(China: Nanjing – Xian – Pingyao – Datong)
Here I am, in a 10th floor Taipei fire-trap internet café, surrounded by sleepless and saucer-eyed “gamers” high on bottomless glasses of Pepsi, in a fug of cigarette smoke and electronic din… and still snotted up with the inevitable Chinese Winter cold: such FUN!!
“And so we are here” was the joyful greeting of our mainland Chinese tour leader every time in the last few weeks that we had to be woken from hard class train “sleep”, or just to get us moving out into minus 20 degrees at Datong to admire 4th and 5th Century Buddhas carved into cliff sides (that’s if they had survived “the National Disaster of the Cultural Revolution” as the Chinese now say openly).
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The (retrospective) story so far:
“And so we are here”: Nanjing.
A day of political and architectural history – after three hours of high-speed train from Shanghai (these are being fast-tracked (!) across the country at an amazing pace) – and some cheeky Algerian wine. The Nanjing Massacre Museum is engrossing and confronting as the Chinese pitch the historical case that the Rape of Kanking is the forgotten holocaust of World war II. The real audience for all of this appears to be the Japanese government who have refused to acknowledge, let alone apologise or teach their kids about the 300,000 murders over three months following the capture of the (then) Chinese capital city. The imagery is well beyond what might comfortably be shown in most museums as the Chinese pitch the casethat “it really did happen” (i.e. not the usual propaganda?), that foreigners acted bravely to protect the locals (also brave) against Japanese extremism and to publish the news to the outside world. This included a Nazi government official who was apparently unaware of what his own government was about to perpetrate, and whose government hardly thanked him for the efforts. This is gutsy stuff about about extreme suppression by external forces trying to make the local population – or what was left of it – submit to the will of a vicious external power. No Japanese tourists appeared to be present.
It’s an interesting exercise in how to “construct” history…
And how might the Chinese “construct” and present Tibet in a future museum????
The rest of the day was the Sun Yat-Sen mausoleum and historical architecture before fronting for lunch at Nanjing station. To explain: Chinese city railway stations are huge grey fortresses with the sort of security we expect at airports, including dire warning about explosives. There are no long and lingering farewells hers, just a quick wave across massive external barriers before bags and passengers are scanned and searched and allocated to waiting rooms. Apart from the “SOLDIERS’/BABIES AND MOTHERS WAITING ROOM” there are separate waiting rooms for each monster 18 carriage train: it’s BIG!
So what was on offer for lunch? The canteen had congealed and cold food, KFC didn’t really appeal, nor did what looked like “OFFAL WORLD” from the rather alarming backlit pictures, so the supermarket hazelnuts coated in cinnamon and chili, and mystery-filled rolls (red bean flavoured pork?) just had to suffice (the large “S” food safety labels didn’t really convince) with peach juice (I think…) before the 15 hour hard class New Year’s Eve overnight trip to Xian.
So I wished you all a happy new year over an untranslatable but great evening meal on the Xian express train after a day of horror images. Our group end of year “party” was a quiet drink in hard class bunks (in racks of 3 in an open carriage: like sleeping bookshelves but quite acceptable) if indifferent Chinese red wine and wonderful Estonian chocolate liqueurs supplied by the elegant Finnish woman in our group. A quiet toast at 9pm (midnight in eastern Australia where most of our group is from) and we slept quite well in a crowded coach (because real Chinese children seem to be exceptionally well behaved and sleep like mice).
“And so we are here”: Xian:
Increasingly cold, increasingly thick coal smog, increasing numbers of colds amongst the group (we’re sharing more than deliciously suspect food at those generous banquet dinners), dumpling and history overload, and a woman in the 4th floor supermarket who couldn’t quite believe the sudden rush of sales of thermals she was making to western tourists who were out walking in -5 degree smog to “see” the sights. My $17 puffer jacket from the backstreet Shanghai market was beginning to come apart at the seams, but it was snug (even if the trip photo of me will be shockers). The terra cotta warriors were breathtaking; the pagodas and gardens provided solitude and peace away from full-on traffic. Traditional music in the drum and bell towers was pretty special, but the real “find” was what my politically incorrect RAAF room mate called “Moozy St”: a mosque/pagoda surrounded by hot food vendors for three blocks – I’m still salivating at the thought of hot persimmon fritters…
Xian is at the end of the Silk Road: the faces and clothing and foods are evidence of Middle Eastern influences as, unfortunately, are the sales tactics in the markets. If the “bartered” price doesn’t drop and is still way too high and you start to walk out of the shop, two things happen: you are forcibly grabbed to stop a quick departure and the price suddenly plummets by 50 to 70 percent. If you still refuse to buy, you get slapped: nice!
The crowds were only keeping me warm from the shoulders down, so a deeply ugly Russian fake fur and fake leather ear-flap hat was found in Xian (which also began to fray, in sympathy with the puffer jacket). No animals were harmed in making the faux fur ear warmers… The dour Rumanian/German group member commented that I was looking like some Moslem female from Chechnya – but I cared less because I was WARM.
By this stage another member of our group had been taken to experience a Chinese Outpatients department for a suspected broken wrist (black ice at the taxi rank). In 90 minutes a doctor was called back from lunch (they all eat at the same rostered time), X rays and ultrasound were done, mystery drugs were dispensed for about $30 – but the dunnies were dire!
“And so we are here”: Pingyao:
The hard class overnight experience in the coal-heated carriage with the grumpy and intimidating attendant (No-one complained about his muddy footprint on the compartment tables – we were suitably cowed and feigned 8 hours’ sleep after he’d attempted blocking our entry to the train, claiming our tour leader couldn’t count bodies accurately).
I reread the “Hangzhou Railway Manual” (before the lights were mandatorily shut down at 11.15) provided next to the Complaints Box on our previous train: “While you are stepping into the train our car attendants will receive you with hot smile and kind words”.
But of course!
The train toilet was a squat-and-hold-the-greasy-rail-in-dim-light-while-bouncing-around-over-an-icy-draft job, opening straight onto the tracks at -10 degrees: I now know exactly what is meant by “freeze your arse off”.
Next morning at 7.15 we just smiled weakly and said thanks to the grumpy guard and contemplated two days in a quaint, 800 year old, walled town with many of its original buildings intact: including temples, government administration buildings and the first bank to issue cheques (should we celebrate this?). A local prison, in use until 1960, included fairly confronting diagrams of interview techniques no longer used (?), like water-boarding. And visibility from the walk along the city walls was down to 30 metres or less due to dark grey, choking, “haze”.
Here we stayed in a modernized (i.e. heated) traditional guest house. We were growing used to hard beds (indeed “hard class” bunks on the trains were softer than many of the hotels’ beds on offer) but here we slept on heated brick platforms with shared twin mattresses of about 3x3 metres. RAAF Man was becoming a bit skittish at this point (something to do with introducing our Chinese tour leader to Tequila slammers) and starting to jump in front of cameras. The two strong-Melbourne-women-with-short-hair-wearing-sensible-shoes-so the Chinese-toilet-attendants-kept-trying-to-make-them-go-to-the-male-toilet-queues did point out to him that he was compulsorily sharing his bed that night, and he’d better behave himself towards at least one photographer: me!
My shots of the city wall and murky streets are really not too bad. I did make the mistake of walking 6km to the north end of the wall (not recommended in the guides) had an interesting above-ground view of the current jail and the back-yard piggeries. Meanwhile another group member had been taken to the local hospital for an extreme stomach upset. Treatment: direct and effective. Conditions: dusty. Toilets: dire. Their taxi driver remained with them for 3 hours, assisting in knocking on doors, finding staff and in general translations.
Day 2 was bitterly cold (and somewhat hung over) so our tour leader shared his family photos and wedding snaps on his laptop while the group generally wrote letters and cards, drank tea or played with mobiles/iPods, as one does until the next banquet meal.
“And so we are here”: Datong:
We were warned that it would be -26 degrees or colder, and in the most polluted city we would “see” due to coal mining, coal-fired power stations and domestic coal-fired cooking and heating. It was.
Getting there from Pingyao was a stoic day’s drive in a minibus with ice on both sides of the windows with one stop at the Li Xiang Mountain Temple: a sublime wooden confection hanging from a cliff about 400 metres above a frozen river. It was like something from the mind of Hans Christian Andreson or perhaps Samuel Coleridge on one of his more opium-addled days.
At some vague stage between dozes on the bus, I briefly woke as we were driving through a town’s main street where every car/truck was three-wheeled, and open butchers’ stalls displayed rows of cows’ and pigs’ heads from animals slaughtered that day… I dozed fitfully and then woke at the first distant sight of the Great Wall – still a day and a half’s journey from Beijing, and occasionally interrupted across the broad landscape by the march of viaducts for new freeways and high speed railways in the foreground… then dozed on… Our tour leader assured us that the “vision” of three-wheeled vehicles and lines of slaughtered animal heads was accurate, and further assured us that plates of pigs’ ears had been a real treat at his wedding.
Four hours of soft class train travel (in a freezing cold coal “heated” carriage) got us to Beijing.
“And so we are here”: at the end of my emails for tonight.