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Shanghai Airport

Well, actually it has two, Hong Qiao, which is mainly domestic and Pu Dong, the international airport. I’ll talk about Pu Dong. The terminal building is a beautiful piece of architecture and there are scores of shops filled with beautiful goods. As usual, the prices go up as you get nearer to your arrival or departure point. Waiting for a plane to leave for Sydney once, I felt very thirsty and went along to the nearest food outlet. I pointed to a drink and an ice cream and asked how much they were. When the salesgirl told me 124 yuan I almost died laughing. ‘Hao wanr!’ (You’re kidding me!) I said and she assured me she was serious. ‘Tai gui le!’ (Too expensive). I turned away still laughing to find a pretty supervisor standing watching. I said again, ‘Hao wanr! Tai gui le!’ and managed to make her smile a little and break her professional reserve. The drink is usually 3.5 yuan in a local shop and even a Haagen-Daz costs no more than thirty yuan at the average Chinese outlet.

That should illustrate why I don’t recommend buying anything at Shanghai Airport. If you’re coming to China be patient and buy things in the shops or. better still, the markets, after you land. Once you get an idea of the normal prices you will be aware when you have wandered into a high priced tourist focussed shop. They are always too dear. I bought a beautiful ethnic batik cloth in a Guiyang street market and later saw the same design in two tourist shops that charged four times what I paid.

Back to the airport, it is efficient but big so if you have a difficulty with walking quickly allow plenty of time to catch your plane. There are travelators in places but it is still a long way to the most distant gates. The shops are a great diversion if you use them as museums for learning about the diversity of goods available in China.

One very important tip. If you have to make a domestic connection you can get bus no 1 between the two airports for about thirty yuan (RMB). If you accept the offers of the many taxi drivers who promise you a cheap fare you may end up paying ten times what you should. If they have a ‘cab’ without a taxi light on top don’t take it unless you really know what you should be paying and bargain them down. Most of these guys speak enough English to understand you. If the cab bears fleet paraphernalia insist they put the meter on before you get in. When I first arrived in China they cheated me well and I paid eight times what I now know is the metered fare between the two airports. It’s between eighty and a hundred yuan depending on traffic conditions.

Shanghai also has the Maglev, a magnetic levitation train that hurtles to town at incredible speeds. If you want to ride it arrive in the day time. It closes in the early evening so late arrivals will be disappointed if they are looking forward to it. In town you can find less rapacious taxi drivers but several times I have had the odd experience of having cabbies refuse to take me where I want to go because they don’t know where it is. Shanghai is a big city!

No one could have predicted that a young woman of a family that lived about sixty miles from the Yangtze river trading centre now known as Wuhan would be the subject of a Disney cartoon movie sixteen centuries later. She joined the army in her father’s place during China’s Northern Dynasties period (386-351) fighting the invaders successfully and rising to the rank of General. No one knew she was a woman until she returned home and appeared before her comrades in women’s clothing. All we know of her historically comes from a feature length poem by an anonymous female poet, one of the few pieces of classic Chinese literature to have a strength role for a woman. The legend has been preserved since then in novels, plays, and more recently in films, including the Disney cartoon, Mulan.

Mulan Shan, Mulan mountain, is a historical, religious and ecologically significant area a day trip away from Wuhan. It was renamed after its most famous inhabitant, Hua Mulan, It is said that all the grasses, the trees, the rocks and the scenery on the mountain have recorded the legend of General Mulan. A Temple has been built in her honour there. Mulan Mountain has hosted religious shrines for more than 1000 years, beginning in the Sui and Tang Dynasties and developed further in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Buddhists and Taoists have existed peacefully together there since that time. There are seven temples, eight shrines, and more than 1000 sacred statues. Every year about 1 million pilgrims come from the surrounding areas to worship. The buildings merge into the steep mountainside.

An ecotourism protection zone will be established on the Mulan Mountain area, with a protected area of 25,000 ha. and a lake area of 4,000 ha. The area has many natural and historical resources that warrant preservation. An island is the nesting site for more than 100 thousand white egrets from April to August of each year. A village in the naturally beautiful Mulan Valley has 52 buildings from the Ming dynasty period (about 400 years old). On Shesui Lake is a white sand beach, a natural fresh water bathing spot. Wuhan Institute of Botany under the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently decided to construct China’s North Asian Tropical Forest Ecological Positioning Station in the Mulan Mountain Area as it is a rare and endangered plant species conservation and migration base in the middle section of China. Its altitude ranges from 200 to 600 meters above sea level, occupying an area of about 22,000 mu(1mu=0.0667ha.). The Mountain’s forest coverage reaches 95% with one half virgin forest and the other half secondary vegetation, North Asian tropical evergreens, hardwood and broadleaf in more than 100 families, 300 genus and over 1000 species. Mulan Mountain area represents a transition from North Asian Tropical to Temperate. Thus, the area is ideal for studying North Asian tropical ecological system positioning. Such studies will provide scientific evidence and technical support for the restoration of forest coverage and ecological environment control over North Asian tropical hilly areas.

Mulan Shan is a beautiful scenic spot which is also of great historical and religious interest. The variety of points of interest make it well worth visiting. However, this is China and a walk in the countryside is not a quietly contemplative experience. Even on the quietest day you will have to negotiate the steep staircases through the forest at the pace of the slowest of the several hundred other people who have also come to see it and are ahead of you. At least this place is not so heavily commercialized as many other places. You won’t see many birds and those you do see will not come anywhere near you. If you live in China for more than a couple of years you will enjoy the chance to get out of the dirty city you live in and walk amongst trees and breath the oxygen produced by them. Mulan Shan is far more tasteful than many other places I have visited. Walking paths and staircases are helpful and blend well with the surroundings. There were no especially garish souvenir stalls and the local vendors were not aggressive. Cool fruits, whole or cut and mounted on sticks for consumption, were a welcome treat on a hot day. However, the heat was ameliorated by the cool forest. Oh, how I miss my Queensland rainforests where I could walk in a quiet forest with only small birds coming to gaze at me curiously, and very few people passing discreetly.

  You are in a taxi, curving round a wooded hill on a two-lane road and then you see it, the Yangtze River, known as the Chang Jiang in China, simply because Chang means long and Jiang means River. The Chinese are practical and simple when it comes to naming things other than food so the road becomes a bridge named First Bridge. You are a bit disappointed, because on this as on all days the great river is shrouded in smog. Below, you see one of the five-storey tour boats that travel through the Three Gorges to Chongqing. You strain your eyes to see the other side of the river and as your cab progresses something emerging on the other side catches your attention. It is a pagoda on a small hill at the other end of the bridge. It’s your destination.

Yellow Crane Tower, or Huang He Lou to the Chinese, has a history as obscure and misty as the smog on the river below but one thing is clear, it was not always part of a great industrial city. Perhaps it was built as a watch tower so some local ruler could keep surveillance over the traffic on the Chang Jiang or maybe it was built by a grateful innkeeper favoured by a magical visitor. History suggests the first and legend would have us believe the second.

Poets were perhaps attracted here first by the legend and found a view worthy of their verse. Later, in a very Chinese phenomenon, they were attracted by the fact that other poets had been here and came to try to write the very best Yellow Crane Tower poem. Now people come here mostly because they have read the poems and loved them. They want to see what Li Bai saw.

The original tower burnt down many centuries ago and several have burnt to the ground since. To save us the eyesore of a ruin the People’s government has built a beautiful new tower and beautified the grounds. It is certainly a nice piece of architecture in an ancient style and a pleasure to visit. You climb to the top storey and survey the soft focus landscape. You strain your eyes to see the hill by the other end of the great bridge. Unfortunately, the soft focus is not provided by a river mist rising in the half light of early morning or evening and what you see through the brownish haze is just another dirty city. You could have seen it in South America, or any Asian country prosperous enough to support a Metropolis, or in any one of twenty-odd Chinese cities. You could have seen it in Europe or America in my youth but we have learned since then.

Some locals would challenge my perception that there is never a clear day in Wuhan. The fact is that in fifteen months of residence and many crossings of the Yangtze I have never seen one riverbank clearly from the other. After many days of rain I expected the smog to have settled but it didn’t. The factories and the cars still operate. A few days of wind after the days of rain allowed me to have a wonderful experience. I looked up and saw a star, my first in Wuhan. The next morning I crossed the bridge again and couldn’t see the other side.

My favourite poem is by Li Bai and in it he is entranced by the view from Yellow Crane Tower, amazed at being able to see ‘the individual blades of grass on Parrot Island’. I was disappointed to find it difficult even to see Parrot Island, let alone the blades of grass. In itself the contrast between my experience and Li Bai’s is an experience of history and of what modern China and the industrial world defines as progress. Perhaps we and China can learn from that. When another generation has come to the time of life when pollutants have had their way with breath-challenged lungs, maybe Wuhan locals can be helped to climb the stairs of Yellow Crane Tower so they can share Li Bai’s experience of a wonderful view of the Long River.

It was a freezing day as I walked across the biggest public square in the world towards the big portrait of Chairman Mao on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The North Wind in my face nearly blew my resolve and sent me scampering for a warm coffee shop but I huddled into my coat and continued. As I crossed the moat and walked through the tunnel below the vast gatehouse I thought of all those who could never have dared make this trip. Any attempt to enter the Forbidden City would have cost them their lives.

Jing Shan, the artificial hill sitting behind the Imperial Palace, failed in its purpose to ease the extremes of temperature that forever assailed the residents of the sacred precinct and I fought nipping in the ears and numbness in the hands as I sought to understand and appreciate the subtly planned beauties of my surroundings. It was good to be away for a while from the clamour of vendors that follows one through too many Chinese marvels. The government has wisely chosen to maintain the dignity of the world’s biggest and most opulent royal residence and forbid all but the most discreet merchants from operating within, and even the chosen must tout their wares in a quiet way. But watch out for girls or pairs of girls. They might quietly invite you to their college’s nearby art exhibition. Buy if you want but don’t go checking to see where your ‘contributions’ to student scholarships went to.

The home of twenty-four Emperors of China is exquisite. Every decoration, every tint, every object, every sculpture, has a purpose to serve in a complex intellectual unity that only scholars now understand, but the beauty and harmony is accessible to all. A sunbrella here, a scratched yellow wooden chair there, stand out amusingly as being ridiculously out of place but workers are workers the world over. Though you would never have guessed the amazing incongruity I spotted as I was about to drop onto a bench from tiredness.

Gu Gong, the Palace Museum, another name for the place, is big, very big. It takes a lot of walking and a lot of energy in a cold wind to see it all. Coincidentally, or not, just as you begin to flag and think wearily of that coffee shop you didn’t run to from Tiananmen Square, a miracle appears. Or is it a temptation spawned by the devil to turn you from the divine words in your Bible of Political Correctness? STARBUCKS!!! At one end of a discreetly located tourist shop in the middle of the Emperor’s Palace. I must confess that I yielded and was glad to participate in this travesty. My soul was further embroiled in the doom of acceptance and even gratefulness for the abomination when a customer rose to leave and I appropriated the fleshly delight of one of the ten chairs. I wonder who would frown more severely on this encroachment, the Last Emperor or Chairman Mao? Someone could check if the maintenance costs on the cadaver in the glass box at the other end of Tiananmen Square have increased since the opening of Starbucks’ Forbidden City branch. How much is it costing to remove the scuff marks made by the Chairman’s revolution in his grave. China is full of anomalies and the Imperial Palace is almost free of them. I am torn within at my easy acceptance of the one that was permitted.

Modern China is as it is and was waiting for me outside. As I left through Tian an men gate again I was approached by two pleasant girls who were delighted to make my acquaintance. They invited me to walk with them through the old district of Dashilar and I was glad of the company. We looked around at the old establishments for a while. One was a Chinese pharmacy which catered for the very rich. A large and old ren shen (ginseng) root was for sale at a million yuan! In a country where an employee with an engineering degree can be paid two to four thousand yuan a month! After this one of the girls asked me if I had seen a traditional Chinese tea ceremony. I had not, and agreed to go in to a tea house which had stood in the same spot for at least a couple of centuries and survived the twentieth century’s revolutions and war. A pretty waitress described the qualities and history of an assortment of special teas and we sampled four of them in tiny cups. It was a pretty procedure, but casual compared to the art form the Japanese have made of it. When we had had enough we were invited to buy tea but I declined. The teas in this shop were definitely like expensive wine compared to the varieties I buy from tea shops around China but they were very much dearer too. After the sales pitch we were presented with a bill and the bill was over a thousand yuan, highway robbery in China! Of course I was obliged to pay and luckily I had enough cash. I made a big fuss about not being told the charges before the ceremony. Ok, so I’m daft for not checking. Days later I was browsing the net and learned this is a common scam and the two girls most likely set me up very professionally. Another Australian told me, a year later, that he was taken the same way, for three thousand. That’s six hundred Aussie dollars! It’s a shame because it makes one wary. It is a common and lovely experience for a foreigner to be approached by young men and women in China who genuinely want to have the experience of meeting a ‘laowai’ (respected foreign person) for no motive worse than improving their English. I would hate to lose the innocent pleasure of this superb part of the Chinese experience because I have been burnt by two Beijing-trained vultures. I was better off in Starbucks.