Botanic gardens - at last

I finally tracked down the Botanic Gardens & since I was feeling a mite cooped up (winter) I decided to go in spite of the fact that it looked like it might rain at any time. Naturally it started to rain about half way there.

I thought  when I looked at the map that it would be semi-rural but I didn't take into consideration the impact of a population of 17 million people. At least from the road, there is no evidence whatsoever of rurality. It's possible that the factories/shops/flats don't extend particularly far back from the road; but I think it's more likely that my map is out of date. 

I'm a bit curious though becasue Guangzhou is actually surronded by mountains.  I think I may have mentioned (about the second week that I was here) that I had been to a place called "Five Mountains" and there weren't any. It turned out today that that was unfair. The place is called "Fifth Mountain" and as we drove through it it was noticably higher than Tian He (where I live).

(Place names are tricky. There is an island called "Second Sand Island" - I spent months trying to find the "First Sand Island". Naturally there isn't one, but I discovered that "Big Sandy Headland" was in fact once an island until the civil engineers go to it and attached it back to the mainland.)

Camellia garden 

In fact, while trying to get out of the gardens at 5:29 - they don't give you a map - I found a sign that said "Fire Stove Mountain" (to give a literal translation) which suggests that spending more time in and around the Botanic Gardens could lead me to the Guangzhou wilderness. With a name like that, I feel a spot of vulcanology coming on. Mind you, I have a nasty feeling vulcanology is the science of rubber. Still, you can take a punt on the idea.

The gardens are huge. I did see a sign that said how many hectares it was but that kind of thing never means much to me. I prefer the "There is no way in the world you could walk around this in a day and see more than 30% of it without proceeding at forced march pace" measurement. Or you could go with the fact that they do a busy bike & golf cart rental business in summer.

It's either because I am vaguely English, or possibly from Melbourne, but I quite like walking outdoors in winter. It was raining, but it was a curious kind of rain that seemed to be more like rain than drizzzle, but leave you much less wet than a drizzle would. So even though I was without an unbrella (because I am a goose) aprt from a brief period where I felt obliged to take shelter in the conservatory (left) I was quite happy to walk around in the rain. If I come down with pneumonia tomorrow,  I guess it will have been not such a good idea.

Note that there is just as much mist inside the conservatory as there was outside. The information board at the front gate says that the gardens have been operating since 1954, but there is a huge amount of work going on. Most of everything looks substantially new - less then 3 years old, given how fast things age here.

The plant pictures are delayed by technological considerations. I can't really comment on the plantisng except to say that they have a lot of stuff. And the plantings are quite seriously massed for the most part, which is sort of good I think. It gives a bit of a feeling for how things might look indigenously, although, to be fair, massed cacti is probably more a statement by a landscape gardener than an actual recreation of an arid plantscape.

Another interesting feature of the place is that there is some seriousl archaeological work going on. Once again, there has been a great attempt to combine archaeology with public viewing but unfortunately the viewing pits were suffering from chronic condensation and poor drainage. So I didn't see very much and unless it's rock we're supposed to be looking at, I don't think anybody will be seeing very much in the future. Preservation is a tricky business.

I may have mentioned elsewhere that there is a bit of southern pride motivating the presentation of the archaeology - elsewhere there is the Nan Yue "emperor" / "jumped up garrison commander" debate; but in a way, anything that gets history public is OK (until we move into history as an excuse for invading the wherever). 

Let's be blunt though - this is a little overstated. It's interesting that the bas-relief has outlasted the Stalinist architects who introduced it to China; until the 1940's it was not at all a Chinese thing. It seems now to pay much more attention to the reality of Asian faces than the Russian version (now it's the high end women's fashion industry that seems unaware that it's in Asia). It's just, perhaps, that the nutritional inputs of a Neolithic fishing village (I know we're on the slopes of a mountain now, but it was a fishing village then) seem to me unlikely to support such muscular physical development.

So as not to lose the habit

I realised I haven't written anything since November. So, just to keep the hand in, here's a miscellany of things that haven't really fitted in anywhere else.

Being in Sydney in early December has been a bit of a distractor in terms of blogging. Pretty much every available other minute was spent preparing to be away from work and catching up with work after I discovered that I hadn't prepared well enough. Plus travel shopping & christmas shopping. I can't call myself a veteran of the markets yet, but I have to say I'm getting more comfortable there. I've found a couple of friendly vendors, at least.

This is not China. This is Goulburn. I would say that on the basis of my recent brief visit there, this is my favourite building in Goulburn. It's really very cheerful. It must have caused quite a stir when it was built - it seems much brighter than a conservative rural community's legal profession could have been expected to embrace in the (I guess) 1930's. It's obviously not Goulburn's fault that it hasn't rained there for a decade or more, but the other thing odd about this building is that the rest of the city and surrounds are just drained of colour. And it might be the only 20th century building in the city to have caught my attention.

This on the other hand, IS China. This is more views from my living room window (and me testing a new camera). I 've always liked timelapse effects. One of the interesting things about this camera is that it is teaching me about photography; I was always skeptical of people who  buy extremely expensive accessories, but look at the stationary cars at the traffic lights and you can see that, according to their headlamps they have all just samba-ed sideways. That obviously isn't very likely and the actual fact is that between my shaky hands and

 the crummy lightweight tripod (given away free with camera),  that's the result of the vibration caused by pushing the shutter button in a 1.5 second exposure. 

This is also from the living room window (the intersection is down and right). The trick here was to get a crisp shot at night of the flashing neon. The great joy of digital photography - I finally worked out how to do it without using up a roll of film and a week's developing time. And no, I didn't take 100 shots and pick the best. I have tried that technique - it sort of works, but you spend an awful lot of time picking over the 100 shots, with no actual guarantees. This is one of 8, in fact, each with a different combination of settings. It's a better picture than a sign, though.

Art - this is my best effort so far I think. Leaving aside the faintly claw-like unleafed branch in the middle.  It's quite tricky really. 

I'm hoping this is good enough to let me move on to plants and/or orchids. I know it's wrong to be impatient, but I can practise when I get home. It's going to be hard to find a teacher in Sydney though.

I think I may have already blogged a picture of this a couple of months ago - if not never mind. 

I like this picture because there are some mornings where the light is just extraordinary and walking down the road can't help but make me smile. Even though it's winter that morning light is still spring-like. This isn't actually a picure of the particular road where I most frequently notice that effect (it's nearby), but it seems to have some of the luminescence. The light might be coming out of the tree, instead of shining down on it.

City of bridges

There's more bridges here than in Venice I reckon - I wonder if anyone has counted them? Here's a sprinking from a 5 kilometre stretch on the inner-ring road. I think I counted 12, but not all the photographs will fit.

Actually, we'd have to start be defining a bridge because what you can see on the left are really elevated roads, as in, hmm, we need another road so we'll just put one up here, outside your window. So they're  bridges in one sense, in that they go over things (roads), but I'm not sure how long a bridge-over-a-road can be before it has to change its name and be called a road. I mean, if it's a bridge over an ocean, I think it can be 70 kilometres long and still not have its identity under dispute. And certainly the Penang bridge is 13 kilometres long, and no-one is arguing about whether that is a bridge. But the fact that water is underneath it does seem to remove all doubt.

More of the same kind of phenomena, but note the passing pedestrians. Definitely a footbridge. But how long does a footbridge have to be to start wondering if in fact it is an elevated walkway? Guangzhou has some quite long ones.

Cars above and cars below. It's not actually possible to tell where this footbridge, if it is a footbridge, comes down to earth. Maybe it doesn't - Hong Kong for example is full of footpaths from the 4th floor of one building to the second floor of another.

The shiny buildings come into their own on these clear sunny days.

It's the second last day of autumn and the sky remains blue and the pollution remains low - mainly coming from the cars on this ring road.  You can see from this that it's a myth that Guangzhou is a sea of people. Bits of Guangzhou are awash with people. The road underneath this bridge, for example. Other bits aren't.

This bridge must be fairly new, because in the main, when possible, the footbridges are covered in plants or planter boxes. 

This is the kind of scene that has helped me warm to Guangzhou. OK, there is a lot of traffic. It's pretty much as bad as Sydney. But look at the trees! They didn't have these in 1990, but now, they're everywhere. (OK, maybe they were here in 1990, but if so, they were very very small) 

And you can see the creepers creeping across the bridge from each side. When they meet in the middle, it'll look something like this....

Pretty, isn't it?

Which Sydney pedestrian bridges look like this?

Economic crisis

Two stories related to the economic crisis:

• Every day the pollution is lessening.

• I went to the bank to transfer some money back to Australia. First you have to buy the AU$ - between the time the teller gave me the quote, and the time the two of us had finished the paperwork (about 40 minutes, they take paperwork seriously) the dollar had fallen sufficiently further that the teller had to give me change. Sufficient change, in fact, to compensate me for the Commonwealth Bank's outrageous charge for banking my money for me. ($15)

People

China is of course famous for having lots of people. Here are some of them. This is Beijing Rd, Guangzhou's slightly most famous shopping district. I prefer Up-and-Down Nine St. myself, but there isn't much to choose between them. I wouldn't actually buy anything in either place, unless I felt like some haggling practice.

Haggling is not actually a deeply fundamental necessity in much of Guangzhou - my art teacher, for example, won't let me pay him by the hour, or even by the class. He has a 6-step plan for me to learn to paint & and his scheme is to charge me for each step, no matter how many classes & hours each step takes. I however know my talent is more than somewhat limited - I can't possibly allow this or the guy will be traveling for two hours every weekend for no return. He may think there is no-one unteachable - but I can still remember years of swimming lessons to no avail. And I have a dim feeling I may have failed art in about Year 6 or 7.

So anyway, haggling is not necessarily essential elsewhere but here it is. It is absolutely essential. I have heard a local start off at 10% of the asking price and settle on about 25%. It's pretty extreme. Furthermore, I have to say some of the stuff is beyond complete rubbish. I've seen watches here for about 20 RMB, and even if I got them for 5 RMB I'd still guess they were overpriced.

None of this deters anybody, as you can see. Indeed, it doesn't even deter me. If you stay off the main drag there's lots of good things around.

I may have mentioned Beijing Rd previously as it is an example of "public archaeology", something I think China is getting really very good at. (My photos didn't come out though, it's not so easy to photograph through glass). Not visible here, but slightly north & south on this strip of road, excavations have uncovered roadway going back to the Tang (400-ish CE), Song (1100-ish), Yuan (1300-ish) and Ming (1400-ish). These have been restored & encased in glass so they are permanently on display in the busiest place in downtown Guangzhou. There are also fragments of city wall and city gate in the southern section. Other places still have their walls intact (Xi'an being a particularly spectacular example, but Zhaoqing locally as well), but the cost of keeping a wall intact is that what is under it cannot be seen. The interest of this exhibition (quite apart from the ingenuity of the presentation) is the visibility of the layers from 4 dynasties. The Nan Yue palace has the same impact, although it has maybe 8 or 9 layers. But it would be a pity to restore just one of them thoroughly and thus lose the rest. For those like me who are imagination-challenged, seeing the multiplicity of fragments from the multiple historic periods is immensely valuable. Each fragment functions as a kind of frame in a film, and viewed together they create the impression of continuity.

I find that Guangzhou provides me repeatedly with that feeling of continuity. Maybe I should say that I find myself musing on issues of continuity a lot while I'm in Guangzhou.

This on the other hand is Shenzhen. I never find myself musing about much in Shenzhen. (Cue pun) This is not the most crowded the street gets - that happens around about 6 PM, but it gives you a fair idea. There's more serious begging here than around Guangzhou as well. Somewhere off-camera is a girl aged between 5 & 15 (depending on nutrition) who specialises in holding on to a spinning wheel by her teeth. Not a dependable way of making a living, but she is one of many buskers. Except the buskers don't look quite as well fed as they do on Circular Quay.

People in Shenzhen tell you they could never live in Guangzhou because it's not safe. I live in Guangzhou and NOWHERE in Guangzhou makes me check my pockets and hold on to my bag like here. The only reason there aren't pickpockets (if there aren't; my feeling is just that I haven't met them yet) is the large number of public security officials hanging around.

No doubt there's someone from Shenzhen writing the same thing about Beijing Rd.

Autumn arrives

So what, you may ask? Well, it's nearly winter and we're all still sweltering in 98% humidity and high 20's. The swimming pool's closed (and empty, so no point climbing the fence), there isn't aT-shirt in the shops (although you can stock up on left over stock at wholesale prices anywhere that is selling them, if you feel you can take the fashion risk of being out of it next year. Needless to say the remainder tables are surrounded by crowds of not women). Autumn fashion is just about on its way out the door as well with winter only weeks away. Autumn's absence has been causing tension all over town.

The other thing about autumn is very strong winds cleans the air even better than the mid-summer rains.
To wit, you've certainly seen that building before if you've been paying attention, but in no photo previously taken my me in Guangzhou has the sky ever looked like that. I mean, that's a proper sky, guv. Wi' clouds an' evrything. Really. No tricky play with digital editing, just azure.

You can see the clouds better in the next one on - I know the sky is a different colour, but that's due to trick photography. I was practising ways to trick the fully automatic exposure controls, and I have found one.


Even that extremely annoying gold building looks OK under a sky this strongly coloured.



(more to come)








This guy will be happy too. Obviously that isn't the world's largest block of peanut brittle right at this minute, but some time in the recent past it surely was. last weekend that was going to melt if he didn't finish his deliveries by about 10:00 am. This weekend he can probably switch to retail around 11 o'clock and make some extra money.

Also, cycling today is the kind of thing you might think about doing for pleasure. Last weekend it was something you would do to lose weight, or because you had no choice.


It's not unambitious, is it?

Imagine how devastated you'd be if you fell off the bicycle (happened to me once going down Williamstown Road when the chain jumped off the sprocket). Or how angry you'd be if some idiot ran into you. Twenty years ago if you'd been doing this (and no-one actually was that I saw, which might be a whole other discussion) it would have been a bicycle but now it'd be about 50:1 on it would be a car. They don't call it brittle for nothing.

It's tempting to think that there is something a little idyllic about a world where you can earn a living selling peanut brittle from the back of a bicycle - that's the "real China" that everybody is worried might be vanishing. But think about that guy's stress. Take a look at his back - it's the back of a man who is worried about many things. OK, it might be the plummeting value of his share portfolio - but I think the balance of probabilities is against it.

just a week in Guangzhou - nothing fancy

I'm not sure if I'm winning or losing the battle with technology, so whether or not I get any pictures into here remains moot at this stage, but I certainly have found a lot of it to play with. Starting off with the simple ambition  to get movies from the mobile phone onto my computer where people could see them, I have ended up with 14 new programs on the laptop. Since all of them were free, none of them is without idiosyncrasies.  But just as I think this is ridiculous, I realise that I can actually shoot a video with my phone, edit it on a computer, add a Beethoven soundtrack (say), add a few special effects, subtitle it & distribute it for pretty much nothing (given that I already had the mobile phone & computer). So what if it takes 14 programs? If I could remember which one to use when, it would probably only take about 4.

Kafka's - view from my couch

Last Sunday I went back to the coffee shop Liz & I discovered, Kafka's. It's conceivable that this is some kind of a deep-ish joke - but it's hard to be sure & the Chinese appropriation of any random passing English word for a dash of marketing cachet makes it hard to be confident about intention. 

Missing from the photograph is the wall of books - mainly about Tibet - which adds the final touch of niceness, really. It's like having coffee in a library, only more comfortable. it's certainly quiet enough to be a library. On the two occasions that I've been there now there hasve beem miore staff (3) than customers (maximum 2). I'm not sure if their cat is staff or a customer. 

This is really a multi-layered nostalgic experience. The flooding natural light and the absence of air-conditioning for overhead fans plus the clogging humidity immediately make me think of a coffee shop in an outback/rural country town. There's one in Gympie, and Balmoral, and Goulburn, and Seymour, and Ballarat, and ... The one in Berwick probably has airconditioning now, and maybe the rents are too high for it to sprawl like this.

Of course, those rural coffee shops are reconstructing the inner-urban proto-European coffee shop of the 60's, Pellegrini's, Tomani's (Tiamo)  and their folk-music analogues (of which the Twilight in Kew is the only one I actually set foot in). It's really very kind of someone to put a potted history of my coffee-drinking life into Guangzhou, just in case I get homesick. The coffee is really excellent -  priced a bit like Grange though. With the Australian dollar where it currently is, the coffee starts at $7 a cup.

I'm tempted to make it into my office & claim them on expenses. 

Macao etc.

This is not quite the first view of Macao you get from the ferry coming over from Shenzhen, but the camera was packed away at the time. This is from the dock next to the actual ferry terminal itself. For those, like me, who were beginning to fear the death of sea transport, the whole Shenzhen/Macao/Hong Kong ferry scene is a big relief. It's buzzing. Ferries arrive and depart for eithe Hong Kong or Shenzhen - admittedly mainly Hong Kong - about every 15 minutes. The ferry terminal building is clean & well laid out & signposted. The information booth knows the answers to your questions. 

Liz and I set off from the heart of Shenzhen with about 5 bags of luggage - so we wimped out of the metro and caught a taxi - to Shekou, which is the ferry terminal for Shenzhen. Research had shown that  there is a 30 minute lead time required to clear customs and immigration - it may be one China, but included in the two systems are border crossing formalities of the usual kind - but we arrrived at 8:36, bought tickets at 8:37 and were on the 8:45 ferry with a minute to spare. Probably the fastest border crossing (outside Europe) I have ever experienced. Lots, well several anyway, old fashioned one-family working boats spotted in the seas around Shenzhen. I have a new retirement fantasy n0w, I've always wanted to live on a boat.

What you actually see approaching Macao is first the bridge in the picture below (from the other side)  followed by extremely cheerful terraces in a multitude of pastel hues. With the sun shining it's a mokment of heart melting niceness. Shame the camera wasn't out. 

I'm having some problems with organising these pictures, which is going to affect the narrative flow, so, sorry, but, pay attention!

The view of the bridge is taken from the bar (closed at the time) - well, one of the bars - in the "mediterranean" section of the regional architecture theme park that may possibly be sponsored by the Babylon Casino (you can imagine the decor, I didn't photograph it)  and fills up the waterfront from said casino around to the ferry terminal. The bridal party below are in "Ancient Rome" - the groom is trying to decide whether to hit us (Liz is laughing at the bride's sneakers) or share in the joint ridiculousness of it all. 

I'm pleased to report that the universal sense of absurdity prevailed. I do hope their pictures turn out nicely though - it was a bloody hot day to be poncing around in full wedding clobber.

A nice additional roman feature is the halloween pumpkins on top of the arch in the background. Very, what?

The picture below was taken for contrastive purposes, a spot of ancient China meets Casino-land (hovering in the background). 

Ho ho ho... this is not ancient China. 

This is "Tang land". Both the foreground and background are the same age - in fact the background is one of the slighly older casinos (I think), so the foreground might be newer.

None of this is without charm, disturbing though that is to report (like admitting McDonalds has redeeming features, say, food value). Tacky yes. But the discreet charm of the ersatz can't be denied.

So, Macao, home to more fakery than Las Vegas? Not quite yet. Get away from the casino district(s) and the older colony emerges. The 3rd photograph back - charming yellow buildings - is in fact a photograph of (admittedly newly painted) genuine 19th century Portuguese-architected (coolie-built) buildings. In the centre of the old town there are lots of these - a very solid afternoon's walk worth.

A day is enough to see Macao really, unless you have a historian's interest. It's remarkably small. To run a marathon you would need to do 3.5 laps of the peninsula; it's about 3 x 3 km. Taxis and food are absurdly expensive, by Chinese standards at least, and the only service the taxis provide is keeping you out of the heat. You can walk anywhere.

The Old Railway Station (Guangzhou West, or should that be North?)

This is the hotel Vicki, Bindi & I stayed at in 1990. It's not a hotel now & the lobby has been turned into a real-estate salesroom.

Other than this hotel & the railway station, nothing is recognisable. Apart from anything, this area is now right in the middle of the massive wholesale clothing markets, so the whole area is buzzing. In 1990, there were shops selling 5 washers - as in the nut & bolt kind - in a saucer. The only mall was the Friendship Store, which had an interior stocked with 1960's leftover appliances, and which only foreigners, with their special FEC - "foreign exchange currency" - could enter. Most people on the street knew two words of English "Change money". American dollars were the best - worth up to 50% more than the bank rate - but even FEC had a black market rate.

Well, the money changers are still there, but only two accosted me in the afternoon. Now I feel the money changers are there as a convenience, to save you going to the bank to conduct business. Their rates today are worse, not better, than the official rates.


In 1990 I was "arrested" for consorting with money changers. IWhat actually happened is that an elderly man on a bicycle rode up behind me and the 50 odd money changers previously surrounding me vanished & the elderly man turned out to be a member of the police who took me back to his hut for questioning. He only spoke Cantonese, so that didn't work very well & eventually I had to take him to a bank so they could explain that travellers cheques & exchange fraud don't easily mix.

The policeman in the blue shirt - that's his chair on the median strip - reminded me.



This little guy was on the bar table in the hotel where we stopped for airconditioning (and a toilet break). He sells horoscopes for 1 RMB.

Apparently my favourite colour is black?

In this hotel we found a cup of coffee that was even worse than Starbucks, and even more expensive. So, Schultz is doing something right.

I still haven't mastered the flash on this camera - but you knew that aleady.

Nan Yue Palace plus plus

Archaeology, slap bang in the middle of town.

This (the Nan Yue palace) is pretty impressive for the simple reason that in a development-minded city it must have taken extraordinary strength of character from someone to prevent this site being turned into a carpark and/or a foundation for a shopping centre. And leaving aside its impressive value as a symbol of political sensitivity - I guess it also has symbolic value as the South seeks to re-assert its story as being equally as valid as the North's - it's a pretty impressive site. There is a lot going on.

The map above roughly indicates the boundary between Qin and Nan Yue in 219 BCE, just minutes before the successful Qin invasion created the first China ("q" is pronounced similarly to "ch"). The Qin established a commandery in Guangzhou (then called Pan Yu, at least the bit with the commandery in it) and started importing Han nationality farmers/soldiers to settle the area, whilst simultaneously - I assume - handing out dukedoms and earleries to those of the locals they thought might have influence. The map is not contemporary to that period though. It's just illustrative.

Not for the first time I wish my hands were steadier so I didn't have to carry a tripod around to get pictures you can read (because I DONT carry a tripod around, so the fine print on this is beyond me), but this gives you an idea of how central this is to Guangzhou - the road running through the centre from East to West is Zhong Shan Road, which you can comfortably see on Google Earth & any decent map of Guangzhou. Beijing Lu, one of the major shopping districts runs down one side. Somewhere is a developer weeping tears of rage.

The dark red line is the site & the orange line is the wall of the old Panyu commandery/city. Liz and I have walked around that wall looking for signs, but they are long gone. It's still a nice walk though. You can see that the palace
took up a pretty fair chunk of the city - probably not surprising given the newness of the settlement and the importance of the army. This, I guess, was more of a military city than anything else.

The layout of the dig is roughly discernible from this schematic - the olive green is Nan Yue, the purple is Song, the green is Southern Han. On the right you can see a reservoir/drainage pit, with an articifical stream running into it. There are walkways dating back to the same period, suggesting a garden. Judging from the pillar footings, someone in the Song dynasty stuck a couple of quite large buildings down in the middle of the garden.

Not labelled here are the Ming and Qin areas, which mean that the site covers a minimum of 1700 years.



The site is roofed for protection & the light is really not very good, nor is photography encouraged. To be honest, a good book or a decent documentary can give you a much better iea of what is going on.

I like this artefact though - as they've dug down the archaeologists have left a pillar remaining undug & labelled each of the layers to give you an idea of how archaeology works, and also to give you an idea of how many layers of activity are on the site. From the top, 2 layers of modern, 1 layer unlabelled, 2 layers of Qing (the lower being a fairly massive chunk) - switching to the left side the 7th layer is Yuan (Mongol) so we might hypothesise the 5-6th are Ming, then the 8th & 9th layers are Southern Song, the 10th (moving back in a little towards the middle) is Northern Song, below that Southern Han, below that is the Tang dynasty, followed by 2 I don't know, the Nan Chao & the Tong period. All of this rests on a layer called Han Dynasty (the real one) and the whole pillar is therefore resting on the Nan Yue level. (If you had studied archaeology in North China you might be tempted to call that the Qin Dynasty...) So that is 1700 years in a 2 meter pillar of dirt. There is a difference between knowing something is true becasue you read it in a history book, and seeing tangible physical evidence of it. You really have to ramp up the scepticism beyond anything plausible to dismiss this; when I look at it I have to think about the 100-odd generations and the millions of people that this can represent. We live in a constructed world - and the construction is not only ours.

Nan Yue Mausoleum

This is another really well set up site for public visiting. This is the top of the mausoleum, so what you see is the roof. Above is a steel & glass pyramid that is approximately congruent with the hill that has been removed to ge to the tomb. So it's still possible to get a feeling from outside of how this hill fitted into the surrounding landscape. It's also possible to go down into the mausoleum itself, which is smallish, but with seven rooms (Tutankanem only had four, if there is any point in the comparison).

The contents have been put into an adjoining museum - whose architect must have had a fair sense of humour because the museum has both its own "Louvre-like" pyramid, repeating the theme of this one here, and "Egyptian-esque" external bas-reliefs. So far as i know, any connection with Egypt is coincidence, so I guess the museum design might be a tad tendentious. Still, it made me smile. Possibly another coincidence is the vast amount of Egyptian artiface looted by the french under Napoleon - so the Louvre reference is also apposite.

What a fantastic thing archaeology is. (Probably not the world's easiest career though.) The Nan Yue mausoleum is one of 2 Nan Yue sites in Guangzhou, the other being the palace which I mentioned elsewhere. The mausoleum is, so far as anybody knows anyway, a vastly simpler site. Just one mausoleum, nothing before, nothing after. When you think of the amount of pillaging of tombs that went on in, say, Egypt, and I assume in parts of China too although I haven't researched that yet, it's extraordinary that this one was excavated completely untouched in 1983. I mean there it was, a bloody great mound sitting in the middle of the suburbs, untouched for 2000+ years. No legends of buried treasure? No idle curiosity?

In the nineteenth century somebody built gun emplacements on one side of it, and no accidental discoveries.

Along comes another developer, starts digging up the hill to build an apartment block and suddenly, there it is. Imagine how unbelievably excited the archaeology department must have been. It's a small site, but it is really really interesting. Actually small sites are better in some ways for the tourist; you don't get quite the same feeling of scratching the surface (of course you are, but feelings do count). I've been back once since the first visit, and I'll probably go back another couple of times. I get museum burnout because there's really too much to think about & since I don't really know exactly what to look for/at, it can be a bit confusing. I think museums generally do a lousy job of providing supporting information & context. This one actually tries pretty hard, but my museum Chinese is, well, underdeveloped.

I can't claim to be such a great artifact photographer - it's a "no flash" museum as well, but here are a couple of my favourite things.

This chap was holding up the base of one section of a massive seven-part Chinese screen. If you can get a screen-sized view of it, he has a fine demonic grin and vicious teeth. He doesn't look remotely like anything I associate with "Chinese" - which I freely admit may be ignorance on my part - I would have guessed Central American.

Or alternatively, an early prototype for a computer game.




This "rhyton" is much more stunning than the photograph - the jade is translucent, and amazingly thin. I've seen a lot of jade in China, and frankly I'm starting to think that plastic is rarer and more intersting, but this restores jade to its proper place in the preciousness scheme of things. It's a piece that makes me start to understand the evil collector mentality - wanting it is very easy.

Drinking horns always make me think of Norse gods (Thor in particular, drinking the ocean to create the tides) and the chosen translation into Greek makes it hard to avoid thinking westwards, but of course, anybody hanging around with horned animals is highly likely to work out that the horns make good cups. And Guangzhou is, don't forget, the city of five sheep/rams/goats. So, no jumping to conclusions.




This is another of those things - again I don't know how clearly you can see the picture, but the carving is very finely detailed. There's a dragon, a phoenix & a rhinoceros in there if you look hard enough. It's a clasp, somewhat more elaborate than the hooks-and-eyes of the pre-velcro cheap fastener.

One of the small things that I liked about it is that it had been broken and mended in its original lifetime; so he may have been the Nan Yue emperor, but he wasn't a nothing-that-isn't-perfect-enters-my-sight kind of emperor. More frugal. Better balanced. Perhaps not quite so rich.

Calling him an Emperor is something of an ambit claim, in point of fact. I have also seen him described as a governor. Certainly his grandfather started off in the South as the governor of the Qin empire - but Qin didn't last long & in the time it took the Han dynasty to get itself organised the Qin-colonised Yue areas naturally acquired a degreee of independence. And from the Han dynasty point of view, an independent kingdom of Han ethnic stock in the South wasn't a high priority, so long as they weren't too independent. So it made sense for them to authorise/collaborate in the Nan Yue kingdom. Of course, eventually all that independence and talikng about kingdoms got the local people unduly excited, and the Han acquired an emperor whose idea of control was more focussed on physical control, and thus after 4 generations (and in a pragmatic sense 3, because the last generation of infant emperor probably wasn't more than a dying optimistic gasp) the Nan Yue kingdom was no more. (But see the history of Vietnam for an alternative view of events)

Zhaoqing

Zhaoqing is a very cool place. Its practically mandatory to go somewhere during the national holiday, being me we left it to the last minute, but settled on the popular destination , the poor man's Guilin, Zhaoqing. As the poet apparently said, take some water from West Lake [famous, in Hangzhou] and seven crags from Yangshuo [famous, near Guilin] and voila, it's the Seven Crags of Zhaoqing.

Here are a lot of other people going somewhere during the national holiday. This is the long-distance waiting room (#4) at Guangzhou East.

Carefully framed as this is (by the ferry window on the right) it might just be Guilin. 


But although this seems to be all that Zhaoqing is famous for in Guangzhou, when you get there there is a lot more.

We were fiendishly lucky to get a hotel room, in fact. The city was so busy with tourists that even the local taxi drivers, usually commission hounds when it comes to finding you a hotel, were refusing to cooperate. We got the last room in the place we stayed & while I was filling out the forms about 5 more people got knocked back.

But the good luck with the room meant that we were going to like Zhaoqing, and we found a lot to like. This is the South Gate of the old city in a city wall which is not completely synthetic - in fact looks pretty old in places. Of course questions of authenticity abound in tourism, and in some ways, who does care if it's real or a copy, apart from the archaeologist? I mean, I do, but I'm not really sure why, or that the reasons are readily defensible.

There has been a city here since Han times (BCE), but I guess the wall here is Qing/Ming fragments. During that time Zhaoqing was the main provincial city (governor's seat) so I expect the facilities would have been well maintained. Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who opened China to Western intellectual eyes, was here for 6 years learning Chinese. And architecting a church. Very talented man.

This is actually the outer gate & we tried to get up to the inner gate but the space between the two is filled by a large hospital. Despite our best attempts we weren't quite able to navigate through the hospital to the next gate - we could see it, but we couldn't climb up to it.

Another thing I liked about Zhaoqing is that the Pearl River - actually maybe it is the West River - is still a working river here. For someone who has spent about 200 hours of his life in boats, and most of that in the 168 hours of one week, I am a complete sucker for boats. I love them, or at least, the idea of them. I don't have one becasue I doubt I would ever actually use it (I know the difference between fantasy and reality) but I still like to watch other people using them. 

In fact Liz and I spent days trying to find how to get to Zhaoqing by boat & one of the reasons the trip was a bit disorganised was the amount of time we spent looking for boats instead of booking hotels. It was nice to see the boats, even if they have stopped running from Guangzhou. (In fact, it appears that the boats now go from Huangpu, about 30 km south of Guangzhou to Gaoming, about 30 kms by bus from Zhaoqing.) I did in fact try to find out form a couple of girls hanging around the river's edge if there were ferries from Zhaoqing, but they thought not. Although they weren't thinking completely clearly because they were trying to photograph me clandestinely with their mobile phone and I scared one of the witless by walking towards her. And she spoke riverboat putonghua, which I didn't study in school.

This is a photo from the window of the hotel, the Shanshui or 'mountain & water' chain. This part of China, and in fact all the way from here to Shanghai if you stick within a couple of hundred kilometers of the coast, could not be better described. 

We just had time on the last morning to dash back down to the river to look at somebody's mansion - nice enough in itself - which contained more revolutionary history: one of the divisions of the armies involved in the Northern Expedition(s) set off from here. But the other half of the mansion was deveoted to a museum of inkstones, which are a local handicraft, produced from the nearby mountains. Inkstones are a new product for the wealthy middle class demonstrating its connection with China's traditions - but nonetheless some of these inkstones were superbly carved. Not really practical for me to bring home, so I was compelled to leave them all there. And the camera broke down, so no pictures either. 

Wholesale clothing markets

I was busy trying out the video on the camera & I didn't get any stills (these are the best of the 1st shots from the videos). I've cobbled together a HOME MOVIE with the clips, but I haven't quite worked out how to show it off to the world, yet. Give me time.

Anyway, these stills don't really catch the feeling of this place. This street runs down between the Wan Tong retail & wholesale markets and the I-have-no-idea shoe market. These are the markets I but stuff at - not that there aren't plenty of other markets but I'm not sure there is enough time for me to become an expert in these places. So for now, anyway, these are they. There are more people here than you could possibly work out what to do with. Ok, there are more people in Indian markets. But so what?
There are also belt markets and watch markets and cuff link markets and wallet markets and probably earring markets and underwear markets, as well as underground markets, handbag markets, just stuff markets everywhere. And there are the people selling stuff, making stuff, buying stuff wholesale, buying it retail, carrying the stuff from one place to another, looking at stuff, feeding the people doing stuff with the stuff, and other people watching the stuff happening.

Somehow these three photgraphs don't seem to have the right amount of stuff in them. Hence the still not available video, which will give you a bit better idea.


What really interests me about this place, and all the other markets, is that they are a kind of education in economics and commerce. For a start, imagine that you can see the entire fashion industry of Australia - 20 million people - in one place. You start to get an idea that there's a lot going on behind the boutiques that you don't see. Then you realise that actually, in Guangzhou you are looking at the fashion industry of Australia, plus a large chunk of the rest of the developed world, and it's a bit headspinning. I find myself wanting to look at some statistics - how many people? How many pairs of jeans/shoes/ear rings/etc/etc to which parts of the world? What's it all worth? It's also a bit of a grim confession, but having been here in 1990, and comparing it with now, I have to confess that I am developing a lot of respect for the free market economists. Here, now, you can see it & it might be a bit intimidating - although I guess if you know your business it isn't - but it's undeniably a better way.

The other thing that strikes me, is that actually, this is the history of Gunagzhou. It has been the intersection of China with the rest of the world, and the intersection of Chinese trade with the rest of the world for a long time. Not the only intersection, as there were the silk roads, but absolutely the maritime intersection. It was the frustration of only being able to do business in Guangzhou that drove the British into some of their least savoury post-colonial manouvres. And there has been trade between Canton and South East Asia for at least 2000 years. The Arabs knew Canton in the 8th century. The Chinese from Canton were trading with India along the coastal routes at least 1400 years ago. So when I stand in Beijing and look at a heavily restored 18th century palace, I'm not sure that perhaps I'm seeing as much history as I do standing outside a market in Guangzhou. That market, barring minor interruptions, has been in continuous existence since BCE.

It's a thrill to hold a Byzantine coin and feel that you are directly connected to something 1200 years old. But that coin is dead. If you buy something in the markets of Guangzhou you can participate in something 200o years old. It's not an artefact. It's special.

Da Sha Tou and the ferry that wasn't

I like Da Sha Tou. It has the fabric markets, the camera markets & a lot of trees. It used to have the wharf for the overnight ferries up and down river as well, so being big fans of ferries and following our trusty, if somewhat dated, guidebook we set out to find it.

Optimism tempered with fatalism was the mood - none of the locals, including the real natives of the city, that I work with believes such a thing as an inter-city ferry exists. But Liz & I know from experience that the lcoals don't always know everything - in Hangzhou in 1999 we had to find the actual riverside wharf to catch the ferry up the Grand Canal, no-one knew about that either. On the other hand, in Harbin in 2002 we had to hire our own boat to make a trip down the river.

We started well, with a very crowded looking ferry office - but they only sold "up and down the river" cruises. They also told us there were no more ferries, and helpfully gave us instructions to the bus station. The bus station told us that the bus we wanted didn't go from there, and helpfully provided what I am convinced was a random number - since no matter how bad my pronunciation is, I refuse to accept that our destination could possibly have been interpreted as one of the Number 57 bus stops.

Er Sha Dong
Xing Hai Yin Yue Ting
Da Sha Tou
Zhu Hai Guang Chang
Ai Qun Da ?
Shi Zhong Yi Yuan
Hua Di
Shi Wei Tang
Qiao Dong Xiao Qu
Zhao Kou Ke Yun Zhan

I ask you, which of those could really be taken for Zhao Qing?

Of course, the fault was to a degree mine, because I don't speak Cantonese & have made about as much progress with it as I have effort put into it (one new language at a time is enough for me), and the bulk of the conversation seemed to me to be in not Mandarin. So maybe I misunderstood some critical piece of information. It wouldn't be the first time that I have discovered an unhelpful local was actually an incompetent listener (me). It's very tempting to blame everybody else.

Anyway, the last stop on that bus route does actually take you to a ferry. One day I will catch that bus and find out where the ferry goes to. Not Zhaoqing though, because I am now convinced there isn't one. The reason that I am convinced is that I have discovered why there is no ferry, and it is a combination of 2 extremely plausible reasons. Firstly, people have been building roads, and roads are faster. That is the history of the world, so no reason why it shouldn't be here either. Secondly, there's a Chinese government department responsible for creating business opportuniteis for the locals - basically something I am in sympathy with - and one of theri favourite tricks is creating transportation needs. As for example at Huashan in Xi'an, where a perfectly good train station at the foot of the mountain has been closed in favour of the next station down the line, thus creating a need for taxis & minibuses. The Guangzhou-Zhaoqing ferry (formerly convenient, if not very fast) is now the Huangpu-Gaoming ferry. Huangpu is a one hour bus trip out of Guangzhou & Gaoming is at least an hour on the bus out of Zhaoqing. Sadly, these market creating activities have caused the ferry to vanish in any meaningful way.

I wonder if it's worth it to bring it back just for the tourist market? I can't be the only person that loves riverboats.

Anyway, getting back to the mainline, we set off to walk down the riverbank and visit every possible wharf. This we did & sadly, found only blisters. And a ferry that crosses the river to the other side - well that's not nothing.

We also found where the police boats park, and possibly where the police boatmen live. It's a little bit run down, and I guess it's so close to the water that it is rat infested, but the block of flats adjacent to the police wharf is potentially the best address in Guangzhou (well, no-one else has a private pier). You might feel the need to move the coconut sellers along - it's nice to see a police station that feels so openly comfortable allying itself to free-floating commerce, but the left-over husks aren't pretty.

This turned out to be a day when we were doomed to walk. Finding a taxi is a bit of a challenge a lot of the time & you have to position yourself very strategically close to where people debouch from taxis and then, fend off other competitors for the newly vacant cab. usually missing a couple of cans gives you enouh information to adjust the game plan but on this particular day, nothing was working. We must have walked another 3 km before we finally commandeered one on the edge of the art district.

It's the grand final

Expatriate rites of passage - watching the grand final in an Irish bar, complete with sullen Geelong supporters. Free beer from the publican - nice of him really since I won't be back next year.

Anyway the right team won, from my point of view, and it was a fantastic game for 2 and a 1/2 quarters.

I had to take the afternoon off work on the basis of an Australian religious event.

Liz in Shenzhen

I've been in Shenzhen about 17 or 18 times and the consensus of all, local and foreign alike, is that it is a city without a history. In a way that's true - like Shanghai, Shenzhen is what it is now because of trade with Hong Kong in the last 30 years. But in another way it's not true because people have been living in and around the area for a long time, just not in big cities. I had to work on the Friday we after we arrived in Shenzhen and Liz spent the day on the internet researching the city, and came up with a list of about 20 things to look at - from Neolithic villages to tombs of ancient kings. Stay tuned. There is a bit of southern pride reverberating through Guangdong, justifiably so since it was peripheral to the various Northern empires for substantial amounts of its history; not perhaps enough to call itself another country, but certainly enough to want to mark the distinctions between Han and Yue.



We haven't visited those sites though. We only really had time to stop off at Windows on the World. I'm cowering because the sun is in my eyes, not because a giant kangaroo eater is approaching the giant kangaroos.

I don't think I can describe Windows on the World. On the right behind me is the Parthenon. Behind that is the Eiffel Tower. The Golden Gate Bridge is being build across the road to my left front - the smaller kangaroo is looking at it. I think you can take it from there.

Around and about

Liz arrived last week on Thursday & I flew down to Hong Kong to meet her. I was flying from Shanghai and I had hoped to catch the Mag-lev (400+ km/p/h) but it doesn't run until 7:30 and I was on an 8 am international flight. So bugger. Maybe next time.

The new airport in Hong Kong - well, new to me - is not at all spectacular, but I'm sure it's a lot less hellish for the locals in Kowloon who used to live next to the old one. Apart from being expensive, the public transport access from Lantau to Central is fantastic. In fact, it's a pretty fair model of the perfect airport-city combination.

I was in Hong Kong in 1990 but I spent 3 days confined to a hotel room so most of what I remember is actually from 1975, when I wasn't paying a lot of attention. In 1975 Central was full of expensive shops. In 2008 Central is full of very expensive shops. The tall buildings above the expensive shops have changed - they are taller and shinier, but you know, tall shiny buildings are just tall shiny buildings. There's a Leunig cartoon from the 70's in which all the building reflect each other's reflections so they just disappear.

It's possible to walk around Central without ever actually going outside - walkways link most of the buildings. There's two possible explanations for this - architects are all geeks who grew up watching/reading dystopic science fiction, or it's a good idea never to be outside. You can choose.

It's not so easy to decide where to meet in a city you don't know - one of the landmark hotels I thought of actually has vanished - especially when the transport is not completely reliable. We decided to meet at St John's Cathedral - fairly easy to check that there was only one of those. So it proved to be, and we met there on the first attempt. (The cathedral may still be in the same place, but someone has managed to build a shopping mall underneath it while no-one was looking)

It's a short walk to the Peak tram from St John's, so we went there. It's very steep - it is so steep in fact that it gave me the chance to use the word vertiginous in conversation - another lifetime ambition realised. The tram terminates in a shopping mall, which makes it another typical piece of Asian public transport, but to be honest, it would be a great thing to live on the Peak. There are a lot of trees, and a fine view. I presume it costs an arm & a couple of legs to do it, but to get off at one of the intermediate stations - Macdonnell, say - and wend your way home across the mountain would be a fine way to end the day. On a par with catching the ferry home to Balmain.
Hong Kong is a complicated place. Central & the rest of the island generally are rich & polished. There are obviously a lot of extremely rich people there. Kowloon-side the shops are smaller, the building older and the streets are more crowded. If you go out to the outer edges, then the whole place starts to look seriously run down. It's hard to believe that there aren't a lot of extremely poor people as well - in 1976 they were made visible in the form of a very large shanty-town; the sort of slum where everybody lives under their own bit of corrugated iron, but no-one has any walls. I didn't go looking for it this time, and I hear it's been moved on.

Anyway, we got down from the peak and it was time to move to Shenzhen - we tried to catch a ferry up the Pearl river, but the ferry terminal has been converted to a shopping mall and we ended up on the MTR (which has taken over the KLR, the line that runs up to the border). Nothing much to say about that trip, except a tip for young players - don't assume that because Tsim Sha Shui & East Tsim Sha Shui have similar names and a connecting tunnel you can easily walk there. Better to catch the train at one and zig-zag via the connecting station (which we didn't do, so I can't tell you the name). Still, it wouldn't be Hong Kong without a trip on one ferry, the Star from Central to Kowloon. Unlike every other form of transport in HK, it's ridiculously cheap. I guess it's subsidised to allow the workers a cheap way to get over from poortown to richville.

Since then it's been mainly work. More later.