Sketchbook

Final Impressions

As we travel to our final official excursion on our last day this is likely to be my final blog post of this trip.

There are a bunch of topics I haven't had the chance to write about. I have one post in mind discussing our guides and how for better or worst they have shaped our experience. I have another post prepared in my head about my new found obsession with contemporary traditional Chinese landscape painting. I could wax lyrical about the food in China or give another essay on Urbanism. I haven't described the song and dance show in Xi'an or the Jade sellers clinging to the side of our boat in Guilin or complain at length about the state of the toilets. What I have tried to do, like a Chinese banquet, is provide tastes of many different experiences. I've attempted to avoid writing a simple log of our activities but to connect different experiences together around themes, ideas and contrasts.


Yesterday I asked everyone the inevitable question: “What was the best bit?”. I think we could answer honestly and say that it is impossible to say that any one day was measurably better than any other. Aside from our Jinan experience, which seems separated from the holiday part of our trip, each place has provided a different surprise, insight or just a great view. I would happily (and intend to) visit all the places we visited again. Notably, I would put Shanghai and Guilin on the top of my list whilst Jinan and Bejing are likely to become regular haunts over the next few years and, who knows, I may be working in Hong Kong before long.

We've overused the cliché “trip of a lifetime” but for Meng and me, I hope it's the first of many. However, for me, what makes this trip special is not the sales brochure pictures of pagodas, gardens, rice fields and terraces but that China is no longer a foreign country to me. Next time we come back I will be returning to my second home.

Panoramas from a Bamboo City

What a difference a day, a new city and a new tour guide makes. I woke up in Shanghai this morning with all the energy and excitement of our first morning in Hong Kong. As we travelled from the hotel to the centre of Shanghai our candid guide suggested that whilst we in the West look at the lack of democracy as a limiting factor in China’s development you can sure get things done if you don’t have to debate about it for 10 years before acting. I can see his point.

They say that Bamboo can grow up to one foot per day. This means that with patience if you watch a stem of bamboo for a few hours you should be able to see it change and move. Shanghai is the man made version of a forest of bamboo – only you don’t need much patience to see the vertical stems of sky scrapers soar up through the undergrowth of the old town as you watch.

Shanghai is a thrusting testosterone driven city – load and proud about its intensions to take on Beijing as Chinas premier city and equally challenging Hong Kong for height. Shanghai also wears its western history comfortably and with pride – preserving much of the ‘Concessions’ architecture of the once European controlled parts of the city. But, as we took the river cruise the tasteful mock classical grand colonial buildings on the east bank were dwarfed by the garish multi coloured sky scrapers on the western bank. The message was clear although the compass is reversed. Europe is the past, Asia is the future.

An ode to the road sweeper lady

We're waiting in Guilin Airport for our final internal flight, to Shanghai. Perhaps it's because the humidity is now verging on oppressive, or that we've been on the road (or in the air) for more than 3 weeks, or the annoying and completely inept guide who has trailed behind us for the last 4 days, but our stamina is beginning to deteriorate. However, as we rest our weary limbs in the departure lounge I spare a thought for the road sweeper lady. Let me explain...

Whilst China is a very big and divers country wherever we go one thing remains consistent. A lady, probably in her mid-sixties (although given the toughness of her life she might be younger), is sure to be found on every road in every city we have visited in China. I will concede that it might not be the same lady but I like to think she simply follows us around sweeping dust wherever we go. She wears a traditional conical hat, a reflective jacket and carries around a long twig with a bunch of smaller twigs attached roughly to the end. She spends her days wearily wandering round Chinas highways pushing dust along the road. Her purpose is mostly a mystery. She doesn't seem to achieve anything. In Beijing and Jinan I assumed that the road sweeper must be participating in a form of euthanasia in what I'm convinced, given Chinese traffic, is the most dangerous job on earth. But even along country roads the lady toils brushing dust along tracks which are essentially only made of dust.

Next time I get tired at work I'll think of the road sweeper lady. Next time I think of the great and seemingly impossible achievements of Chinese guts and determination I won't think of the Great Wall of China but of the lady who, alone, sweeps the highways of one of the biggest countries on earth armed with nothing more than a twig and conical hat.

Town and Country

There is a famous historical conundrum that China's level of technological development meant that it could have industrialised more than 200 years before we did in the west but something prevented China from taking the necessary final step. Different historians have speculated about why. Some have proposed that the singular power of the Emperor discouraged the free enterprise necessary to incentivise finding an economy of means for production. Others have suggested that China's complex linguistic diversity prevented the free exchange of invention necessary for the development of industrial technology. My favourite explanation, however, is that Chinese culture was fundamentally ecological - in other words too connected to nature to allow for the possibility of heavy industry. If this is true then this aspect of Chinese culture has diminished but not quite disappeared.

In cities like Jinan greenery is scarce and localised to a few designated parks or, in the case of Beijing, the Emperors back garden. Land prices are simply too high to ‘waste’ on commercially unproductive trees. These cities are dusty and polluted but not inhumane. They do, however, represent a complete dominance over nature. Even in the gardens of the Emperors, the Chinese tradition of cultivating nature as a medium for story telling means that the plants and stones are arranged every bit as carefully as the ink marks on calligraphy scrolls.

More harmonious relationships with nature exist out of town. The Great Wall for example, which should represent a harnessing of brute force to create an impenetrable barrier along China’s northern boarders is, in fact, little more than a ribbon gently winding round uncompromising jagged mountain tops.

Then to the Longji Terraces. A three hour drive from civilisation (Gualin) and a further one hour trek took us to the not quite top of a mountain from which we could see the contours made real of rice paddies descending down shear slopes. If we had visited in early spring the contours would have appeared razor sharp and filled with water reflecting the sky. Now only a couple of months later they are filled with rice crops and the mountains have begun to reclaim them eroding and softening their banks with new layers of vegetation. .

As the thunderstorms roll around the vertical mountains which surround us in Yangshuo, I'm reminded that nature usually wins out in an argument with human development. On a column outside the hotel a red line marks the high watermark of floods in 2008. The water would have half submerged all the rooms on the ground floor, not only of the hotel, but of the whole town. This settlement has formed in, what must be, the floodplain of the River Li because aside from the most adventurous of mountain goats and seemingly impossible trees which grow out horizontally no one can live on these mountains. We instead wind our settlements around them with a forced deference conceded only by the occasional mobile phone mast – a sign of the new industrial revolution.

To be an alien

We are enjoying our holiday very much but I must confess a note of disappointment. Whilst I do feel privileged to be able to say that I've seen the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City and the Terracotta warriors, the reality is that we have been overexposed to images of these monuments well before we got to China and this has a number of unfortunate consequences. The site of the Terracotta warriors, for example, is much smaller that we were expecting.

It is big and in an aircraft hanger of a building but, all the photographs of the site are taken through fish eye lenses making it appear to be vast. This isn't helped by the fact that before you arrive at the site you've been through at least 4 or 5 shops trying to sell you full scale terracotta warriors for your garden. Similarly, the Forbidden City is constantly around you on billboards and on TV as virtual fly-throughs. I've seen the Forbidden City sell everything from the Olympic Games to Toothpaste and so arriving there seems like a strangely unreal experience – like being inside a virtual reality simulation which has, unfortunately, been filled with American tourists.

There are moments of revelation though. For example you get glimpses of the surprisingly modest domestic living quarters of the emperor in the Forbidden City.

Under a hastily arranged tarpaulin you get a glimpse of the basic equipment being used by the archaeologists of the Terracotta Warriors as they toil (presumably through the night) to uncover and reconstruct each and every pottery man. In the Xi'an museum I caught site of a model which, for a moment, connected me with what it might have been like to be a 19th century explorer arriving in China for the first time. The model was of an Emperors carriage. The carriage looked as if it had arrived from an alien planet with a domed roof set low over a wide wheel based flying saucer. This is the stuff of fantasy novels and to the un-expecting eye would have been a very strange site.

I'm pleased to say they the alieness has continued into our boat tour of the Li River. Even though this landscape must be one of the most photographed in the world the thing about natural landscapes is that they remain elusive and impossible to fully capture. In England (particularly my part of England) we are used to a modest sort of landscape which rolls around gently eroding and softening in a quite understated way. Not so here the hills are vertical cliff faces protruding out of the ground into monolithic mounts which loom out of the mist. This is the site you would expect to see when visiting middle earth – a truly alien experience.

Haggling

With each site we visit there is inevitably a gateway of shopping to pass before we get to the actual attraction. Sometimes they are loosely dressed as part of the experience – the ‘Jade Museum’, the ‘Terracotta Factory’ and the ‘Lacquer Workshop’. Other times they are blatant shopping centres built to capture rich tourists with to much disposable income or, like today, they are honest tourist markets – there to do little more than sell you cheap trinkets and fake watches. Whatever the shopping experience there are a couple of things to remember.

First, the shop owners will hound you the moment you walk in the shop. Depending on their level of English and sophistication they may start by engaging you with small talk before gently introducing objects that “will benefit you and your family for years to come” or the more direct “Want this? Will do special cheap price for you!” Most of the time this is both annoying and counter productive and causes you to leave before you’ve finished browsing. God help you if you show the slightest interest in anything they have to offer – you’re likely to have 3 or 4 sales assistants descend on you like vultures if the catch sight of the colour of your money.

Second, never pay the ticket price. Ticket prices appear to have been produced by thinking of a random number and then adding a 0. Sometimes the seller won’t even price their goods – instead they will give you a price based on your perceived level of gullibility. Mum still hasn’t gotten the hang of haggling and has, on a number of occasions, been heard asking the shop assistant the price of an object and then following up with “Oh that sounds very cheap” or “Isn't that reasonable”. Invariably Meng steps in and escorts mum quickly away from the stall having lost any semblance of a bargaining position. We now have a system that involves mum spotting something she likes then moving quickly away from the stall and letting Meng step in. It's surprising how such a sweet girl as Meng can turn very aggressive in a bargaining situation. Her arrival on the scene is invariably treated with dismay by the shop assistants as she hammers them down to half or a quarter of what they were offering my mum. I rarely understand completely what these negotiations involve but I have learned enough to try the technique myself with - some success. The patter goes something like this:

1. Pick up an object and ask its price.
2. Greet the answer with laughter and a roll of the eyes and proceed to leave.
3. At this point the assistant will chase after you asking how much you are prepared to pay. Tell them you aren’t interested and clearly have very different opinions of the value of the goods on offer.
4. The assistant will ask you to name you price and you answer with an amount that is about one quarter of what they are asking.
5. At this point the shop assistant will look incredibly hurt and start to demonstrate the high quality of thing you are buying. Ignore them – apologise for wasting their time and leave the shop.
6. They will then chase you down the street with a new and much more reasonable offer (sometimes the offer you were originally going to pay).
Turn back hesitate for a moment, as though in thought, then pay the money.

It worked for me today at Xi'an market. I bought a box of paint brushes which were offered to me at £25 for £5. I'm going to start using the technique in Marks & Spencer’s when I get home - think of the Money I'll save!!

Art

There is no getting away from the fact that, wherever we look signs, walls, books and magazine covers are adorned with what look (to western eyes) like beautiful but meaningless squiggles. This is, of course, Mandarin writing but there is an advantage to seeing these images without the baggage of understanding their meaning. For me they are each perfectly composed little patterns. In this mode, it is possible see these patterns everywhere – not only in writing and I have formed a relatively uninformed view that this writing is key understanding virtually all artistic culture in China.

Whilst in the west our artistic culture has fragmented into competing styles and tastes, all pre-modern (1940s) Chinese art seems uniformly consistent, both across times and types. This is partly an unintended benefit thousands of years of powerful Emperor rule as cultures and races have been assimilated and where superstition has been wielded as a weapon of control. It also has to do with the context in which the art is made.

Despite, and perhaps because of, modern China's industrial skylines nature and its patterns are treated with reverence.

(Trees at the Big Goose Pagoda in Xi'an)

Even the patterns of tree branches can be treated with significance and natural forms are the basis, not only for representation (particularly in Chinese painting) but for the technique of representation. In other words, its not enough just to paint a tree but to paint using tools and techniques that allow the painter to adopt gestures that follow the trees own forms. This also seems to be the origin of the calligraphy tradition, but the letter forms which make up the Mandarin alphabet not only serve a representative purpose but are also symbolic. The patterns have, therefore, become refined into simple gestures but are still based on representations of nature so that a great writer in more ancient times is not simply a wordsmith but a skilled visual artist as he manipulates the appearance of letters as well as articulating words.

Taken to their abstract conclusion these natural forms are found in a highly stylised architecture particularly in the tree bow like roofs and in the formalised patterns adorning every surface. However, because ancient buildings often occupy extensive grounds and cultivate natural settings they seen to reconnect with their environment seamlessly. Buildings appear almost as pieces of calligraphy in the landscape.

This is, of course, a westerners simplified view of a complex set of art forms but I can't help but look with slight jealousy at what appears to be such a seamless and coherent artistic tradition.

Off Camera

If you have ever visited a film set you will know that there is a narrow angle of view in which the scenery and the actors are perfectly positioned inside their make-believe world. If the camera were to shift, even slightly, to the left or right the illusion would be broken as a small army of production staff come into view.

As we embark on the package tour part of our journey Michael (our tour guide) gently but quickly sheppards us from one perfect view to another with scripted factoids about this or that emperor. He tries not to expose us to the off camera world but no matter how narrowly he defines our view he can’t stop us from looking in the ‘wrong’ direction or outside the predefined parts. Take the Great Wall for example. Whilst the view from the top was undoubtedly spectacular the car journey too and from the wall was, in many ways, more impressive but, when pressed, Michael seemed almost embarrassed to discuss the bits of the wall we weren’t actually visiting. Perhaps this is why he chose to distract us on the way back with a lecture on China’s family planning policy.

There are other things that won’t make it on to our photos. Whilst I painted a serene view from a picnic area at the top of the Great Wall I chose not to include the Korean boy peeing off the side of the wall next to me. On the other hand I would be unable to capture the noise as we walked through the tunnels, deep in the mountain, to the cable car station which made me feel that I was travelling into the nostrils of a dragon.

Sometimes, however, Michael has planned some off-camera moments. The value of a trip like this is in an intangible commodity of views and memories but, ultimately, someone has to pay for it. This is why the off-camera surprise of yesterday consisted of a ‘Jade Museum’. The museum itself was an identical series of rooms – each big enough to accommodate a single coach party and displaying about 15-20 modern jade carvings. We were greeted by an enthusiastic ‘curator’ who wasted little time with a museum tour before taking us, past the master craftspeople (4 bored looking people behind glass screens polishing bits of Jade), through to the ‘museum shop’ or perhaps, more accurately a Jade supermarket. We were told that we would be taught how spot real Jade from fake. The answer – to buy it from the museum shop.

It is often these off-camera moments and scenes that are most interesting and most revealing. They may not be part of the ‘Magic of China’ illusion but they are an inevitable and important part of the script of our holiday.

A Tale of 4 Cities

It's best to think of Beijing, not as a single city or different districts but as four distinct cities squashed together and competing for space.

Loosing the battle for space are the ‘old citys’ or Hutongs. Whilst Hutongs exist in other parts of Beijing they are mostly preserved in a few acres of land close to the Forbidden City. Here, you can take a rickshaw for £10 if you are an easily targeted western tourist or £3 if you have a Chinese person in your party who can haggle. I held out for £2 - so we walked. For the visitor the Hutongs are little more than very narrow streets with Red doors hiding courtyard houses behind. These houses once belonged to the officials and most important servants form the Forbidden city but, after the revolution they were given back to the people so that behind each red door 3 or 4 families may live. Whilst some families still cling to the way of life offered by the Hutongs they now represent prime real estate and it can only be a matter of time before they are gradually preserved as museums and bijou hotels offering ‘a taste of authentic China'.

Then there are the Emperor’s palaces and temples. The forbidden city (the second city) is still a potent landmark of Old China. Unusually, if they are compared with ancient British monuments, signs of aging and decay are not apparent here. Before the Olympics most of the Forbidden City was given a new coat of paint and its dazzling colours mean it could easily have been built yesterday. The Emperor’s palaces and gardens also act as the lungs of the city providing (at a price) the residence with much needed open space and greenery.

Outside the Forbidden City is Tiananmen Square – the third city in Beijing. I can’t help but feel conflicted about this place. On the one hand Tiananmen Square is the source of immense pride for Chinese people – not least Meng and our guide but for me the connotations of Tiananmen’s recent history are difficult to shake off. The square is undoubtedly impressive but it’s still hard to reconcile the instruction not to discuss anything political whilst on the square (and thus in ear shot of the secret police) when you are surrounded by buildings who’s titles are all prefaced by “The Peoples…”. On one side the entrance to the forbidden city displays a portrait of Chairman Mao. This symbol is, presumably, designed to neutralise the influence of the Emperors edifice but instead raises Mao to the status of a deity.

Then to the fourth city – “Modern Beijing” which is gradually winning the battle for impact and real estate. Beijing has all the problems of a modern capital city but on a vastly larger scale to most. It therefore solves them on a much bigger scale. The new railway station, for example, would dwarf most international airports and the bullet trains which serve it could be modern jets. What does a city do when it wants to face the future? Build a another huge square of course and surrounded with landmark buildings. But never forget your past. Place the square on axis to your most ancient monument but dedicate it to new god –Olympus - and invite everyone to the opening party.

Beijing is complex, layered and contradictory with its past and future written in stone. In other words everything a great city should be.