Media Hub

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
(Samuel Johnson, 18th-century English author)

This past June, Tim Fish, associate headmaster and Jen Smith, fifth grade team leader and social studies teacher and I (Ane Lintvedt, head of upper school history and social studies) visited Shanghai, Xi’an, and Beijing. We were sent to explore the possibility of establishing a small exchange program with Fanyi University, an English language translation school located in Xi'an, and to investigate the ease with which members of the McDonogh family could experience the rich history and culture of China.

First Day/ First Impressions

After twenty-four hours of travel and a successful navigation of Chinese Customs, we met our cheery 20-something guide Ying. Her English was quite good, although the driver doesn’t speak English, she tells us. Three cities and three “non-English-speaking” drivers, and we’re wondering if the drivers are, in fact, government observers of us and our guides. We drive an hour into the city from the airport, watching huge apartment buildings and office buildings glide by, and cringing at the crazed driving patterns.

Rule #1 of Chinese roadways: the bus always wins. There don’t seem to be any other traffic rules in Shanghai.

We are driven to our hotel, which was very nice, and has a plaque announcing it is approved for foreigners by the Chinese government. Part of the meaning of this becomes clear when we log on to the wireless internet in our rooms and discover we cannot access the blogs we set up to keep students and friends informed of our travels. The line “I assume the Chinese government is blocking access to our blogs” also was removed from an email message I sent that evening.

I was too tired to process any thoughts about a heavy-handed Chinese government that night. And in truth, we really didn’t see much of the legendary Chinese/Maoist government in our travels. Internet access was great except for Google and Wikipedia, Ying informed us. We had to stay in approved hotels, occasionally visit government-owned tourist stores, and were given relatively little free time to walk around on our own.

Shanghai

A very nice “western” breakfast in the hotel, and we’re stoked for the day’s activities in Shanghai: visiting the Shanghai Museum, the Yu Gardens and Old Town Shanghai, and an Acrobatics show in the evening. The two history teachers and the history-teacher wanna-be are thrilled: we see 12 museums or national parks in 8 days. Shanghai Museum holds an awesome collection of beautiful and fanciful bronze bowls, wine cups and containers from the Shang era, 16th-11th centuries BCE. Some of those wine cups could hold a small child, so the Shang era folks really liked their wine and really knew how to make a serious bronze vessel. [photos]

The Yu Gardens were built by an imperial administrator for his parents, and this estate forms a quiet oasis in the middle of the 18-million person city. The bridge to the gardens is called the zig-zag bridge. Evil spirits can’t turn corners, so the bridge secures the gardens.

The gardens are surrounded by a kind of crazy market area with lots of knick-knacks. [photos] All printed prices are negotiable. Once we got the hang of this, we learned to start at about 20% of the asking price and then walk away. Vendors armed with calculators would chase us down and then the real bargaining would begin. That evening, we were taken to what looked like a middle school auditorium to see an acrobatic show. The venue wasn’t promising, but the show was a lot of fun. Most of the acts highlighted intricate tumbling and gymnastic routines and amazing human pyramids. The finale showcased six motorcycle riders chasing each other inside an enormous steel globe/cage on the stage.

Our second and last day in Shanghai was spent on or near the Huangpu riverfront. We walked along Nanjing Road, which has to be the equivalent of Fifth Avenue in NYC. Lots of big buildings, lots of people, lots of neon, lots of western franchises shoulder-to-shoulder with Chinese stores and wares. [photos]

The only parts of Old China visible here were thousands of parked bicycles and a Lexington Market sort of marketplace. You had to look hard for these when KFC, Haagen-Dazs ice-cream parlors, Louis Vuitton, Lens Crafters, and an NBA store were so visible.

Then we took a river cruise. The Huangpu River leads to the port of Shanghai, which used to be a fishing village until the 19th century. It’s now an incredibly busy mercantile waterway [photos] and its shorelines showcase the amazing westernization of the Chinese economy since 1991. Huge glass and steel buildings line both sides of the river, and behind rows of those are endless rows of huge apartment buildings, as far as the eye can see. [photos] All that remains of the European concession neighborhoods, still called the Bund, are some elegant 19th-century buildings, each one with a conspicuous Chinese flag flying on its roof. [photo]

Xi’an

From boat to van to plane, and by 8 pm we were in Xi’an (pronounced Shee-an), our base for the next 4 days. Xi’an is an inland city, analogous to a Chicago, St. Louis or Kansas City. It was the capital of imperial China for about 2000 years, and the starting-point for the ancient Silk Roads trade. On our first full day, in a pouring rainstorm that flooded the streets with feet of water because there were no storm drains, we met with our contact and the organizer of our tour, Mr. An-wei of the Sino-American Society, and went with him to Fanyi University and to visit a middle school.

Three Fanyi students –Becky, CiCi and Jenny -- visited McDonogh’s Middle School in November 2008, and they were thrilled to host us on their campus. We met with 40 students who are majoring in Teaching Chinese As A Second Language, and answered their questions and asked a few of our own. We were guests of the vice president and provost of the university for lunch, and then were transported back to Xi’an. [photos]

We were a lot less comfortable with our visit to a middle school. We were ushered into a room with the principal, three vice-principals, a Communist Party official, and a translator. None of the school officials seemed to know who we were or why we were there, and the Party Official put a damper on discussions.

The buildings were rather run-down and inexplicably smelled like cat urine, classes had about 45 well-behaved students each, both of which our guide Jeff assured us were normal. Besides the big classes, we were surprised to learn that it’s now mandatory for Chinese students to learn English from kindergarten onwards. If this keeps up, in a generation or two China will have the most English speakers in the world. Our visit was interrupted by a loud-speaker announcing it was time for eye exercises. Students do these exercises twice a day to strengthen their eyes from all the studying they do. Hmm.

On day two our afternoon destination was the Museum of the Terra Cotta Warriors, which has a beautifully-developed, park-like landscaping to surround the three pits in which Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (pronounced Chin Shur Wan-dee) (221-210 BCE) had a life-sized army built to defend him in the afterlife. The first pit is the one we see photos from: lines and lines of infantry soldiers, archers, and charioteers, in formation to defend the emperor’s tomb. [photos] It really was an awesome sight.

Before we entered the museum site, we were taken to a government store that sells guaranteed replicas of the Terra Cotta Warriors of all sizes, credit cards accepted. Yes, they had the life-sized ones for about $3000. No, as tempting as it was, none of us got one of those, even though it would look fabulous in my classroom. We collapsed in a little museum café that had Diet Coke, the holy grail of our stay. It was good.

Day Three in Xi’an was a little less frenetic than Day Two. We spent the morning at the Shaanxi Province History Museum, which had wonderful collections of Tang dynasty stuff, and had some nice collections that related to the Silk Road traders and travelers. [photos] There was a good museum shop that had tchotchkes for the classrooms, including alphabet cards and a book on slippers for foot-bound women. Then we got some rare free time and went exploring into the non-touristy areas near our hotel. [photos]

The afternoon was an excellent trek into the ancient Muslim quarter of Xi’an and the Great Mosque. The narrow roads to the Great Mosque were lined with merchants hawking food, which we really didn’t dare eat --although it was tempting -- and inexpensive, knock-off tourist goods. The Great Mosque was a fascinating combination of Arab and Chinese architecture and symbols: the minaret of the Mosque, from which a call for prayer would have been called, was a pagoda. [photos]

Our last day in Xi’an was relaxed, because Mr. An-wei had to cancel our last meeting. The three of us walked over to a Starbucks for a cup of coffee. We chose to eat muffins and not the red-bean croissant, however.

On the way to the airport, Jeff and the driver took us out of town to a set of tombs from the Han dynasty (c. 200 BCE – c. 200 CE; about the same time as the Roman Empire). There was a very high-tech introductory movie that featured three-dimensional holographic figures telling the story of the Han tombs. Evidently European tourists come here, but not the Americans, which is too bad. It’s every bit as nice as the Terra Cotta exhibits, and has a beautiful museum shop as well.

The cool thing about this site was that the archeological pits had glass ceilings so we could walk over the top and look directly onto another, smaller terra-cotta army. These figures were not life-sized, but they included female cavalry officers and whole “armies” of farm animals to take along to the afterlife. [photos]

Archeologists have also dug up manacles for the forced laborers, so even though these tombs weren’t quite as imposing as those of Qin Shi Huangdi, the human cost of the Han imperial tombs was still undoubtedly high. [photo]

Beijing

Onto the plane and onward to Beijing. The airport, clearly built for the 2008 Olympics, is gi-normous, as the kids would say. And like the Birds’ Nest venue in the Olympic Village, it’s constructed of wire and glass. We were scooped up by our third 20-something guide “Sabrina” and deposited in a 5-star Howard Johnson hotel that would have looked right at home in Vegas.

It had rained before we got to Beijing, and that meant the air was clean and the temperature was nice – low 80s, probably. This was spectacularly good, since our first of only two days in Beijing was daunting: the Great Wall and the Temple of Heaven. We were driven, by our third “non-English speaking” driver, about 60 miles out to a section of the Great Wall.

I’ve seen lots of photos of the Great Wall snaking across the tops of the mountains. I never, ever contemplated how one got up there. Now I know: lots and lots of stairs, really steep stairs. But the reward was that we had a whole section of the Great Wall to ourselves for at least an hour. It was almost miraculous. [photos]

The north side of wall is higher than the south walls, and the north walls have crenulated ramparts (like the top of the castle in a chess set) so the archers can fire on the northern nomads against whom the walls were built. In the section we were on, which was (re)constructed in the 17th or 18th century, there were small holes for cannons as well. [photos]

The Great Wall should be enough for one day, but we had only two days in Beijing, and a lot of history to see. Our next stop was the most important imperial temple, where the Ming emperors went to pray from the early 1400s onwards, called the Temple of Heaven. [photos]

It was getting very hot by the late afternoon. The Chinese women, young and old, use umbrellas and parasols to keep the sun off their faces, and the men usually walk with them and share the shade – although rarely carry the parasol. Jen and I decided that When in China, do as the Chinese do, so I bargained for two parasols, having asked Sabrina what a reasonable price would be before I did. She said 30 ¥ each would be reasonable; the vendor started at 150¥ each. I offered 60¥ for two, and then walked away. I won. Having portable shade was great.

On our way to dinner, we had to stop at another government shop that specialized in silk. We had to take a tour about silk making, and I scored three silk moth cocoons for my classroom. The prices were none-too-cheap, and none of us bought anything here. We made our way to a small, non-touristy restaurant (finally) and had a fabulous dinner of Peking Duck. It was one of the two best dinners we had in China.

The next day, we headed for the center of Beijing to see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is like Versailles, or perhaps the Mall is Washington D.C.: it was a palace and a government office complex for the 500 years and 24 emperors of the last two dynasties, the Ming and Qing. Tiananmen Square is a great plaza where people went to hear an imperial edict given from the walls of the Forbidden City. It is the great meeting place of the capital city. The communist government built a war heroes monument on the square, and Mao Zedong’s mausoleum is now located there. [photo] And of course, Chairman Mao’s portrait is placed directly on the main Meridian gate to the Forbidden Palace. [photo]

As with the Temple of Heaven, we couldn’t go in to the buildings, so it became a tour of architecture, which we found a little tedious, I think. It was hard to get a sense of the scale of the place in the heat and the crowds. My favorite piece of trivia had to do with the roof guardian ornaments. The more important the building, the more roof guardians were on the eaves. The Hall of Supreme Harmony, in the middle of the complex, had 10 roof guardians, the most that were allowed.

The Summer Palace, favored by the rather infamous Qing Empress Cixi, was spectacular. There were beautiful buildings and pavilions and a huge man-made lake and islands (forced labor again) and thousands of trees. [photos] This was definitely preferable to the Forbidden City in the summer! There is a story that Empress Cixi took tax monies collected to help industrialize China at the end of the 19th century and instead used the money to build what is called a Marble Boat on her lake. I now know that it’s a wooden ship that has a shell of marble. It was never meant to sail: it was a pavilion shaped like a yacht.

We convinced Sabrina and the driver to let us walk around the Olympic Village a little bit, and then we got stuck in horrendous traffic that made us miss whatever tourist/government restaurant reservation we had. So instead, Samantha took us to a great local restaurant, where we were the only non-Chinese. Another great “off-tour” meal! The evening event was a vaudeville performance at the Beijing Opera, which, because we didn’t understand the humor, was lost on us.

Our last morning was unscheduled, and we had a breakfast and lingered a long time to talk over our travels. Then we packed, and headed out to the airport and to home. We left Beijing airport at 6:00 pm on Thursday. We arrived in Toronto at 6:45 pm on Thursday. Then our connecting plane was 4 hours late. We didn’t care: we were on the North American continent, everyone spoke English, the airport was air-conditioned, and there was Diet Coke. We slept on the benches. We landed at BWI at about 2 am on Friday morning.

Closing Thoughts

I suspect the three of us have some similar impressions of China from our travels. We’d agree that there has been tremendous westernization in China over the last 18 years. The twenty-somethings are as addicted to their computers as Americans are, but the Chinese government randomly censors their access to the worldwide web. In Shanghai and Xi’an our guides spoke openly about wanting greater and faster westernization, and spoke almost cynically about the one-party political system. In Beijing, however, it was all Chairman Mao all the time. Something’s got to give. There are basic infrastructure things that were bypassed. Water issues struck me. No one drinks the tap water, not even the natives. The 5-star hotel has a sign over the faucet that this is non-potable water.

I often argue in my classes that that 20th century has been an anomaly in China’s history. For 3000 years, China has been a society that has valued education, that had an organized government system, and was usually the most technologically-advanced society in the world. There are certainly signs that China is returning to her position of global prominence. It was a fascinating trip.