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.

Sun Yat Sen - and Guangzhou

I went to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park Sunday - it was unplanned & unscheduled (I took a bunch of teachers out for breakfast to celebrate the Autumn Festival). Can't help mentioning that we went via Shamian - to show a couple of the people who hadn't seen it before - and saw 11 wedding photograph parties, definitely a new record. I guess it was the public holiday.

Anyway, being unplanned & unscheduled, I only had the mobile phone with me for a camera - I might go back some time and retake these photos because they were quite interesting.

It's not a fantastic museum, but it's a better attempt than the one at Martyrs' Park with which it inevitably overlaps (history being what it is) to some extent. And the hall, which you can see behind the statue, has a really fine interior, including a stunning dome and some very 30's stained glass panels around the dome - pale beige & washed out pastel blue & greens. The effect of light is very fine, almost glowing. 

Anyway, Sun Yat Sen - who had many names - was one heck of a guy & I suggest reading about him elsewhere in more detail. All I can say is that personally, as someone who has on several occasions struggled to persuade 3 departments in a large company to move in the same direction at the same time towards a mutually beneficial end, my admiration for major political figures continues to grow. That any politician can achieve anything is remarkable - that they can achieve as much as SYS in such an enormously complex political environment is nothing short of astonishing. The museum suggests he died of overwork - easy to believe.

The museum does manage to give at least some impression of this tumult. But what particularly caught my atttention was some of the material about Guangzhou, so I'm really just going to put this down here.

This is an attempt to show all the historic Guangzhous superimposed on a schematic of the modern city. (I believe that if you double click on the picture you will get a larger version.)  YOu can see the effective boundary of the modern city along the railway line. Or you could check out Google Earth. 

The legend tells us: (sorry, couldn't manage to format this any better)

• The small solid black rectangle is the original Pan Yu, the settlement in the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE). The current Pan Yu is about 15 km south.
  
• Slightly to its left is an unfilled rectangle representing the Yue wall during the Han Period (Yue is the family who gave their name to the language spoken in the South, we call it Cantonese, but formally it is "Yue Hua" or maybe "Yue Wu") 
• The surrounding cross-hatch identifies a wall/area dating back to the Three Kingdoms (250 CE). 
  
• The diagonally hatched area is the Song Dynasty Guangzhou.
  
• The heavily dashed line is the Ming Dynasty wall
  
• The Qing wall extensions are shown by the dots on the left and right sides of the Ming Walls, leading down to the river.

Not a skerrick of those walls is visble today.

This 19th Century (well, it was drawn in 1900) map gives you an idea of the Qing walls, 11 years before the Qing dynasty ceased to exist. By this time Sun Yat Sen was criss-crossing the world raising money & consciousnesses to establish a republic.

The pink section  on the left of the city walls you could probably characterise as the outgrowth of international trade. Shamian, about which I keep banging on, is the orangey-saucer shaped "island" at the bottom of the pink. 

This map dates from 1647 which is very early in the Qing Dynasty. It shows the extended walls leading down to the river very clearly. Another thing that you can see in this map is the idea that Guangzhou is surrounded by mountains - not a feeling I particularly have, I suspect partly because of pollution and partly because of skyscrapers, and to a large degree because I spend most of my time indoors. But it has been the city of five mountains, and there is still a subway station called just that (another cluster of universities) and the next picture emphasises it even more.

Clearly not painted by somebody interested in urban geography, this dates from somewhat later in the Qing.

It's quite an interesting perspective - there is absolutely nowhere in the south you could look down on Guangzhou like this. So it's a mind's eye drawing.

This picure gives you a little idea of the way in which Bai Yun mountain has foothills that actually come right down into the city. The Sun Yat Sen memorial is built on the last hint of a foothill, providing a kind of balancing point between inside and outside the city.

It's worth having a look at Google Earth (again). There is an excellent photograph in it called "Pabellon de Sun Yat Sen" which looks back down onto the hall from the lower foothills. You can also, from slightly higher up, follow the line of the foothills back into the mountain proper.

notes on audio video

audio

No video available, but this is a cleaned up version of the same soundtrack.

=====

Notes to self: for video from the phone, which is badged .mp4 but is in fact .3gp, copy/move it to the PC, rename it so the extension is correct, then:

• Use mp4cam2avi to extract the video signal (make sure to select video only)
  
• Use mob3gpcon to extract/converet the audio signal (make sure to select audio only)
  
• Use Windows Movie Maker to edit the video & audio back together, save as "for PC use" which producess a .wmv file.
  

Not really an ideal process. Can't use "Super" (can't even test it) without a higher resolution screen. "G-Spot" very handy tool. Wavepad at least adequate for simple audio cleanup (high & low band pass filters, must find out what that actually means. Don't use the noise filter for violin music! Audacity doesn't like Windows-encoded files (eg the .avi that comes out of mob3gpcon. Need to explore more with WMM (eg, can the audio be mixed back into the AV track?)

Update: Finally got around to testing "Super" and it is indeed. The distributors describe it as just a GUI connecting a whole bunch of other programs - that seems unduly modest. It handles the 3gp conversion, both audio & video, re-encodes as required, provides a host of handy things you might want to do, isn't sensitive to file names & pretty much seems like the only tool you'd need for coding/decoding. All I need is a bigger screen & better resolution, juut like it says on the box.

Might look for a better freeware editor than WMM, I think. 

More Martyrs

Well I've delayed writing this because I have been trying to include a recording - sing ho for technology. Since probably no-one is interested in the details except me, I'll just say HO again, and move on. No sound track is available at this time.

I went back to Martyr's Park - which as I noted last time is a very nice place to do nothing on a hot day, and nothing has changed. Last time I was there on a Monday and the museum was closed. This time it was a Saturday, so I got to go to the museum, of which more later.

Being a weekend there were more people here than previously, but it was still a long way from crowded. Some people playing social badminton (no net, very popular, more popular then table tennis), some people practising tai chi with swords, one solitary maniac practising his wushu/kongfu.

But the highlight for me was the guy playing/practising his erhu, the two-stringed Chinese violin (although it's played like a viol from chin to knee, but it's not fretted). Cue technology...ohhh. Anyway, the erhu is one of my favorite instruments and well played it's astonishing. There are a few beggars who play it - one pair in my district features a blind erhu player led along by a rope - but they aren't usually particularly good. This one was really good. Probably the best I've heard not on CD. Fortunately the modern mobile phone records sound - although mine only records it as part of a video - so I was able to get the last 60 seconds of his performance. I hope I didn't upset him by listening/recording & that it was just coincidence he finished when I sat down.

I'll keep trying with getting the recording uploaded. Everything else has worked eventually.

Note:  recording uploaded semi-successfully. Click here => Erhu

The museum is housed in a great building, one of the sites of various Republican party meetings back in the days of Sun Yat Sen, who is understandably big in these parts. The museum itself is a little disappointing, but has its points. Useful for language lessons, anyway. Nine types of halberd, each with its own name. Now I know - or might, if my memory worked at all. Mind you, knowing would be a rather private satisfaction; not likely to get to show the knowledge off.

Modern historiography being what it is, getting the Chinese side of the Opium Wars isn't really a big deal. In fact, their treatment of the British was positively restrained compared to my history lecturer in 1976. What was interesting was some of the old maps, for a couple of reasons. One is that I found out Guangzhou was a walled city, which I half-knew, but don't recall seeing actually mentioned anywhere previously. There are place names which sound like old walled city place names - but there is absolutely nothing left of any walls, so I wondered how long ago the names were actually relevant. Well, certainly 1850 and beyond, I now know. In fact, the river side of the city had a double wall; I guess that makes sense, a kind of secure trading area doubling as a buffer in case of attack from the river.

The other interesting thing was that stuff happened at some of the places I've been to, and other places that I will go to & none of that stuff seems to be in the guidebook(s). It's good to be able to say, you know, here there was one of 9 cannon emplacements during the Taiping rebellion. (or was it the Opium wars - I will have to go again with a notebook)

Skipping though the party political history, not because it's not interesting, but because it's rather name overloaded, to the war against Japan, and there were some very nasty photographs indeed. Blunt. Brutal. Ugly. On one level, there just aren't enough war photographs on public display really. On another, I guess it angers as many people as it educates.

That's about it really. No photography allowed in the museum, and the ones I took didn't turn out very well. But I'll finish with a picture of this guy - I'm going to have to find out more about him. He seems to have a statue everywhere, and yet I've never heard of him before. He must be seriously local, and seriously well-regarded. I mean, you can be a big man in your lifetime but if everybody hates you, when the civic statuary budget comes up in committee after you die, it just always seems to be overspent.



Here he is again. Looking younger. Ye Jian Ying, for those who are interested. I've got at least one more, in bronze, if I can find it.