May Term 2012

I arrived in Bloomington 24 hours ago, happily (using air miles) via First Class on American.  It seemed a fitting way to end a First Class journey around the world—after a 6 hour train from Datong to Beijing. There were two newsworthy articles this morning in the Wall Street Journal relevant to the trip.  One was the … Continue reading »

Guess what? On the way in to Datong, my guide pointed out the new buildings on the far side of the river, which included the government center, apartment buildings, and so forth.  She noted that the government decided to move away from the older area of the city to foster tourism, and prepare for the day … Continue reading »

Words failed Li Bing when he saw the last temple I saw today.  The famous Tang poet could only inscribe “magnificent” on a rock, but added a dot after zhuang guan, an exclamation point in a language that has none. He might have been thinking about the kind of day I had, which began when we … Continue reading »

If you were looking for a city built to be a caricature of a  Chinese city, you wouldn’t have to look far, at least not if you were in Pingyao, a world heritage Unesco city of nearly 50,000 people In Shanxi province. Unlike the similarly positioned Lijiang, in Yunnan, far from here, which had to be … Continue reading »

In effect, the class ended when we arrived back in Beijing on Friday. We all had a free afternoon and evening to do last minute things—whether it was visit the zoo to see pandas, the pearl market to buy copies or real pearls, or to sample the night life (my recommendation was the Banana club. … Continue reading »

We were in Chengde, 130 miles or so north of Beijing.  It’s about 15 degrees cooler, 1500 feet higher, and has about 23 million fewer inhabitants.  We’ve gone back to China about 10 years ago, maybe more, but it does boast a McDonalds and a KFC franchise. It is pleasant to visit a smaller city, if only … Continue reading »

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 … Continue reading »

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 … Continue reading »