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.

Just behind the Culture Park

I brought some black-and-white film back from Penang, which has been challenging the local developers because who uses film any more? And B&W - I think one shop I went into was surprised to discover that there was such a thing as B&W film. Eventually I asked someone at work to find out where I could get it developed, because no-one in the shops around my district seemed to have an clue. She returned a few days to say there was a shop behind the culture park which sold B&W film - seemed a fair bet they could develop it. Where's the culture park? I asked. Near Shamian. OK, well in fact now you mention it, I remember seeing it on the map when I was visiting Shamian, so no problems.

In fact, I was quite happy to have an excuse to head back to Shamian because it's a cheerful place, so I leapt on a train Saturday and set off for : "Yellow Sands" subway. Did I make the obligatory sarky remarks about vanished glories last time I blogged on Shamian?


Anyway, this is the vision from the pedestrian overpass between the subway station and Shamian. I'm thinking the last time the sands were yellow here was at least 300+ years ago.

However, I did find some yellow...









Of course there are things you expect to see in China, which are what people call "the real China" but is actually just one particular memorialised part of it. Annoyingly, no matter how much I editorialise in my mind about this, I am still very pleased so see a man on a bicycle carrying bananas. Perhaps it's the aesthetics of it all - they were VERY yellow.






Note, Shamian, another couple falling prey to the evil wedding photographer.

it took a little bit of map & compass reading to find the culture park, because Guangzhou's road system is 3 dimensional and it isn't completely clear from the maps which roads go under or over which other roads.

But on the way there I observed that I was in the garment district - another garment district, not the one in the north near the old railway station.


Actually, no bundles in this shot...

This picture should give you an idea - the bundles are packages of clothes from the wholesalers, typically 2 or 3 items in a range of sizes. If your shop needs more than one bundle, then someone will be trolleying it (centre) to you. And if you aren't in the business of selling clothes here, then you're in the business of wearing them (girls, left & right). And this is a quiet spot of the road where I could pause to get the camera out.




One entrance to the market

The hub of all this is a market, I guess mainly wholesale, but I'm sure possible to do retail as well.

The place is surrounded by wrapped bundles of clothes, in piles, unattended but labelled, waiting for either delivery or collection. I am sure it all works, but it's hard to believe looking at it.

The market is surrounded on 3 sides by the fashion business, and on the 4th - Culture Park. Hmm. So behind Culture Park is a fashion district. And somewhere in this fashion district is a shop that sells B&W film. What's your guess - is the only non-clothing shop in the district going to stand out or be invisible?

I was fairly confident it would be the latter, but nothing daunted, map & compass in hand, I set out to scour the area semi-systematically. I found every conceivable button, braiding, tassel, elastic, banding, coat hanger, mannequin, fastener, bead, beading, sequin shop. Not just shops, streets of shops. Let's say, at least 50 button shops - and I must have missed some. I found a lot of restaurants all jam-packed. I found people selling polystyrene boxes of food prepared in their kitchen - food that in some cases looked better than at least one of my local restaurants - I found people drinking beer from teacups. I didn't find a film developer. Apart from that small defect, it is a really buzzy part of town.

Beats any terrace windows in Newtown

And, not without architectural charm either.

By this stage I'd moved so far away from the culture park that I'd pretty much given up on finding film shops. But I was having a good time exploring, and crucially, I wasn't lost, so I thought I'd just keep zig-zagging my way North until the subway appeared or my feet gave up the ghost.

Abruptly - as in, cross one street - I found that I was in the printing district. if you wanted to start a design business here, you could sit in the street on a couple of milk crates with a laptop & a customer. When you had the design ready you could go & buy the paper, get the papershop to deliver it to the printer next door, who could pop around the corner to get the ink, or if required, buy a new machine for a new process. Naturally, if there were any problems, spare parts, electricians and engineers are at hand. This is another whole district devoted to one industry: in fact mainly driven by the advertising printing for all the clothing shops next suburb South. Mind you, I'm not completely sure about the economics of all this. There were an awful lot of people asleep in their shopfronts.

Equally suddenly, I turned a corner into the toy district. And about 200 metres along the main road, that turned into the homewares district.

And then a cathedral. I almost didn't see it because it was impossible that it should be there. you could have videotaped me for a paradigmatic image of "double-take". It's just there. Not a single foreshadowing sign for tourists or dislocated worshippers. However, I guess this is how a mediaeval city worked - districts organised by crafts and a cathedral in an attention grabbing location. Not that I want to imply that Guangzhou is mediaeval, more that patterns of urban geography are repetitive and re-emergent. I wonder how much of the patterning here is organic and how much planned?

Anyway, the day's mission was to develop a film and by now it was pushing 3 o'clock. As it happens, I found the 2nd hand camera district a while back - which curiously shares its suburb with the fabric markets, the one fashion component I hadn't seen all day. To further demonstrate the estrangement between the fabric markets & the clothes markets, it's not even a close walk. And the tailors in the fabric district are slowly shifting over from clothes to curtains for the new apartment buildings. Howsomesoever, it seemed like a fair bet that where there were 2nd hand cameras, there would be a B&W film developer. And so there was. I wonder how the pictures will turn out? That's an emotion you don't get with a digital camera...

The Cameron Highlands

Tea plantation auditioning for an advertisement

To be fair (although to whom I'm not sure) there isn't much difference between the Cameron Highlands and any overdeveloped touristy vaguely mountainous area - say the Dandenongs (or Blue Mountains, whatever). True, the Dandenongs doesn't have tea plantations, which is to their disadvantage, because a tea plantation is very nice to look at - just as nice as all those ads on television whose art directors got there before me. But, the Cameron Highlands, just like the Dandenongs, does have lashings of devonshire tea. Those Devons - they just went everywhere.

Nice, isn't it.

It's also true that the Dandenongs don't have a wide range of Indian, Malayasian and Chinese food - but then, the Cameron Highlands doesn't have any overpriced hippie arts and crafts. Of course, they do have arts and crafts, and probably it was overpriced, but it did seem ridiculously cheap and some of it was really quite ... nice. We resisted the temptation to buy though, because it wasn't self carrying.

The really big attraction of the Highlands "the hills" is of course that the temperature differential between it and the coast is so great. Likewise the humidity differential. I spent 3 days going around saying "I'm so cold" - but the sucker prices were out on the jumpers rather than the gewgaws so I wasn't going to buy one. For sure I don't need it in Guangzhou. Actually, half of my jumpers in Sydney were bought in the gift shop at Tullamarine when I arrived in Melbourne from Sydney having forgotten precisely what "cold" means in Melburnian dialect. They don't get much wear because by the time I need them again I've forgotten that I own them, and have to buy another on arrival.

Be that as it may, I was quite happy to be cold - the temperature is actually around 22, so it's not actually life-threatening, but after GZ and KL, 22 and low humidity is paradise. We stayed in a gi-normous B&B/guesthouse/hotel which was very nice - a bit damp, but otherwise impeccably maintained and/or painted. We walked downhill to a tea plantation - it didn't look so far on the map, but so much for the tourist map - it was a seriously long way and it was seriously downhill. That wasn't bad in itself of course, but the walk back seemed a bit intimidating. However, we found the local electrician repairing the wiring at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, and he was happy to give us a lift back. Keen golfer, plays off single figures - apparently the local golf course is the cheapest in Malaysia. Very nice of him - although if we'd known his shortcut, we could have reduced the distance by about 2/3! Still a steep climb though.

I bullied Liz into having Chinese food for dinner, and it was OK, but it seemed pretty clear that Indian was the go, judging from the crowds on the boardwalk & the sheer number of Indian places, so we had Indian for breakfast the next day. In Australia the most common Indian bread is naan (which you can get in Malaysia too) but in Malaysia roti is the signature Indian bread. And while you can get roti in Australia, Malaysian roti is an art-form. In Tamah Rata, the artform reaches its greatest heights - cue bad puns from the peanut gallery. It comes in cones, in strips, in pancakes, in mounds, folded, with curry, with fruit, with whatever you like pretty much. And if you have ever been amazed by a guy making pizza by tossing dough around like a Frisbee, roti is made the same way, only the dough is a millimetre thin by the time the cook puts it onto his hotplate. It is unbelievable - speaking as a moderately skilled dough-maker. We managed about 6 different kinds in the three days - but I think my favourite is the one with curry sauce. Even for breakfast, this is excellent. (My diet didn't fare too well in Malaysia)

View from look out - note imminent arrival of rain

We went for a pleasant little walk on Day 2 to a pleasant little waterfall & a rickety, rot-infested look out for a view over the whole valley which was impressive (making due allowances for the holiday accommodation) with the rain clouds sweeping in. Inspired by this we planned to do 2 walks on day 3 - the shortest one in the morning, and then a quick visit to a strawberry farm in the PM.

There is a Buddhist monastery in the hills, and it's only a kilometer off the road. Just so you know, it takes 3-4 hours to walk that kilometer. Longer if it rains - which it will, because it does every day around noon. We did eventually arrive at the monastery, wetter than I have ever been in my adult life (because being in wet clothes is muche wetter than being under a shower) where a very nice nun gave us an umbrella - for free! thus raising my estimate of Buddhist monks about 1000% because in general they are a predatory lot with the mandatory exorbitant donation - well the ones around Shanghai & Guangzhou are. In Guangzhou locals have frantically waved at me to advise me NOT to give money to a begging monk - so my view is not isolated. On the other hand we have a monk in one of our schools and I feel a bit sorry for him because in 6 months he doesn't appear to making much progress. Maybe what goes around comes around in the ripping-off business.

One reason for jungle trekking

Anyway, it was nice of the nun. It was quite an interesting monastery - it is one of 3 in Malaysia named after the Ming navigator who allegedly discovered America (Zheng He, but I can't remember his Hakka or his Cantonese name, which is the temple name). It seems to be a kind of Pirate Buddha; it was certainly a very interesting temple with a couple of artifacts I hadn't seen before. (I think the camera must have got wet, because I can't find the pictures) It must be doing pretty well financially because it was big new and shiny, while the guidebook suggests that there has been a temple there for quite a few decades.

We cancelled our plan for a second walk.

Next morning we tried to make a quick dash to a strawberry farm, but somehow we missed it and ended up taking a tour of a small Muslim community - not so visible in the Highlands as elsewhere. We ended up with a back of semi-dried strawberries for the bus trip back to KL. I have to say that I have never found dried fruits to match up to raisins and dried apricots. You'd think that dried strawberries would be fantastic, what could be better than intense strawberry flavour?, but they just don't work. The sugar overpowers the flavour.

Ipoh

We could certainly have spent more time in Penang, but I had been recommended to the Cameron Highlands - cool, they said, with tea plantations, so since it was on our way back to KL, we headed off by ferry and bus.

Personally I prefer trains to buses, and train stations to bus stations. However, Liz' navigational skills and instincts for the way things work got us to the bus depot in the mainland part of Penang - the ferry between the island and the mainland was free!

According to the guidebook there were cheaper bus fare to be had, but no-one I found was in a haggling mood. Nor particularly was I & it is hard to care cantankerously about less than $1. The number of people involved in the fare was fairly large - the shill, the man who wrote out the ticket and took the money, the person who had to be spoken to to confirm the existence of vacant seats, the person who took the tickets, the bus driver, and the sleeping bus driver. 6 people, to split my 12 ringgits - to say nothing of the petrol & maintenance costs. There were maybe 20 people on the bus, which makes three rounds trips a day between Ipoh & Penang. I guess, multiplying it all out, that's 120 ringgits a day each on average (assuming no costs). Actually that's OK - they could spend about 1/3 of it on overhead and it is a reasonable business. I don't know what rents are like if you are local, but you can certainly eat for less than 10 ringgits a day, so 80 (2/3 of the aforementioned 120) is probably manageable. Not luxury, but plausible. And some of the people (the ticket selling & collecting operation) is possibly/plausibly working for more than one bus line.

The bus ride to Ipoh was unremarkable - the vegetation in Malaysia, to my eye at least, is a monochrome tropical green, certainly from a bus window travelling at speed. Ipoh, when we arrived, was a fairly unremarkable place. Except for the food: in 20 minutes walk from the hotel down one street and back we saw about 5 restaurants that looked fantastic. The one we ate in was, and it seemed no different to the others. Penang gets a big rap for food, and the food in Penang was excellent, but my feeling is that Ipoh might mount a pretty fair competition. Another thing Ipoh has in common with Penang is the terrace houses; but ultimately the lack of an ocean is hard to overlook.

The hotel we stayed in was hosting a British food exhibition, or so the advertising claimed. It was not clear how or where, although the coffee shop (the coffee was vile, so that was quite British) did have an absolutely magnificent looking apple pie. But it looked like the same untouched pie at 3 o'clock, 5 o'clock, 7 o'clock and 9 o'clock the next morning - so I'm not sure how long it had been hanging around.

Mind you, having spent a ridiculous amount of time in Starbucks in China & Malaysia (internet access guaranteed), it's wrong to ridicule British coffee. American coffee is far, far worse.
We planned to catch an early bus out of Ipoh, but when we got to the bus depot, there wasn't one, so we went to the other bus depot, where there wasn't one either, so we went to a Buddhist cave temple while we waited. There are in fact two temples, one on either side of this lump of rock - probably an interesting place of a geologist, Ipoh, I would guess it is in the crater of a very antique volcano.





It was a very quiet and peaceful place - and very damp.

I tried to buy the temple shop's stock of photographs of the statues, because they had a number I haven't seen before in other temples, and it was too dark for the camera (and my ability to use a flash without generating glare is limited).





Most of them were wadded together in solid blocks and stuck together with mould. It was not very clear how old the temple(s) are - if it was China cave temples go back to around about the BCE into the CE (CE 67 first recorded Buddhist temple in China), but this one seems rather modern. It might possibly go back 100 years, and the bulk of it looks like it goes back about 30 years.






Compared to the temples in KL and Penang, it was very pristine (a polite way of saying not very used).


But still, almost a storybook place for a temple, none the less.

Penang - Tourists

This is a view of a very Fitzroy/Newtown bit of Georgetown, from the hotel window. The streets are wider, and the cooking smells are more pervasive and not at all trendy, plus the whole place is a little battered - the tropical climate is hard on buildings.




This is the entrance hall to Cheong Fatt Tze's favourite house - he sounds like Penang's answer to one of the great English colonial rogues. Born poor but respectable (family of school teachers) he ran away to Java, married a rich man's daughter while still a water-carrier (guess he had great charm) and parlayed the inheritance into a massive trading fortune and considerable influence and respectability.

This is a very traditional rich trader's house - not dissimilar to the Chen family mansion in Guangzhou, although significantly smaller. I don't really have the photographic technique to capture the features I like about these kinds of houses - internal courtyards, huge amounts of natural light, timber and paper construction (he used Scottish iron too), the constant cool breeze generated by the architecture without help from fans.

They say it's his favourite house because his favourite wives were housed here - but I gather he had a house and wives in most of the trading cities in South East Asia, and how they know his favourite was here, I don't know. He certainly wasn't their favourite - his heirs lost all the money and pretty much trashed the place before it was bought for preservation by a private trust.

It's now an upmarket B&B - about $50 AUD per night. Well worth it if you are in the neighbourhood.

That's the outside - it's very blue. I'm not sure if the wrought iron is clearly visible, but it's the same pattern you can see in any inner city in Australia. There was a film being shot there while we visited, so I couldn't get around to a lot of the front garden.

Other European features are the wooden shutters and french windows.





The old protestant cemetery is really about as picturesque as cemeteries get. Moss, dappled light on aged marble, people living in the mausoleums, syringes and old beer bottles on the paths.

But cool and pleasant, for all that. Trees, nature's answer to the lack of outside air conditioning.






These two stones tell a probably not uncommon story - Harriet Scott died on May 21, 1864 at the age of 25, two weeks after giving birth to twins, John and Harriet on May 7th.

John Jr. only survived 5 months, and his sister 16 months.