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| Beijing Forbidden City Palace |
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| Great Wall of China |
With two weeks to fill before our flight home from Singapore we decided to revisit China while our Visas were still valid. Landing in Beijing was a shock with the temperature of -4 C, after leaving Melbourne with temperatures in the low 30's. Entering China without a vehicle is so much easier, and we breezed through immigration and customs.
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| Summer Palace - Beijing |
The trip has turned out to be another tour of world heritage sites, China has so much history, culture and fantastic scenery that many of the sights have been listed by UNESCO. Our first stop was at the Forbidden City in Beijing, which was the home of the emperors. It is a huge site in the middle of the city with hundreds of temples and palace buildings, which after a while all start to look somewhat similar. However it is an incredible place and reflects the size of the court the emperor had. Despite the sub zero temperatures there were still thousands of tourists, something we had to get used to right through China.
The great Wall runs relatively close to Beijing, so we took the bus to the wall and spent the day, again in freezing temperatures walking the vest restored section of the wall. The weather ensured the wall was not too crowded and we could walk some of the less popular sections (where tour groups do not venture) and have sections almost to ourselves. It is an incredible structure, built over some of the most inhospitable terrain. In places the wall climbs up slopes greater then 50 degrees and it is very convoluted as it maintains the highest points of the mountains.
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| Ping Yao Street |
Back in Beijing the emperor and court moved to the summer palace on the outskirts of the city for the hot period of the year, where the empress had a huge lake excavated and palace buildings, temples and follies constructed, using monies which were meant to be spent on building their navy. As with many things Chinese the scale of the endeavour is huge.
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| Ping Yao City Wall |
Taking the excellent bullet trains which travel at up to 300kph, we headed south, stopping briefly at Ping Yao, a mediaeval village which has remained completely intact within its old city walls. One of the oldest Confucian temples as well as the location of the oldest bank lie within the walls, and it has retained its original street layout. Now a significant tourist attraction the centre has been renovated to offer all a tourist needs.
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| Bullet Train |
Xian our next stop is another huge city which lies at the eastern end of one of the old silk roads. It is being developed into a new industrial centre but has retained a lot of its old charm in the centre where again the huge city walls protected the inhabitants. The Shanxi museum has some fantastic displays of artefacts from excavations in and around Xian some dating back to 5000BC which demonstrate remarkable advanced culture and technological skills.
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| Pottery from 5000BC |
A visit to he terracotta warriors is a must, and again it is difficult to appreciate the scale of the work. Pit 1 - the most famous is absolutely huge and housed thousands of warriors. Whilst most pictures show the lines of restored warriors they do not show the immensity of the pit, and the painstaking work required to excavate and reconstruct the warriors. With only a fraction of the pit excavated it will be tens of years before it can all be reconstructed. The detail on the warriors is incredible, although standard mould were used to make the heads the detail of the faces was all done by hand, so every one is different, and the facial characteristics reflect the variety found across greater China.
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| Terracotta warriors in Pit 1 |
For a change of scenery we caught the train to Huashan Mountain. Huashan is a large granite mountain which rises 4000ft almost vertically from the adjoining plains and was sacred to Taoists who built many temples on the very rugged top. Nowadays there is a cable car which takes 10 minutes and saves climbing the 21,000 steps to the top. However, even when at the top there is a continuous series of steps mainly carved into the granite to enable you to access the various temples on the peaks. Incredible scenery, and incredible endeavour to build temples up here, having to carry all the materials up 21,000 steps!
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| Hua Shan Mountain |
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| Hua Shan - spot the cable car gondolas |
Our whirlwind tour continued to Chengdu - a fast developing megacity in the south west where the main attraction was the panda research centre. This remarkable place houses and breeds pandas with great success. Pandas are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, but Chengdu have managed to breed over 130 pandas and are aiming to reach 300 when they believe they will have sufficient stock to reintroduce some into the wild. These docile creatures live solitary lives in the mountains but their habitat is being progressively destroyed. There are currently around 1500 wild pandas and 500 in captivity, so breeding 130 is a significant achievement. As well as the giant pandas they breed the beautiful red panda.
The other attraction outside Chengdu is the giant 72 metre high buddha carved into the cliff at Leshan. The site is the junction of three rivers and the Buddha was cut as a means of appeasing the gods to tame the torrential rivers at its feet.
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| Giant Panda |
A 14 hour train ride then took us through the mountains, the high speed rail line has many long tunnels and huge sections built on stilts, to Shanghai where we had time to see the famous view from the Bund and get a flavour of this very cosmopolitan city before our final stop in Hong Kong.
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| Leshan Giant Buddha |
So what are our impressions of the eastern side of China,
- it is remarkably well developed and there is a huge amount of new building of blocks of flats and infrastructure.
- it has a long history of which the Chinese are justifiable proud.
- the public transport system is very efficient and cheap.
- they design and construct on a huge scale, and are investing very heavily in tourism, manily domestic.
- there are vast numbers of people - even the small cities have populations of over a million.
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| Shanghai skyline |
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| Terracotta warrior |
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| as excavated - Before restoration |
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| Young Giant Panda Red Panda |
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| Night time street scene - Xian |
