Sunrise on Tai Shan
7000 steps and over five hours climbing. It had rained almost all the way up until we’d climbed too high for it to rain any more. For the rest of the way to the summit we were passing through a whiteout that still hadn’t shifted by the time I went to bed. It didn’t look good for the sunrise. But you pay you money and take your chance. And if you can see no further than your outstretched hand on the only day you’ve got to go up there, you’d better be praying to everything you can on your way to the top for a clear sky in the morning. I’d set my alarm for 04:15. Sunrise was at 05:20. read more »
7000 steps to the top of Tai Shan
When it comes to mountains, they don’t come any grander or any more renowned in China, than Tai Shan. It is neither the tallest nor the most spectacular of China’s famous peaks, but having been visited by anyone who was ever anyone in Chinese history – from the first emperor Qin Shi Huang to Confucius and Mao Zedong – the mountain today, like Tiananmen Square in Beijing, is a place of pilgrimage for the Chinese people, a chance to connect with thousands of years of Chinese history and tread the same steps as those nation builders that came before them. read more »
His ‘n’ hers: street fashion China style
Have you ever noticed, that when you start to notice something, you can help but notice the thing you noticed with increasing regularity? Like the time I found out that Volvos always drive with their headlights switched on. At first I didn’t believe it. But after I noticed one and then another of these Swedish behemoths happily going about with their lights all bright and shiny, it was soon as if every second car I saw became a Volvo I was seeing them so often. If you are abroad, this noticing gets boosted ten-fold when surrounded with the new and peculiar. In China for instance read more »
Qingdao: beaches, beer and more besides
The way it’s sometimes written one would be forgiven for thinking Qingdao was the jewel of some kind of Chinese Riviera. But though when it comes to the seafront Qingdao is more Blackpool than Barcelona, more St Austell than St Tropez, the city’s beaches still remain insanely popular during the busy summer months. I was witness to this insanity on my first day after arriving. I took a trip up to the No. 1 Bathing Beach. Reputed to be the largest bathing beach in Asia, it is another legacy of Qingdao’s German occupation, as well as being the beach closest to the city centre. read more »
Close encounters of the sexual assault kind
I’d been joined about a yoghurt-and-a-half into my eating by a curious character who’d obviously taken some interest in this pasty, check-shirted picnicker, and had crossed the rocks to say hello. He looked like a kind of toothless Gollum, shuffling up to me with his gaping grin as I looked up from my pot. All those stalagmites and stalactites jutting around inside the abyss. It was like peering into Carlsbad Caverns when he smiled. But he was a friendly sort, and once he’d took my nodding and noises of encouragement for encouragement, we got to sharing my bananas and chatting read more »
Why do people go to Suzhou?
Why do people go to Suzhou? I wasn’t planning on going myself until I got talked into it whilst I was in Nanjing. “It’s beautiful,” I was told. “You can see the canals and … there are lots of gardens.” I was skeptical. Suzhou bills itself as the “Venice of the East,” a moniker my guidebook had referred to as a “hackneyed … chat-up line” that I was unlikely to fall for. It is a town, it continues, that has “had to contend with destruction of its heritage and its replacement with largely arbitrary chunks of modern architecture.” Though Marco Polo, everybody’s favourite read more »
Suzhou: Big Pants and public dancing
Suzhou has always, historically, been a prosperous town. The completion of the Grand Canal led to the city becoming a centre for shipping and commerce during the Sui dynasty and, just like Hangzhou to the south, the merchants arriving via this new trade route contributed to Suzhou flourishing during its early heyday. By the 14th century, the city had become China’s leading silk producer. Scholars, aristocrats and high officials made their home here, constructing gardens and villas to complement the canals, many of which can still be seen today. read more »
Say cheese! It’s Chinese Domestic Tourism Day
Visit any major tourist site in China – or even any local point of interest for that matter – and you’ll likely witness it yourself. Maybe it’ll be the identical baseball caps you notice first, bobbing along in the collective safety of the sightseeing pack. Maybe it’ll be the tour buses you hear pulling up and emptying out next to some formerly tranquil beauty spot or other. Or maybe it’ll be the amplified screech of some half-frazzled, umbrella-wielding tour guide that lifts you from your scenic contemplation and dumps you right back down to earth in the middle of the crosshairs of read more »
Typhoon dodging with the Nanjing Martyrs
I knew it was coming. The night before I left Hangzhou I’d dreamt of deluges and floods, of trains being swept off tracks and being hounded by lightning strikes. It was summer, typhoon season, and the Philippine Sea was boiling up splendidly, sending swirling chaos towards China’s east coast just in time to leave me scrabbling to avoid it. Typhoon Vicente had already struck Hong Kong a few weeks earlier, leaving a force 10 storm’s-worth of damage and a massacre of dead umbrellas scattered across the city. Moving north, I thought I’d left all that behind. But there were already two other read more »
Nanjing: city of the future; city of today
In the three years since I’d last visited, Nanjing seemed little changed. It still seemed the sprightly, agreeable city I’d encountered the first time. The metro was still wonderfully clean and efficient, with a second east-west line having opened in 2010. The streets around the old town were still vibrant and the noodle shops still looked as inviting as ever. There was none of the overwhelming enormity associated with some of the more substantial Chinese cities, though Nanjing could hardly be described as petite. Indeed, though the city is developing rapidly, with a current population read more »