revolution resulting in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and the formation of the Republic of China.

View over central Wuhan and the Yangtze River

We only spent a couple of days in the city, and we were pretty worn out from walking for miles around the sights of Nanjing so one of those days was spent recuperating and making the most of a stable and moderately fast internet connection to catch up with some blogging and photo backups. On our second day though we ventured out to see what the city had to offer.

Us with the Yellow Crane Tower

Our first stop was the Yellow Crane Tower, probably the most famous landmark in Wuhan. There has been a Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan since 223AD although the current structure dates only from 1981. There is an exhibit on each of the five floors of the tower, one of which had models of five of the historic towers.

Models of some of the tower’s incarnations

As we climbed, we found ourselves taking photos of the same view in each direction at progressively higher heights and enjoyed getting a closer look at the bright mustard yellow tiles. We could see construction work in the distance (a common sight in China), grass growing on apartment block rooftops below and several bridges spanning the huge Yangtze River.

Yellow tile details

View over Snake Hill Park including the bell pavilion, from the top floor of Yellow Crane Tower

After descending the stairs we wandered through the rest of the park, there is a huge ‘lucky’ bell which for a charge you could toll, a statue of Yue Fei who was a 12th century local military hero and a lovely garden with lawns which to me looked almost English until Andrew pointed out the numerous bonsai trees…

Snake Hill Park details (clockwise from top left): Lion topped fence post; statue of Yue Fei (complete with posing children); flowers in the garden; carved stone gate

City buses in China generally have no English signage though they are frequently the best way of getting from one sight to another. Fortunately we’d done some research on bus numbers and written down our stop names in Chinese so were able to navigate the system to our next destination, the Hubei Provincial Museum.

Hubei Provincial Museum

This huge and very modern museum displays mostly archaeological exhibits especially from this region of southern China. The highlight, and where we focussed our attention, was the exhibit on the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng which was excavated in 1978. It is the tomb of a feudal king buried 2400 years ago and incredibly, academics were able to date it by calculating when the observation of a chart of constellations decorating the lid of a trunk was made!

Inside the tomb were lots of intricately decorated food vessels, including this bronze lidded dou which would have been used to hold seasonings

Particularly noteworthy are the musical instruments, 125 pieces in total including drums, stringed instruments, panpipes and stone chimes as well as the centrepiece, the heaviest musical instrument in the world, a set of 64 bells weighing in at a massive 5000kg. According to the explanatory notice

Each bell is able to produce two tones. The whole set covers a range of five and a half octaves with twelve pitches and change of keys.

which sounds pretty impressive to me with my limited musical knowledge…

The set-bells take pride of place in the centre of the exhibition room

The highlight of the afternoon was attending one of the 20 minute performances of replicas of the instruments in the small on-site concert hall. Very professionally done and thoroughly enjoyable we wished it had been longer.

Set-bell concert performance

One of the pieces that we are sure we recognise but thus far have been unable to dredge the name of from our memories is this – if anyone can put us out of our misery we’d be very grateful!

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rBFb24E9kw]

[update: with many thanks to Clare who emailed to let us know that it’s Beethoven’s Ode to Joy]

Nanjing, China

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Nanjinglele - the official mascot of the 2014 Summer Youth Olympic Games, taking part in Nanjing during our visit

“Nanjinglele” – the official mascot of the 2014 Summer Youth Olympic Games which Nanjing was hosting during our visit

Nanjing first became the capital of China in 229 CE, indeed the ‘jing‘ (京) of Nanjing (南京) literally means “capital of a country” and ‘nan‘ (南) means “south” so if I tell you “bei” (北) means “north” you now know China has two capitals – in name at least!

For nearly 2000 years the capital moved back and forth between north and south, but it was Nanjing that witnessed the end of Chinese imperial rule and the troubled start of the current republican era with the birth of the Republic of China in January 1912, and then the People’s Republic of China in 1949, when the capital finally settled in Beijing.

Nanjing is a city rich in history, and the whole place is like a giant museum. Here begins the tour of the sights we visited, which I make no apologies for sounding like a chapter of a Chinese History textbook. It’s required reading people, and there will be a test at the end..

Purple Mountain, and Dr Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum

Nanjing’s Purple Mountain, a mass of hiking trails, entertainment and the tombs of both the Ming dynasty emperor and the first president and founding father of the Republic of China

The Purple Mountain, so called because its peaks are often enveloped in golden-purple clouds at dawn and dusk, sits to the east of the city and is a popular destination for locals and tourists alike.

Map of the main Purple Mountain hiking trails at the bottom. None of the named points on this map corresponded with the signposts further up the trail we followed. None

We found the Purple Mountain easy to get to but difficult to navigate once we got there. With the exception of the mausoleums and parks to the south, the signage on the mountain trails are only in Chinese. I hadn’t found a good map before we went, and I regretted not having made some translation notes when we tried asking for directions at one of the many intersections. My best charades for “mountain top” elicited only blank looks and a vague pointing in the direction we’d just ascended, so we decided to call an early end to our hike and head to Dr Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum.

Stairway to Dr Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum, Nanjing, China

View up the stairway to Dr Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum. Considered the founding father of modern China, he’s a very popular guy

Designed and completed within 4 years of his death in 1925, his mountainside mausoleum is magnificent. It reminded us of the imperial tombs of Hue in Vietnam, but while those were for emperors, Dr Sun Yat-sen was a revolutionary, a key figure in overthrowing the last emperor of the imperialist Qing dynasty, and was appointed the first Provisional President of the Republic of China in 1912.

The Italian marble statue of Dr Sun Yat-sen sits in the Sacrificial Hall at the top of the mountainside stairway. His sarcophagus lies in a hall behind the statue

It was well worth the climb to the hall at the top, and we were a little disappointed that we weren’t able to see his sarcophagus which rests in a bell-shaped room behind his statue.

Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

Entrance to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. A gloomy day foreshadowed our lesson in the worst of human behaviour

The period in Chinese history between the founding of the Republic of China (1912) and the People’s Republic of China (1949) was a very dark time for China as the Japanese Army, which had been poking at China with “incidents” here and there since the end of the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, disobeyed its own government and started the Second Sino-Japanese war of 1937-45. Japan quickly escalated and broadened the conflict by attacking the USA, bringing it and its allies from World War II to the Pacific War, which ended with the utter devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Once the Japanese imperial government got behind and reinforced the early successes of its bloodthirsty runaway army, they took Shanghai and then quickly took the capital Nanjing. What the conquering Japanese did in Nanjing explains a lot of the ill-feeling that still exists in China toward Japan to this day, and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall details what history recalls as the “Rape of Nanjing.”

One of the many graphic, large exhibition halls inside the museum

We found it to be a very well thought out museum. The exhibits are varied, the English captions and explanations are excellent and for the most part it’s neutrally factual in its description of the atrocities. It is, however, harrowingly unflinching. The photos of the killing fields and beheaded Chinese were difficult to see, especially one of a young boy caught with a monetary note in his pocket, tied to a lamppost and photographed just before he was executed.

Equally harrowing were the recently recorded first-hand accounts from the Japanese soldiers themselves talking about their actions during the war – one said of the gang-rape that every soldier took part, and those that denied it were liars.

Memorials to the victims, and the Peace Statue

The Chinese government estimates that approximately 300,000 civilians and unarmed Chinese soldiers were brutally slaughtered in the six weeks following the city’s capture.

Presidential Palace

Main gate of the Presidential Palace in Nanjing

The Presidential Palace site has been the seat of the southern Chinese power since the first emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). While the buildings have been destroyed and rebuilt in the style of the times over the years, it was here that the birth of the Republic of China took place and Dr Sun Yat-sen was elected Provisional President, albeit for a few short months before he resigned and power was transferred to Beijing. In 1927, nearly 15 years later, Nanjing and the Palace once again became the capital, this time of the People’s Republic of China led by Premier Chiang Kai-shek, until they fled the Second Sino-Japanese War when the Japanese invaded and took the city in 1937.

Portrait of Dr Sun Yat-sen hanging in the first hall of the Presidential Palace

After the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, and the subsequent Civil War in mainland China, the capital was finally wrested from Nanjing when Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from atop Tiananmen in Beijing.

Today, the Presidential Palace is a museum to this turbulent and important period of Chinese history, but while it has some interesting exhibits, such as the Kuomintang (KMT) Party flag and the encrusted skull of a tiger, it is sadly lacking in English translations and suggested walking routes. As one TripAdvisor reviewer put it, you’d better have done your homework before you visit!

The flag and uniform of the Kuomintang (KMT), the first party of the newly created Republic of China and currently the ruling party in Taiwan

The administration buildings make up the central strip of the grounds, and are flanked by lovely peaceful gardens to the west and more traditional Chinese buildings to the east – the latter also contains an underground bunker and both contain a pond complete with stone boat!

The lovely gardens of the Presidential Palace.

The Stone Boats of the Presidential Palace. The larger one on the left is in the west gardens

We enjoyed visiting the Presidential Palace, and while the significance of a lot of the items on show was lost on us because they only had Chinese captions, and most of the government offices looked similar with their rows upon rows of desks (with qwerty typewriters!), it was great to see where so much important history had taken place and we loved walking through the gardens.

Classical gardens of Suzhou, China

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Suzhou is situated on the banks of the mighty Yangtze River and is a city of canals. Also dubbed the ‘Venice of the East’ although we’ve travelled through several alternate Venices by now (St Petersburg, Bangkok, …) and none of them are even close to having the same atmosphere as the real thing.

Not a gondola in sight…

Suzhou is famous for its classical Chinese gardens, nine of which have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Unlike the imperial parks of the Forbidden City and Summer Palace in Beijing, these were private gardens, built by wealthy men and intellectuals and designed to recreate natural landscapes in miniature.

A miniature landscape, rocks, trees, water and small pavilion in the Master-of-Nets Garden

The Humble Administrator’s Garden

The Humble Administrator’s Garden originally dates from the early 16th century and is the largest of the remaining gardens in Suzhou. At first we though it wasn’t actually so big but it’s full of twisting paths and little buildings so that you can actually get lost. It is cleverly designed so that beautiful vistas open up across the garden at various spots, some even use the technique of ‘borrowing’ scenery, something that we also saw in Japanese gardens. Here, for example, looking across to the North Temple Pagoda:

It was a hazy day, but you can see the pagoda at the end of the lotus pond (it’s actually 0.5km away from the garden

Like many of the buildings in this and the other gardens, the name comes from Chinese literature. The garden was first laid out by Wang Xianchen when he retired from public life as an imperial envoy and poet. He was inspired by a quote from an essay titled ‘Staying at Home Idle’:

To cultivate my garden and sell my vegetable crop…is the policy of a humble man

After Wang died, his eldest son lost the garden to pay gambling debts and it was split and changed hands several times in the following centuries before being reconsolidated by the government in 1949.

The Mountain-in-View Tower

I’m sure it would be a wonderful place to relax on a quiet day but when we visited it was absolutely overrun with tour groups. Chinese tour groups are like an extreme version of a normal tour group;

they have a kind of herd mentality that makes them lose any peripheral vision and just keep walking in a straight line regardless of whether their way is blocked by another person
they are obsessed with taking photos of each other, usually to the exclusion of whatever ‘view’ they’re standing in front of and frequently draped over a wall or statue
many walk around with their cameraphones in front of their face snapping everything but looking at nothing
the guides are equipped with a microphone to project the information as far as possible, not the most peaceful in a compact garden with dozens of them competing for attention

See if you can spot Andrew taking a photo for someone in the middle of this chaos

The House of Sweet-smelling rice contained an exhibition of stunning embroidery by a local craftswoman, Haiyun Zhou

At the far end of the garden is a space given over to hundreds of bonsai trees. This section wasn’t quite as packed as the other areas of the garden and we enjoyed seeing the variety of different trees which had been miniaturised, and some of them had some forming wires in place to shape their branches.

The bonsai trees were displayed on pedestals in the areas between the paths

I really liked spotting the patterns of stones in the paths

A rare quiet moment in the Humble Administrator’s Garden

Master-of-Nets Garden

Having learnt our lesson from the day before we were determined to get to the Master-of-Nets Garden as early as we could to minimise the crowds. The garden opened at 7.30am but with a one hour walk from our hotel the best we could manage was 8am. It paid off, we weren’t the only ones there but it was a much nicer and more enjoyable experience.

Plan of the Master-of-Nets Garden in tiles

In the centre of the garden is a pond surrounded by the living quarters of the former residence which are linked by courtyards and covered walkways.

Entrance doorway of carved stone

Rock gardens found in the inner courtyards of the Master-of-Nets Garden

Building interiors (clockwise from left): pot plant in The Beauty Within Reach Tower; window in The Watching Pines and Appreciating Paintings Studio; The Peony Study

Reflection of The Prunus Mume Pavilion in the garden’s pond

Looking across the pond from The Leading to Quietude Bridge

Canglang Pavilion

For a city with some major tourist attractions, Suzhou is remarkably lacking in signage (in either Chinese or English). We stumbled across the entrance to Canglang Pavilion when we got lost on our way to the Master-of-Nets Garden and, as it was close by, we returned on our way back to the hotel. It is the oldest of the existing gardens in Suzhou dating from 1044. The name can be translated as Great Wave or Surging Wave Pavilion.

The garden is fronted by a wide canal and you must cross a bridge to enter

Situated on a small hill in the centre of the garden is the eponymous pavilion, a popular place for a rest and a picnic

A covered walkway leads around this rather murky pool to The Buqi Pavilion

Latticed windows in the whitewashed walls are a notable feature in the Canglang Pavilion

An old and twisted tree outside The Pure Fragrance House

Our favourite of the gardens that we visited was the Master-of-Nets Garden for its clever layout and rock gardens. I’d really like to visit Suzhou again in other seasons, I think the gardens would feel quite different and that the most memorable views would be transformed by a covering of snow or brightly coloured autumn leaves.

Shanghai, China

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Ni Hao again!

From Seoul we flew into Shanghai, which makes China the first country we’ve visited twice on our two year trip. The first time we explored the north in and around Beijing, and we knew then that we’d be back to see more of this vast, welcoming country.

Arriving in style, the Shanghai Maglev!

The Shanghai Maglev, one of only 3 Magnetic Levitation commercial train services in the world, also holds the record for the fastest train in the world – it’s levitation, Holmes!

Shanghai has a magnetic levitation train line connecting the airport to the downtown financial district, and as soon as I found out I knew we had to try it! Unlike conventional trains that use wheels and tracks, maglev trains use powerful electromagnets to float, or levitate, over a rail. Because there are no moving parts or contact, there’s less noise and energy lost due to friction which means they can travel faster, but they do need more energy to run and they’re a lot more expensive to build.

The 30.5 km of rail in the Shanghai Maglev uses electromagnetic suspension which means expensive electrified rail

While the Maglev doesn’t run at its record-breaking speed of 501 km/h (311 mph), the journey took just over 8 minutes and hit a top speed of 301km/h – not quite as fast as the Shinkansen in Japan or the express trains in the rest of China, but it was noticeably smoother and quieter. At ¥40 a ticket (about £4), it was easily worth the experience!

The Bund

The beautiful old architecture of riverfront Shanghai, known as The Bund

There’s a long history of European influence in Shanghai, the legacy of which can be seen in the riverfront architecture of The Bund. We found a number of self-guided walking tours that describe the various buildings and picked a day that turned out to be clear but very hot indeed!

No. 2 The Bund. Originally the Shanghai Club which was the most exclusive Gentlemen’s club in Shanghai in 1920s and 30s, and now it’s the Waldorf Astoria Shanghai (and very swanky it is too – we popped in to cool off in their air conditioning!)

The cool and inviting foyer of the Waldorf Astoria, Shanghai

“The Bund Bull” – designed by the same Arturo Ugo Di Modica who designed the Wall Street Charging Bull and more recently one in Amsterdam. The large domed property in the background is the HSBC Building

The Bund stretches for 1 mile from the Suzhou Creek in the north to Yan’an Road in the south. About ¾ of the way up, Nanjing Road goes inland to the west, and used to be the site of the British concession. Sadly the concession buildings and settlement are no longer there, though we did stop in a nearby alleyway for a spot of lunch.

Our side-street lunch just off Nanjing Road – fried dumplings with a “little” bit of spicy sauce, and pork rolls which we’d missed after eating them every day in Datong!

Somewhat ironically, the old financial institution buildings and the Bund Bull face the growing might of the Shanghai Financial District of Pudong just across the Huangpu river.

The Shanghai Pudong Financial District, including the 2nd tallest building in the world, the Shanghai Tower (centre right)

The Propaganda Poster Art Center

Yang Pei Ming in his Propaganda Poster Art Center (photo source: CNN Travel)

The enticingly named Propaganda Poster Art Center is the life-work of Yang Pei Ming, a private collector, housed in 4 adjoining basement apartments of an otherwise nondescript Chinese high-rise block.

The mundaneness of the surroundings only heightens the feeling of discovery and clandestineness as we looked through nearly 100 years of Chinese public poster art from early 1900s, and through the rise of Chairman Mao.

The first room is largely chronological from the 1930s (photo source: GoAsia.co)

Understandably we weren’t allowed to take photos as the museum supports itself by selling prints and postcards of many of the works (as well as the small entrance fee), and although the overall order seemed a little disjointed in places, there were translations and explanations for most of the posters which set them in their historic context of Chinese and world events.

No. 187 – “Long live Marxism, Lenism [sic], and Mao Zedong Thought poster” (photo source: Propaganda Poster Art Center)

While most of the art was inward, enthusiastic Communist messaging, there were some examples that rally the East against the Western aggressors during the Second World War and the Vietnam War. I love to see history from the other side to that which I have been taught, and this collection of poster art is fascinating for both its historical significance as for its artistic style and development.

Propaganda poster depicting the UK. The caption reads: “John rides the ox and I ride the horse, what a shame if he wins the game.” (photo source: Agustinus Wibowo)