Originally published @ 2:52 am, Mon 25th Oct 2010
I'm catching up on blog entries having been lucky enough to go to China on holiday.
We started in Beijing in a week of national holidays. Clear skies and lots of people. Children often wanted to say “hello”, having started to learn English very early at school. Quite a few local people wanted to pose for photos.
This young girl was very confident, and determined to finish her bun whilst posing for photos.
The Forbidden City, a large complex of palaces into which ordinary people could not go, gave a hint of how China had ossified as its Emperors sucked up all the wealth and turned the country in on itself.
My favourite story from secondary school was that China had invented powered flight well before the West, but when the Emperor realised such devices could negate the value of the Great Wall, he had the technology destroyed.
The Great Wall of China was began some thousands of years ago, although the Badaling part, the most accesible from Beijing, is more recent. The wall was started by Emperor Qin, the first to unify China.
Built for military purposes, although I wonder whether in time the trading purposes of such walls will be recognised, as was a significant part of the rationale for Hadrian’s Wall near Scotland and Offa’s Dyke on the Welsh border.
Despite it's similarity with the Offa's Dyke, we still made a point of visiting. (Have to be careful here; John Trewick, a West Bromwich Albion footballer in the seventies, asked to remark how impressive the wall was, is down in history as saying that once you'd seen one wall, you'd seen them all; he maintains he was joking, but the TV documentary makers conveyed it otherwise.)
Emperor Qin commissioned huge time and effort to create thousands of statues to protect him in his after life, only for revolting peasants to smash the statues within weeks of his death. Not good value for money.
Known now as the terracotta army, only 3,000 of the statues near Xian have been unearthed, since a method needs to be devised to preserve their colour once they are unearthed.
Xian’s city walls are huge (complete, wide, high and 14km long) and offer the most panoramic bicycle lane imaginable. One more wall joke.
Met a Chicogaon mother and daughter over dinner that day and we agreed how nice the Great Wall and the Xian city walls were.
Met a couple of chinese guys from Vancouver as well and we agreed how nice the Great Wall and the Xian city walls were.
Met an Israeli as well and we agreed how difficult it must be to keep the apple trees of his family's business irrigated in such a hot land.
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