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.