The Bund The architecture along the Bund or Waitan is a living museum of the colonial history of the 1800s. The area centers on a section of Zhongshan Road within the former Shanghai International Settlement. The word bund means an embankment or an embanked quay. It was initially a British settlement; later the British and American settlements were combined in the International Settlement. The Bund is a mile-long stretch of waterfront promenade along the Huangpu River. There are 52 buildings of various architectural styles, including Gothic, baroque, and neoclassical styles. The area is often referred to as “the museum of buildings”. Building styles include Romanesque Revival, Gothic Revival, Renaissance Revival, Baroque Revival, Neo-Classical or Beaux-Arts, as well as a number in Art Deco style. Having seen these buildings initially the night before, mostly lit up, our viewing this morning was from the land side, and particularly interesting in that the colonial architecture was really fascinating considering their location, but not surprising given Shanghai’s history. A lot of these buildings would be more at home in London, that out in the far east.
The Bund waterfront is about two kilometers long and impossible to cover in the time allowed for this part of the tour.
There was just enough time to get photos of the waterfront and the old buildings.
Some of these buildings had odd shapes, like one on the far right that looks like a bottle opener.
And, for some odd reason, a bull.
On the other side of the water, the sights that had been quite colorful the night before, were equally impressive though somewhat diminished by the haze.
Tiananmen Square Some interesting facts before we get out of the bus… Tiananmen Square or Tian’anmen Square is in the centre of Beijing name after the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a gate that one separated the square from the Forbidden City.
The Square contains,
the Monument to the People’s Heroes the Great Hall of the People the National Museum of China the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong.
The square is about 109 acres and was designed and built in 1651, and since then been enlarged four times since, the most recent upgrade in the 1950s.
The Monument to the People’s Heroes
This is a ten-story obelisk built to commemorate the matters of the revolutions. It was built between August 1952 and May 1958. On the pedestal are reliefs depicting the eight major revolutionary episodes.
The Great Hall of the People
This was opened in September 1959, and covers 171809 square meters. The Great Hall is the largest auditorium in China and can seat up to 10,000 people. The State Banquet Hall can seat up to 5,000 diners.
The National Museum of China
This is one of the largest museums in the world and the second most visited museum in the world after the Louvre in Paris. It was completed in 1959, and sits on 65 hectares, and rises four floors. It has a permanent collection of over 1,000,000 items.
The Mauseloum of Mao Zedong
This was built shortly after his death, and completed on May 24th, 1977. The embalmed body of the Chairman is preserved and on display in the center hall.
My own observations This is huge; one of the largest public squares in the world, and if you’re going to walk it, like we did, make sure you’ve been exercising before you go. It covers 44 hectares, borders on the Forbidden City, and has a memorial to Chairman Mao in the center of it. But you cannot go near it, it’s fenced off, and it is guarded.
That’s both the statue and the square as there are random guards marching in random directions all the while watching us to see that we don’t misbehave.No one wants to find out what would happen if you jumped the fence around the statue, but I’m guessing you’ll have a few years to contemplate the stupidity of your actions with some very unhappy government officials.
Around the edges of the square are huge buildings, on one side is the museum
and on the other is the Chinese equivalent of parliament.
Around the sides are also large gardens
At one end, where the Forbidden City borders on the square, there’s a huge flag pole flying the Chinese flag, and this too like the monument is fenced off, and guarded by members of all of their armed services. No tanks rolled out during our visit much to our disappointment. There is no entrance to the Forbidden City from the square
At the other end is the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, which was closed the day we were there, as was the museum.
There are four sculptural groups installed outside the mausoleum.
Other than that, it’s just another square, albeit probably one of the largest in the world. It can, we were told, hold about a million people.
I have spent the last few days catching up with everything that didn’t get done during November, and find that only about half of what I wanted to do.
The in tray is about seven inches high, and daunting.
But I haven’t given up and I’m pressing forward and got another two chapters written, and a good start on another.
A direction I thought the story might go a week or so back now seems not to be the right way, and I’m outlining this and plot it’s impact on later storylines.
It’s like hitting a fork in the road, and you’re not sure which direction to take.
For the statisticians, a total of 3,141 words for the two days, making a total of 84,107.
In 1974 a 26-year-old farmer, Yang Jide, was drilling a well and found fragments of the terracotta soldiers and bronze weapons.
What was discovered later was one of the biggest attended burial pits of China’s first feudal Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the following years remains had been found in 3 pits, yielding at least 8,000 soldiers and horses, and over 100 chariots. The soldiers were infantry, cavalry, and others.
Emperor Qin was born in 259 BC and died in 210 BC. He began building a mausoleum for himself at the foot of Mount Li when he was 13. Construction took 38 years, from 247 BC to 208 BC. It was divided into 3 stages and involved 720,000 conscripts.
The pits of pottery figures are 1.5 km east of Emperor Qin’s mausoleum. Pit 1 has about 6,000 terracotta armored warriors and horses and 40 wooden chariots. Pit 2 is estimated to have over 900 terracotta warriors and 350 terracotta horses with about 90 wooden chariots. Pit 3 had so far yielded only 66 pottery figures and one chariot drawn by four horses.
Official records say it was discovered later that it was likely Xiang Yu, a rebel, intentionally damaged the Mausoleum and the soldiers in the pits, by setting fire to the wooden roof rafters, and these fell on and broke the warriors into pieces.
However, we were told that after the terracotta warriors were completed, the Emperor ordered the builders to be killed so that they would not tell anyone about the warriors, and then of those that remained alive deliberately smashed all of the artifacts.
The thing is, all of the terracotta figures that have been found are in pieces, and they need computers to piece them back together again.
The visit: The first impression is the size of the car park and the number of buses parked in the lot, and a hell of a lot more outside up the road an off on side streets. Obviously, it costs money to park in the parking lot.
The other first impressions; the numbers waiting to get in were not as many as yesterday outside the forbidden city, in fact, a lot less.
Be warned there’s a long walk from the entrance gate where your bags are scanned and a body scan as well, before admittance. This walk is through a landscaped area which it is expect might sometime in the future reveal more soldiers, or other artifacts.
At the end of the walk that takes about ten minutes, you can get a one-way ride to the second checkpoint, but we opted not to as no one else in our group did.
That walk is the warm-up exercise to an organized viewing of the exhibits after going through a second ticket checkpoint. On the other side, we had to hand our tickets back to the tour guide which was disappointing not to end up with a memento of actually having been there.
So, on the other side in the courtyard, the guide told us the most important parts of the exhibition, that we should spend most of the time looking at pit 1, and then spent a little time in 2 which is only there in the first stages of excavation. Then move onto the museum if only to see the replica chariots.
We do.
The chariots were small but interesting
The horses were better and intricately detailed
These are soldiers, perhaps complete examples of those types found in the end pit.
This is one of the archers. You can tell by the way he wears his hair.
Pit 2
The excavation of this pit has only just begun, so it is possible to see where they have carefully removed the top cover, and you can see the broken parts of the warriors lying in a heap.
Some parts of the warriors are more discernible closer up
These parts are carefully extracted and taken to the ‘hospital’ where they are digitised and the computer will match each part with the warrior it belongs to.
Pit 1
This has quite a number of standing soldiers that have been glued back together, but not necessarily complete and I notice a number if the statues were incomplete. And if they cannot find the missing pieces, then they are not added to or filled in.
The scale of the pit is enormous, and they have hardly scratched the surface in the restoration process.
What is there is a number of horses as well.
That’s at the front of the pit, a long line of statues, and what is clear is the location of the well where the first fragments were found by a farmer.
There are about eight lines of soldiers, and some lining the sides.
Midway down there is a large area currently under excavation
At the back is the hospital where the soldiers are reassembled. There’s nearly a hundred in the various stages of rebuilding. These days the soldiers are rebuilt using computer imaging.
The hospital area is where they are put back together
And these are some of the statues in various stages of reconstruction
Another two views of the size and scale of the reconstruction project
The coffee shop is also a sales centre, but there are too many people waiting for coffee and too few places to sit down.
Our destination is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from downtown Hangzhou.
Meijiawu Tea Village is located in the west of the world-known West Lake and hailed as “ten miles Meiwu” for its vast area along the Meiling Road, is an ancient village with a history of 600 years. It is the main production base and a protected area of the fragrant West Lake Dragon Well Tea.
The tea leaves from Meijiawu are beautiful in green color, graceful in shape, strong in fragrance and rich in flavor.
So, first, we get to look at the tea bushes, which are much larger than the bushes we’ve seen on the side of the road. I’m not up for becoming a tea picker any time soon, so I’ll leave it to the professionals.
All tea leaves are picked by women. It takes about 8 hours to pick two kilos of leaves.
Tea leaves are still picked by hand three times a year, the first spring, by young girls about 15 or 16, the second, summer tea, picked by girls about 20 years old, and the autumn tea, called grandma tea, picked by older women.
Next, we go to the drying demonstration, three tubs with tea leaves, that have to be stirred by hand for a number of hours.
We then get the sales pitch, which extols the benefits of the green tea, which apparently good for everything. So, now we have tea and supplement pills.
The teapot fountain in the gardens is a nice touch.
Still, we had a cup or two of tea discovered the right way to make it and had a stroll about the grounds. And for that hour in the morning, it was very pleasant.
This is a about 1kg package of tea leaves. Don’t ask me how many cups of tea that will make!
It went quickly. One minute it was the 1st and the next it was the 30th.
But then all NaNoWriMo Novembers seem to fly. Especially at the end when it seems you just posted the days work, and all of a sudden, it was the next day.
Because of the full commitment to the NaNo project, nothing else got done. IT didn’t mean that it wasn’t swirling around in my head, it was just there wasn’t enough time. Trying to maintain a social media presence, and write 3,000 words a day is impossible, so I had to abandon some of the social media tasks.
Now, I’m just exhausted.
Today I did something other than writing, a job that I’ve been meaning to get done for a while, finish painting the lounge room window frames. It’s not a large job, just time consuming, but it provided some relief from having to come up with new ideas for the story.
My NaNo project reached nearly 80,000 words for the month, and got to Chapter 55 of a planned 99. I had not expected it would take so many to cover the story. I am still working on it, and there will be updates throughout December.
As for everything that was on hold, work will recommence shortly.
To be honest I didn’t think I’d get this far, because it takes a lot of effort to syphon time away from everything else I have on my plate.
I wish I was a full time writer.
That sounds like the title to a song, doesn’t it.
But, like everyone else who is trying to manage and juggle everything they have going on, I’m no worse of than just about ever other writer that’s not selling a million books a year.
That would be great, eh? A million books!
One day.
Maybe.
But, this story will continue after the end date, because I’ve made a promise that by the end of the year I would have at the very least a readable draft for them to read (and be critical).
Phew.
Time for some rest, and pick it up tomorrow.
For the record, todays effort produced 2,958 words, for a 30 day total of 78,488 words. That’s 57 chapters out of a planned 99.
I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve.
Just not everything I intended to achieve.
But, that’s the nature of writing.
Of course, had I set my sights on a book that needed only 50,000+ words I would have completed the novel by now, and that is the case for the last three years.
This year I set out to push myself and finish a novel that I have been hunting and pecking over for two or three years. It needed something like a NaNoWriMo to screw up the courage to make an attempt to finish it.
At the outset I failed to realise the story was not going to fit in the constraints of 50,000 words. To be honest I had no idea how long it would be, but all I had to do was to let the story tell itself.
It did.
And I discovered the characters didn’t want to fit into a small box, they wanted to grow, they wanted to change, each following a path they never expected to follow.
And I’ve been with them, and they still have a ways to go.
Tomorrow will not be the end of their story.
For the bean counters, todays word count is a little less than the last few days, some 2,641 words, for a running total of 75,530 words.
This is going to be some story when it’s finished!
West Lake is a freshwater lake in Hangzhou, China. It is divided into five sections by three causeways. There are numerous temples, pagodas, gardens, and artificial islands within the lake.
Measuring 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) in length, 2.8 kilometers (1.7 miles) in width, and 2.3 meters (7.5 feet) in average depth, the lake spreads itself in an area totaling 6.5 square kilometers (2.5 square miles).
The earliest recorded name for West Lake was the “Wu Forest River”, but over time it changed to two distinct names. One is “Qiantang Lake”, due to the fact that Hangzhou was called “Qiantang” in ancient times. The other, “West Lake”, due to the lake being west of the city
It’s about to get busy, with a number of activities planned, and the warmth of the day is starting to make an impact.
The tour starts in the car park about a kilometer away, but the moment we left the car park we were getting a taste of the park walking along a tree-lined avenue.
When we cross the road, once again dicing with death with the silent assassins on motor scooters.
We are in the park proper, and it is magnificent, with flowers, mostly at the start hydrangeas and then any number of other trees and shrubs, some carved into other flower shapes like a lotus.
Then there was the lake and the backdrop of bridges and walkways.
.
And if you can tune out the background white noise the place would be great for serenity and relaxation.
That, in fact, was how the boat ride panned out, about half an hour or more gliding across the lake in an almost silent boat, by an open window, with the air and the majestic scenery.
No, not that boat, which would be great to have lunch on while cruising, but the boat below:
Not quite in the same class, but all the same, very easy to tune out and soak it in.
It was peaceful, amazingly quiet, on a summery day
A pagoda in the hazy distance, an island we were about to circumnavigate.
Of all the legends, the most touching one is the love story between Bai Suzhen and Xu Xi’an. Bai Suzhen was a white snake spirit and Xu Xi’an was a mortal man.
They fell in love when they first met on a boat on the West Lake, and got married very soon after.
However, the evil monk Fa Hai attempted to separate the couple by imprisoning Xu Xi’an. Bai Suzhen fought against Fa Hai and tried her best to rescue her husband, but she failed and was imprisoned under the Leifeng Pagoda by the lake.
Years later the couple was rescued by Xiao Qing, the sister of Baisuzhen, and from then on, Bai Suzhen and Xu Xi’an lived together happily.
The retelling of the story varied between tour guides, and on the cruise boat, we had two. Our guide kept to the legend, the other tour guide had a different ending.
Suffice to say it had relevance to the two pagodas on the far side of the lake.
There was a cafe or restaurant on the island, but that was not our lunch destination.
Nor were the buildings further along from where we disembarked.
All in all the whole cruise took about 45 minutes and was an interesting break from the hectic nature of the tour.
Oh yes, and the boat captain had postcards for sale. We didn’t buy any.
Lunch
At the disembarkation point there was a mall that sold souvenirs and had a few ‘fast food’ shops, and a KFC, not exactly what we came to China for, but it seemed like the only place in town a food cautious Australian could eat at.
And when tried to get in the door, that’s where at least 3 busloads were, if they were not in the local Starbucks. Apparently, these were the places of first choice wherever we went.
The chicken supply by the time we got to the head of the line amounted to pieces at 22.5 RMB a piece and nuggets. Everything else had run out, and for me, there were only 5 pieces left. Good thing there were chips.
And Starbucks with coffee and cheesecake.
At least the setting for what could have been a picnic lunch was idyllic.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 