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May 8th 2007
Published: August 7th 2007
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Yuantong Si
Arriving (unintentionally) in Kunming at the tail-end of Golden Week was a guarantee of low accommodation availability and high prices, but we were lucky to bump into a couple of Westerners working in the city who persuaded a cafe owner to phone round a couple of hotels for us. The outcome was an extremely acceptable room in a building at the south end of Cuihu Park, whose lake and bridges provide a pleasant circuit for strollers throughout the day. This is also close to the Yunnan University campus and a slew of expat restaurants and cafes.

With a mere 2 million inhabitants, Kunming is by no means a large city by Chinese standards and I never felt a sense of being crowded. Like the other cities we'd passed through, it seemed modern and not at all poor - on closer inspection, it had many similarities with Western cities, with McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Carrefour having a presence. All manner of consumer goods were freely available, and I noted that iPods and my camera were more expensive than in the US.

After being in China for a week now, there are some observations I'd like to note down. Firstly, as mentioned a couple of times, there is clearly wealth here, in a way I rarely noticed in other parts of Asia. Though environmental pollution is one of China's most pressing issues, there are many electric motorbikes on the streets (I don't recall seeing one anywhere else in Asia) and their quietness is a positive danger for pedestrians who use their ears rather than their eyes to detect nearby traffic. Some roles such as driving buses and taxis, which are exclusively male in other parts of Asia, have female occupiers in China.

I think that China is the first country I've visited where the domestic tourist market completely dwarfs the foreign one. This can be seen in the number of hotels catering to Chinese, as well as in more obvious situations, e.g. the Kunming Tourist Information Centre, its name proudly displayed in both Chinese and English, had no staff who could speak a word of English. (They also had no maps of Kunming, which I would have thought was a disadvantage for foreign and domestic tourists alike.)

The general lack of English speakers seems to be due to a combination of not needing to (because of the small
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Yuantong Si
number of foreign travellers here) and cultural factors (evident in various events over the last couple of millenia) that have placed little emphasis on (and at times positively discouraged) an interest in the world beyond the country's borders (the twinning of Kunming with Wagga Wagga maybe being an indication of a more progressive attitude nowadays). Though things may be different in Beijing and Shanghai, here in the west of China you really do need to know some basic Mandarin if you are to fully enjoy your stay.

There are several immediate language issues for Westerners here, one being that Mandarin is tonal (like many languages in the region). Whereas English uses tones to denote concepts such as surprise or a question, Mandarin uses tones to distinguish different words. To use the wrong tone could be to say "litre" instead of "province", for example. (The concept of "English" tones is represented in Mandarin by stress on certain words).

The second problem confronting the Westerner here is the usage of Chinese characters known as Hanzi for writing, a set of thousands of pictographs. Individual characters, and combinations of two or more, are used by the Chinese to represent words - there is no alphabet as such. Though some of these characters are easy to learn because of either their simplicity or their resemblance to the word they represent, many are sufficiently abstract to give no indication of their meaning (this is arguably a very clumsy system - Chinese children take 2 more years than their Western counterparts to become literate). This combination of tones and an unfamiliar writing system means that the average Western tourist will need to put in an enormous amount of effort to achieve the same level of communication ability that a couple of days of study would suffice for for, say, a visit to the Costa del Sol.

Fortunately - and I write this with a wry smile - there is a writing system called pinyin that takes the tones and characters and represents them in the Roman alphabet using several accents to denote the different tones. Though many Chinese can not read pinyin, guidebooks and phrasebooks will contain the Hanzi characters and pinyin for various English words, giving you a fighting chance of being able to pronounce the word correctly using the right tone. The wry smile is because pinyin was apparently not developed using English as the target language - instead, it was Albanian. (I'm not 100% sure this is correct but I couldn't find anything more credible on Google ...) This helps to explain the somewhat unintuitive (for most Westerners) pronunciation of words like the set of principles governing the layout and orientation of buildings - "feng shui" in pinyin, but pronounced more like "fung shway" in English.

Many of the Hanzi characters are also used in Japanese (often the same meaning but with a different pronunciation). I'd stopped studying (I use the word loosely, with no implication of academic rigour) Japanese about 4 years ago, and foolishly fancied my knowledge of the written language might help me in China. Unfortunately my knowledge at its best had been that of a 4 year old child's, and the intervening years had reduced it to that of a 4 month old's - and a thick one at that. I was further confused by the fact that the characters for certain common words are either completely different to (e.g. "east"), or simplified versions of (e.g. "chicken"), the characters used in Japan. However it has still been gratifying to occasionally correctly identify a character, and at the very least I can probably compare characters in my guidebook with those on a menu or bus station timetable faster than the average clueless tourist.

On a language-related note, it appears that all calculators here (often used by shopkeepers to display prices if either their English or your Mandarin is insufficient) are talking ones.

The Internet cafes in Kunming were generally enormous, with hundreds of machines in vast rooms populated by chain-smoking games-playing young people. In most places we were served free tea. We were also victims of the hit-and-miss "Great Firewall of China", being unable to access Wikipedia or any of the BBC sub-pages (though you could access the home page). The Times website will hence be the source of all the info I can't access on the subversive, pro-Taiwan, pro-Tibet BBC sports page.

I'd come to realise in Vietnam that wearing rigid gas permeable contact lenses was a liability in that cleaning fluid was not available anywhere. Web investigations had further revealed that China would be a similar cleaning fluid desert. I'd also been unable to find an adequate substitute for my usual moisturiser (for dry skin, rather than to stave off the effects of aging). This crisis had resulted in a distress e-mail to my parents to resolve the situation in the only way I thought possible, namely for them to purchase the items I needed in the UK and send them to me poste restante. This they had duly done, and I was both surprised and gratified when I turned up at Kunming GPO to find my parcel as the most recent poste restante arrival (I'd been expecting to have to search through hundreds of items). A flash of my passport and handing over of 3 yuan, and I should have clean contact lenses and moisturised skin until 2008.

Ordering food in restaurants is one minefield if there's a language barrier. Pouring over the menu and guidebook trying to match Chinese characters in both is time-consuming. Pointing at dishes mentioned in the guidebook in the hope that the restaurant might have them is another option. Pointing at appetising dishes ordered by other customers is a further way. We've generally coped so far with one of the above methods though maybe 75% of the time we've had either an English menu or English-speaking assistance.

There were 2 noteworthy eating experiences in Kunming. One was in a self-explanatory place called Vegetarian Restaurant where "meat" dishes in the shape of the particular flesh they were supposed to represent were constructed ingeniously from tofu, taro, and other vegetable alternatives. The portions were enormous and I left feeling more stuffed than at any other meal this year. It reminded me of a place I went to a couple of times in New York whose name escapes me.

We also visited one of a chain of restaurants called Brothers Zhang to sample a Yunnan speciality called crossing-the-bridge noodles. The name comes from a tale regarding a scholar who would inconveniently study in a pavilion in the middle of a lake, joined to the mainland (and his house) via a bridge. In order to keep his lunchtime noodle soup warm when transporting it from kitchen to pavilion, his wife hit upon the idea of adding a layer of oil to the top of the contents of the bowl. The name was a little more exciting than the dish itself. After figuring out we needed to identify the particular version of the noodles we wanted, pay for it, then take the chit to the appropriate kitchen
Council housesCouncil housesCouncil houses

Attractive the world over
window and point out where we were sitting, we were soon served a steaming basin of chicken broth together with plates of meat and vegetables to be added to the broth as required. A bit oily for my tastes, but would be welcome on a cold night.

In terms of sights, Kunming is fairly lacking, with one exception being Yuantong Si, the most important Buddhist temple in North Yunnan. This freshly-painted place of worship was very much in use, and its vibrant colours and visiting pilgrims made for an atmosphere that was far from staid.

The square outside the Workers' Cultural Hall provided some morning entertainment, as it was the site of crowds of people participating in mass dancing, fan dancing, sword dancing, badminton, and other activities presumably intended to get the blood flowing at the beginning of the day. Outside of one office block we also saw the uniformed staff conducting regimented aerobics to booming Chinese pop, some looking considerably less enthusiastic about this process than others. I could sympathise.

Supposedly one of the most spectacular pieces of scenery in Yunnan is Shilin, the Stone Forest, consisting of an array of limestone spires. Unfortunately, for such a popular destination, it's extraordinarily difficult to get to. The tourist train mentioned in the RG had been discontinued (though we only found this out at the station on the day we were attempting to travel, despite having done a fair amount of web research), leaving the options of slow trains that would give virtually no time at Shilin, organised tours that would spend more time at souvenir shops than at Shilin, and hiring a private car which would simply be expensive. The time issue was compounded by the fact that we actually wanted to see a less-touristed forest near Shilin. Since none of the options were particularly appealing, we decided to scrap a visit.

After a relaxing few days in Kunming, it was time to start heading west and north into higher elevations (though Kunming itself is at 2,000m). We took it as a good omen that, on the night before we left, we saw a man pulling a wheeled suitcase that contained a securely-fastened small child.

Dull but possibly useful info
Getting there: Take a bus from Jianshui to Kunming (many through the day - we took the 11:35AM), costing 50 yuan and taking about 3 hours 15 minutes.
Stayed at: Seagull Hotel. Cost 160 yuan for a twin, 140 yuan for a double. Would stay here again.
Ate at: Vegetarian restaurant opposite Yuantong Si. Note that the portions are on the large side.
Notes: i. The Poste Restante pick-up near the GPO has Western Union plastered all over it rather than China Post.



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Symbol on official buildingSymbol on official building
Symbol on official building

Taking this photo earned me a stern clucking from a guard


9th August 2007

chinese language
Enjoyed your blog a lot and thanks for sharing your experience! Comment on English languge: Chinese as a language appears difficult and cumbersome if you look at it as a user of phonetic language. When learned as first languge, it is rather easy to acquire. By grade 3, I was able to read newspaper. With thousand of years' of experience, I believe the Chinese have figured a painless way to pass on the language to the next generation. I am not aware that Pinyin was Albanian. Pinyin uses romanized alphabets to standardize chinese mandarin pronunciation (Taiwan uses a different system). It is (supposedly) taught in schools. But once learnt, it is probably discarded as the "characters"become the daily written and ready form. Although Chinese and Japanese are very different languages, Japanese uses Chinese characters for their meaning and sound to write its language. Both languages use same character for "East". Mainland China uses the simpliefied version and therefore looks a little different vs q PS. In general, I am at awe at your level of knowledge on Chinese culture, history and geography.

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