Short trip to Shanghai

I made a quick trip to Shanghai last weekend on the high speed train. The regular Wuhan-Shanghai train takes half a day; the high speed train, which hits 250 km an hour, takes five hours or less, depending on the number of stops. It’s a sleek, efficient, classy operation. Snack carts are piloted by women dressed in smart outfits – looking like old-line airline stewardesses. Attendants pass through the cars constantly picking up after passengers. Vast new train stations have been built or are under construction in Shanghai and Wuhan to accommodate the high speed system, which will eventually extend over much of the country.

Nanjing Road department store

This was my first visit to Shanghai since August, 1980, when I spent much of the time listening to shortwave broadcasts of the Democratic National Convention. I remembered especially Ted Kennedy’s inspiring “The cause endures” speech at the convention, and my regret he wasn’t nominated, opening the door, as it turned out, for Reagan’s ruinous presidency.

On my first day in Shanghai in 1980 I met a couple of students who offered to guide me to the Yu garden, one of the city’s tourist sights. En route, the two were taken away by a plainclothes security person, without a word to me. Shanghai then had a façade of modernization unknown elsewhere in China: there were billboards for foreign products, women wore short skirts, little children waved and said “Hello, uncle!” on the streets. But underneath the surface was harsh social control.

Pudong area

That kind of overt police action probably wouldn’t occur in today’s Shanghai, China’s commercial and cultural center. The streets are full of foreigners, some of them obviously residents. One European woman was walking her two spaniels, dressed in neat little jackets with their names in Chinese. She spent some time explaining to me the difference between English and Springer spaniels.

Vuitton trunk

Across from old colonial buildings along the Bund, facing the Whampoa River, is glaringly modern Pudong, in 1980 not much more than a mud flat. Nanjing Lu, always the city’s chief shopping area, is chockablock with high end stores selling imported luxury goods. Vuitton, a designer brand much favored for copying by enterprising shanzhai pirates, has erected a giant retro steamer trunk on Nanjing Lu, as if to say, “Get your real Vuitton here.” Things had changed so much I was only slightly surprised to see a Salvation Army band playing.

Band on Nanjing Lu

It turned out not to be Salvation Army; judging from the uniforms, they were retired PLA musicians. I’ll be making other trips to Shanghai later. This week I’m headed for a week in warmer parts of the country: Kunming and Yunnan province in southern China.

Snowfall by East Lake

Happy New Year. The Year of the Rabbit: a peaceful year after the year of the Tiger.

Christmas visit to Guizhou province

Guiyang strawberries


During Paula’s Christmas visit to China we took the overnight train from chilly Wuhan to Guizhou Province in southern China, where strawberries were being sold on the streets. Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces, although one couldn’t tell it from Guiyang's expensive hotels, Modern Woman Hospital, and high end stores: at the newly opened French-owned Carrefour store primo bottles of Guizhou Moutai, a potent liquor, are on offer for 28,800 RMB, about $4500.


Guiyang's delivery men

 At night, however, as the streets clear of shoppers, “delivery men” who spend their days walking the streets looking for small jobs sleep in ranks on the sidewalks, using their baskets as pillows.

In a park adjoining the National Culture Palace, snake oil salesman, fortune tellers, singing bird aficionados, sidewalk calligraphers and “Tuo luo” players passed the time. The last involves striking a spinning top with a whip to make it hum eerily. Taking singing birds for an outing, most often “Hwamei,” the Laughing Thrush, in distinctive bamboo cages suspended by large silver hooks, is another favorite hobby in southern China.


Fortune teller (with parakeet)

The National Culture Palace and Hotel is an imposing, oddly-shaped building dedicated to the minority cultures of mountainous Guizhou: Dong, Bouyei, Miao, Yao, Shui and others. The museum isn’t well publicized -- Paula and I wandered through empty display rooms, the only visitors—but interesting for its displays of jewelry and minority costumes.The touristic potential of minority cultures is being exploited as Guizhou develops its tourist industry. A tour we took to Huanguoshu Falls included a stop at a manufactured “Miao village.”

Qianling Park performance

 At Qianling Park, we watched an impromptu classical dance performance while someone played a saxophone on the hillside. An older man told us about Americans who’d been in Guiyang during the anti-Japanese war, and gave us a rule sheet for “Digital Army Military Chess,” designed “just for the foreigners who don’t know Chinese.” The rules are not entirely clear and even a bit alarming (e.g. “Without the engineer troop to dig the mine, can’t win the other side unless use the bomb”) but he gathered a crowd around as he talked to us about his time in Wuhan during the war, and the decline of the “English corner” in the park. The slogan was taken down, he said, referring to red banners routinely hung to make announcements: “Without a slogan they won’t come,” he said regretfully, and then, to the admiring crowd: “Practice makes perfect!”


Feeding macaques, Qianling park

 For Paula the high point of Qianling Park was watching the resident population of macaques, who ran free in the more wooded portions cadging food from visitors. Signs asking visitors not to feed the animals were ignored by monkeys and people. One woman appeared with an armful of Ding Dong-like pastries wrapped in plastic, which the monkeys clearly liked.

Bronze statue,Jiaxiu pavilion

From the National Culture Palace we walked along a river walk beside the Nanming River to Jiaxiu pavilion, a symbol of the city, built during the Ming Dynasty to provide a place for aspiring scholars to prepare for the imperial examinations. A statue beside the river walk depicted a man fishing with a slender bronze pole; we wondered how long a work like this would survive in the U.S. without being vandalized.

Ceremonial opening, countryside

On our second full day in Guiyang we took a public bus to Tienhetuan, past Guizhou’s distinctive mountains, looking like sculpted burial mounds. There was much evidence of the government’s efforts to develop the economy of rural areas and thereby reduce the massive migration to China’s cities. On one hillside a long line of construction equipment had been arranged to complement the festive opening of what would probably be an industrial plant.

Tourism is also being developed, though we were the only foreigners on the bus to Tienhetuan, and found ourselves alone as we made our way through a long, elaborately lighted cave complex. We were mildly alarmed at the thought that no one knew we were in the cave, nor did we have any idea how long the cave trail was.

Huanguoshu Falls

On our last full day in Guiyang we joined a tour to Huanguoshu Falls, one of China’s largest waterfalls and Guizhou’s most famous sight. An all-day affair, the tour included a visit to a fake Miao village and two sales stops, one plugging a knife set, the other local food specialties. These sales stops are a normal part of tours for Chinese visitors, who like to load up on the local food items.

Huanguoshu Falls, modestly identified on a sign as the “No 1 marvellous and wonderful one for the world” is spectacular, not in an overwhelming Niagara Falls sense, but for the way the falling water interweaves with rocks and vegetation. One can climb up to a spray-drenched trail, called Water Curtain Cave, which passes behind the falling water.

Dragon Palace cave

Entrance to Dragon Palace

Also on the tour was Dragon Palace, a karst cave with ragged curtains of stone at its entrance. Visitors enter the cave in little electrically-powered boats, cruising passages with names in Chinese and English (one identified as “Hole-hole”) into large, cathedral-like rooms , lit in technicolor and accompanied by classical Chinese music on the boat’s sound system. Silence might have been preferable, but silence isn’t popular in China.

Tianxing Scenic area



Fellow travelers












A final stop was at the Tianxing scenic area, a quiet, beautiful promenade through striking rock formations along a walkway of large stones, water flowing between them and submerging all but the very top of each stone. By that time we had become part of the Chinese tour group, especially an extended family of three generations, who were always checking to be sure the two Americans weren’t lost. 

Paula and I were back in Wuhan to celebrate New Year's Eve. With the power out in my apartment building, we lit candles and toasted the New Year with Austrian champagne.


Learning calligraphy, Guiyang market