My
package 12-day tour of China was a tiring
bundle of surprises, from the bankruptcy of
our first tour company to climbing massive
steps on the Great Wall of China and to a
short 30km trip on the world’s fastest train –
the Mag-Lev from downtown Shanghai to Shanghai
airport.
I
wanted to go to China soon after I began my
retirement project. That project was to learn
Mandarin because it seemed right to learn a
bit more about a country with the world’s
biggest population, the world’s biggest
military and the world’s number 2 economy. The
Toronto District School Board obliged by
offering low cost Continuing Education
programs in Mandarin for seniors. I studied to
the end of the beginner level twice, then
studied intermediate level twice. I became
fascinated by the vast difference between this
language and any European language that I had
dabbled with.
The
stylized pictograms called “characters” are
the national language that began with Emperor
Qin who forged a Chinese empire in 221BCE. It
was a shared written language. (Qin also
introduced a shared single currency and built
roads.) It wasn’t until Mao Tse Tung in the
1950s that Mandarin became the official spoken
language for the whole empire with a system of
pronunciation based on the western alphabet.
(Sad
to say, as it turned out, when I got to China
my Mandarin was very inadequate and I was
thankful for their practice of adding some
small-lettered English translation under many
of the signs in tourist areas. But I am still
fascinated by the beautiful characters.)
Several
friends
in Toronto spoke highly of travel with
Sinorama Holidays. So for Fall 2018 we booked
to go on a 15-day tour package and invited a
friend who lives in LA to come up to Toronto
and join us in going on this tour. Time
brought us close to the day scheduled for a
Sinorama briefing on our impending tour in
Toronto. Then we learned out of the blue that
the company was bankrupt. There was no tour!
Disbelief became panic. However, we were told
that because we had paid by Visa, we could
“dispute” the amount paid for the tour because
we could not receive the services paid for.
Following a fretful weekend, we phoned Visa
and, happily, Visa refunded our cost. However
our LA friend was locked into a trip to
Toronto to join us for a non-existent tour to
China. Searching for some alternative, by a
lucky fluke, we found that Nexus holidays had
a 12-day tour within the same timeframe as our
original tour. Nexus offered a better price,
but for a somewhat less sophisticated tour. We
took it anyway.
Just
a couple of weeks later we set off on a direct
5pm flight from Toronto to Beijing on Hainan
airlines, which turned out to be a very good
airline. Thirteen hours later we arrived in
China a day later and 12 additional hours of
time change later.
Next
morning, the hotel window opened on a suburban
Beijing landscape: spaced big clumps of 30
story high rises, tree-lined roads, the green
park areas and the blue sunny sky. Clumps of
highrises imposed themselves together with
clumps of older lower apartment buildings
whenever our tour bus took to the road to take
us around Beijing or Shanhai or Xi’an. The
older apartments all had a heat pump air
conditioner fan hanging on the wall or on a
small balcony from – it seemed – every
apartment.
Our tour guides told us the
astronomical size of the cities we visited:
Beijing 21.7 million; Shanghai 24.2 million
population; and Xi’an 12.9 million. Toronto
with 3 million people is Canada’s biggest
city. These Chinese cities are in a different
league. Although the cities have been there
since before the Christian era the massive
growth in population and housing and
infrastructure has occurred since the late
1980s. The modern cities were built in less
than 40 years.
The
hotels were almost all embarrassingly super
deluxe. There were some huge high floor rooms
and some wonderful breakfast spreads perfect
for an international clientele. But the tour
schedule was exhausting. Typically, we set off
before 8am, went from site to site, had lunch,
went to a site, had supper, maybe had a show
and returned to the hotel at 9pm. We collapsed
in bed. We had the wake up call at 6am. Once
we flew to another city in the morning.
Another time we flew to another city in the
afternoon.
In
Beijing we saw Tiananmen Square and swarmed
with the locals through the Forbidden City. We
mixed with crowds in the park and as they
peered in the Temple of Heaven. We had a
rickshaw ride in the old alleys (the
“hutongs”) and visited a house in the old
city. We saw the wonderful lake, the bridges,
the pagodas and parts of the Summer Palace.
And we drove north to climb – yes, it was
climb rather than walk in the pass where we
visited the Great Wall. There
were seemingly endless steps, many of great
height, interspersed with shallow ones.
Someone who measured their steps said we had
climbed the equivalent of 88 stories. But
this part of the Great Wall came with a
wonderful mountainous landscape on a clear
warm sunny day. We took a boat cruise along
the canals of Suzhou, the Chinese “Venice”. We
went to West Lake for a boat tour, then
dinner, then a spectacle in the open at night
with lights and music and dancing. The
spectacle, presented fairly recently to the
G20 leaders, took place on a huge
stage mechanism raised from the lake bottom to
within a couple inches below the surface of
the lake. So all the action seemed to
magically take place on the surface of the
lake. Beautiful
- and very, very, impressive.
We
returned to Shanghai and cruised on the river,
seeing the spectacular night lights on the
riverside high rise buildings of Shanghai.
Next day we drove by the Bund areas and
visited the museum in the People’s Park. We
walked along park paths to go through a gate
of the Old Town of Shanghai. We had very
expensive Jasmine teas in a famous old
teahouse in the centre of Old Town, reached by
a “zig-zag” bridge over a small ornamental
lake.
Next
we flew to Xi’an, where we saw the terracotta
warriors and the wonderful park grounds around
the buildings built over the warriors. We also
walked on the 20ft-wide cobbled road on top of
the high Xi’an city wall that was restored in
the 15th century during the Ming
dynasty. This is the oldest intact city wall
in China. (Xi’an was the capital of the 1st
emperor Qi around 200BCE.) We visited a
Buddhist Pagoda in beautiful park grounds. We
had a dumpling banquet and saw a Tang period
dance and song show. We visited the park of
the tall new brass Buddha – allegedly the
largest Buddha in the world. Everywhere was
clear and treed.
I
noticed that very many of these public places
we visited had a very European flavor despite
the banks of high rises that I knew were near
these cities. Oft times these were hidden by
parkland trees or an attention-grabbing
foreground pagoda.
The
partial downside to this tour was the almost
daily visit to a government store. Sometimes
this was also informative: making silk duvets
from cocoons; the role of jade in the society;
the best green tea on a tea plantation; making
big fresh water pearls. But
it was a tad too much and the many on our tour
were not as enamored with the selling of
expensive Chinese traditional medicines as
were the few!
In
all our travels we were on freeways and roads
in very good shape. Elaborate cloverleaves and
passes tended to go up, up, up – especially in
Shanghai, where one would see about 5 levels
of roads interweaving. City roads were well
paved and tree-lined and they frequently came
with separated bike lanes. Electric scooters
were pervasive and seemed to dominate the bike
lanes. Our guide said many people would have
one of these, whereas cars were not for
everyone. Yet we did see cars – mainly sedans.
We noticed a good number of Mercedes and BMW
and some electric cars – and some electric
public buses!
On
our tour we frequently found ourselves in a
downtown area that had sizable park areas –
paths, paving, grass and trees. Beijing and
Shanghai had extensive subways. These seemed
moderate in cost and easy to use, but we
didn’t have time to try much off-tour. People
were using the parks and the historic
buildings in droves. They acted as if they
belonged in what must be a pretty recent
environment. People did not seem sullen or
oppressed.
It
slowly sank in that this super-rapid
urbanization and industrialization, this rank
on rank of apartment housing and these new
roads and parks and subways had happened in
two generations – lifting a huge number of
people out of rural poverty into an
industrialized society. We detected a sense of
pride about what China had done and a sense of
shame about the Cultural Revolution that
preceded it. That is understandable. But I
missed any reference to our role – I mean the
Western world’s opening up trade to China in a
conscious hope for its development. It was
trade with the outside – the model of the
ancient Silk Road – that had brought wealth to
this new China.
Yes,
we recalled Tibet. Yes, we recalled the
Tiananmen Square tanks and the blocking of
protest for more democracy. Yes, we hear of
Muslim persecution. But when touched by the
sheer scale of the accomplishment, it is hard
to weigh everything. Does
the biggest good to the biggest number win
out? Or is one torture too many?