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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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