Floyd's Travels and Thoughts on Life: China, June 2014: 7 cities, 10 days

Sharon and I took a small group tour to China in June. Leaving Detroit on June 12 we arrived in the capital of Beijing after a long 12.5 hour flight. Beijing was the first of 7 cities we visited. Arriving one day early to recover from jet lag and before joining the tour, we visited the Buddhist Lama Temple in Beijing, which was filled with crowds of people burning incense. From there we went to the nearby Confucius Temple which was less crowded, more tranquil, and had much better air quality. On the first day of the tour we visited Tiananmen Square, a vast area which includes the tomb of Chairman Mao. Large lines of people were waiting to view his preserved corpse which rises from a chilled chamber in his underground mausoleum each day for viewing. Leaving the square we walked to the nearby Forbidden City, the home of many of the emperors of China's later dynasties. The following day we drove to a section of the Great Wall at Bandalung outside of Beijing. The wall at this location has been restored and was being visited by large numbers of people from all over China and elsewhere. The Great Wall of China was built in stages to serve as an effective barrier against the horses of the Mongol invaders. Many of the sections were connected during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) following the invasion of North China by Genghis Khan and others. After braving the crowds walking on the wall for several hours we returned to Beijing, stopping to visit the Summer Palace, the imperial retreat of the members of China's last dynasty, the Qing. During its long history China has had 679 emperors until the last emperor in 1912.
   From Beijing, we flew west to the city of Xi'an, the ancient capital of China. In Xian, in about 600 AD China became unified, and by the 9th Century Xi'an, located on the Silk Road, was the largest and wealthiest city in the world. The 679 emperors who have reigned in the history of China belonged to 25 different dynasties, and Xi'an was home to 13 of those dynasties when Xi'an was the early capital and before the capital moved to Beijing. It was outside of Xi'an that I saw the most impressive sight on my visit to China -- the vast complex of the Terra Cotta warriors.
After visiting Xi'an we flew to the city of Hangzhou. There we visited a green tea farm and went for a ride in a dragon boat on West Lake.  We then drove from Hangzhou to the 2,000-year old water village of Wuhzen, and from there to the city of Suzhou, where we visited some parks, markets, and the remains of the ancient city walls. Our tour ended in the very modern city of Shanghai.
   China is a vast country and our visit was brief, and we never got to see the rural areas, but here are my initial impressions. China is a country on the move, rapidly building infrastructure in its goal to become the largest economy in the world. Everywhere we went there was construction -- roads, high-rise apartment complexes, tall skyscrapers, etc. The people are very friendly and the food in China is very different from that served in Chinese restaurants here in the U.S. As the most populous country in the world, there were the expected masses of people everywhere. Thankfully, for those of us concerned about pollution and air quality, not everyone in China has a car (yet!) and many people are going about their business on non-polluting bicycles. We were very fortunate weather-wise. Beijing is known for periods of terrible air quality, but we happened to be there when winds had dispersed much of the stagnant pollutants. Still, it was obvious that sub-standard air quality is a major problem in China; rarely did I see blue skies and it was almost always overcast.

Here is the main gate of the Lama Temple in Beijing and some of the statuary inside.

The more tranquil and less crowded Confucius Temple in Beijing

A section of park in the vast Tiananmen Square

A small part of the Forbidden City, home to many of China's emperors. The Forbidden City is the largest palatial complex in the entire world and was the seat of power during the time of the last two Chinese dynasties -- the Ming and the Qing

A small section of the Great Wall of China, at Bandalung near Beijing

The famous Marble Boat at the Summer Palace outside Beijing. The Chinese emperor who was the longest-lived (89 yo) built the Summer Palace as a gift for his mother. The marble boat resembles marble but it's really just wood, carefully painted to resemble marble.

Pit #1 of the vast complex of the Terra Cotta army. It was the emperor Qin Shi Huang (221-210 BC), a man obsessed with immortality, who created this vast army of life-sized terra cotta warriors, to serve as a mausoleum for his afterlife. All would have remained buried underground were it not for a farmer who discovered a piece of one warrior sticking above the earth on his farm field in 1974. The mausoleum site is vast and much has yet to be excavated. Only one terra cotta figure was unearthed intact; all of the rest were in pieces and had to be painstakingly reassembled. In addition to the warriors and their weapons, archeologists have also excavated full-sized terra cotta horses and two bronze chariots that consisted of about 84% copper.

No two life-sized terra cotta warriors are the same. They are in different kinds of clothing and armor, have unique facial features, different beards and hair styles, etc. This leads one to surmise that each terra cotta figure may have been patterned after a real live individual soldier that was alive at that time.

A green tea farm in Hangzhou

The 2000-year old, and well preserved, water village of Wuhzen.

Durian fruit for sale at a market in the city of Suzhou

The lovely Garden of the Master of the Nets garden, one of the many lovely gardens we saw in China. This garden was quite small but very attractive, and exhibited the 4 elements required of a proper Chinese garden: plants, ponds, rocks, and buildings.