Oriental Pearl Tower

China: New Year 2001 on the Shanghai Bund

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January 1st 2001
We celebrated New Year's on the Bund watching the fireworks over Pudong with Stefan and Markus, my fellow students at UIBE. As I described in the previous blog, these guys had been traveling all over China, as far as Tibet and we had agreed to meet up in Shanghai. We came down on the double-stacked "soft sleeper" express train from Beijing, sleeping across from each other on the top bunks, a g ... read more

Asia » China » Shanghai

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For centuries China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. A... ... read more