Author: Fred Hoyt

Another long day in the world Yongle created.

One way to look at Beijing is from the perspective of its builders, beginning with Yongle.  The third Ming emperor, Yongle moved his capital from Nanking to Beijing, partly to be in a better position to combat the ambitions of the barbarians from the North; ultimately, he was right—it was the Manchus from north of the Great Wall that replaced the Ming in 1644. I think there were other reasons, involving family intrigue, that prompted the decision, but Beijing has never been the same.

Yongle built three of the memorable constructs that have defined Beijing since.  We’ve already mentioned two—the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City, early in the 15^th century.  Just in case I don’t get another opportunity to visit the Forbidden City, when I got up this morning I took a walk to my favorite morning park in Beijing—Coal Hill.  It’s typical of the Beijing parks, being full of youngsters my age doing stretching, and younger Beijingers doing everything from taiqi to calligraphy to line dancing.  And since it was once part of the Forbidden City, it was a playground for the emperor, and that’s what differentiates it from many other parks.  It was the beneficiary of the Emperor’s desire to have a nearby mountain other than the rock pile from Tai Hu.  As a consequence, the million workers who built the forbidden city for Yongle saved the dirt from the moat and piled it up into Coal Hill, a 300 foot mountain at the north end of the forbidden city.  If you’ve seen pictures of that palace, looking down on the 9999 rooms, you probably know the view from Coal Hill.  I had it this hazy morning (most mornings in Beijing are hazy).  From the top, you can also see nearby Beihai, remnants of the Mongol rule from Beijing, the Drum Tower and Bell Tower, that once welcomed the day and signaled the night and the closing of the gates, and the original location of Beijing University, from which angry students marched on May 4,  1919 when they learned that the powers at Versailles had given Japan rights in China.  That uprising provided the climate in which the seeds of communism were planted, making it one of the signal events in modern Chinese history.  Every major Chinese city has a Wusi (5/4 or May 4) street in commemoration).

The other standard Yongle established was the building of tombs.  He chose a site near  Beijing with good feng shui, mountains at the back, river at the front, and planned his tomb with the thoroughness he planned the Forbidden City. He laid out the Sacred Way, the stone figures that lined the path that the burial procession trod, with the servants and animals guarding the Emperor’s journey into the nether world—then proceeded to set the standard for the subsequent tombs of his successors.  This being a Confucian society, the emperor considered it disrespectful to be more outlandish than his father.  In Yongle’s case, the result was the largest extant wood structure (no nails, the guide stressed) in China. The building, which once housed relics of the one tomb excavated (the result of which was the oxidization and disappearance of fabrics and other things in the tombs, prompting a decision not to open any more tombs until the technology improves), now also contains a history of the life of Yongle. Among other things, he sent the famous expeditions of Zheng Ho, which established China as a seapower.

Yongle was not responsible for the Great Wall, but the great wall we have come to know was a product of the Ming dynasty, which, as I said, lived in fear of invasion from the north. The Ming resurrected a defense system that predated even Qin Shi-huang, the first emperor, who consolidated the wall his predecessors had built.  The Ming wall ran over 4,000 miles, from Shanhaikuan, where it met the sea to Jiayuguan, where it extends into the desert.  The stretch we climbed was within 30 miles of Beijing (if you think about the possibility of invasion from the north, bear in mind the distance from Seoul to the 38^th parallel in Korea), the product, I think of the post-Mao dynasty, which has been building tourist attractions like crazy.  The section we visited was reputedly the steepest reconstruction, and it elevates about 700 feet in less than a mile—someone said a 45 degree angle, and having done it, I’m inclined (there’s a pun here) to agree. In places it’s three people wide at most, and as crowded as Beijing highways  (even with the banning of 1/5 of the cars each day, driving in Beijing is a challenge!  The Beijing government has restricted the purchase of new cars to 20,000 a month, with a lottery auction that sometimes reaches $20,000 US for the right to buy a car!  Public transportation is numerous, with 20000 natural gas busses, and 13 metro lines, with a fee of roughly 30 cents!) Half the population of China was on our section, and I wonder how horses and warriors could have gotten up the stairs.  In any case, in 1644, when peasants rose in rebellion in response to famine (the Emperor was supposed to provide social stability, even then—defined as prosperity at home and prestige  abroad, then and now!), the Manchus bribed one of the gatekeepers at the wall to open the gates, and the rest was history—Manchu history.

One the way home, we visited the Olympic village, an area cleared (the Dao temple was left, but unfortunately was closed), and then lavished with public funds for China’s coming out party (the party for the Party) in 2008.  I’d been by it before, but had never walked around.  It’s situated in the center of the city—exactly north of the Forbidden City, with a plaza that rivals Tiananmen square, and buildings that are so much the modern equivalent of the Yongle architecture, especially the Bird’s Nest and the Water  Cube that I asked our guide if the old palace is GuGong (old palace) is the Olympic Village the XinGong (new palace).  Yongle would be proud of this new addition to the city of Beijing.

It is one of the great ironies (and you know I love ironies) that having built the buildings, the Chinese government is trying to figure out what to do with them. For its  debutante role, the government spent extravagantly; the Zhang Yi-mou opening number cost more than was spent on education in the entire country in 2008! The story is that the Bird’s Nest will be converted into a shopping mall, though the outside will remain as it is.  That’s so New New China. After all, the man who launched it in the 1980s is Deng Xiaoping, sometimes pronounced done shopping.

Mao Tse-tung announced to the world the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, less than two blocks from our hotel, and that’s where our day began—at sunrise, when most of us joined the crowds (mostly Chinese from out of town) who gathered in Tiananmen Square to watch the hoisting of the Chinese flag over the largest square in the world.  The army team of something like 400 soldiers are part of a crack unit that is quartered in the Forbidden City, just as the soldiers were under the Emperor.  The troop marches out at sunset, stands at attention, the colors are raised, and the loudspeakers blare Qilai, the Chinese national anthem.  You may have heard it at the Olympics when China swept to so many medals.  Oh, did I mention that sunrise is at 4:55—which explains why most of the thousands who attend are not foreigners; many are just getting back from the night life in this capital city at that time. When I asked the students who went what they’d seen, the best answer was, “The Chinese Superbowl.”  It’s a real indicator of the patriotism the Government embraces as part of its effort to promote social stability and remain in power.

Most of those students who came to the ceremony returned to sleep, but 5 in the morning is a great time in Beijing; it is cool, not many people crowd the streets, and there’s always, at least in our area, fascinating places to explore.  For example,  most of the Forbidden City is still forbidden, or at least parceled off into parks that require more time and a separate admission.  The one I visited this am is in the Southeast corner of the grounds, and houses the Imperial Ancestral tablets.  In a society where ancestor worship was part and parcel of the fabric of society, this was an important place.  And in a palace that was forbidden to ordinary people (and parts to anyone other than the imperial family), this was  an even more still area.  It had the main temple, the red buildings with the blue borders and yellow roofs, typical of the rest of the Forbidden City,  some interesting features like a rockery (mountains are an important part of the Chinese feng shui, the forces that determine fate, and so the emperors hauled rocks from Tai Hu, Lake Tai, near Shanghai, nearly 800 miles to be piled up to make “mountains” for their viewing pleasure.  As Deng Xiaoping put it, ”To be rich is glorious.”

When we went to Tiananmen later in the day, the square was already mobbed with the tourists we were going to jostle for the next three hours for views of the Palace Museum.  Built in 1402 and completed in 1420, the Forbidden city was the home of the  and Qing dynasties until 1924, when a warlord removed Pu Yi, the last Qing Emperor, who began the descent chronicled in The Last Emperor, winding up as a gardener in Beijing (after being puppet emperor of Manchukuo under the Japanese from 1932 until 1945)  It has been a public museum since.

Going from South to North, one goes from the public to the private quarters, which is typical of traditional Chinese houses.  In the case of the Emperor, that transition takes one through the public halls to the throne room, where, I have long theorized, the failure of Westerners to do the 9 prostrations to the Emperor led to the conflicts which began the century of humiliation. Our guide assured us that the Palace is being renovated, but until the treasures that went with the Kuomintang to Taiwan (which the mainlanders view as a province of mainland China, not a country), it will remain as “one palace, two museums”.

What remains (our guide said Chiang Kai shek took 3000 items with him to Taiwan, leaving 1 million in the palace) is imperial.  One can only be impressed and awed—as one was supposed to be, by the wealth and power of the royal family, even if the actual count of rooms is only around 8500, rather than the 9999 (there’s a lot of nines in the palace; it’s the “lucky” number for the emperor.

Three hours later, having passed through the private quarters of the emperor and his concubines, including the shadow of the palace area being renovated for Qianlong’s private residence—whose contents were in Milwaukee last year!—we were out.

Our next stop was a tour of the traditional Manchu area of the city (Beijing was actually several forbidden cities.  Part was forbidden to anyone but Manchus.  Part was forbidden to non westerners—after the Boxer Uprising in 1900, the Legation quarter was also sealed off.  When I first came to China, there were a lot of hutongs.  Gradually, many of these houses-a four or five room apartment, centered around a courtyard, were torn down and replaced with high rises.  Those that remain have been refurbished to provide water, electricity, and in many cases, toilets. Someone asked me why there were so many public toilets in Beijing, and the answer is that there are so few private ones.

The hutong tour has become a big business, as Chinese on bicycles pedal foreigners around, especially the lovely area that fronts on Beihai Park and the lakes created for the royal family north west of the forbidden city.  I’ve wandered there by day, because many famous officials (the Soong sister who married Sun Yat-sen, and became part of the communist party lived there; her sister, Meiling married Chiang Kai-shek) had homes which have become museums.  At night, the area becomes alive with bars and night clubs, being at least one of the places in Beijing that prevents tourists from making the flag raising in the morning.

One other aspect of the royal families was the temple of heaven, which we visited yesterday when we got into Beijing.  Probably as well known as any building in Beijing, the Temple of Heaven was an important place for an emperor, whose right to rule depended on providing prosperity at home and peace abroad.  Thus, the praying for good harvests was a form of election protection. So important that when Korea threw off its vassalage to China in 1905, and established itself as a Kingdom in a vain attempt to fend off the Japanese, one of the first things the Koreans did was build a temple of heavan for the King.

The first was the Confucian temple and the Imperial College.  These buildings were the “university” system in traditional China, were passing the exams were even more important than the college boards today.  From the Mongols in the 14^th century until 1908 or so, those exams allowed upward mobility.  If you were successful, you became an official, and if you became an official, you became rich (I’m not sure if that’s changed, since the topic of corruption is alive and well in China today

As I explained, education today in the Asian colleges, even more than in the United States, is still important.  I cited the case of a Korean president of Motorola University in Beijing.  I asked her at the end of her presentation whether she had graduated from Seoul National or Yonsei Universities.  She looked surprised, and answered, Seoul National.  I knew that Motorola hired only from those two schools, the Illinois Wesleyan Universities of Korea, a country which borrowed a lot, culturally, from China.

 

Our final stop was at the Lama Temple.  The temple was the birthplace of the Qianlong emperor (I bet there will be more to say about him from Chengde; he was emperor for 1732 until 1791). He and his grandfather, Kangsi, who was emperor for the longest time in China (dutiful grandson, Qianlong stepped down as emperor so as not to serve longer than Kangsi), ad indeed the Qing dynasty generally, had a warm spot for the Mongols and the Tibetans—the writings were in four languages—Chinese, Manchurian, Mongolian, and Tibetan—and turned the palace into a monastery for the Tibetan Yellow hat sect.  It is the most unusual Buddhist Temple in Beijing, because Tibetan Buddhism incorporated the animistic religion preexisting in Tibet, with blue demon headed Buddhas found nowhere else.  At one time, obviously, the relations between the Tibetans and the Qing dynasty were amicable—which is quite a change in the new China.

Long and satisfying day.

 

We’re now 600 miles and over 1000 years removed from the Tang capital of Xi’an (and a 13 hour train ride) in the capital of China (mostly) since the Mings moved back here to better combat the barbarians from the North. We’re in Beijing, capital of the People’s Republic of China, a city of 16-19 million people that now commands respect from the rest of the world, as Chang’an once did.

We left Xi’an having done two of my favorite top five things to do in the former capital.  One was the 14k bicycle ride around the top of the wall around the city. There’re not a lot of old things to be seen from it, but there is a lot of reconstruction of the old, and construction of things that look old that abut the wall.  One of the latter is “antique street,” made to look old, but housing the chain stores and hostels that have made China a tourist mecca (and in many cases one that is over the top; one thing I see more of , is the wide screen presentations, even in places like the Temple of Heaven, complete with advertisements—oh, those marketers; they seem to be pushing the definition of gauche to new levels); one of the former is a temple in the corner of the city within the wall.  Outside of the wall, we went to a Buddhist temple that was the birthplace of a monk who founded one of the eight major sects of Buddhism (the most well known in the West is probably Chen, better known through its Japanese version, Zen, which had something to do with the art of motorcycle maintenance in my youth).  What was distinctive about that temple was that there were elephant statues, and I had to confess that I’ve never seen elephants in a Buddhist temple before; one of the guardians of the temple was riding an elephant, and another a lion. It struck me that the temple was closer to Hindu temples (each of the major Hindu gods has an animal as a transporter, and of course, the elephant god, Ganesh, is one of the most popular of the Hindu pantheon).

The other top five thing to do in Xi’an is to wander the Muslim quarter.  Called the Hui nationality, one of the 50 some the Chinese recognize, the Muslims have an area that centers on the Great Mosque.  I like the Mosque because it shows what happens if you stay in China long enough—you become Chinese! There’s a Chinese like gate at the entrance (called a pailou) that is very Chinese.  Unfortunately, it was being renovated, but the minarets that look like pagodas were a dead giveaway that this was a mosque in China that had been here for centuries, ever since Muslims came to China on the silk road.  The area is fun to wander for food (lots lamb kababs), supplemented this week by a Malaysian food fair (yummy durian—that’s a joke for those who don’t know that durian is supposed to be the fruit that smells like hell but tastes like heaven—the former is certainly true), souvenirs including Muslim caps and calligraphy in Arabic, and the general run of copy everythings that are everywhere in China.

I think I’d really like to come back to Xi’an sometime and spend a week in the area, exploring the thousands of places that reflect the thousand years of Xi’an/Chang’an. Building here is like building in Rome; you’re likely to uncover something no matter where you build.  A Han tomb was discovered near the airport, and for another, there’s a temple about 90 miles from Xi’an that houses a finger of the Lord Buddha; it’s become kind of a theme park,  I understand, but this is piece the Buddha gave China.  I understand he willed one body part to each of the Buddhist lands, so this is rare.

I’d like to have the guide we had in Xi’an again; her email handle is sunnyok, and that well described her willingness to share her knowledge and her love of Xi’an with us.  She told me that she was from Manchuria, and as I suspected, was half-Manchu, one of those 56 nationalities, 92% or so of whom are Han Chinese.  As a minority, she says that she gets some privileges, including extra points on the college entrance exams, and the right to have two children. She said that in any case, she and her Han husband can have two children because they have no sibilings, so the one child policy has relaxed somewhat.

I think I’ll save my observations about Beijing for tomorrow, since I’m planning to get up at 4:30 to view the raising of the flag in Tiananmen Square, which is about three blocks from our hotel.

We had a student who had a birthday today, Michael Goldstein, and if you’d been here to celebrate with him, here’s what you might have done:

Most people come to Xi’an for the terra cotta warriors, and rightly so, but the first emperor who constructed them ruled China for only 15 years, and his dynasty lasted only 3 more years.  The pride of China (the Midnight in Paris as it were) were the Tang, generally conceded (by Chinese) to have presided over the most prosperous and imaginative period in Chinese history.  Certainly the Tang set standards for much of East Asia.  It was the Tang period (600-900 roughly) that influenced Japan and Korea.  In fact, if you go to Japan and look at the Buddhist temples, you’ll see the roofs that resemble Tang China more than its successors.

And, if you knew the importance of the Tang, you might have looked at the map, as I did, and found that one of the sites you’ve never visited (and you’ve been to Xi’an many times before) is the site of the Tang palace.  After all, the current city wall surrounds what was the Ming version of Xi’an.  We’re in the north side of the city, just outside the North Gate of that wall, and less than a mile from here is that Tang Palace park.  You might have figured out that I’m an insomniac, and while China doesn’t cure that for me, it makes me glad I am, because it extends the day.

So at 6:30 am, I wandered off for an hour and a half through the city, focusing on visiting those ruins.  I saw the excavations and attempts to build up the three south gates to what was a huge palace, and if I get a chance to go back tomorrow, there’s a small museum with some of the artifacts from the palace.

You would have been more likely to join the rest of our team for the 9 am tour to the terra cotta warriors—after all, no foreigners (other than me) were at the Tang DeMing gong yuan (the palace park), and none were spotted on my walk back through tree lined (sycamores) side streets of Xi’an.

The emperor’s tomb complex is about 20 miles from the current city of Xi’an, located where there was favorable feng shui.  The emperor himself has enjoyed periods of fame and infamy (our guide stressed that even though the Zhou and Shang states predated the First Emperor, they don’t count because they were based on slavery!) partly because on the one hand he unified the country, reconstituted the great wall, standardized the currency and roads, and gave his name to the country (he was from the state of Qin); on the other hand he had a rapacious appetite for monuments to himself, which led in turn to forced labor (20,000 workers built the tomb complex, and he reputedly killed them all to preserve secrecy—can you believe that the tombs lay undiscovered after the immediate aftermath of his dynastic fall until 1974, when a head appeared in the retrieval of matter from a well being drilled on the site).  He also burned books that he did not like, and killed scholars who refused to tell him ways to live forever, and subsequent scholars have gotten their revenge.

If you’d joined Michael and his classmates today, you would have seen the four basic complexes that are now open—Pit number 1, the best known, was opened in 1979, and houses the infantry.  Two more accommodate other armies designed to guard the emperor in the hereafter.  The main pit collapsed after the rebelling populace burned the tomb, smashing most of the 8,000 warriors.  There are now around 2000 reconstructed—and you might have thought jigsaw puzzles were difficult!  The other display is of some bronze chariots that are exquisite.

The big question mark is the emperor’s tomb itself, supposedly a recreation of the universe (with mercury serving as the sea) that remains unopened.  The consensus is that the Chinese await the technology to prevent oxygen from destroying silk, wood, and colors, as has happened with many other tombs, and even to parts of the terra cotta army.

We spent a little time in the splendid provincial museum, that demonstrates the importance of the province and the city in Chinese history, with artefacts especially from the Qin, Han, and Tang periods.  The interesting thing about the Tang period is the importance of two women.  One, the Empress Wu, took over for her husband and ruled China. She was the only female to claim the title, though Tzu-hsi, a concubine who rose to queen mother and poisoned a number of emperors to be the power behind the throne until her death in 1908 (you might remember her from The Last Emperor),  and Madame Chiang and Madame Mao might have acted the role! She had, our guide kept emphasizing, a desire to be more powerful than the males, which she demonstrated by having male concubines (shucks, I told our guide, so did many empresses, including Catherine the Great, whose biography I read this year), and by constructing a lion standing up to guard a building, which is quite rare in China.  The other was a famous concubine, who was “plump”, and set the bar for beauty in Tang China.

If you were to celebrate your birthday with us, you might have asked the guide for an unusual dinner in Xi’an.  We had the famous Xi’an dumplings last night (some in the shape of a chicken, which were filled with chicken; my favorite was the walnut shaped dumpling, filled with walnuts).  She suggested Muslim food.  One of the consequences of Chang’an’s position as a world leader in trade (the silk road ended here) is that foreign traders came.  Unlike India, where the Muslim contact was, at times, military and political, Muslims settled in Xi’an, and have been here for centuries.

She suggested a special meal for Michael’s birthday that consisted of a lamb stew that was made famous by an emperor (who started a dynasty), who had started life as a beggar.  He begged for bread, which got hard, and then he put it into a soup, and lo and behold, when he became emperor, everyone agreed with him (which is why I want to be emperor) that it was one of the most tasty dishes they had ever eaten.  It was certainly a different way to spend your birthday.

After the dinner, we went to one of the best shows in China, the Tang dynasty show.  Ruth Ann and I had seen it several times before, and knew it was spectacular.  What Michael did not know was that we’d arranged to have a birthday cake brought to him by two of the Tang performers, who gave him a dao (a halyard?) to cut it. The choreography is even better than I remembered, and some of the musical instruments the cast used were archaic.  One that is haunting sounds like an oriole—the emperor commanded a musician to write a piece for him that sounded like an oriole, which had sung for the emperor’s coronation (I can’t remember when I’ve seen anything other than an English sparrow, but the Tang dynasty was a long time ago).

So, if you have a birthday coming up, you may want to spend it in Xi’an, because I don’t think you can do the things I’ve described in Chicago.

Happy Birthday, Michael.

 

We’re in Xi’an, a city of 8 million, but one, as I’m fond of writing, that was the capital of China for over 1000 years (thirteen dynasties, our guide reminds us; can you name more than 3? Qin, Han, and Tang?), but most recently 1000 years ago.  It’s a reminder that China was once THE place to come for fashion, political ideas, culture, and what passed for “electronics” in those days.  It was one terminus of the Silk Road that connected Europe and Asia, and brought the sophistication of the East to the backsliding West.

The journey here began with our last day in Shanghai, with a great site visit to a former student who is the General Manager of Cargill China. I hope that Confucius’ saying, “It is a great pleasure to welcome guests who come from afar” applies to him, because I was certainly glad to visit with him.  Omar Sadeque graduated IWU in 1992, got an MBA from Baylor, and went to work for Cargill.  Though I’ve followed his career, it’s been mostly from a distance.  The last time I visited him, it was May of 1997 or so, and he had just been sent to China, where, reasonably fresh from the MBA program, he’d been given around $30 million and told to “start a chicken feed plant.”  I remember being impressed by his responsibilities, and by his expat life style, which included car/driver/apartment/cook and maid.  He successfully established that plant, and has spent most of his career in the East—in Indonesia and Thailand, among other locations, helping grow the 12% of Cargill’s business that is in Asia.  I’ve heard good things about him from his coworkers in Malaysia, Viet Nam, and Singapore, where I have  visited Cargill operations courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Faculty Development Trips.

His current assignment is a major one—to build a chicken processing plant in Anhui province that will eventually employ 4500 people, and perhaps supply chicken, as Cargill does elsewhere, to McDonalds and KFC.  The company kind of flies under the radar; although it’s a $120 billion corporation, and would rank in the top 15 of the Fortune 500, it’s still family held, and in a business far less glamorous than Infosys, which has comparable revenues.  Its motto is nourishing people and nourishing ideas, and I’ve been impressed with what I know about its social responsibility.  When we were in Viet Nam, for example, the plant manager took us to a school that Cargill and its suppliers built and maintain for youth in an area where the government cannot afford to build schools.

Omar’s task was not only to do the right thing, as he put it, but to do it in the right way.  He helped the company negotiate the purchase of land rights (only the government owns land in China) from 1500 farmers, promising them not just a fair price, but an annuity, and moving them elsewhere.  A similar operation in India would probably cause (as it has) a farm protest, and indeed, similar displacements in China (the Yangtze Gorges project displaced over 1.5 million people) have provoked riots and unrest. But not many agreements contain the annuity.  It is an impressive company, and I’m certain that a number of students present will consider applying to the Minneapolis-based corporation.

Before our 21 hour train ride to Xi’an, we had an afternoon free to browse in Shanghai.  The bus took us to a market that houses mostly knockoff goods.  It used to be a big open air market for fake North Face, Rolex, etc., but the intellectual property negotiations have made the knockoff market less obvious in China.

For me, the building was a short walk from People’s Park, and there were a few sites there that I would much rather have seen—and did. People’s Park occupied what had once been the Racetrack in Shanghai, and I have postcards of it from the 1920s and 1930s.  The Chinese government  converted the clock tower and grandstand into a Museum of Modern Art, and it’s story, as well as the planned growth of Shanghai were related in a nearby museum; on visiting it, I was able to check it off my bucket list.

The 21 hour train ride (I almost typed “strain ride”) was kind of a shock to the students.  On the Hong Kong-Shanghai train, being an international train, there was a baggage car; hence, the four-bed compartment (the so-called soft sleeper) was fairly comfortable with our day packs and us.  On the Xi’an train, we had to take our luggage into the compartment, and find a way to store it and us together.  I think our students understood why Chinese travel light.  After the visit to the knockoff market, several students had to buy additional suitcases!

Well, we are here in Xi an which means Western Peace.  It was also called Chang an, which means long peace.  I’d hoped to write more, but I’ll save it for after our tour tomorrow (when we visit the terra cotta warriors) or Saturday, where we tour before another train ride.

 

I had almost started by saying we were touring the “old”, which is the Jade Buddha temple—built in 1928—when I realized we’d visited the Yu Yuan (the Yu garden) which dates from the 16^th century, and spent almost two hours in the Shanghai Museum, where I lingered in the Bronzes, some of which go back to 2500 BC, and the beginnings of the Chinese state.

I’ll be perverse and stick with my first thought, because “old” tends to be no later than the early 20^th century, especially in the area where we are located.  Our guide said there are 3 working Buddhist temples in Shanghai (population 23 million), and the Jade Buddha is the most visited.  One (and this is so PRC) was moved to make way for a metro station and reconstructed. The third one is quite a distance from the Bund, but was featured in a lot of postcards from a hundred years ago.  We passed it once, but our guide pointed out that it was a prison camp area under Japanese occupation, and thus is not on most tour agendas.

Our guide did one of the best jobs in explaining Buddhism that I’ve had in a long time, and especially the differences between the Buddha, Bodhisatvas, and Arhats.  She compared it to Phds, Masters, and College Graduates, an analogy I finally understand.  The main Bodhisatva (serious disciple who has learned and stayed behind to help people) is the Guan Yin, whose transformation, documented in the Shanghai Museum, and I hope over time at the Buddhist caves I will be seeing in Datong after the students leave.  The Guan Yin started as an Indian man (all the Buddhas are male), but I think it was the Empress Wu, the only woman to rule China, who made him into a her.  The museum exhibit also (bear in mind that it is a little Sinified) noted that in becoming Chinese (which happens if you’re here long enough, as our students will see in the mosque in Xi’an), it became more compassionate.  The Guan Yin is popular especially among women because they pray to her for children.

She was also excellent in explaining the layout of the Buddhist temple—with its halls, drum tower,and bell tower, etc.  Our students will get other opportunities in Xi’an to see another temple (an OLD one), and I hope to compare and contrast it with the Tibetan temple in either Beijing or Chengde.

The secular version was the Yu garden, once the centerpiece of the third Shanghai city of the old days—in addition to the French Concession and the International Settlement, there was a Chinese city.  The wall around it has long since been torn down, and the rest of the area rebuilt as a “China town,” but there is no mistaking the wealth of the Pan family which built the garden originally, or the authenticity it represents in furniture, layout, gardening, and especially the juxtaposition of rocks (many with interesting shapes, some piled together to make hills) and ponds—together the characters for mountains and water equal scenery.  As one of the students noted, facing a man-made pond filled with huge goldfish and a hill that at one time was the highest in flat Shanghai (it is on the Yangtze River delta), “I could really study for finals here.”  It’s one of my favorite places in Shanghai, partly because no matter how crowded it is, the use of space gives you the illusion of solitude—in a city of 23 million people.  The surrounding “Chinatown” offers a wealth of shopping, eating, and other experiences, such as the Temple of God , which is a Taoist (an indigenous religion that has somewhat amalgamated with Buddhism) temple; I’ve bought reproductions of the International Settlement coins there over time, as well as xiaolungbao, a Shanghai dim sum, tea, chopsticks, and lots of whatnot.  Every time I think the boundary of gauche has been reached, I go back to the Yu garden area and discover how inventive is the mind of man.  Today, the touts were trying to sell us a roller skate that goes on your heel, and has only two wheels.  We managed to escape, at least the wheel man, with pocket books intact.

That Shanghai has a museum is in itself a change from the first time I came here—or rather that it’s open is a change.  I first saw materials from the Shanghai museum in Chicago when a traveling exhibit came to the Field Museum (I believe) in the lovefest that followed ping-pong diplomacy.  But it was always closed when I started coming to Shanghai.  In the 1990s, the Shanghai government (remember, I mentioned it was this period when Zhang Ze-min, who had been mayor of Shanghai, replaced Deng Xiao-ping as China’s leader) built a number of new edifices in People’s Park (which had been the race track in the International Settlement).   One was the art museum,  in the old clocktower; another was the museum, where our guide supplied us with an audio guide.  Although I’d been to the museum before, I’d never bothered with the guide.  It was very useful in the two exhibits I spent my time in—sculptures and bronzes.   In addition, the gift shop is first rate, especially in books.  I was a little surprised to see some books for sale which I know in the pre1990s period would have been banned.

What really showed me the contrast between the old new China and the new new China was a boat trip we took tonight on the Yangtze River.  I’ve done the trip, but not recently, and never in the evening.  It was unnecessary because there were few lights at night in China, a country notoriously power poor. And poor as well.  The old Bund was lit up—and there were enough new skyscrapers to confuse Shanghai with Hong Kong, although Hong Kong’s setting is unmistakable.  Shanghai doesn’t have the Peak, but it certainly has the location as the financial center and main entry and exit point for the trade from central China along the Yangtze River.

Speaking of the old and the new, the bus took the old back to the hotel, and the new to Xintiandi, a trendy area, to continue their exploration of Shanghai.

From Hong Kong (a capitalist enclave in the People’s Republic of China) we took a 21 hour train ride to Shanghai, which has been reclaiming its prerevolutionary title as the center of capitalism (and finance)in China. I think of it, not always positively, as New York.  One of the original treaty ports opened to foreign settlement in 1842, it gradually became an enclave with its own self government—in fact, two governments.  One, that controlled the area we’re in now, was once the famed “International Settlement”, formed by the union of the British and American concessions in the 1860s.  Administered by foreigners, it was really a quasi-independent city, with its own officials (elected by a minority, which did not include Chinese until the 1920s), its own police (supplemented when needed by forces from the foreign navies here), its own stamps (at least until 1896; the stamps featured the dragon, an otherwise imperial symbol), and courts which administered foreign laws.  There was a US Court for China, for example.

Because of extraterritoriality, the right to be in this protected Settlement (the French, as was their wont, refused to join, and had the French concession, which was more known for gambling and gangs; It was right next to us, along the Whangpu, the area known as the Bund), safe from the vicissitudes of civil war (the distintegration of the Chinese empire lasted almost 100 years, and included a 19^th century quasi-Christian uprising called the Taiping rebellion that lasted nearly 20 years, and left millions dead, and swelled the population of Shanghai with refugees).

In the early 20^th century, Shanghai became the hub of especially British, and later Japanese, enterprises in central China, as the port connecting the Yangtze interior to the rest of the world. Hence, along the Bund were located the major banks and hotels and clubs that recreated the life style of countries thousands of miles away.  We’re just behind the Bund, that wonderful façade of 1920s and 1930s buildings that you might have seen in Empire of the Sun. The former Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, just down the street from us, dominates the Bund—its British lions restored in front guard the entrance to an interior that I remarked to Ruth Ann, “I’ve seen churches that aren’t this nice,” with marbled floors and columns, and murals recently uncovered on the ceiling depicting stylized cities of the Western world.

Because of its association with capitalism under the Nationalists, Shanghai suffered for a long time after 1949.  Many of its industrialists fled, either to Taiwan or Hong Kong, to help jump start those “tigers,” but Shanghai languished until the early 1990s, when former political officials from Shanghai—Zhu Rong-ji and others—moved into high offices in Beijing, and the city more than came alive economically. Always populous, it now has 23 million inhabitants.  Always crowded, it has (since my first visit here in 1990, and with a great assist from the Shanghai Expo) found ways to move crowds (infrastructure is one of the major contrasts between China and India; on our over 800 mile ride from Hong Kong to Shanghai, we were paralleled by new highways) such as subways, expressways (some of which destroyed the old colonial homes; I’ve met Tess Johnston, who has compiled Lost Shanghai, and other books detailing the colonial architecture.  She and her photographer were taking pictures of the buildings as the bulldozers were tearing them down), and double decking.  One of the most crowded streets was the Bund, which had 11 lanes of traffic and needed 20.  That was torn up and an underground tunnel put in.  Amazing changes.

I love the old colonial architecture of the Bund (so called Puxi, the west side of the Whangpu river), and the Chinese have made serious efforts to preserve the “Heritage” of the colonial past.  The buildings in this area are signed with the period, former use, and architectural style.  Many are art deco, dating from the late 20s, or early 30s, such as the Sassoon House lavishly redone (3 years of renovation) by the Fairmont, and its 1906 partner, the former Palace Hotel, now the Swatch Art Palace Hotel (naming rights?).  At least one has been restored to its former use, as the headquarters of AIA.  Cornelius V. Starr, the founder of the insurance company, had a building on the Bund, and maintained good relations with the Chinese government after 1949, and returned here in the late 1990s.  Not many people know (but I do) that the “AIA” building was owned by the North China Daily News, a British newspaper devoted to preserving the colonial way of life, but as I’ve said, I love irony (the most ironic location, perhaps, was when I came in 1990.  There were few places where foreigners could buy things, the so called “Friendship Stores,” which used special money—foreign exchange certificates; the biggest was in Shanghai, on the grounds of the former British Consulate).

If you’re a foreigner walking along the Bund, you’re likely to take pictures of yourself facing the Shanghai that people in the 30s, who had spent months at sea, witnessed on their arrival.

If you’re Chinese (or young Americans, like IWU students) you’re likely to be drawn to Pudong, the East side of the Whangpu River, which is the symbol of the new, new, newest China. The Pearl TV tower dominates this new town, which I visited when it was a gleam in a developer’s eye (in 1994 or so).  It was rice fields and construction gear, and we went to a construction hut where there was a plan for the financial capital of China, with 3 million people, a major new airport connected to the city by a maglev train, the tallest buildings in the world; I thought, “Fat chance.” If you’ve seen the toilets, you’ll wonder what chance the Chinese have of creating this model city.  12 years later, on the way to Pudong airport, driving past this city of 3 million people to the major new airport watching the maglev train speed by the tallest buildings in the world (including one shaped like a bottle opener), I ate crow before that group of students, warning them not to doubt China’s ability to do whatever China sets out to do.

We got in around noon and had the day free, and, as you can tell, I enjoyed wandering aimlessly in and out of the 1920s and 1930s (the students think that was my youth), occasionally stopping for 2012.  We do our tour tomorrow.

 

 

From Hong Kong (a capitalist enclave in the People’s Republic of China) we took a 21 hour train ride to Shanghai, which has been reclaiming its prerevolutionary title as the center of capitalism (and finance)in China. I think of it, not always positively, as New York. One of the original treaty ports opened to foreign settlement in 1842, it gradually became an enclave with its own self government—in fact, two governments. One, that controlled the area we’re in now, was once the famed “International Settlement”, formed by the union of the British and American concessions in the 1860s. Administered by foreigners, it was really a quasi-independent city, with its own officials (elected by a minority, which did not include Chinese until the 1920s), its own police (supplemented when needed by forces from the foreign navies here), its own stamps (at least until 1896; the stamps featured the dragon, an otherwise imperial symbol), and courts which administered foreign laws. There was a US Court for China, for example.

Because of extraterritoriality, the right to be in this protected Settlement (the French, as was their wont, refused to join, and had the French concession, which was more known for gambling and gangs; It was right next to us, along the Whangpu, the area known as the Bund), safe from the vicissitudes of civil war (the distintegration of the Chinese empire lasted almost 100 years, and included a 19th century quasi-Christian uprising called the Taiping rebellion that lasted nearly 20 years, and left millions dead, and swelled the population of Shanghai with refugees).

In the early 20th century, Shanghai became the hub of especially British, and later Japanese, enterprises in central China, as the port connecting the Yangtze interior to the rest of the world. Hence, along the Bund were located the major banks and hotels and clubs that recreated the life style of countries thousands of miles away. We’re just behind the Bund, that wonderful façade of 1920s and 1930s buildings that you might have seen in Empire of the Sun. The former Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, just down the street from us, dominates the Bund—its British lions restored in front guard the entrance to an interior that I remarked to Ruth Ann, “I’ve seen churches that aren’t this nice,” with marbled floors and columns, and murals recently uncovered on the ceiling depicting stylized cities of the Western world.

Because of its association with capitalism under the Nationalists, Shanghai suffered for a long time after 1949. Many of its industrialists fled, either to Taiwan or Hong Kong, to help jump start those “tigers,” but Shanghai languished until the early 1990s, when former political officials from Shanghai—Zhu Rong-ji and others—moved into high offices in Beijing, and the city more than came alive economically. Always populous, it now has 23 million inhabitants. Always crowded, it has (since my first visit here in 1990, and with a great assist from the Shanghai Expo) found ways to move crowds (infrastructure is one of the major contrasts between China and India; on our over 800 mile ride from Hong Kong to Shanghai, we were paralleled by new highways) such as subways, expressways (some of which destroyed the old colonial homes; I’ve met Tess Johnston, who has compiled Lost Shanghai, and other books detailing the colonial architecture. She and her photographer were taking pictures of the buildings as the bulldozers were tearing them down), and double decking. One of the most crowded streets was the Bund, which had 11 lanes of traffic and needed 20. That was torn up and an underground tunnel put in. Amazing changes.

I love the old colonial architecture of the Bund (so called Puxi, the west side of the Whangpu river), and the Chinese have made serious efforts to preserve the “Heritage” of the colonial past. The buildings in this area are signed with the period, former use, and architectural style. Many are art deco, dating from the late 20s, or early 30s, such as the Sassoon House lavishly redone (3 years of renovation) by the Fairmont, and its 1906 partner, the former Palace Hotel, now the Swatch Art Palace Hotel (naming rights?). At least one has been restored to its former use, as the headquarters of AIA. Cornelius V. Starr, the founder of the insurance company, had a building on the Bund, and maintained good relations with the Chinese government after 1949, and returned here in the late 1990s. Not many people know (but I do) that the “AIA” building was owned by the North China Daily News, a British newspaper devoted to preserving the colonial way of life, but as I’ve said, I love irony (the most ironic location, perhaps, was when I came in 1990. There were few places where foreigners could buy things, the so called “Friendship Stores,” which used special money—foreign exchange certificates; the biggest was in Shanghai, on the grounds of the former British Consulate).

If you’re a foreigner walking along the Bund, you’re likely to take pictures of yourself facing the Shanghai that people in the 30s, who had spent months at sea, witnessed on their arrival.

If you’re Chinese (or young Americans, like IWU students) you’re likely to be drawn to Pudong, the East side of the Whangpu River, which is the symbol of the new, new, newest China. The Pearl TV tower dominates this new town, which I visited when it was a gleam in a developer’s eye (in 1994 or so). It was rice fields and construction gear, and we went to a construction hut where there was a plan for the financial capital of China, with 3 million people, a major new airport connected to the city by a maglev train, the tallest buildings in the world; I thought, “Fat chance.” If you’ve seen the toilets, you’ll wonder what chance the Chinese have of creating this model city. 12 years later, on the way to Pudong airport, driving past this city of 3 million people to the major new airport watching the maglev train speed by the tallest buildings in the world (including one shaped like a bottle opener), I ate crow before that group of students, warning them not to doubt China’s ability to do whatever China sets out to do.

We got in around noon and had the day free, and, as you can tell, I enjoyed wandering aimlessly in and out of the 1920s and 1930s (the students think that was my youth), occasionally stopping for 2012. We do our tour tomorrow.