Around China In One Website

Ernie's blog

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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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.


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A Tale from the Snowfield

 

 

 

-By Ma Duangang

 

It was a week ago that I invited Fatty Ren, a southerner, to dinner in the Wailou Hotel. I had long heard that he had become rich by raking in almost half a million yuan from reselling fur.


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Karamay - Black Oil and More

 

 A statue of old Salimu, Xinjiang's first oil man.

 

 

Analogies are long gone from the SAT, America's college entrance test; the kids can't wrap their heads around them anymore. See if you get this one:

 

America is to Alaska as China is to:

A.      Harbin

B.      Taiwan

C.      Xinjiang

D.      Inner Mongolia

E.       Sala Peilin

 

Congratulations if you chose C. You get partial credit if you answered D. But Xinjiang is more remote and fundamentally estranged from the Chinese soul. And Xinjiang has much more of that which makes the world go round. Nowhere more than in Karamay, whose name literally means "black oil", where it bleeds from the very earth, first scooped up by enterprising old Salimu, who discovered its properties and made the first oil fortune peddling it. Here's to the beauty of Karamay, and not the bounty.


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Three Chinese Side Acts

 

 

 Someone's a few seconds away from being converted to doufu ru.

 

 

Wow, that's quite a puddle of ketchup you've got with your French fries there. And what's that - mayonnaise? Very continental. Ooh, and you put some A1 sauce on your burger, sophisticated.

 

*CRASH*

 

No no, leave it on the floor, where it belongs. There are more heavenly flavors on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your western philosophy.  Condiments are the best place to start, by switching the sweet and salty act with some Chinese talent, three dressings that will do for your palate what the Starship Enterprise did for mankind. That's right, explore strange but tasty new worlds.


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Old Outsiders

 

 The author, in 1896, hidden among other Yangtze boat passengers.

 

 

 

The passage through the thronged streets took nearly an hour, but all was quiet. I was not allowed to go to an inn, but was most kindly received at the Church Mission House, a dark and not agreeably situated house in a crowded Chinese quarter, inhabited by the two ladies who, after four years of patience and difficulties, have effected a permanent lodgment in what is well known as a hostile city. They spent the first two years at an inn, and so little were they thought of, that the mandarin, when urged to take some action against them, replied, "What does it matter? They are only women!"


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Chongqing, More Than A City

 

 Skyscrapers rise like bamboo shoots in Chongqing

 

 

It has the population of Iraq, and the land mass of Austria. So calling Chongqing a city is somewhat deprecating, like calling the Grand Canyon a crevasse, or Australia a South Pacific island. Chongqing contains worlds,echoing through its many hills, veiled in perpetual mist. Better, perhaps, that most travelers just pass through on their way to the gorges, for Chongqing will overload their senses as surely as their leg muscles.


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