Visiting China--Shanghai Scenes

Almost every tour of China goes to Shanghai. With 24 million people, it is China's largest city and #9 in the world. If you count only cities and not their suburbs, it is the biggest city in the world. It grew more than 10% each year over most of the last 20 years.

Travel Story--Wuzhen Water Town, China

China's rivers run west to east, so moving goods from the south to the north and vice versa was difficult before trains and highways. The emperors solved the problem by connecting the rivers with a canal, the Grand Canal. When completed, it ran from Hongzhou in southern China (close to Shanghai) to Beijing, more than 1,000 miles.

In the 20th century, the Grand Canal fell into disuse and the once-prosperous towns along it shrank.

Lately, tourism has revived those towns. A number have been repaired and renovated as tourist attractions. Some have local crafts, others have traditional plays or music, all have restaurants and gift shops and boat rides. Most are very picturesque. I have been to four of them. Here I'll describe the one I most recently visited, Wuzhen.

Visiting China--Garden of the Master of Nets, Suzhou

Garden of the Master of Nets, Suzhou, China

A walk in the rain.

In China, I toured the classical gardens of Suzhou.  For generations, great respect was given to pensioners, especially former government officials, who build exquisite gardens where they wrote poetry and studied arts such as calligraphy. In Suzhou, you can visit several of the finest surviving traditional Chinese gardens.

The Garden of the Master of Nets is probably my favorite, and it is regarded as among the very best. It is not very large. Land has been at a premium in China for hundreds of years. Part of the art of the traditional garden was to make a small area seem large and interesting. Corners and walls were arranged so that, seen from a different angle, the same spot looked quite different.

Touring China --

downtown Beijing

In September I took a tour of China with the Denver Art Museum's Asian Art Association, coordiated by Access China Tours. We went from Beijing to Dunhuang in the west through Xian and Chengdu in central China to Lijiang and Dali in the far southwest (Yunnan Province) ending in Shanghai. The contrasts are staggering and I am trying to organize what I saw. We tend to talk about "going to --" as if landing in the capital or the top tourist location will show you all the place has to offer. It is not that easy!

In US terms, our trip was like seeing New York City and Washington D.C., the countryside near Atlanta, Georgia and Biloxi, Mississippi, as well as visiting Taos, New Mexico...different in levels of urbanness, climate, history, ethnic mixes...

Dunhuang dunes

Beijing is "China"...As the capital most tours go there. The traffic was pretty continually snarled and the air gray. That said, the Forbidden City (a quaint old name, in modern Chinese the name is the Former Palace), Tiananmen Square, the art museums and the Great Wall are all well worth seeing. In September, it was warm and relatively humid.

Dunhuang, in Gansu Province, is about 1500 miles (2,438 km ) west of Beijing, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. It was dry! Days were hot and nights very cool. Great sand dunes loomed above the town. An important trading area, the people were and are a mix of races and ethnic groups. A small place with a long interesting history.