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.