A Detour Through China
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The Owl
Vol. 2,
Issue 22
June 5, 2008
Baltimore,
Maryland
Dear Inquiring Traveler,
China usually makes the news these days because of its booming economy and upcoming Beijing Olympic games—until the catastrophic earthquake that recently devastated the southwestern province of Sichuan hit the headlines.
Here at The Owl, we decided to pay our own tribute to China by stepping off our well-trodden European paths and taking a detour to explore a little of this vast and ancient land.Best regards,
Editor,
The Owl
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A Detour Through China (Part 1)
by Paul Lewis
Where should the Grand Tourist go in today’s age of global travel?
My answer was to spend three weeks in China after decades spent trudging the well-worn paths of France, Italy, Spain, and Greece.
It has been an eye-opener. Doing the Grand Tour of China is rather like jostling through perpetual crowds enveloped in pollution, while barely able to communicate with the natives. I recommend it.
Never Alone
That enormous population of over 1.3 billion souls means you are never alone. Everything is always full–streets, gardens, monuments, trains, buses, planes, airports, stations, restaurants. Visitors live in a crowd.
But contact with the world around you is difficult, if you do not speak that bell-like language ("ding-ding" means "very") or read its beautifully unintelligible script (educated Chinese spend twenty years learning 8,000 characters and four different speaking tones.)
In many countries you can guess what is said or written. Not in China, though thankfully the English word "toilet" is fairly ubiquitous in cities. Linguistic isolation is only strengthened by an absence of western newspapers and the spotty availability of international TV or Internet access.
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Men Not Allowed
China may no longer look or feel like an old-time Communist police state. There is no resemblance to Ceaucescu’s Romania, for example, or Poland under martial law. But censorship is alive and well. So be resourceful; bring the complete works of Shakespeare or Dostoievsky for your idle moments.
Another unusual feature of life in China is that much of what you see is glimpsed through a mist of pollution almost unimaginable in western cities. Visitors to Beijing or Shanghai often feel they are living in a sulfurous cloud.
But those cities are impressive. In Beijing I fought my way through hordes of visitors to tour the Forbidden City, a vast warren of red and gold palaces which housed the Imperial Court: Forbidden because the Emperor was the only whole man allowed to sleep there to ensure all children born in the palace were his. Eunuchs, of whom there were thousands, did not count.
In one respect, the Forbidden City is something of a disappointment. Its lavish gold and silver furnishings were carried off by Chiang Kai Shek’s defeated anti-Communist forces when they fled to Taiwan in 1947. Even my old Alma Mater, Oxford University, managed to pick up a slice of the Imperial Library.
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Smokey Air and Smoking Incense
An hour away by plane (which never climbed above the pollution), Shanghai offers a very different vista–one of a futuristic cityscape, imported from beyond the moon, where bullet trains and roads-on-stilts snake between breathtaking towers and soaring mega-buildings.
This is the face of Chinese modernity. But its price lies in that never ending string of barges hauling coal to smoky power stations along the Yangtze River.
Yet at Shanghai’s temple of the Jade Buddha, one festival morning, I watched youthful crowds with smoking incense sticks burn imitation bank notes in honor of the gods before kowtowing in silent prayer until their foreheads touched the ground.A Cult of Eight
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But while some Chinese are religious still, money is what most really worship after fifty years of Communism. "To be rich is glorious," they still say. But they are superstitious about acquiring wealth.
The number 8 symbolizes Good Luck, which equates with wealth. So everyone wants plenty of 8's in their telephone number, on their apartment front door or the license plate of their car. It is no accident that this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games will open on the eighth day of the eighth month of the year 2008.
But Bad Luck also exists, in the form of the number 4 which sounds like Death in Mandarin. So, while Chinese have no qualms about a thirteenth floor hotel room, the elevator that carries them there will move between the third and fifth without stopping.
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