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Hefang Street, Hangzhou

Posted on September 12, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Back during the Southern Song Dynasty when Hangzhou was China’s capital, the city was perhaps the biggest and richest in the world. The 14th century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta called it “the biggest city I have ever seen on the face of the earth.” While Marco Polo, whether he ever actually visited China or not, noted that “the number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of goods that passed through their hands, was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof.”

Ten (alternative) Scenes of West Lake

Posted on September 7, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Revered by emperors and inspiring poets for centuries, Hangzhou has long been considered one of the most beautiful destinations in all of China. “Above there is heaven,” the Chinese say. “Below there is Hangzhou”. Marco Polo even went so far as to describe the city as “the most beautiful and magnificent in the world” when he visited at the end of the 13th century, and if the number of visitors that still flock here to witness this magnificence are anything to go by, its reputation has not waned one bit in the intervening years.

The thing about travelling in China as a Westerner

Posted on September 4, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

The thing about travelling in China as a Westerner, as any Westerner that has travelled in China will know, is that at times it can feel like you are walking round with a neon sign above your head advertising your endlessly fascinating other-worldliness. In every city, in every town in mainland China, a foreigner will, more often than not, be seen as nothing more the foreigner he is upon being first encountered “in the wild” as it were.

Anyone for Hangzhou?

Posted on August 26, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Turns out Shanghai by 6am wasn’t such a wild exaggeration after all. The no-lights-on-the-bus situation meant that after sundown, and an hour or so spent trying to write in the dark, I was asleep by 9pm or thereabouts. It was then a night of sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, in my too-short, too-narrow, upper-middle bunk, as we rocked and rolled our merry way east. It was like trying to sleep in a sledge … as it careered down a snowy hill … for nine hours straight … all the while dreaming of coaches rolling crash barriers, flaming wreckages and head-on collisions to the incessant punctuation of honking coach horns all night long. But at least when I woke we were closer.