Nanjing Ventured, Nanjing Gained

---

Chinese New Year in Nanjing

I had kindly been invited to stay with a friend in Nanjing for Chinese New Year, but my first morning felt more like waking up in the middle of a Sarajevan winter in the early 90's, than a city in Eastern china.

It being Chinese New Year’s eve, the locals were embracing their culture in explosive style. Chinese take their fireworks very seriously, and it’s all about the quantity and decibel levels. So at 7am (as good a time as any, after all) the day’s incessant gunfire and shelling began to reverberate between the neighbourhood’s closely-packed tower blocks - and my skull. The violent rhythm of rockets and bangers was not entirely without musical merit though - the myriad of car alarms they subsequently set off added some avant-garde harmonies if nothing else.

After an initial couple hours of frenzied firework activity, things lightened to a steady stream throughout most of the day before really stepping up to a heavy bombardment between the hours of 4pm and 8pm.

At 8pm there was a slight lull while everyone watched the New Year Gala on TV, and while they readied their weapons for the main offensive, which come midnight duely rocked the foundations.

The whole melee seemed to have a general lack of respect towards the explosives or the confined spaces involved. However, I was (slightly) heartened by a scene I spotted out of the window when a small child was actively restrained from the action on the grounds of being too young. Poor kid, though, didn’t look very happy at why he wasn’t allowed to play when his, obviously older and wiser, 6-year-old relation was merrily allowed to be setting off bangers.

Things weren’t just loud though, they were also bitterly cold. Nanjing is around 1000km south of Beijing, so is normally a few degrees warmer than the capital. It is thus considered that any house built south of the Yangtze river doesn’t require heating. All very well in summer, but on days such as this one (when it was snowing), it can be rather character building. It also brings me onto another emissions related point, but I shall save it for the end and more hardened readers***

The home-cooked food, however was always warming. My friend’s mother has the same knack as my own fair mother, of being able to nip into the kitchen for a short while, and seemingly out of nowhere rustle up a collection of incredible dishes.

All the food was far tastier than it’s apparent simplicity should allow and I suspect under the veil of simplicity there was hidden much more skill than I could imagine. It seems that a “mother’s knack” is common phenomenon across the world. Good thing too. Yum.

Chinese New Year is generally far more about family than the occasion itself. New Year’s eve is normally a fairly quiet affair (apart from the firecrackers) which the majority of families spend round the TV watching the Chinese TV Gala - a show not too dissimilar to a Chinese Royal Variety Performance.

There are singers, comic sketches, acrobats, magicians and a marvellous array of wonderfully overstated and tasteless costumes. The Gala itself normally attracts over a 90%!a(MISSING)udience share, meaning around 700 million people watch it annually. 700 million and 1 this year, including myself.

The city of Nanjing

Nanjing is, on paper, an ancient walled-city of leafy avenues and old universities, nestled by the banks of the Yangtze. Of course, no Chinese city can live up to the cosiness of a description like that and sure enough at the end of the day Nanjing is still a rumbling industrial beast like any other Chinese city, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have considerable charms.

Perhaps it was due to it being Spring Festival, but the city certainly had an upbeat feeling to it. It is noticeably more colourful, both in general fixtures and fittings and with greenery, than Beijing’s sprawling browns. I wondered as well whether the atmosphere is due to having far fewer immigrants than Beijing, where a vast number of the population come from over China. There seemed to be that extra sense of pride and ownership in the city.

For a city of a mere 5 million inhabitants (modest, almost to the point of self-deprecation, by Chinese standards) it also has more than it’s fair share of Chinese history.

Its city walls, at over 33km in length, are the longest the world has ever seen, and hark back to the early Ming dynasty when Nanjing was the nation’s capital (the name literally means “south capital”, to Beijing’s “north capital”). I love city walls, they always capture the imagination and I tend to think they give a city a really feeling of “place” and continuity.

The city was then capital again when China became a republic in 1912, under the leadership of the ever popular Dr. Sun (though I think with a name like his he should advertising fruit juice on TV, rather than running newly-founded republics). Against his wishes a grand mausauleum was built on the mountain (Zijin Shan) overlooking the city, where on any particular day during the spring festival, upwards of a million Chinese tourists can be seen, layered four or five deep in places, paying their respects.

As is the way at Chinese tourist sites, though, the crowds are easily escaped and five minutes walking up the path from the mausaleum, there was not a tourist in sight. We climbed the mountain to hazy, but atmospheric views of the city. It is fair to say my first glimpse of the Yangtze did not quite meet the exotic images the name has always conjured in my imagination. I couldn’t see it at first through the haze, as it was behind the plume from a coal power station.

Other interesting sights in Nanjing (though overlooked by my Lonely Planet guide) included a German Shepherd riding a scooter. Not on its own, of course, but perched in the footwell much like a comically oversized elephant teetering on a comically undersized circus stool. Its owner did a fine job contortioning herself around it in order to reach the necessary controls.

The Total Perspective Coach

Two days after New Years we took a coach trip 150km or so east to attend the wedding of a mutual colleague (the subject of a later blog, I feel), a journey which for me was pretty close to the total perspective vortex. The whole scale of China began to unravel. The “city” never really ended, the density just eased marginally. As the road rolled on the succession of factories, concrete houses, dirty looking tower blocks just continued. Endless, homogeneous and innumerable. And it’s like this the whole way up the Yangtze.

Also interesting was that my friend, despite being from just down the road in Nanjing, could not understand anything that was said by the locals - as they speak the Wu dialect. The dialect is one of the many variations of Mandarin Chinese, and just happens to be spoken natively by more people in the world than French (about 90,000,000 - I’ve just wikipediaed it. Fact.)

I know it has been said before but there really are a lot of people in China. I’ve decided to count them before I leave as I’d like to know exactly how many. None of these crappy estimate things. Facts are the order of the day. Brb...



That earlier point:
*** Huddled in all the clothes I’d bought with me while watching the television through my own Dragon’s breath, it made me think of all those people who sit cosily in the homes in Europe, with their heating turned up and their Land Rovers in the drive smugly refusing to do anything about their own emissions “until China reduces its own”. How can this be fair when families in China, and not just underprivileged ones but well-educated and relatively well-off families, are waking up with frost on their windows, and frozen fruit in their fruit bowls?

China’s per capita emissions are still far below the west, and it shouldn’t be burdened with too much responsibility simply because it has a large population. Where you draw population lines is arbitrary, each country should have its particular responsbilities based on its on past and present emissions per person, and it’s economic ability to make the necessary changes.

It's easy to see China as the bad guy, and scape goats are always convenient to have, but they are preventing those who should be doing the most from doing just that.

---

Photos

Cranes Grazing on a Brownfield Site
In Africa you have Giraffes on the Masai Mara, in China...