Are you ready to go to China

Are you ready to go to China, seventeen years later? (now in 2020)

We took this trip in 2003 but I never posted it on my travel page.  I didn’t have a travel page back then, so of course it was never posted.

So WHY post it now?

Because I have been thinking a lot about this trip lately.  We are now in April of 2020 and dealing with the Covid19 Virus Crisis. On our trip to China in 2003, we were in China and Hong Kong at the peak of the SARS Virus Crisis, and that’s got me thinking about this trip.

The headlines in our morning’s paper the day we left home for China read “War’s First Shot: Strike on Saddam” and “Virus draws attention in Respiratory Ailment”.

The second story went on to say that some mysterious respiratory illness had already apparently infected over three hundred people in China alone, and several hundred more people in other parts of Asia.  The World Health Organization (WHO) calls it “a worldwide health threat” and can’t find the cause of the ailment.  Several handfuls have died in China and other places.

This mysterious virus went on to be named the SARS Virus.

The first story was of course the start of the Iraq War. The day that we came home, the newspaper headline said that the war was over. I couldn’t believe that I had missed an entire war while on vacation in China. The reality was that I hadn’t missed an entire war.  That war continued until its ‘official’ end which was in December, 2011, though fighting continued on.

Our China trip was from March 20, 2003 to April 10th.  The SARS virus was not the news we had hoped for to start our trip to China but life can be like that. We never considered not going, just because of an unknown virus. I might make a different decision today.

I started this trip with my very first digital camera which was a ‘point and shoot’ camera.  Still, it was a great trip for us and some of the photos were pretty good.

SARS was hitting its peak by the end of the first week in April, 2003 which was when we were in Hong Kong. It was quite a place to be with a raging virus. We learned a lot about dealing with a virus and it is now flooding back to me, so here we go with my China, Tibet, and Hong Kong trip, seventeen years later.

This was our first day in Beijing during our visit to the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City is like the ‘winter palace’ and we also visited the summer palace, also an amazing place.

Part of our China tour was spending some time cruising up the Yangtze River.

Tibet was a place that I knew nothing about. It turned out to be a wild experience for us. Below is a view of old town Llasa from the roof of the Jokhang Temple.

 We followed the news every day during the trip, to the extent that we could. By the time we got ready to fly to Hong Kong, we knew that the SARS virus was raging and considered dangerous. You can see my wife Vicky below out on the streets of Hong Kong. This was our first experience with such a deadly virus.

The Forbidden City

Our first stop on our first day in Beijing was the Forbidden City, or Palace Museum.  It was the home to the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties.  It was built back in the early 1400’s and it was called the Forbidden City because for some 500 years, everyone was forbidden from entering it without the emperor’s permission, which was not granted very frequently.

This was a great first stop for our trip to China as it was incredibly impressive.  The size and scope of the Forbidden City was a bit overwhelming.  The grounds cover 180 acres.  I didn’t get a count on how many buildings but our guide said that there were 999 rooms altogether, 9 being a lucky number to the Chinese.  Our guide also said that 300,000 people built the Forbidden City but I can’t believe that.  I would think it was more like a million people.  It was a mind-boggling construction project for the 1400’s as it would be for today.  The size of some of the rocks that they moved and carved were huge.  They did it in winter by digging wells and freezing the roads to move the rocks.  The builders were also artisans as much of the carving is intricate, ornate, and very detailed.  There are also hundreds of 500-gallon copper pots, full of water, in case of fire.  These huge buildings were heated from below in winter by charcoal and coal.  They had gardens, fish ponds, many trees, a sewer system, and a moat around the city.

Our guide said that the emperors had some 30,000 eunuchs live in the Forbidden City to take care of the place, but the emperor was the only ‘functioning’ male to live there.  The emperors also had up to 3,600 concubines live with them.  The city was forbidden to all but the emperor but soldiers, advisors, and scholars would come in every day to inform the emperor and to get his orders, but they didn’t live in the Forbidden City. 

The Chinese believed that the only person with human rights was the emperor, per our guide.  The emperor was a very powerful position and in all, China had over 400 emperors.

We only saw a fraction of the Forbidden City but we saw enough to understand that it was an incredible place.  We saw the emperor’s quarters, the concubine’s quarters and the throne which was the source of the “power behind the throne”.  But what might have impressed me the most was so many of the small details. The Forbidden City was highly decorated by artisans. The details of their work was evident everywhere in the city. We saw untold examples of true artistry. I’ve included a few examples below.

There were also many opportunities for learning about the history and culture from our guide but also from displays.

I loved our stop here but I think I could have spent several days and still not seen it all.

Tiananmen Square

Our first afternoon’s visit was to Tiananmen Square.  The square is named after the Tiananmen Building, which came first.  The Tiananmen Building was the entrance to the Imperial Palace.  Tiananmen means the gate of heavenly peace.  It has, however, been anything but peaceful at many times.

Chairman Mao used the Tiananmen Building for his office later on and he gave many speeches from it.  The square itself is about 100 acres and can hold one million people.

Buildings at the corners of the square are the Tiananmen Building, the Great Hall of the People (for the Chinese national congress), Mao’s Tomb, which sits in front of the old city gate, and the Chinese History Museum. There are also other statues and things to see.

Tiananmen Square had plenty of people when we were there but it was not crowded.  Most people in the square appeared to be Chinese tourists.  We saw lots of people flying kites and doing things like that.  There were a few guards either standing guard or marching in twos.

Beijing

We stayed in Beijing at Grand View Garden Hotel which is in southern Beijing.  We felt very safe in the whole area.  We walked around the area until well after dark.  We even walked down some small dark alleys but always felt comfortable.  We did come close to getting run over by both cars and bicycles, but that appears to be an all-day, every-day occurrence here. You can see our hotel below.

There isn’t much concrete or asphalt in Beijing.  Most surfaces are either rock or brick.  Most ground is uneven so we really had to watch our steps.  We found some really great walkways in the area.  They have paths along roadways and rivers.  Most paths appear to be relatively new.  There were lots of trees about to bloom.  We noticed that people here walk a great deal and they also stop to exercise a lot.  Our guide said that there are nine million bicycles in Beijing.  Bicycles are everywhere and also function as carts, trucks, taxis, and so on.

People appear to be very healthy.  We have hardly seen anyone who looked heavy, let alone over-weight.  On our walks, we saw people cooking and selling food along the road, fixing bicycles, and cutting hair.  Free enterprise is everywhere.  We also saw people in public parks playing ping-pong, chess, and other games. You can see a guy below operating his barber shop in the park.

We ate dinner tonight at the Peking Duck Restaurant.  We had a huge meal including two Peking ducks with the heads served as well.  We also had duck soup, cucumber pickle, lemon chicken, beer, wine, tea, and a table full of fourteen other dishes.

The Great Wall

Our second day started with a trip to the Great Wall at Badaling Mountains.  We drove north and the ground was pretty flat until we got to the Badaling Mountains, then the land rose steeply to about 2,500 feet elevation.  I would say that these mountains are not very tall but they are quite steep.

Once at the Great Wall, we had a choice of which direction to hike.  One direction was more downhill and one direction was more uphill.  We opted for the more uphill direction since less people went that direction.  The day was overcast and hazy which made the hiking cooler but didn’t help my photos.  There was still some snow on the ground in places.  The farther we walked, the fewer the people.  By the end of our walk, and the end of the wall, there were only about twenty people within our sight.

The Great Wall is easy to describe but hard to imagine until you walk it.  The mountains go up steeply and down steeply and so does the wall.  It’s about 20 feet high and 20 feet wide.  There is hardly a flat surface on the wall.  We had to watch just about every step that we took.   The stair steps are almost entirely uneven in both depth and height.  Over some short periods of steps, the steps must rise at an angle of over 60 degrees and they twist as they rise.  Even on the most flat areas of the wall, some rocks protrude.  It’s an OSHA nightmare.  I loved it.

Most of my thoughts were about the soldiers and the battles and how they would work.  It would have been very difficult fighting for both sides.  Running up and down the Wall could not have been easy.  It’s hard for me to imagine the Great Wall as a project that was begun in 221 B.C.

Another aspect of the Wall that impressed and amazed me was the intricate design work put into the wall itself. It wasn’t just a protective wall, it was architecturally pleasant. Some of the work in making designs in the rocks was incredibly impressive. The designs below were repeated over long distances and all done exactly the same. I don’t know who made it that way or why but it was very impressive to me all the same.

We walked the wall in the uphill direction all the way to the end. You can see that in the last photo below. I don’t know if they have plans for refurbishment but it will never be an easy project. We then walked back to the start and walked in the other direction too.

Walking the Great Wall was a tremendous experience for me. It far exceeded my expectations. Seeing photos and reading about the wall doesn’t do it justice compared to actually walking the wall. You can’t really appreciate the steepness and the difficulty that had to be involved in the construction of the wall until you have walked it for a distance.  I, of course, kept a constant lookout for any invading Mongols.

The Sacred Way

The Ming Tombs was our afternoon stop on our second day.  The Ming Tombs are a group of mausoleums built by the emperors of the Ming dynasty.  The majority of them are located in a cluster near Beijing and are collectively known as the Thirteen Tombs of the Ming Dynasty.  With all due respect to the Ming emperors, I was far more captivated by the Sacred Way road.

We were told that the Emperor is known as the Son of the Heaven and that he came from heaven to his country through the Sacred Way and of course he would deservedly return to heaven through this same road.  So the Sacred Way (generically) is the road leading to heaven and connected to the imperial necropolises.  This particular Sacred Way is connected to the Ming Tombs. 

The Sacred Way starts with a huge stone memorial archway.  It’s a relatively straight road lined with stone statues.  Most sacred ways have 18 pairs of statues, usually with 12 human figures and 24 animals including lions, camels, elephants, horses, and mythical and divine animals.  The animals symbolize various things.  The lion symbolizes awesome solemnity because of their ferocity.  Camels and elephants symbolize the vastness of the territory controlled by the emperor.  Horses are the emperor’s mount.  A sign on the Sacred Way said that these stone animals were erected in the period from 1436 to 1438.

I loved walking the Sacred Way road.  It was serene, beautiful, peaceful, and dramatic.  I could also imagine the occasion of an emperor’s last ride to his tomb. Vicky, of course, especially loved the horses.

There were very few other people visiting here so it really was very peaceful. I added this last photo to again emphasize the size of these figures.

Temple of Heaven

Our third day started with a visit to the Temple of Heaven, a product of the Ming Dynasty.  It was an imperial complex of religious buildings in the southeastern part of central Beijing.  This complex was visited by the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties for annual ceremonies of prayer to Heaven for good harvests.

The temple complex was constructed from 1406 to 1420 during the reign of the Yongle Emperor, who was also responsible for construction of the Forbidden City.  The complex has been extended, renamed, and renovated over the years.  It has also suffered from fires over the years as is the case with most long-standing wooden buildings.

Today it is no longer a temple but rather a public park and tourist stop.  It is 700 acres and very beautiful.  The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is really a spectacular building.  It’s a triple-gabled circular building built on three levels of marble stone and is 118 feet in diameter and 125 feet tall.  The emperors kneeled and prayed here to the heavens for good crop harvests, rain, and divine guidance.  Our guide said it was the only time that the emperor knelt.  At the Forbidden City, the emperor was god.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the Temple of Heaven was outside the temple walls.  The outside area is used as a park, mostly by retirees from what I could see.  They spend their days singing, dancing, playing checkers, cards, mahjong, knitting, painting, telling stories, playing badminton, and more.  Americans could learn a few things from these folks. Just below was the ‘games’ area. 

The woman below is evidently telling stories by painting them on the walkway. It’s just some colored water that then disappears as it dries. There were quite a few story-tellers like this woman.

I was quite impressed by all the dancers. Oddly enough to me, they were dancing to “American Big Band” music. Most people had big smiles as they danced.

Summer Palace

Our afternoon visit on our third day in Beijing was to the Summer Palace.  The origins of the summer palace go way back in time but most of what can be seen today goes back to the year 1750.  Our guide said that the emperors would come here to get away from the hot and humid Beijing summers.  If I had been an emperor, I would have lived at the summer palace all year long.

The Summer Palace grounds are over 700 acres.  Seventy-five percent of that is Kunming Lake which is entirely man-made.  The dirt from digging and building the lake is what made Longevity Hill which is a 200 foot tall hill and the location of the palace.  The Summer Palace is a collection of palaces, temples, buildings, gardens, walks, pavilions, halls, bridges, towers, corridors, and the lake.  And did I mention that the lake is teeming with fish?

There is an island in the middle of the lake and it has a famous seventeen arch bridge to get out to it. We did not take the bridge to the island but you can see it in the distance on the left side of the island.

The marble boat below is not really a boat, it was just built in the design of a boat. It is actually a pier out into the lake. We were told it was used for lunches and other events for the emperor. It looked like a nice place to eat lunch.

The summer palace was originally off limits to all but the emperor, just like the Forbidden City.  Now it is open to all and a major tourist attraction. While not as impressive as the marble boat, the tourist boats for trips out on the lake are still quite impressive.     

Beijing Miscellaneous

This will just be a Beijing miscellaneous post.  It’s a few things that I left off along the way that struck me as very interesting. Also, we saw lots of places and things in Beijing that were not major tourist attractions and had many enjoyable experiences.

This first photo was at the Forbidden City. This is a lousy photo due to the poor lighting but it is the throne of the “power behind the throne” saying.  The mothers of very young emperors would be behind the curtain, behind the throne and give advice and directions to their sons, the emperors.

I really enjoyed seeing the Great Wall.  Near the end of the wall, I saw this work crew.  They were either repairing or improving this section of the wall.  What struck me was that, all these years after the wall was built, this work crew does not seem to be working that differently from the original construction crews.  It was impossible not to notice the lack of modern day construction equipment.

Wandering around Beijing, we found several markets to explore.  It was a fascinating experience.  At this market, we were crowded and could only move through the market very slowly, always waiting for the person in front of us to move.  At one point, I got what felt like a forearm hitting me in the back.  It happened a second time and I turned around to tell the jackass that I couldn’t move since it was so crowded.  It turned out to be a frail looking and very elderly woman.  I guess that’s just life in a crowded Beijing market.

We visited a “Cloisonné Ware” factory.  We watched them making copper and enamel goods and the workers were very impressive as was their products.  This is just a photo of a very large vase at the factory.

We visited a Hutong neighborhood with our guide.  It was a long walk in an old residential neighborhood.  The streets were narrow passageways, like alleys, that wound around and it was hard to know where we were.  Our guides even had trouble finding their way.  The streets have high walls on both sides.  The doors to the houses are marked by various means.  They each have two rocks that tell about the family standing, like a scholar or business man or government official.  The houses and doors have other markings as well that tell other things about the family.

Xian City Wall

We took a Long Hai train for an overnight trip from Beijing to Xian.  We had our own sleeper car and it was quite comfortable, though much too hot for my liking.  We saw lots of China that most people don’t see, which of course is common for train travel anywhere in the world.  We saw lots of farming and almost all the work was being done by hand.  The only green crop that I saw was winter wheat.  We saw thousands of little greenhouse huts made of mud and hay.  Those were growing vegetables and melons.  Brick making also was a popular venture along the railroad tracks.  In many places, we saw people digging the dirt to make the bricks.  We also saw many young trees planted in perhaps a plant nursery situation.   

We only spent two days in Xian but there were some great highlights.  For me, the Xian City Wall was really incredible.  I’ve seen many city walls around the world but none to compare to the city wall in Xian.  Our guide said that the Tang dynasty (618-907) originally built a wall around Xian or at least around their palace here.  But the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) built the high fortified wall that’s more of what we see today.  The wall was originally just tamped earth plus binders but was eventually strengthened by facing it with blue bricks.  The wall construction happened over hundreds of years.  

The wall is about 40 feet high and surrounded the city at a length of perhaps nine miles or so.  The top of the wall is 40 to 46 feet wide but the bottom of the wall is 50 to 60 feet wide.  The wall is rectangular and had four city gates along with a moat, drawbridges, watch towers, and lots more.  It was impressive to stand on it and to walk around it.

I believe that the last photo was originally the government office for paying duties, tariffs, or fees for goods being shipped into or out of Xian.

Big Wild Goose Pagoda

Our first major stop on our first full day in Xian was the Big Wild Goose Pagoda.  It may not have been that spectacular but I really loved the name.  It is alternately called the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda.  Somehow, the name really appealed to me.

It is a Buddhist pagoda in southern Xian that was first built in 652 during the Tang dynasty.  It was originally five stories.  It was rebuilt in 704 and later renovated during the Ming dynasty.  The tower sits inside the Daci’en Temple complex which was built in 648 to honor Empress Zhangsun.  The upgrade on the tower took it from five stores to ten stories but a massive earthquake in 1556 knocked off three stories.  Today the tower has seven stories and is 210 feet tall.  The tower also leans a bit.

There were many more things to see at the pagoda complex.  Some of the buildings were very impressive, both outside and inside as you can see in the next three photos.

I’ve included the last photo just to show that spring was further along in Xian than in Beijing.  I believe that these were Magnolia trees. The pagoda grounds were quite nice.

Terracotta Warriors

Our main stop in Xian was a visit to the famous Terracotta Warriors archeology site.  It is a major tourist stop and for good reason. It was well worth seeing it and it was actually not very crowded when we visited here.

The Terracotta Army was discovered by a farmer in 1974 as he was digging a well.  The region is evidently riddled with underground springs and watercourses.  The farmer had dug the well and dropped down a bucket.  When he pulled up the bucket, there was a terracotta head in it.  That led to the archeological digging which led to what we see today.  Years later, someone made a short documentary ‘re-creation’ movie of the discovery.  The movie was evidently quite good and the old farmer attended, signing books.  We were told that he looked quite healthy and happy.

The figures were constructed under Emperor Qin as part of his burial complex.  His mausoleum work was begun in 246 BCE soon after he ascended the throne at age 13.  The project involved some 700,000 workers.  The emperor felt that he would return in his afterlife and therefore he needed his army of terracotta warriors to defend him.  My guess is that he might have needed defending from all the people that died building all this.

We visited all three of the terracotta archeological pits, plus the bronze room.  It was all very impressive and is still an active dig site.  I expect that it will remain active for many years to come.  The dig sites are now covered by buildings to protect them.  There are around 8,000 terracotta soldiers so far plus hundreds of horses, chariots, and other artifacts.  I understand that they have discovered figures other than soldiers as well, perhaps officials, musicians, acrobats, and strongmen.

Vicky was more impressed with the horses than the warriors and there were hundreds of horses.

I’ve included a close-up of one warrior.  Each figure was unique, even including the faces.  The detail of each figure was really quite incredible.

The archeological site is still very active. We saw teams working in several areas. Some areas are very different than just masses of warriors, such as the site below.

Three Gorges Dam

From Xian, we flew to Wuhan and then drove six hours to Sandouping and the Yangtze River.  From there we boarded a boat for a trip upstream from the dam on the Yangtze.   

But before we started our river cruise, we visited the Three Gorges Dam, then still under construction.  We spent several hours at the dam site but it was a huge project and we only got a small glimpse of the entire project.  The dam is some 7,660 feet long and 607 feet high.  It was a monster of a construction site at over 17 square miles with some 28,000 workers on the project.

The following is information that we heard from our guides or that we read on information displays.  I found this project fascinating and of course, it was highly controversial for a number of reasons.  The dam was proposed by Sun Yat Sen in 1919.  American engineers picked this site for construction in 1944.  Concerns and problems delayed construction for over forty years until around 1990.  It was the largest dam in the world when constructed and projected to cost $28 Billion US dollars.  The dam was built with a double-lane 5 stage lock system and also a water elevator system.  The lock system was expected to take three hours to pass but the elevator, for small boats, only thirty minutes.  The dam was expected to produce 10 to 15 percent of China’s power needs when completed.  It was also expected to reduce the river flooding by 90 percent and greatly increase both navigation capabilities and irrigation for farmers.

Again, the dam project is enormous.  The amounts of rock being quarried, crushed, and moved was staggering.  We crossed the Sanxia-Yangtze Bridge and went to several of the main observation points.  We got good looks at the dam, the locks, the elevator, the rock filled cofferdam for ship passage, landscaping for the completed project, and saw a model of the entire project.  We also saw enough rock to last me a lifetime.  Power production and the second phase of the dam was scheduled for completion shortly after we were here.  

I’ve included a few photos just to give a small glimpse of our visit to the dam under construction.

Below was one of the most fascinating things that we saw at the dam site. The engineers needed to determine how they would stop the flow of the Yangtze River to divert it. With the steep mountains, it was not an easy task. They needed a way to dump something in that would form a barrier and stop the water. The design that they came up with and that worked was pieces formed in the shape below. With Vicky standing there, you can also see that they are big chunks of concrete.

The dam is a very complete project. They had done quite a bit of landscaping already, despite it still being a major construction site. We were lucky to be here when many trees were in bloom.

The Yangtze River

We boarded a boat and started our trip up the Yangtze River.  After negotiating the first of the three gorges, the Xiling Gorge or “gate to hell’ as described by Chinese boatmen, we had a ship board lecture and learned a lot about the Yangtze River, the reasoning for the dam, the life of people living along this portion of the river, and the displacement of well over a million people who live along this portion of the river.

One main reason for the dam was flooding.  Our lecturer said that in 1870, the Yangtze flooded and killed about 300,000 people.  A major flooding happened again in 1930/1931.  In 1998, flooding killed 1,462 people and caused some $20 Billion in damage.  These numbers seemed incredible to me until I saw the Yangtze River.  I will point out two main features regarding flooding.  First, the banks of the river are incredibly steep.  The lecturer said that the record for the river rising in one day of heavy rain is 66 feet.  That’s an enormous rise of water for one day of rain.  But it is understandable when you see the steepness of the banks and then understand that the Yangtze has over 770 tributaries.  Put those two facts together and I can readily understand how so many people can drown in a major flood.  You can see this in the first two photos.

Our lecturer said that on the island in the middle of the Yangtze where the dam is being built, they found relics and artifacts 8,000 to 10,000 years old.  We saw caves and old physical markers as we passed along the river, so the project will bury a lot of history.  The next photo is a cave and we saw lots of them along the river.  The photo after is an old walkway made in the rocks along the river used to physically tow, by rope, boats up river.

There will be lots of agriculture displaced as we found quite a bit of farming along this section of the river.  The first photo below is primarily row crops.  The second photo is orange and tangerine groves and those citrus did very well along this section of the river. I would hate to be the person to have to harvest those citrus on that steep hillside.

The lecturer also said that the dam will displace some 1.3 million or more people along the river.  They will have to move to higher ground.  They will have a choice of moving to an apartment up above or to some other location where they will hopefully be able to farm, if they are farmers.  I believe that the next two photos were the town of Wushan which had existed since the Shang dynasty (1600 – 1027 BCE).  It’s population was 30,000 people and the whole town had to be torn down and moved farther up the hills.  It was a strange sight to see.  People were working furiously to meet the deadline for the dam to become functional and the flooding to start.

We also took a side trip by riding a sampan up the Daning River and through the lesser gorges: the Dragon Gate gorge, Misty gorge, and Emerald Green gorge.  The water was clean and clear.  We could hear birds chirping.  We saw monkeys half way up the gorge.  The rock face had rows of square holes, remnants of a plank walkway used to access salt mines up river that date back to 246 BC.  In Misty Gorge, we saw a hanging coffin way up on the cliff that we were told was a relic of the Ba People from 3,500 years ago.  It looked like a beautiful place to live but probably a very difficult place to live.   

The last photo was just one I took late on our last day on the Yangtze River before we reached Chongqing.

Chengdu

We got off our boat in Chongqing.  The next morning, we rode a bus from Chongqing to Chengdu.  We left early in the morning.  Our local guide said that the trip would take five hours.  She said it would only take three hours if the road had been put in properly.  She said the road manager instructed his work crews to put the road around the mountains instead of putting in tunnels.  She said he saved a lot of money that way on completing the project, which the manager pocketed for himself.  She said the government officials found out about it and put him to death.  After hearing this story, I immediately quit yelling out the window at lousy drivers.   

I thought that Chengdu was the most beautiful city that we had seen so far.  It was beautifully landscaped with many trees, shrubs, and flowers.  That was true along all roads and also along the Brocade River.  Chengdu was a bustling place and quite flat, so bicycles were everywhere in masses.  The people seemed to smile and laugh a lot more than other cities.  From all the surprised looks that I got, I presumed that they don’t see as many tourists here in Chengdu.

On a morning in Chengdu, we started off with a walking tour of a local shopping center near our hotel.  The first major shopping block was pets.  Shop after shop had huge quantities of pets.  Fish were the most popular followed by birds, rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, dogs, and cats.  I asked our local guide why we see so many dogs in Chengdu, relative to Beijing.  She said that Beijing discourages dog ownership for environmental reasons.  She also said that licenses for dogs are expensive in Beijing.  My guess was that the government didn’t want any of the Olympic committee members then scouting Beijing to step in any dog crap.  I’ve included a couple of pet store photos.

Later in the morning, we visited the Shu brocade factory.  Chengdu shop owners, like other Chinese shop owners, really know their customers.  They had soft chairs, playing cards, and tea for the men to enjoy, while the women shopped.  I played a half dozen games of solitaire, drank some tea, and Vicky purchased four tablecloths.

I suppose construction is the same in Chengdu as it is in the rest of China.  I was continually amazed by the major construction projects using only manpower and very basic tools to accomplish really major jobs. I’ve included a couple construction project photos from Chengdu. I really admire the workers doing these jobs.

The first photo below shows a freeway overpass support post being constructed with bamboo ladders and hauling concrete up by rope and buckets. Amazing.

In the second photo below, this was a ‘destruction’ project. They were tearing down a large building, using nothing but sledge hammers and muscle power.

Chengdu Panda Base

We spent most of an afternoon in Chengdu at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.  I’m not sure why it has such a long name.  It’s basically a Giant Panda breeding research sanctuary.  They have 50 pandas here, out of the 1,000 pandas in the whole world (in 2003).  They have baby pandas, toddler pandas, families of pandas, and even red pandas (in the raccoon family).

Our guide said that pandas eat 50 pounds of bamboo leaves and shoots in a day.  She said that pandas sleep 50% of the time and eat 47% of the time.  We were lucky and saw at least ten large pandas that were active as well as five young pandas that were active and three babies in the panda nursery.  We were also able to get very close to the pandas and watch them eat bamboo. 

I was very pleased with the experience.  The facility is an excellent place with fabulous grounds.  We also went through the panda museum which highlights pandas, butterflies, and vertebrates.

I’ve included a few photos just to give a small glimpse of our time at the panda sanctuary.

Chengdu to Lhasa, Tibet

We were up early in Chengdu for an early morning flight to Lhasa, Tibet.  Most of our flight appeared to be flying down the ridge of the Himalaya Mountains.  It was a clear day and the mountains were almost all snow-covered with clouds gathered at their base.  Our flight was two hours long and one of the great flights of my life.  Judging by the sharp peaks and razor ridges, I would have to guess that the Himalayas are relatively new mountains.  I’ve included two photos below.     

We landed at the airport and had to pass through several crowds of people but when I reached our bus, I realized that my watch had been stolen.  Welcome to Tibet.

Some people in our small group felt light headed, dizzy, and had headaches from shortly after we landed.  Lhasa’s elevation is almost 12,000 feet.  It is one of the highest cities in the world.  For my part, I felt fine.

It was about an hour drive from the airport into the city.  The drive was through a big flat valley with the wide meandering Kyi-chu River surrounded by steep, barren looking mountains.  We passed several monasteries that were a short ways up the mountains.  We also passed some small housing complexes.  Farming was being done for many miles of our drive on nice, flat farmland.  Wheat was the main crop growing.  Thousands of trees have been planted along the sides of the road.  There were very few trees, let alone mature trees, to be seen otherwise.  The farmland was starting to be worked and I saw more tractors than in all our time in China.  I also saw some rototillers being used for major farming operations.  You can see a few photos taken during our drive from the airport to the city of Lhasa.

Barkhor Street

We arrived in Lhasa and checked into the Shangbala Hotel which is one-third of a block from the Barkhor Bazaar.  It was very near the center of old Lhasa.  We were perhaps a quarter of a mile from the Jokhang Temple and about seven-tenths of a mile from the Potala Palace.  We had lunch after arriving and then our guide suggested that we take two hours to rest and acclimate to the 12,000 foot elevation.  But four of us felt fine and couldn’t wait to explore old Lhasa.

Barkhor Street is the old Lhasa downtown and popular both for pilgrims and as a commercial center.  The public square around the Jokhang Temple is a polygon and sort of a spiritual center and destination for pilgrims from all over Tibet.  The Jokhang Temple is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery built in the 7th century.

You can see the public square in the first photo which I took from the roof of the Jokhang Temple.  You can see the Potala Palace in the background which is less than a mile away.  The second photo was taken standing in the square.  Barkhor Street was filled with pilgrims chanting prayers and spinning prayer wheels, people shopping, and tourists, plus lots of beggars which were mostly women with children on their backs.  The beggars were dirty, had ragged clothes, and begged for money.  They would hook our arms and try to run us in circles.  The third photo is just one of the vendor’s booths.  The trays of dried fruits, nuts, and produce particularly appealed to me but all the fresh produce looked good.  The vendors in the square, for the most part, left us alone.  Vendors seemed content to wait for us to approach them.  Everything was for sale with many brilliantly colored items such as flags, purses, and wall decorations. 

The next photo is the front of the Jokhang Temple which stands at one end of the square.  In the following photo, we ventured down the streets right behind the Jokhang Temple and you can see that the other streets were not very well maintained.  I should add that I found the Tibetan people to be some of the most interesting looking people that I’ve ever seen.  They have great variations of head shape, skin color, hair style, facial features, and complexion.  Some have skin that is extremely dark but not black.  They look so unique and similar in some ways but also very different from each other in other ways, but still they all look somehow clearly Tibetan. 

Tibetan Home Visit

We were lucky enough, thanks to our tour company, OAT, to be able to have a visit in a Tibetan family’s home.  On the afternoon of our first full day in Lhasa, we paid a visit to a local Tibetan family.  Three generations lived in the house.  The family does sewing, like colors on purses, to earn money.  They served us food and drinks.  The food included yak cheese (very hard), puffed barley and puffed wheat, fermented rice cakes, dates, raisins, black beans, popcorn, barley powder, and rice chips.  To drink, they gave us yak butter tea and barley beer.  I tried everything and liked it all.  You can see our group and the food in the first photo.   

I’m in another room having yak butter tea in the next photo. 

This is their alter or alter room in their home.

I’m with the grandmother and mother of the house in the next photo.

The man of the house is making tea, or at least getting the water hot for tea.  At 12,000 feet elevation, this gadget worked quite well and very quickly.

Potala Palace

The Potala Palace was the highlight of Tibet, the highlight of Lhasa, and one of the great highlights of my travels.  It will be difficult for me to describe it and our visit there.  The information from our local Tibetan guide was extremely extensive, complicated, and confusing.  For that reason, this post on my visit will probably be the same.

It was my understanding, from our Tibetan guide, that the white portion was built by a Tibetan king for his use as the traditional seat of Tibetan government.  The white palace was built up starting in 1645 from foundations of an earlier structure that was built here in the 7th century.  The red portion was built by the Dalai Lama with the intention of spiritual usage and was built in the late 1600’s.  This was the winter palace of the Dalai Lama from either the 7th century or from 1649 to 1959.  Either way, it’s been a museum ever since 1959.

Some of dimensions and particulars of the Potala Palace are that it’s 13 stories high.  It sits on the Red Hill rising to about 980 feet above the valley floor.  The entire building measures some 1300 feet by 1150 feet.  It’s huge.  The walls are massive, like ten feet thick, and wider at the bottom than at the top.  It’s all built on and into Red Hill.  The palace contains over 1,000 rooms.  No photos were allowed inside the palace but we were allowed to take photos outside the palace and on the roofs of the palace.

The next photo is a door near where we entered the palace. Even a simple door just oozed history and mystique.

We did a lot of walking, climbed a lot of stairs, and also went up and down a lot of ladders or steep, ladder-like stairways.  Most of the steps were uneven heights.  Many steps were both very narrow and very high.  All the rooms had very high thresholds at the doors.  The majority of the palace was very dark.  We needed to use our flashlights frequently to see where to step and walk.  Watching where you step, however, leaves one’s head vulnerable to getting knocked into a beam or door on occasion (ouch!).  Most of the hallways were very narrow, like seven feet wide.  The walls in different parts of the temple could be from one to three stories high.  There was a whole lot of incense and yak butter candles being burned throughout the temple.  Some areas were extremely smoky and I could almost feel it as well as smell it.  We also had a lot of people passing us most of the time.  Some hallways were extremely crowded.  Many people were tourists but many more were pilgrims along with a few caretakers and monks.  People passing us went from infants in their mother’s arms to many very old people.  Many people were chanting and humming.  Some of the Chinese tour guides spoke very loudly.  We heard quite a few phones ringing, both cell phones and palace phones.  We started on the north side and worked our way to the top and then back down again to the bottom.  At any given time, I had no idea where we were in the palace.

The palace’s more than a thousand rooms are all connected by a crazy wild maze of hallways.  The rooms contain all sorts of stuff.  There are tons (literally) of Buddhist scriptures, written in Sanskrit.  Many rooms are stacked from the floor to the ceiling with scriptures and who know how deep they are stacked as it was too dark to tell, even with a flashlight.  Many rooms house statues.  The palace might have 200,000 statues.  Room after room housed statues of Dalai lamas, Buddha’s, Panchen lamas, and others.  The thousands of statues are made of gold, silver, bronze, wood, and who knows what else.  Many statues were adorned with jewels of all types, sorts, and sizes.  There were also many stupas, which are tombs of the Buddha or Dalai lamas.  Stupas too were made of gold, silver, bronze, and wood and adorned with jewels.  Some tombs had bodies in them while others just had relics in them.  Some walls and ceilings were covered with paintings, such as the life story of Buddha.  Many wall and ceiling paintings told of Tibetan history and religion.  Many other walls and ceilings were covered with tapestries, murals, and painted scrolls.  These too were very colorful and told stories.  Some tombs were big such as the Dalai Lama V’s tomb which was three stories high.  Some tapestries were also several rooms high.  We also saw sculptures, canopies, curtains, carpets, porcelain, jade, gold and silver objects, and lots and lots of documents.  There were no bare walls or ceilings or posts.  Every surface except the floor was painted or covered with something.  When we were near a window, much of what we could see was very bright and colorful.  Most of the time, it was a very dark palace.

Buddhism is evidently a very complicated religion.  Many rooms in the palace seemed to house statues of the same people as were in the last room.  Our guide described each one as being different.  Other rooms were for compassion Buddha’s, the hall of the grandest path, the Mandela centers (how to practice meditation), and the hall of Eleven-faced Avalokiteshvara, but it all blended together to me.      

The pilgrims that we passed inside the palace all had prayer shawls, yak butter for candles, and money.  In each room or chapel, the pilgrims would stop one or more times, say something or chant, dab their prayer shawl or their head against a post or statue, put some yak butter into the candle holder, and put money into one or two places.  Then they would go to the next room and repeat the whole process.  There was money all over the palace.  Much of the money was in piles in front of major statues or stupas, but money was stuffed all over in cracks in the wall, into the chicken wire that was protecting the paintings, in wood carvings, statues, and everywhere.  Most of the money was bills representing very small amounts of Tibetan money.  I did, however, see a U.S. $100 dollar bill stuck in front of a statue.  The Tibetan pilgrims that we passed appeared to be peasants from the mountains or outlying areas.  They had many layers of clothing on, most of which was very dirty.  All of the pilgrims appeared to be on a mission.  They had very interesting faces, hair, sizes, and shapes.  Many pilgrims seemed very surprised at the sight of us.

The next series of photos were all taken from different places on the rooftops.

The last series of photos start with a view from the palace roof looking back towards the street.  You can see that there is a lot of palace grounds that are hidden from view from the street.  The last two photos are exiting the palace through streets going down and towards the front of the palace.