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AOSA ANNUAL REPORT 1999 |
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China is a country that is changing so fast, you may not recognise many aspects of this account if you visit(ed) in 1999(97). We had not expected the traffic to be so heavy, in a country that has only recently allowed private cars, but the jams did have the advantage of giving you an excellent opportunity to look at all that was happening in the streets in greater detail. Much of Chinese life is lived here - not surprising when you know of the size and poor state of much of the old property, and the isolation felt in the newer high rise apartments. They have grown up with much communal living and apparently feel happier in a crowd than with space to move (something for which we were grateful when there was a choice of bits of Great Wall to climb!). The shops consist mainly of garages - cubes with one side completely open to (and contents usually spilling out onto) the street, affording an excellent view to those stuck in a bus, or ambling by. Occasionally there was obviously a local centre for a particular type of product (e.g. bamboo furniture) but more often a steaming pot of dumplings and a sizzling wok of ??? (plenty of take-away here) was sandwiched between the hardware store and the bicycle repair shop. When it starts raining there is an instant rainbow as millions of cyclists don their multicoloured capes. There appear to be gaps in China's history - there are plenty of Ming Tombs, Tang art and Dowager Empress Ci Xis monuments (she spent all the money earmarked for the navy on a marble boat on the lake at the Summer Palace) - though most of these have had to be reconstructed since the devastation caused during the Cultural Revolution. There are 1950's 5-storey apartment blocks and 1990's 87-storey offices/apartment blocks. But ordinary older houses or buildings are few and far between. We did see the Hutongs (Mongol word for narrow streets) - single storey houses built around a courtyard - originally for one family but now housing four. These are being knocked down at a great rate to make way for more high-rises. Shanghai was a slight exception - the waterfront or Bund has colonial style buildings (largely built by Western companies in the early C20th) and we found similar ones in Guanzhou (Canton) where my mother was born - our main reason for going to China. Shortly after the pits of the warriors at Xian were sealed off (when the Emperor died) there was a farmers' revolution. They remembered that the figures were clay but the weapons real so they raided them, then set fire to the roofs which fell in. The thousands of warriors are still being dug out and reconstructed. The pits are the size of a few football pitches. Go to page two |
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