China Air: Smog Mixed with Occasional Fog

Fog Tucked into the Mountain Folds in the Three Gorges Area of the Yangtze River

It always looked like it was going to rain. When it wasn't raining, the sky looked like rain was coming. Except it wasn't.

Smoggy View Across the River from Shanghai's Bund

Tourists Photographing Through the Haze at the Moat of the Forbidden City in Beijing

Tourists at Tien An Men Square Looking through the Haze Across the Square

Cutest Chinese Children

Three What?

Practical Pants Slit

I think Chinese children are so cute.  Maybe it's the shape of their faces? Chinese people refer to Caucasians as "Big Nose People". Not such a cute name.

I loved watching this baby boy on his mother's lap on a train ride. He was tired and squirming, but his mom was extraordinarily patient.

Goldfish Watching With Matching Hat

Baby in a Basket

Doing a Dance for Visitors to School (Maybe it's been done once or twice before?)

A Chinese Head-Scratcher: Tangled Translations

Why are silly signs posted all over China?

Can't you just say "Entrance" and "Exit"?

Just on one day's outing in Suzhuo, a city of about 4 million people, I encountered multiple mess-ups. The particularly puzzling thing is that I had arrived by a fast new train that is so competently cutting edge. Why is the complicated engineering right and the syntax wrong?

Terrific Technology

You can't step away from the train without tripping over a small error.

Suzhou is known as the Venice of China, with canals, picturesque footbridges, and more than a dozen gardens designated as World Heritage sites. In one garden alone, known as the Humble Administrator's Garden, sign after sign was tortured text. Here is one example.

A sign at the visitors' center of the Yangtze River Dam.  

Securing Tien An Men Square

I was on Tien An Men Square on June 5. That day was the 24th anniversary of the Student Uprisings on the square. It being my first time to the square, I did not know whether security was stepped up or not.

The entrance to Chairman Mao's Tomb was blocked off.

There were security cameras everywhere (but it appeared to me that they were permanent fixtures).

Really, only ONE Warrior Survived: Crushed Terra Cotta

The Only Terra Cotta Warrior that Was Found Intact - All the Rest were Broken

I had a surprise when I visited the Terra Cotta Army in Xi'an, China. Only one clay soldier was found intact. When you see the sea of soldiers, what you see is thousands of figures that have been pieced together from broken pieces. Before touring the tomb, I had seen many photos and written accounts about the thousands of life size clay figures dating from the third century BC, buried to protect China's first emperor as he crossed into his afterlife.  The collection of 8,000 clay soldiers, 130 chariots and 670 horses was discovered in 1974, along with the tomb of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.  

Terra Cotta Soldiers buried in the tomb of China's First Emperor; Some are Headless

What was news to me was that in the throng of thousands of sculptured figures standing on display in the enormous pits, only one soldier was found intact. Except for  him, every one of the other nearly 9,000 items has been pieced together and restored. It is like a giant, maddening puzzle. The amount of restoration work boggled my mind.  

Details of Broken Soldiers Put Back Together Again

The Farmer who Discovered the Tomb, while searching for Water (see his poster above), posing with Random Tourists

Other Random Tourists Visiting the Tomb

Warrior Restorers

China's One Car Policy

There are so many people, so many cars, so much smog and so much noise in China, that the government has stepped in to impose some controls.

In Beijing, people are generally allowed to own only one car. There are 6 million cars in Beijing. To own a second car, a resident of Beijing must get on a waiting list - and wait and wait and wait. The car dealer can strike a deal with a buyer, but the customer's permission must come through before the sale can close. 
In Shanghai, the cost of a car registration is the limiting factor. It costs about $10,000. A license can be had for a little less if the license has the number 4 in it. The Chinese word for the number four sounds like the word for death which sounds like "suh". 

Yes suh, I'll take a discount.

Mrs. Wong and her Orange-Eared Dog

The Hutongs in Beijing are the crowded streets of old buildings, where several families cram into small spaces lacking indoor plumbing; many without electricity. Mrs. Wong is an elderly woman who makes arrangements with the government to invite tourists into her home.  She resides in one of the nicer Hutong homes.  She lives alone in a parlor that can accommodate 14 or so guests crowded around, plus a sleeping alcove cordoned off by a curtain, and a kitchen. She has running water, electricity and heat. She lacks a toilet or bathing facility. Mrs. Wong counts herself lucky because the neighborhood's public toilet and shower facility serving her sector is steps away from her front door. 

Mrs. Wong's Hutong, Beijing

She and her 30-something niece invite visitors into Mrs. Wong's home to see what life is like in the Hutongs, and to see her niece's demonstration of the intricate process of bottle-painting. The art flourished during the emperors' reigns, when royalty carried their snuff in beautifully decorated glass bottles. The bottles are painted from the inside, requiring wisps of fine bristles, a steady hand and eagle-sharp eyesight.  Mrs.Wong taught the skills to her niece, having painted for many years until her eyes failed, and having learned the art from her grandfather who painted for the royal family in his prime. As a talented servant to the royals, Mrs. Wong's grandfather enjoyed the perqs of aristocracy. He owned a grand home in the typical rectangular design, with many rooms facing into an inner courtyard. The People's Revolution seized his grand residence, leaving him with a sliver of one corner. He passed his home down to his granddaughter, Mrs. Wong; and he taught her the art of snuff bottle painting. She feels lucky to have the home she has - and to have it to herself. During the course of the visit, Mrs. Wong spoke through an interpreter, explaining how highly regarded her grandfather's work was. She showed one snuff bottle he had painted; and then photos of acclaim for her niece's bottles which are for sale at the end of the visit. 

Sample of Snuff Bottle Painted by Mrs. Wong's Grandfather for the Last Emperor

Mrs. Wong derives just about the same amount of joy from her white poodle pet.  The dog's ears were dyed bright orange. She explained that the festive color was in honor of its birthday. But, apparently, Mrs. Wong did not need a birthday excuse to decorate the dog. A photo of the dog sporting ears of lemon yellow blinked as the screensaver on a personal computer  in the sleeping alcove. The distraction of dog dying might help keep Mrs. Wong from mourning that life is but a sliver of what her grandfather had before the Cultural Revolution. 

Mrs Wong's niece, showing photo of herself being honored for her skills in the ancient art of painting snuff bottles from the inside; and Mrs. Wong's poodle pic on the screensaver, sporting yellow ears

China: Cheap. Cheap.

The outer perimeter of Tien An Men Square in Beijing is teeming with tourist buses and with vendors holding armfuls of souvenirs for sale. The first asking price was often five times what the seller expected.  As I walked away from the square, I was followed by a man thrusting baseball caps and straw toys at me for my attention and my money. An olive green hat with a red star was "Fie dollah for hat,  lady". I politely shook my head no. He persisted, repeated, running alongside me, trying to keep the hat at my eye level in front of me. After many repetitions and lots of little prancing steps, he switched.  
"OK lady, cheaper.  You don't like one hat for fie dollah? How about fie hats for one dollah?"  

Some guys simply start their pitches with "Cheaper, Cheaper". 

Huge is not a big enough word for China

China's size amazes me. The first place I visited in China was Tian an Men Square. Although it is smack in the middle of the downtown Beijing, nine football fields could fit into it. 

Tien An Men Square, Beijing

The square is bordered on one side by the entrance to the Forbidden City, which was occupied by the emperor and now by government offices and a museum. The Forbidden City had 999 rooms, but after some consolidations has shrunken to the mere 800s. Once inside its gates, the Forbidden City is all you can see.

Forbidden City, Beijing

There are 6 million cars in Beijing. The throngs of the cars plus 32 million people and industry helps explain the city's constant " fog". 

I also visited Chonqing. It is a city whose name I might have been vaguely familiar with (maybe). It has a population of 9 million in the dense urban core and 34 million in its regional district perimeter. Chonqing leapfrogged over New York, Los Angeles...even Beijing and Shanghai; and it rivals Tokyo. The Chinese government made a strategic planning decision to lure manufacturing and economic growth to Chonqing because it is located well west of Shanghai and Beijing; near populations that provide a ready source of labor. Two weeks ago, an issue of the English language paper, China Daily, featured multiple articles reporting on global companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Coca Cola, and their interest in Chonqing.  The enormity of China's land mass and population is hard to grasp. A Chinese city that is larger than New York isn't even a household name in the United States. 

The world's largest dam project was constructed on China's Yangtze River. Wanting to control unpredictable flooding, to improve river transport and to generate energy, China built a dam, a reservoir and a lock system for shipping. The construction required flooding an area occupied by 1.39 million people who had to be moved.  That's about one and a half times the population of my home state of Rhode Island. China is relocating the people whose homes were submerged and whose lives must be rebuilt higher up on the river's banks. 

Yangtze River Dam: View from one shoreline across the Reservoir

To memorialize the traditional lifestyle along the Yangtze River, the Chinese government has preserved selected antique structures.  When traveling by boat down the river, one periodically passes ancient pagodas nestled into the hillside. A particularly spectacular structure, the Red Pagoda had a wall built around it to protect it from flooding. 

A

Bridge Walkway to the Red Pagoda in Shibaozhai, built in the early 1700s; below.

The government even built a replica of the type of time-honored footbridge that was sunken into the Three Gorges project, but copied and pasted up higher on the side of the gorge.  

Fake footbridge on Yangtze River in one of the Three Gorges, as a replica to ancient pathways that were sunken as part of the Dam Project

Beijing's Boombox Beggars

Visitors to Beijing's Forbidden City are routed along a one-way path that snakes through the palace grounds and out through an exit on Jingshan Gianjie road. The path is bordered on one side by the tree-lined palace moat...

and on the other side by Jingshan Gianjie road.  

As I walked along the gravelly shaded path, upbeat pop music coming from a boombox on the ground caught my attention. I looked down to the source and saw the boombox on a blanket, next to a 30ish year old man with twisted legs and no left arm, motioning by glancing down to his basket for begging. Having been warned about the beggars, I averted my eyes and kept walking. Moments later, I encountered another boombox, playing a snappy dance rhythm. This time it was next to a man with facial deformities. I kept walking. Just as his tunes faded, more peppy music filled the air with yet a third beggar. The poor souls were tough to pass by. After the third, I reached the end of the pathway. But, those poor Boombox beggars are still with me. 

I can't believe my blog is blocked in China!

Before going to China earlier this month, I had a vague awareness that Facebook was blocked in China. It would have been nice and easy to put up a photo and post a couple of words commenting on my travels in China. Nope. I knew that Google was blocked in China. And, after typing "Facebook" into a Yahoo browser, the progress wheel spun around ineffectively and failed to connect. I got in to my gmail account by going through Yahoo.  And, I found this hard to believe--my own worldgrazer blog is blocked. Maybe because the Chinese government dislikes the blogspot host? After a couple of tries, the farthest I could get toward worldgrazer was an error message, "The operation couldn't be completed". Wow. I am going to post this experience when I get back to the USA. 

The T-Shirt vendor calls this "Mao-Bama"