Pingyao, China's Wall Street

Just in case you're wondering where Wall Street will be two or three hundred years from now; we give you Pingyao. Pingyao, the banking capital of Shangxi, nay of China itself, during its Ming and Qing Dynasty heyday. If the flagstone streets look somewhat narrow and lackluster, know that so too will the glass monoliths of New York and Hong Kong someday. You can't imagine anything grander than a 70-story glass and steel edifice to high finance? Well, then you ought to visit Pingyao, a lesson in hubris, whose people built walls and streets to keep people out instead of letting them in, a grand, faded old cautionary tale whose lesson teaches that there's more to the world than counting money.

China's New Philanthropy

Chen Guangbiao stands behind his wall of charity money

It may help to think of money as energy, - electricity, to be more precise. Jealously stored in a battery, its power diminishes. Set up a bank account for a weak little circuit. Build an efficient business to boost voltage. Give it away wisely, though, and the whole grid gets amped up.

Of all China's recent big numbers, the amount being given away by philanthropists is the most encouraging. Instead of draining off energy into pampered heirs, the super-rich are putting it into worthy causes, increasing China's wattage exponentially.

Jack London: China Futurist

In 1910, Jack London wrote this short story about the late-20th-century invasion of China.

It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world and China reached its culmination. It was because of this that the celebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty was deferred. Many other plans of the nations of the earth were twisted and tangled and postponed for the same reason. The world awoke rather abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years, unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this very end.

Second Tier Cities, First Tier Treasures

 The Museum of Liaoning's Western Zhou Wine Vessel

Someday, and that day may never come, but then again it just might, you'll find yourself in a far-flung Chinese province, in a grand funk. For the market street has been shopped, the local specialties sampled and digested, the pedestrian street strolled, and the TV incomprehensible. And then you'll be ready, ready to visit the museum, to see the prizes of long-forgotten times when that city was no second-tier contender, but a realm of pride and glory. That's the beauty of China. Unlike your Sanduskies and Reginas, every sizeable city has lived through a hundred incarnations, and has the treasures to prove it.

China's Rising Waters

Too much or too little, always in China has it been thus. Especially with water - gasping seasons of drought, followed by deluge, disease, and famine. The Yellow River is called China's sorrow as often as its cradle, and the Yangtze has overrun its valley more than a thousand times. Placed in that context, the floods now plaguing China have claimed small victory. Juxtaposing this disaster with the true cataclysms in her past is not intended to be impersonal and callous, but rather transpersonal, to prove the depths to which China has been submerged, buoying up and out every time.