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Published: April 8th 2010
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The Chinese festival of QingMingJie or Tomb Sweeping Day, is exactly as you would expect. It is a day to care for graves and remember the owners. It also allowed us to take advantage of a three day weekend. TianJin TianJin is linked to BeiJing with the world’s fastest intercity train - the 120km is covered in 29min at speeds up 300km/h. Though of course from the futuristic world of high speed travel you get immediately plonked straight into the middle of what is essentially a very typical Chinese city. Tower blocks, traffic, and a bombardment of noise meet your arrival and the standard round of “sights” are a familiar bunch- a drum tower, an “ancient culture street” (i.e. knickknack alley) and a bustling, and a tasty food alley.
The one thing that is noticeably different with TianJin, is the odd European whiff some of the architecture has to it. TianJin, and it’s port, have a long history with European trading companies, and the result is a smattering of buildings which would sit easily in London or Berlin.
Every area in China has its special dishes. In TianJin they are MaHua - twisted pastries that taste rather like
a box of Kleenex, and GouBuLi (literally “Dogs don’t care”), that are essentially standard BaoZi steamed buns, just at inflated prices. We asked for rice in a GouBuLi restaurant in order to provide a cheap filler, but the waitress explained that they didn’t have rice because “this is a BaoZi restaurant”. They didn’t have free water either, presumably for the same reason.
I definitely warmed to the people of the TianJin more than its trademark food, not least the elderly man who having aimed a sincere “you are beautiful” to my female friend then turned to me, looked me in the eyes and repeated the compliment exactly. What a dear. Someone give him a biscuit. I refuse to believe they are his only words of English.
The train-ride up the coast passed through Tangshan, a city hit by an 8.2 earthquake in 1976. The whole place was flattened, and a quarter of a million people lost their lives. Yet there’s no sign of it passing through it now. The majority of Chinese cities have few, if any, buildings 35 years old, and TangShan is no different.
ShanHaiGuan ShanHaiGuan (literally mountain-sea-pass) in HeBei province is where the Great
Wall meets the Yellow Sea. It is the start of 5,500 miles of wall and therefore, we decided, worth a visit.
The town, like DaTong last week, is trying to turn itself into a tourist destination. Inside the city walls the main street has been entirely rebuilt (mainly with concrete) in mock old Chinese style, and by night the city gates are illuminated in arrays of coloured lights. It’s utterly unconvincing though. The veneer is only one building thick and take any side street and the true town lies behind. We also seemed to be the only tourists in town.
LongTou - the Dragon’s Head Where the wall meets the sea is called LongTou - the Dragons head. See the photos for explanation. This part of the wall is one of the oldest of the regularly visited sections - at almost 25 years. The original LongTou disappeared many moons ago, so what you see is a complete reconstruction. Putting this to the back of the mind though, you can still feel the significance of the place. With the sea at your back, you can look inland and imagine a real sense of the scale of the
incredible feat of construction that lay winding across the mountains and barren terrain of northern China. It is the full stop at the end of a properly Dickensian-sized sentence.
It was also nice to see the sea again, an old friend of mine. Though don’t be too disheartened when you learn that the Yellow Sea is not the vivid sweetcorn colour it’s name would suggest. It’s rather brown. But I can now cross “Skim stone on Yellow Sea” off my list of things to do in life.
If you are considering visiting ShanHaiGuan it is worth considering that the taxi drivers clearly run off commission from the tourist attractions. You do not need to pay anything to see the LongTou if you go to the east side, certainly not the 25kuai we were charged for an utterly bizarre “museum”, which contained no captions just recreations of scenes from the Great Wall’s history. I couldn’t quite work out what the historical significance was of the wax model of a gruesome figure cutting his own throat with a machete... Also don’t believe the extortionate prices quoted in hotel lobbies, expect to pay normalish prices.
JiaoShan - the First Mountain on the Wall
JiaoShan is the first mountain the wall meets, and naturally it charges right up its steep southern face in a show of defiance. The first gate (built to resemble the Chinese character for mountain - 山) and first couple of kilometers of the wall have been restored and is worthwhile climb. Though the real satisfaction came from the scramble up the following unrestored section that took us to the summit. The view back down the wall was all very classical and inspiring, but it was just a shame that the foggy/smoggy air precluded seeing the sea we knew should’ve been within sight.
Like a Taxi, Just With Fewer Wheels The roads around ShanHaiGuan buzz with bright red, three-wheeled taxis. Many are clear rip-offs of European designs (most noticeably Peugeot 206s), just with a wheel removed. Inside it is impossible not to instinctively learn out round corners in a vague hope of helping to stabilise it. We hired a 3-strong convoy of them to get us from the wall to the QingHuangDao, the local city. It certainly added spice to the day.
Our driver was an utter character with an incredibly
strong accent and a Kevin Keegan style bob. He sported a red baseball cap, worn backwards, carrying the slogan “Boss Mauritius”. If Kiss had been Chinese, he would’ve been the drummer.
He was clearly proud of his set of wheels, boastfully overtaking the other members of the convoy in some touring car style wheel-to-wheel racing. However I feel the weight of the four of us passengers rather compromised its performance, especially when faced with an incline, at which point he would have to turn the fan off in order to preserve as much power as possible for the crawl to the summit.
He was equally proud of his sole cassette tape, a collection of 90’s dance classics, including 2Unlimited (there’s no limit, don’t you know) and an atrocious techno cover of a Deep Purple song. But he seemed to know the way (more than could be said for one of the other drivers) and the 25km ride only cost us the equivalent of 80pence each, oh plus a chunk of our adrenaline reserves.
On the journey back to Beijing we saw one of those things that neatly and concisely says so much about China. On the main
road out of QinHuangDao the coach overtook a donkey and cart making it’s way along the hard shoulder. The driver perched on the cart was, with one hand, encouraging the donkey with some well placed whips, while texting on his mobile with the other.
Shanxi Coal Mine Accident On another note, I included a link in my last blog to a news article about the latest accident in a Chinese coal mine, well remarkably, 8 days on many of the miners have been rescued.
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