Shanxi Province

Shanxi province was the home of many famous Chinese martial artists. A friend sent me this article, of which I've excerpted a portion below. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article. There is a very nice slide show which accompanies it which is worth taking a look at. Enjoy.

Bridging Generations on China’s High Plateau

By ARIC CHEN

AS our train from Beijing entered Shanxi Province in northern China, the land turned stark and blinding. Scarred by the chasms scratched out by brutally fitful rain, its sculpted, parched earth yielded only scrubby fields and poplars, as goats and donkeys sought lazy refuge from the relentless June sun.

My mother and I had arrived in her birthplace, our ancestral home. And as the train rolled past centuries-old Ming dynasty watchtowers, melting forlornly into the hills, I recalled the words of Zhang Jigang, the Shanxinese choreographer whom I had met in Beijing. “You’ll see how important Shanxi is to Chinese civilization,” Mr. Zhang, a director of the Olympic opening ceremony, told me. “In my opinion, you cannot know China without knowing Shanxi.”

As the train rumbled on, my mother was quick to agree. “See? Didn’t I tell you?” she said, in that Chinese mother sort of way.

With the Great Wall edging its north, towering peaks in its east and the Yellow River cordoning its south and west, Shanxi — its name means west of the mountains — is not the China of fertile rice paddies and lush bamboo forests. Instead, picture the arid plateau, heaved through the ages into clouds of dust by marauding Mongol horsemen, and still carved by the awesome monuments left by a millennium and a half of Buddhism.

From Shanxi’s political and spiritual crossroads arose some of China’s earliest dynasties. And in its courtyard mansions — the 1991 movie “Raise the Red Lantern” was filmed in one — you can almost make out the ghosts of the province’s famed merchants and bankers, clattering their abacuses among meandering, tranquil courtyards.

I, however, was in Shanxi to confront a few ghosts of my own. Growing up in Chicago, where my Taiwanese-raised parents had met as students in the 1970s, I was typical of many first-generation children in playing down — or, in my case, even shunning — my ancestry. Having been formed by Phase 1 of that classic, child-of-immigrants narrative, I was determined never to give in to Phase 2. But here I was, trying to rediscover my roots, as if seeking some kind of redemption.

Specifically, I had come to see where my maternal grandparents had lived and where they’re now buried — the province they left in 1949 as mainland China fell to the Communists. My grandfather was then a legislator in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, and like some two million other Chinese, he and my grandmother joined it in fleeing to Taiwan.

After six hours on the train, my mother, Wang Qihui, and I arrived at our first stop, the city of Datong. It was across this dry rugged landscape, blasted by Gobi Desert air, that my great-grandfather once traded livestock before retiring to the family compound in the Shanxinese capital of Taiyuan. Nowadays, Datong is the heart of coal country — Shanxi’s abundant reserves have made it a crucible of China’s boom — and, surveying the city’s mirrored high-rises and smoggy air, the blessings seemed mixed.

Still, Datong is known throughout China for its historic sites. And before long, my mother and I were wandering its pleasant temple district, joining the monks in golden robes as we ascended the millennium-old Huayan Temple, its cavernous upper hall presided over by five enormous Buddhas seated among magnificent Qing dynasty (1644-1911) frescoes.

With our hotel-arranged tour guide, Zhang Zhao, and his maroon Volkswagen Jetta, we also hit the sites just outside of town. We explored the majestic Yungang Grottoes, their deep niches and sublime chambers chiseled with thousands of Buddhist sculptures by the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534), and the fifth-century Hanging Temple of Mount Hengshan, its matchstick pavilions clinging perilously high to the side of a cliff. We stopped every so often at the remains of withered market towns and garrisons, while visiting sections of the Great Wall that you won’t find on postcards, their endlessly snaking coils of rammed earth eroding into a poetry of ruins.

When we weren’t scouting 1,000-year-old treasures — or dodging gusts of powdered coal — we were liberally sampling the celebrated Shanxinese noodles that my grandmother, a good cook, could only approximate in Taiwan: pinched, curled or sliced, usually seasoned with the province’s malty vinegar and always washed down with a shot of grappa-like Fen Jiu.

After one such meal, curiosity got the better of me and I asked Mr. Zhang, the tour guide, to take us to one of the traditional cave dwellings, called yaodongs, that dotted the hillsides. In a dash, we were in the tiny village of Donggetuopu, standing beside the arched entranceway of a whitewashed cave. Out popped a wrinkled man named Zhang Dehua (none of the Zhangs in this article are related); at 75, dressed in an olive Mao suit and cap, he still looked ready for revolution. “It’s 500 years old,” he said with a wide smile, clearly proud of his cool, tamped-earth den. “But I’ve only lived here for 30.”

Modern Beijing, Old Beijing

Whew. I'm almost back to what passes for normal.

With the Beijing Olympics beginning, I thought it would be appropriate to post something on Beijing. A friend sent me this article. I've excerpted a portion below. As usual, if you'd like to see the whole article, which includes pictures, click on the title of this post.

Old greets new in modern Beijing

David Armstrong, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, August 3, 2008

(08-03) 04:00 PDT Beijing -- As the River Dragon boat chugs up the limpid Kun Yu River, the towers of new Beijing loom in the background, symbols of the Chinese capital's newfound modernity and prosperity. In the foreground, however, Old Beijing is very much alive: Elderly gentlemen dangle fishing rods in the water beneath soft-green willow trees; bathers in skimpy swimming trunks dive into the water; middle-aged ladies atop the riverbank make courtly dance steps to recorded ballroom music.

Old Beijing is slower, quieter and more culturally conservative than the glittering metropolis now anxiously putting the finishing touches on its preparations for the Olympic Games, which start Friday. Just as new Beijing is eager to impress the world, old Beijing is content to take tea, go about its business in traditional courtyard houses, talk things over and watch the world go by.

Old Beijing is not necessarily ancient. With 1,100 years of history, it is young compared with Athens, Rome or Jerusalem, and virtually no traces of Kublai Khan's 10th century capital survive here. Outdoor ballroom dancing, embraced as a form of morning exercise, dates only to the 20th century. Even the oldest sections of the Summer Palace, where the River Dragon is headed and where the emperor used to take his court in the beastly heat of summer, date from 1750 - fairly young by Old World standards.

But the vestiges of old Beijing that survive among the car-clotted 12-lane expressways, the throbbing discos, the mammoth shopping malls and the rowdy expat bars seem as if they've always been there. They do not endure in splendid isolation - as do major antiquities outside Beijing, such as the Great Wall or the Ming Tombs - but stand amid the high-rises and neon of the new city of 15 million.

The Summer Palace, on man-made Kunming Lake, is a popular green park near high-tech corporate campuses and elite universities. It seems to have nothing in common with its up-to-the-minute neighbors. Walkways lined with willows, stone buildings made to last, steeply arched bridges, pagoda-crowned hills, the half-mile Long Corridor covered promenade that connects imperial pavilions, the elaborately carved marble replica of a steamboat at the water's edge - they are more than the sum of their parts. Popular with both Beijingers and visitors, the Summer Palace rarely feels touristy.

On a warm morning, squadrons of uniformed schoolchildren scampered where emperors, court eunuchs and concubines once strolled. The children were having a grand time, unwrapping snacks and sipping bottled water. "They come here to have a picnic with their schoolteachers," explained Beijing guide Mandy Lu. "It happens every spring and fall. It's a tradition. It's meant to give the children a day off and let them enjoy themselves with their teachers."

Near the marble boat was a cozy bookstore with a small selection of English-language books. Also on hand were evocative photo books with black-and-white views of the Summer Palace when it was a royal retreat. After the 1949 revolution, the Communist government threw the grounds open to the public and installed the bookstore. Before that, it was a teahouse favored by the Empress Dowager Cixi, remembered today as something of a Wicked Witch of the North, and memorably portrayed as such in the Bernardo Bertolucci film "The Last Emperor." Another book on sale is "From Emperor to Citizen," the autobiography of Puyi, the boy ruler who was dethroned in 1911 and evicted from the Forbidden City in 1924.

The Forbidden City

The monumental, institutional side of old Beijing is best represented by the Forbidden City - officially, the Palace Museum, a national historic site.

Unlike the Summer Palace, there is no placid water approach to the Forbidden City, though it is easily reached on the subway from the Tiananmen East or Tiananmen West stations. Otherwise, visitors must fight their way through Beijing's increasingly epic traffic jams along Chang'an Avenue, the city's main east-west artery.

Historic Beijing was built along a north-south axis and designed to be a harmonious, geometric work of art. Much of that visionary urbanism has been lost, but in the Forbidden City, Beijing retains its historic air of grandeur.

Although it is nearly always swarmed by tourists trailing guides, their triangular flags and parasols held aloft, the Forbidden City cannot fail to impress. Dating from 1417, the place is vast. Courtyard after courtyard, historic pavilion after historic pavilion, dignified stone lions and gleaming marble staircases, the whole surrounded by a high wall and a moat, it is rivaled among big Asian antiquities only by Bangkok's otherworldly Imperial Palace and Cambodia's moldering Ankor Wat.

Even before you enter, the Forbidden City commands attention. The high balcony just in front of the palace grounds, from which Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China in 1949, is fronted by a large portrait of The Great Helmsman himself. This is the very heart of what the West used to call Red China, when foreign media variously called the city Peking, Peiping, even Beiping.

Most of Old Beijing easily predates Red China, of course. Tiananmen Square hosts the kitschy, creepy Mao Mausoleum, which displays the embalmed body of the former leader, who died in 1976. But this windy, flat concrete expanse was, in earlier, smaller incarnations, a vibrant center of political life. Mao expanded the square by knocking down many of the twisty, funky alleyways and rambling compounds that bordered the south side of Tiananmen. Colorful fragments survive, with their crowded streets, and vertical signs overhanging narrow passageways.

During the 1960s, in a successful push to expand the physical limits of his growing capital, Mao demolished the city walls; today the second ring road hums where the walls used to stand guard. Mao's business-minded successors unleashed bulldozers to further modernize the city, first demolishing, then radically rebuilding it.

Fortunately, some major monuments escaped the wrecker's ball. So, too, have a handful of neighborhoods in the heart of the city that are essential to old Beijing.

Sayonara

I'm going home today.

Shabu Shabu

Tonight's adventure was shabu shabu. I like it about 10,000 times better than sushi.

We had the usual endless meetings all day. In the canteen, I ran into the CEO of my company and was introduced to him. More endless meetings.

At the end of the day, one of the people I work with led a small group of us to a restaurant which serves shabu shabu. I liked it a lot. That and the beer. The green tea ice cream for dessert really hit the spot.

Nothing much more to report. Tomorrow night a few of us are supposed to go out to the bars. Saturday I leave for home.

By the way, I had a chance at dinner to tell the group I had flow in from Detroit on Monday, and boy, were my arms tired. They got a kick out of that.

Wednesday Night in Tokyo

I just got back from a company dinner at a "traditional" Japanese restaurant in a high rise. I ate many things I could not identify, but didn't kill me. I thought a nice garnish was a small crab, complete with shell and claws in my appetizer.

I’ve noticed the Japanese are very stingy about two things: napkins and trash containers. One napkin is basically all you’re going to get for a meal. In any room, it’s a real hunt to find a trash container.

I went to the Tokyo office this morning for some meetings. Before the meetings we visited the office where most of our contacts work.

It was a big room with a lot of desks crammed into it. You’d have maybe three or four desks sitting side by side; touching actually. Facing them and touching would be another 3 or 4 desks to form a unit. As though crossing a ‘T’, the supervisor’s desk is at the end of the row, looking down the length of the unit. I certainly wouldn’t want to work that way now. Cubicles are certainly an improvement. I remember working in engineering at Chrysler nearly 20 years ago, and the engineering area was a huge space filled with desks. No privacy, but at least they weren’t touching.

Downtown Tokyo is like a teeming anthill. Many people are commuting in from a train ride which is an hour or an hour and a half long (or more!). The train rides are grueling, as the “pushers” make certain that every available cubic centimeter of space on the passenger cars is filled. It is my understanding that 1/3 of the population of Japan lives in the Tokyo metropolitan area. They tend to arrive at the office around 9, but may stay as late as 9 at night. Not that it’s all productive; they spend a lot of time here. Consequently, they take their time off very seriously. Weekends and holidays are off limits for the most part. I certainly can’t blame them.

The building is lightly air conditioned; just enough to take the edge off. Everyone has an old fashioned folding fan with which to cool themselves.

This has been a very interesting trip.

Hello from Tokyo!

It's just past midnight here. It's just past 11 am at home. I just got into my hotel room and am almost settled down for the night.

I don't sleep well when I travel, and last night was no exception.

I met some of the people who are here for meetings for breakfast. The breakfast buffet had surprisingly western options. I took the opportunity to have a hearty breakfast, and lots of coffee.

The landscaping at the office we went to was very Japanese looking. The interior lobby was very Japanese. It looked like an old inn with the sliding doors, the old polished wood, etc.

The conference rooms were conference rooms. I guess they are the same the world over. For lunch they brought in unsatisifying finger sandwiches. I couldn't identify what was on them, but they didn't kill me either.

Our flight from Osaka to Tokyo was at 7pm. The efficiency of the whole airport operation was very impressive. I have never been through check in, security, boarding, unboarding, and baggage claim as easily, as quickly, or without the hint of a hassle as at the airport.

The next step was to board a train to take us to downtown Tokyo.The ride was about 30 minutes. I got to experience a little of what Japanese commuters endure everyday. That is, the ungodly way everyone is packed on the train. Yes, I experienced "the pushers" who are quasi security men whose job is to stuff people into the train cars until you are packed like sardines. Some Japanese commute everyday under those conditions for well over an hour each way. Luckily, we only had to endure it for about 20 minutes.

We got to the station downtown, and were supposed to board another train that would get us closer to the office and hotel which is right across the street. While waiting for the train to leave the station, a co worker from Japan whom one of my companions recognised happened to be walking by. It turned out that the reason the train wasn't leaving was that there was an accident somewhere along the line, and we were going to have to wait at least an hour before we'd be able to leave. Probably longer.

So we left the train station in search of a cab. The problem was that half of Tokyo was in the same situation.

The line at the taxi stand was probably half a mile long by the time we got there, and there were no cabs in sight. They were probably picking up fares upstream somewhere and just weren't making it our way.

It was about 10 pm by that time, so we decided to get something to eat.

In the Trade Center building, there is an area called the food street. We tried several restaurants, but what we were running into was either the kitchens were shutting down or they couldn't seat four of us. After four or five restaurants, we finally found one who could seat us.

The menu, of course, was in Japanese. The wait staff spoke no English, and my Japanese was not up to deciphering the menu. By pointing and gesturing we managed to order some food, but more importantly, by that time of the night, we got some beer.

I'm not sure what it is we ate, but it hit the spot. The only trouble was that the restaurant couldn't manage to accept any of our credit cards. The credit cards in Japan are smart cards, which have a microcomputer embedded in them. Many places can accept an American card, but not everywhere. So we split the bill four ways and paid cash.

By the time we were ready to leave the restaurant, the line at the taxi stand was gone, and there were plenty of cabs.

We finally got to the hotel at nearly midnight.

The place is pretty high class. The room is again very small, but very well appointed. I am sitting by my window on the 34th floor, looking out over Tokyo at night, which stretches all the way over the horizon.

35 million people live here. It encompasses an area, if transplanted to Michigan, would stretch from Detroit to Ann Arbor in the west, and all the way up the Thumb area of lower Michigan.

Well, I'm exhausted. I need to get some sleep. I have meetings in the morning.

Hello from Osaka!

It's interesting that when I went to www.blogger.com to log in, I found myself on the Japanese language page.

Well, I'm here. I left Detroit about 4pm on Sunday, and arrived in Osaka at 5:30 pm Monday night. It was a very long flight. They ran four movies! I got a lot of reading done, as well as a lot of Japanese language review. I also ran through many crosswords. I didn't sleep at all though.

Just before we landed, there was a thunderstorm which helps with the humidity. It was still very humid, but without the storm, it would have been much worse.

After getting off the plane, through baggage check and customs, I then had an hour long train ride ahead of me to get to the station nearest the hotel; then a couple of block walk.

The hotel is nice enough. The rooms are very small by American standards, but very clean and well maintained.

Well, I've seen the airport, a bus station and my hotel. Early tomorrow, I have to head into the office for a full day of meetings then go directly back to the airport to fly to Tokyo for more meetings.

Interesting that the little bit of Japanese I know helps smooth things a bit.

I'll post again from Tokyo.

Paris

It's summertime, and we spend a lot of time outdoors. How better to spend that time, but in a beautiful garden. This article appears in the NY Times. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article, which includes a slide show.

Hidden Gardens of Paris

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

NEXT to the Palais de la Découverte, just off the Champs-Élysées, is a flight-of-fancy sculpture of the 19th-century poet Alfred de Musset daydreaming about his former lovers. As art goes, the expanse of white marble is pretty mediocre, and its sculptor, Alphonse de Moncel, little-remembered. For me, however, it is a crucial marker. To its right is a path with broken stone steps that lead down into one of my favorite places in Paris, a tiny stage-set called Jardin de la Vallée Suisse.

Part of the Champs-Élysées’ gardens, this “Swiss Valley” was built from scratch in the late 19th century by the park designer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand. It is a lovely illusion, where nothing is quite what it appears at first sight. The rocks that form the pond and waterfall are sculptured from cement; so is the “wooden” footbridge. But the space — 1.7 acres of semitamed wilderness in one of the most urban swaths of Paris — has lured me, over and over again. My only companions are the occasional dog walker and the police woman making her rounds.

On a park bench there, I am enveloped by evergreens, maples, bamboo, lilacs and ivy. There are lemon trees; a Mexican orange; a bush called a wavyleaf silktassel, with drooping flowers, that belongs in an Art Nouveau painting; and another whose leaves smell of caramel in the fall. A 100-year-old weeping beech shades a pond whose waterfall pushes away the noise of the streets above. The pond, fed by the Seine, can turn murky, but the slow-moving carp don’t seem to mind, nor does the otter that surfaces from time to time.

The Swiss Valley is one of the most unusual of Paris’s more than 400 gardens and parks, woods and squares. Much grander showcases include wooded spaces like the Bois de Vincennes on the east of the city and the Bois de Boulogne on the west, and celebrations of symmetry in the heart of Paris like the Tuileries and the Luxembourg.

But I prefer the squares and parks in quiet corners and out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Many are the legacy of former President Jacques Chirac. In the 18 years he served as mayor of Paris, he put his personal stamp on his city by painting its hidden corners green.

“He took some of the pathetic, shabby squares and gardens and transformed and adorned them,” said Claude Bureau, one of the city’s great garden historians who was chief gardener of the Jardin des Plantes for more than two decades. “He appreciated beauty — of women, of nature.”

Paris’s current mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, has taken over the task. In his seven years in the job, he has created 79 acres of what City Hall calls “new green spaces.” Just this month, he transformed the open space in front of City Hall into an “ephemeral garden,” a nearly 31,000-square-foot temporary installation of 6,000 plants and trees, and even a mini-lake.

Intimate, lightly trafficked and often quirky, the small gardens of Paris can be ideal places to rest and to read. The trick is to find them. You can consult “Paris: 100 Jardins Insolites” (“Paris: 100 Unusual Gardens”), a guide by Martine Dumond whose color photos make discovery for the non-French speaker a pleasure, or explore various Web sites like www.paris-walking-tours.com/parisgardens.html. Or you can simply wander on foot, confident that around the next corner there will be something new.

You’ll find spaces for listening to a concert or watching a puppet show (like the Parc de Bagatelle in the 16th Arrondissement); church gardens (like the one enclosing the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Seventh Arrondissement); gardens with vegetable patches (like the Jardin Catherine-Labouré in the Seventh Arrondissement); oriental gardens (like the one at Unesco headquarters in the Seventh Arrondissement that was a gift of the Japanese government). There are gardens with beehives, bird preserves, out-of-fashion roses, chessboards, playgrounds, menageries, panoramic views, even a rain forest and a farm. Green spaces adjoin cemeteries, embassies, movie theaters and hotels.

Even hospitals.

I doubt that most visitors to Notre-Dame Cathedral know that inside the nearby Hôtel-Dieu complex, which is still a working hospital, is a formal garden-courtyard with sculptured 30-year-old boxwoods. The hospital’s gardener replants much of the space every May — with fuchsias, sage, impatiens and Indian roses.

From the top of the flight of steps that cuts across the garden, you can find yourself all alone, looking out through the hospital’s windows to the tourist hordes outside. Every few months, the hospital’s interns choose a different costume for the male statue at the back — at the moment, he is Snow White.

(It was Mr. Bureau who told me that some of the most peaceful gardens belong to hospitals. Gardens help cure patients more quickly, he said).

The Square René Viviani on the Left Bank across from Notre-Dame is another spot that is easy to miss. But this tranquil square features what is said to be the oldest tree in Paris — a false acacia brought to France from Virginia in 1601, and now shored up with concrete posts. Sitting on a park bench in one corner yields one of the best views in Paris — Notre-Dame on the right and St.-Julien-le-Pauvre, a tiny church built in the same era on the left.

And then there are the gardens that are the back or front yards of museums. For instance, at the cafe-garden of the Petit-Palais— with its palm and banana trees and sculptures and mosaic floors lit from below — a half dozen marble tables and metal chairs offer the ideal setting to watch the museum’s stone walls change from buff to tawny yellow as the sun moves.

Journey to the Far East

The powers that be have decided in their wisdom that it is for the common good that I leave the country for the time being and visit my company headquarters in Japan. I’ll be leaving in a couple of weeks for a one week duration. I’ll be there just long enough for adjust to sleeping in a timezone 180 degrees out of phase with my normal body rhythms.

I’ve never been there before, in spite of having a long interest in the history and culture of Japan. Being a business trip, I really don’t expect to see much of the country aside from airports, train stations, hotels, office buildings, and restaurants.

Since my mother passed away and my kids are grown, I am less anxious about travel. I don’t have to worry about them any more. From that regard, I am quite looking forward to it. Here is a chance to test my fledging Japanese language skills. Here is a chance to see what it’s like over there.

One thing I am NOT looking forward to is the flight. I don’t mind flying. Not at all. I can’t stand travelling by air though. I don’t like airports, checking in, security, waiting at the gate, finding my luggage; you name it. It seems like the whole processs has been explicityly designed solely to antagonize the traveler. Then there is the length of the flight to consider. It’ll be about 13 hours each way.

So, I’ll probably see a couple of movies. I’ll do some crossword puzzles. I’ll probably work on some Japanese language related stuff, hopefully take a few naps, and get some reading done.

I’ll have a lot of time to do some reading. I’m only going to have so much space to lug around books, so something thick and densely printed. I don’t think I’m going to want to think too hard, so something entertaining rather than something to be studied.

Any suggestions?

Tranquility on less than $200 a day

A friend of mine sent me this article from the NY Times. I am printing an excerpt below. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article.

Seeking Tranquillity, on Less Than $200 a Day

By MATT GROSS

THE Saturday sun beamed down on central Kyoto, taking the edge off the November chill as I climbed onto my rented bicycle. I swerved through quiet alleys, past centuries-old wooden houses and Shinto shrines tended by generations of monks, and pedaled west to Arashiyama, a suburb of gardens, temples and bamboo forests at the foot of the mountains that ring this former imperial capital of Japan.

Light glinted off the wide Hozu River. Figures crossed a distant bridge. Jasmine, bean cakes, tea and roasting yams scented the autumn air. But there was a problem, a big one: tourists. Lots of tourists. In fact, there were so many high-season visitors that traffic — foot, bike, car — came to a halt. Furious at the crowds and exhausted, I turned around and rode back to Kyoto proper.

Frankly, I should have known better. With its grand Buddhist temples and tucked-away shrines, its oh-so-close mountains and trickling canals, its spring-blossoming cherry trees and autumn-flaming maples, Kyoto may be Japan’s prettiest city — and that’s a curse as much as a blessing. Like a Japanese version of Colonial Williamsburg, it is jam-packed with tourists, who come to see the religio-historical sites by day, and feast and party with geishas by night.

Indeed, more than 48 million tourists visited this city of 1.5 million in 2006, according to the Japanese National Tourism Office. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Kyoto’s citizens may be among the country’s most standoffish, a closed society that keeps strangers at a distance. Some candy stores, for example, won’t let you in without an introduction from a trusted customer. Not even wealth will buy you entree into this closed society.

A fortune does, however, come in handy in Kyoto, which can seem ridiculously expensive. A night in a ryokan, or traditional inn, can easily run 30,000 yen per person (about $291 at 103 yen to the dollar). And a multicourse kaiseki meal, a Kyoto specialty, can cost the same — again per person.

Of course, I didn’t have a fortune, just $500 for the weekend, and I was apprehensive. Could I make Kyoto my own, unearth its secrets and escape with at least a few yen to my name?

The Hotel Nishiyama, which I’d found on the comprehensive directory at www.japaneseguesthouses.com, offered a tentative yes. On a quiet street not far from the Kamo River, the Nishiyama had an immaculate courtyard garden, friendly English-speaking staff and tatami-mat rooms at a reasonable 10,500 yen a night, including breakfast. It was also the only hotel in my price range that actually had a room available — though only for one night. The next day, I’d have to move on.

I arrived too early to check in, so I wandered around, taking note of cute cafes, a Galician restaurant and a Comme des Garçons boutique — all of which suggested I’d wound up in a chic neighborhood.

When I got back to the hotel, an old friend from grad school, Tucker, was waiting outside. But before we had a chance to catch up, he was leading me down the road to the Nijo Castle, whose painted silk screens he needed to examine; he was, he claimed, writing a book on Japanese art.

Not that I minded — Nijo Castle is one of Kyoto’s prime attractions (admission 600 yen). Completed in 1623, it was home to the Tokugawas, the shoguns who ruled Japan for almost 300 years, establishing rigid caste hierarchies and essentially cutting the country off from the outside world.

It’s easy to see the castle as emblematic of its self-imposed isolation: You have to cross two sets of fortifications to reach the main residence, where arrows direct you through a precise route from room to room, allowing barely enough time to appreciate the painted screens (no photography or sketching allowed!) before the crowds jostle you onward.

After saying goodbye to Tucker — he vanished almost as mysteriously as he’d appeared — I set off for Pontocho, a long, skinny alley that is the center of Kyoto’s restaurant and bar scene. Pontocho feels like a Japanese movie-set come to life: red lanterns and looming billboards light the way past dozens of restaurants, bars and teahouses, some forbidding by design (unmarked Shoji screen doors), others by price (8,000 yen a person for sukiyaki!).

A welcome exception was Bistro Zuzu. Dim, crowded, energetic and dominated by a long bar and open kitchen, Zuzu is an izakaya, or Japanese pub, that serves homey snacks, most under 1,000 yen and many with a French twist. A mizuna salad came with a poached egg and crunchy bits of bacon, like a frisée aux lardons. And the aptly misspelled “verry tender” beef ribs were finished with butter and a sprinkle of pink peppercorns.

But not everything bore Gallic influence: horse meat “sashimi” was as Japanese as it gets, the purplish slices surprisingly clean tasting. With a couple of frosty draft beers, sea-bream sashimi and a rice ball with tart pickles, I spent 4,630 yen — a lot for one person, I suppose, but I’d eaten enough for two and, for Pontocho, it was definitely cheap.

Afterward, I wandered to Temas, a boutique that applies ancient traditions of pigment dying to modern fashions. The clothes were pricey, but I’d gone for the bar upstairs.

Winter: Enough already!

Having cleared the driveway AGAIN, my thoughts naturally turn to being somewhere else. Somewhere warm. Somewhere scenic. How about Taiwan? The island's other name is Formosa, named by the Portugese from a Latin word meaning "beautiful."

I have friends who live there, and others that have visited many time. They are remark on how beautiful the place is.

Below is an excerpt from a travel article in the NY Times on spending 36 hours in Taiwan. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article. There is a slide show there that you don't want to miss. Check it out.

- The Snow Shoveling Daoist

36 Hours in Taipei, Taiwan

By EDWARD WONG

TAIPEI, the vibrant capital of Taiwan, distills the best of what Asian cities have to offer — great street food, crackling night life, arguably the world’s best collection of Chinese art, and hot springs and hiking trails reachable by public transport. With interest in mainland China surging, Taipei — one of the most underrated tourist destinations in Asia — offers a look at a different side of China, one that escaped the deprivations of early Communist rule and the Cultural Revolution. Here is a Chinese culture (some contend that it is uniquely Taiwanese) that practices bare-knuckled democracy and has preserved traditions thousands of years old in a way that was impossible to do on the mainland.

Friday

3 p.m.
1) ANCIENT WAYS

The National Palace Museum (221 Chih-shan Road, Section 2; 886-2-2881-2021; www.npm.gov.tw/en/home.htm) is considered by many to be the finest repository of Chinese art in the world; it houses artifacts dating back to the earliest days of Chinese civilization. The collection includes oracle bones, which have the first known written Chinese ideograms, as well as ritual bronze vessels, Ming Dynasty pottery and jade sculptured into the shapes of cabbage and fatty pork.

5 p.m.
2) TOP OF THE WORLD

But enough of ancient culture, at least for now. Immerse yourself in modern Taipei by going deep into the belly of the tallest building in the world, the 1,670-foot Taipei 101 (7 Xinyi Road, Section 5; www.taipei-101.com.tw/index_en.htm). The first five floors, with stores like Armani, Louis Vuitton and Sogo, should satisfy any shopping urge. Take a high-speed elevator to the indoor and outdoor observation decks, starting on the 89th floor, for unparalleled views of Taipei and its environs. In every direction lie city blocks and avenues winding among concrete-and-glass towers, with verdant hills rising in the distance. Wisps of cloud float past the windows. Beware of vertigo.

7 p.m.
3) OYSTERS IN THE SKY

Dinner is only a few floors away. Go down to the 85th floor of Taipei 101 to feast on traditional Taiwanese dishes at Shin Yeh (886-2-8101-0185). Try the deep-fried oysters and rolls stuffed with taro and shrimp. Set dinners start at about 1,600 Taiwan dollars per person ($50.40 at 31.75 Taiwan dollars to the U.S. dollar). Be sure to make reservations well in advance, ideally several weeks before arriving.

9 p.m.
4) MARTINIS WITH MOOD

Lounge bars have popped up all over Taipei. If you’re in a mood for dessert with your drink, try the bar in the consciously hip People Restaurant (191 Anhe Road, Section 2; 886-2-2735-2288). The attitude starts even before you enter: the double doors have no handles, nor do they open automatically. Figuring out how to get in is only part of the fun. Once inside, walk through the shadowy industrial rooms and take a seat at the bar or in the lounge, where cocktails are served in large glass globes. Next, saunter down the road to Rewine (137 Anhe Road, Section 1; 886-2-2325-6658), whose head bartender has won international awards for his unique cocktails.

The New Smithsonian Magazine

Having just finished shoveling the snow, AGAIN, the first thing I do when I come in is of course to take a look at the new Smithsonian Magazine. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the online version of the March 2003 issue.

This is a particularly good one. There is an article on how China is sprucing up The Forbidden City in advance of the Olympics. There is also an article on Japanese Hot Springs.

Unfortunately, the Smithsonian does a very good job of locking down their photos. It seems to me there are a lot more in the print magazine than the online one too. Below is an excerpt from the article on the Forbidden City. Enjoy.

- The Snow Shoveling Daoist

Forbidden No More

As Beijing gets ready to hosts its first Olympics, a veteran journalist returns to its once-restricted palace complex

• By Paul Raffaele
• Smithsonian magazine, February 2008

I had expected to feel awe as I approached the Meridian Gate guarding what most Chinese call the Great Within—Beijing's Forbidden City—but I'm surprised to feel apprehension, too. After all, it's been a while since the emperors who ruled from behind these formidable walls casually snuffed out lesser lives by the thousands. From 1421 to 1912, this was the world's most magnificent command center—a reputed 9,999 rooms filled with nearly a million art treasures spread over 178 walled and moated acres.

Had I accompanied the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, the first Westerner to visit the Forbidden City, in 1601, I would have seen these pavilions, courtyards and alleyways bustling with courtiers: concubines clad in silk, gold and jade; eunuchs serving as cooks, cleaners, clerks, compilers and companions; and the emperor's hard-eyed troopers bearing curved swords. But when I first visited, in 1973, not a single human voice sullied the silence, though the cawing of crows sounded like warnings and I thought the breeze playing about my ears could be the whispers of emperors past. I spent that first day 35 years ago treading the ancient clay bricks and marveling at the long procession of scarlet pavilions. Most were locked, and there were no guides to tell me their secrets. Mao Zedong was then putting China through his Cultural Revolution, and he had virtually closed the entire nation to outsiders. He had also sent the intellectuals—including, I assumed, the Forbidden City's guides—out to the countryside to toil with peasants in order to clean the dung from their overintellectualized brains.

I fell in love with the Forbidden City that long-ago day, and over the next 18 months visited it often. Back then, I was frustrated by how much of it was off-limits. But when I returned recently for three weeks of indulgent exploration, its formerly hidden glories.

"The road gods beckoned"

There did we begin
Cloistered in that waterfall
Our summer discipline
- Basho

In this month's National Geogaphic Magazine, there is an article on the hiking trip the Japanese Poet Basho took in 1689. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to that article. The photographs are simply breath taking.

I posted about Basho's trip in August of 2005, and included a link to an online version of Basho's journal. Please visit the archives. The post was entitled "Speaking of Hiking an Ancient Trail."

Fortune Cookie

Fortune cookies. They're found all over the world, except apparently in China.

Below is an except from a newspaper article on the history of the fortune cookie. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article. Please pay a visit.

Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.

The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert,” he said. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”

Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of fortune-telling within Japanese desserts.

Ms. Nakamachi, who has long had an interest in the history of sweets and snacks, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea.

It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.

“These were exactly like fortune cookies,” she said. “They were shaped exactly the same and there were fortunes.”

The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held black grills over a flame. The grills contain round molds into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were folded into the cookies while they were still warm. With that sighting, Ms. Nakamachi’s long research mission began.

A visit to the Hogyokudo shop revealed that the Japanese fortune cookies Ms. Nakamachi found there and at a handful of nearby bakers differ in some ways from the ones that Americans receive at the end of a meal with the check and a handful of orange wedges. They are bigger and browner, as their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. The fortunes are not stuffed inside, but are pinched in the cookie’s fold. (Think of the cookie as a Pac-Man: the paper is tucked into Pac-Man’s mouth rather than inside his body.) Still, the family resemblance is undeniable.

“People don’t realize this is the real thing because American fortune cookies are popular right now,” said Takeshi Matsuhisa as he deftly folded the hot wafers into the familiar curved shape.

His family has owned the bakery for three generations, although the local tradition of making the cookies predates their store. Decades ago, many confectioneries and candies came with little fortunes inside, Mr. Matsuhisa said.

“Then, the companies realized it wasn’t such a good idea to put pieces of paper in candy, so then they all disappeared,” he added. The fear that people would accidentally eat the fortune is one reason his family now puts the paper outside the cookie.

The bakery has used the same 23 fortunes for decades. (In contrast, Wonton Food has a database of well over 10,000 fortunes.) Hogyokudo’s fortunes are more poetic than prophetic, although some nearby bakeries use newer fortunes that give advice or make predictions. One from Inariya, a shop across from the Shinto shrine, contains the advice, “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”

As she researched the cookie’s Japanese origins, among the most persuasive pieces of evidence Ms. Nakamachi found was an illustration from a 19th-century book of stories, “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan.”

A character in one of the tales is an apprentice in a senbei store. In Japan, the cookies are called, variously, tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), and suzu senbei (“bell crackers”).

The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present-day bakeries. A sign above him reads “tsujiura senbei” and next to him are tubs filled with little round shapes — the tsujiura senbei themselves.

The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie’s appearance between 1907 and 1914.

The illustration was the kind of needle in a haystack discovery academics yearn for. “It’s very rare to see artwork of a thing being made,” Ms. Nakamachi said. “You just don’t see that.”

She found other historical traces of the cookies as well. In a work of fiction by Tamenaga Shunsui, who lived between 1790 and 1843, a woman tries to placate two other women with tsujiura senbei that contain fortunes.

Ms. Nakamachi’s work, originally published in 2004 as part of a Kanagawa University report, has been picked up by some publications in Japan. A few customers have bought senbei from Hogyokudo, the Matsuhisa family said. But otherwise, the paper has drawn limited attention, perhaps because fortune cookies are not well known in Japan.

If fortune cookies are Japanese in origin, how did they become a mainstay of American Chinese restaurants? To understand this, Ms. Nakamachi has made two trips to the United States, focusing on San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she interviewed the descendants of Japanese and Chinese immigrant families who made fortune cookies.

Beijing

Below is an excerpt from a travel article in the New York Times, on Beijing. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article. Do yourself a favor and take a look, the pictures that accompany the article are great.

December 9, 2007

36 Hours in Beijing

By JAKE HOOKER

BEIJING can feel chaotic and sprawling, especially as it races to finish Olympic construction before the Games begin on Aug. 8. But there's an ancient order to the place, a cosmology, and you can follow it. The palaces and temples line up like stars on the city's south-north axis. The government chose to build the Olympic Stadium on the axis, too. All over town there are digital billboards with a countdown to the Games. Down to the second. But wait. Besides the cranes and compact cars and floating particulate matter, everything essential about the city — its tall vermilion walls, its septuagenarians flying kites on bridges, its pigeons — has been there all along.

Friday

3:30 p.m.
1) GREEN GETAWAY

Once the private garden of Ming and Qing emperors, Beihai, set beside the Forbidden City, may be the most beautiful public park in China. There are Buddhist temples by the lake, the footpaths lined with willow trees, and the provincial tour groups wearing identical baseball hats. The northern entrance to a private garden called Jingxinzhai (24 Dianmen Xidajie; 86-10-6406-2279; www.beihaipark.com.cn) closes at 4 p.m. in winter and an hour later in summer, so first visit this private world of pavilions, fish ponds and rock gardens. Sometimes an orchestra gathers by the big lake, and the locals sing songs, drink tea from thermoses and read about the stock market and price of eggs in the Beijing Evening News. There is an inward tendency in the Chinese character, and these walled gardens were designed to shut away the outside world.

5:30 p.m.
2) THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

After your respite, see the heart of the city on foot. After taking in the scale of the Forbidden City from outside the north moat, follow the narrow street, Beichang Jie, under the dark leaning scholar trees. You'll pass by What? (72 Beichang Jie; 86-133-4112-2757), a tiny rock bar that affords sidewalk wicker chairs and a glimpse of street life: migrant workers, high school students, young soldiers and black Audis with tinted windows keeping watch over the sealed leadership compound of Zhongnanhai. At the southern end of the street, turn left onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace, and walk east along the boulevard, past past the soldiers clearing Tiananmen Square, and the lovers in the shadows of the big trees . You are in the center of the city, which, in the Chinese mind, is at the center of the world. And it feels that way.

8 p.m.
3) DUCK FOR DINNER

The headless ducks hang from black hooks, ready for the brick ovens. Eleven Chinese cooks in dark pinstriped pants handle them with long poles, with a grouping of little porcelain ducklings looking on. The dining room of the Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant (22 Dongsishitiao; 86-10-5169-0328) is rowdy, as Chinese restaurants are supposed to be, and the braised eggplant is sweet and good. The skin of the lean bird is crisp, and its meat — wrapped in a thin pancake with spring onions and a sweet dark sauce — washes down nicely with red wine or beer.

10 p.m.
4) ANTIQUES AND SANGRIA

Beijing's best known bar strip, the Sanlitun neighborhood, is a playground for hookers, expatriates and Nigerian drug dealers. Instead, take a cab to the Drum and Bell Towers, and slip into the hutongs, or historic alleys, heading north, toward Bed Bar (17 Zhangwang Hutong; 86-10-8400-1554). Look for a red lantern down a long, quiet lane. A converted machine-parts factory decorated with antique furniture and paintings of the old city, Bed is a pleasant place to drink sangria, talk with friends, and drink more sangria. If you're with a group, reserve a private room overlooking the courtyard.

Saturday

9:30 a.m.
5) RITUALS, OLD AND NEW

Built by the Ming emperor Yongle in 1420, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is a masterpiece of Chinese religious architecture. The hall was one of many altars inside the kingdom's largest complex for ritual sacrifice, the Temple of Heaven, or Tiantan (86-10-6702-8866; www.tiantanpark.com/cn). Twenty-two emperors came here to make sacrifices to heaven, affirming their divine role as ruler and shaman. Nowadays, in the Long Corridor through which ritual offerings once passed, crowds of retirees play poker, Hacky Sack and the two-stringed erhu.

Noon
6) DOSE OF REALITY

The government understands that the sacred axis of the imperial city will also be the axis for tourists this summer and is preparing accordingly. Go north from the west gate of the Temple of Heaven and you will be impressed by the tidiness, the fresh paint, the grassy lawns. But wander down any of the hutongs of the Qianmen area, south of Tiananmen Square, and you may have a different — and more textured — impression. A battlefield between developers and conservationists, this famous neighborhood of provincial guilds, opera houses, bordellos and hot pot restaurants is in epic flux. Some hutongs have been razed, and some still bustle with cheap restaurants, backpackers, butcher shops and crowded courtyard homes. The nearby Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall (20 Qianmen Dongdajie; 86-10-6702-4559; www.bjghzl.com.cn) puts the conflict in context.

A Teahouse in Hang Zhou

The current post at Martial Views is about energy drinks. It reminded me of tea and kung fu, which reminded me of a post I made a long time ago, about a teahouse in Hang Zhou which has a unique way of serving tea.

Kung fu is expresed in may ways. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to a NY Times photo essay on this unique and fascinating expression.

Shanghai on a Budget

The following is an excerpt from an article from the NY Times on exploring Shanghai on a budget. Shanghai has long past, as well as being a city of the future.

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to to the full article. There is a nice slide show that goes along with it. Enjoy.

Frugal Traveler
In Shanghai, Balancing the Past, the Future and a Budget
By MATT GROSS
IN Shanghai, the present does not exist. Want the past? Stroll along the Huangpu River and gaze at the stretch of Greek temple banks, Neo-Classical-style skyscrapers and Art Deco hotels. This is the Bund, a relic of Shanghai's golden age, built a century ago by the international coterie of businessmen who had transformed a river town into the richest port in Asia.
Want the future? Turn your head 180 degrees and gape at Pudong, the spanking-new financial district. This is the home of the Oriental Pearl Tower, the silvery tiers of the Jinmao Tower and a feng shui fantasia of glass, steel and construction cranes — a fitting symbol for the international coterie of businessmen currently transforming Shanghai into a new symbol of globalization.
But what, I wondered on a hot afternoon last August, is Shanghai today? On one side I had history (partly my own; I'd been here 18 months before); on the other, speculation — and that worried me. Not because there was no now now, but because the nostalgic and the futuristic rarely come cheap.
I had $500, or just under 4,000 yuan at 7.9 yuan to the dollar, for the weekend, and more than a third was already committed to my hotel, No. 9. A five-room B & B in a 1920s mansion tucked down a quiet lane, No. 9 blends China's distant past, recent history and immediate future in equal measure: Life-size wooden gods from the walled city of Pingyao guard the ground floor, Deco wardrobes and desks adorn the guest rooms, and high-tech touches like Wi-Fi, touch-sensitive desk lamps and heated mattresses abound.
Equally important are its staff members, who pad around smiling in soft black knits, and the owner, David Huang. A furniture designer born and raised in Taiwan, David moved to Shanghai and retook control of No. 9, which his grandfather had owned before the family fled the mainland in 1949. He is the hotel's animating presence, a giver of lavish dinner parties, a wine connoisseur happy to share his collection, and a low-key fixture in the city's art scene who knows all the best openings. At 700 yuan a night — considerably higher than Shanghai's budget inns, but well below the Four Seasons — No. 9 is the Frugal Traveler's favorite hotel in the world.
But since David wasn't around when I checked in, I put my bags away, walked out through the lane — where grandmothers played mah-jongg outside pink stucco homes and cicadas chirred in the trees — and grabbed a quick snack of jian bing, a crepe stuffed with egg, chili sauce and a piece of fried dough, from a street vendor (1 yuan).
Then I caught a taxi to the Bund (fares are cheap; my dozen rides totaled just 218 yuan), where I pondered Shanghai's temporal-ontological issues until the intense heat drove me indoors. Fortunately, many of the Bund's architectural treasures are being converted into air-conditioned malls. No. 18 on the Bund, for example, was once the Macquarie Bank Tower; today its first two floors are full of boutiques like Younik, which offers one-stop shopping for local designers like Lu Kun and Jenny Ji, one of whose sporty striped T-shirts (325 yuan) I bought for my wife, Jean.
But Shanghai knows its visitors want culture with their consumption, so you'll find a headless sculpture by Liu Jian-hua in the lobby of No. 18 on the Bund; the Shanghai Gallery of Art inside Three on the Bund (a 1916 building renovated by Michael Graves); and a must-see ceiling mural at the former headquarters of HSBC at No. 12.
Apart from Younik, however, most of the shops along the Bund are generically fancy — Dolce & Gabbana, Zegna and so on — so I hopped a cab to Lane 210 on Taikang Road, whose affordably chic offerings had wowed me in 2005. The stores were unchanged: La Vie carried more Jenny Ji; Shirtflag still sold cute, propaganda-inspired T's (“Worker, Peasant, Soldier — let's kiss!”); and Kommune remained a hot cafe, where I paid 35 yuan for a smoothie. But a slew of buildings had been knocked down, and my favorite stall for xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, had vanished without a trace. No one I asked even remembered it. Such is the magic of Shanghai today: now you see it, now you don't.
I needed a shower before dinner, so I rushed back to No. 9, half-worried the wrecking crews might have beaten me there. Still no sign of David, but my American friend Ryan soon arrived, and we walked down Jianguo Road in search of food, passing yet more quaint blocks scheduled for demolition.
Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at Yoma, a cozy Japanese restaurant with a dozen blond-wood tables and a harried but friendly waitress. We'd gone there partly because of Japan's historical entanglement with Shanghai, partly for its homey classics like tuna tartare and fried tofu in dashi broth, and partly for its affordability. Spending 200 yuan each meant we could splurge on dessert.
And if there's one place for sweets in Shanghai, it's Jean-Georges, on the fourth floor of Three on the Bund. Ryan and I settled into a black banquette in the dark and sparsely populated lounge and ordered the chocolate tasting — a quartet of cacao-accented flavors that ranged from coconut to Sichuan peppercorns (138 yuan, including coffee). It more than satisfied my cravings, without emptying my wallet.

Journey Across the Roof of the World

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article.


Journey across the roof of the world
By Jane Macartney

There's a train that puts Tibet in touch with the outside world - and more firmly under China's grip

As the train climbed towards the highest railway pass on Earth, funny things began to happen.
Pens leaked. Air-tight bags of crisps and peanuts burst open. Laptops crashed and MP3 players stopped working. Passengers began feeling nauseous, and some reached for their oxygen masks. A few were sick.

But few of the 500 passengers on board were complaining. For railway buffs, this was as close as it came to paradise. We were on board the first passenger train to journey the 4,000km (2,500 miles) from Beijing to the ancient Tibetan capital of Lhasa and the final 1,110km yesterday took us up through the 5,072m (16,640ft) Tanggula Pass and across the roof of the world.

As the 19-car T27 train climbed around hairpin bends on banks and bridges, Ivor Warburton could hardly contain his excitement. “This is everything I had hoped and a bit more,” the former British Railways executive exclaimed.

Outside the sealed windows, protected by ultra-violet filters, shaggy yaks ran startled from the train, rare antelope grazed on the grasslands, snow-capped peaks glistened in the sun and fat marmots scampered into their burrows.

This journey was made possible by what President Hu of China called a “miracle” of engineering.

“We have the courage, confidence and ability to stand among the advanced peoples of the world,” he declared when he officially opened the line on Saturday.

It took more than 30,000 workers five years and more than £2.3 billion to build. About 550km of it runs over unstable tundra, requiring raised causeways and underground cooling pipes to prevent the ice melting. It is the world’s highest railway, surpassing Peru’s Lima-Huancayo line, which reaches 4,800m, and the highest station is in Nagqu, a town at 4,500m (14,850 ft).

Chinese officials consider it a testament to the success of their country’s economic reform and its rise as a major world power. State-controlled newspapers published pictures of villagers waving at the pssing train, and television showed President Hu congratulating workers who built the line.

But the line is also a political statement. It cements Beijing’s writ over Tibet, 56 years after the Chinese army marched into the remote Himalayan fastness. Along the line, paramilitary People’s Armed Police were stationed at intervals of about a kilometre, each standing at attention, back to the train, gazing out over grasslands where scarcely a human being was to be seen.

“The People’s Armed Police are here to protect the railway” read a banner at one station, though they may be more worried about scavengers eager to steal the rails than saboteurs wanting to disrupt services.

Previously, the journey from Beijing to Lhasa would have taken days, if not weeks, by road and rail. It can now be completed in 48 hours, for a fare of as little as £25 for those prepared to sit bolt upright on hard-backed chairs.

The one-way air fare of more than £200 is beyond the reach of most Tibetans and Chinese, and hardly an adventure. The rail journey takes you from one of the most densely populated parts of the planet, through endless hours of farmland, and then up through the rocky desert of the Himalayan foothills into boundless grassland.

Yesterday the train left Golmud — once the last station on a line that used to end abruptly in the sands of Qinghai province — at dawn.

It stopped to change its ordinary locomotives for three diesel-powered 3,800-horsepower engines made by GE in Erie, Pennsylvania. The engines had been adapted to pull 15 carriages and a generator car up from 2,816m to altitudes of more than 5,000m where the lack of oxygen reduces power by as much as a third.

Mr Warburton, whose company RailPartners hopes to launch a luxury tourist train along the line by late 2007, admired the achievement as we climbed at a gradient of one in 50. “This is brilliant because the climb is relentless,” he said.

Shanghai

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the original placement of this article. There are some terrific pictures there.


October 9, 2005
Shanghai, a Far East Feast
By R. W. APPLE Jr.

MADE for trade, the modern city of Shanghai came into being in the second half of the 19th century as a commercial link with the West. British, French, German and American traders settled there, eventually followed by White Russian refugees. They built a metropolis with Asia's first telephones, running water and electric power, a city of drugs, warlords, brothels and legendary riches. And like all expatriates everywhere, they brought their tastes in food with them. To this day, the Shanghainese have an appetite for croissants and French pastry and for Russian borscht (luo song tang, or Russian soup, on menus) although many may well not know their precise origins.

After 1949, the old hedonistic culture was gradually submerged in Communist conformity, with gray tunics and shabby state shops supplanting the chic boutiques and throbbing dance halls that gave Shanghai its reputation as "the whore of the Orient." By all accounts, food, and especially restaurant food, took a back seat to ideology.

"Ten years ago, a good restaurant was one that paid you," said Don St. Pierre Jr., managing partner of ASC, China's leading wine importer, with only modest hyperbole. "Now we're on the verge of being a world-class restaurant town." Richard Bisset, another old China hand, said that 17 years ago, when he came to Shanghai, "the Western food here ranged from Kobe beef to prawn thermidor. Full stop."

Today, Shanghai is again one of the most galvanic cities anywhere, with foreigners once more pouring in to seek their fortunes and the port seemingly on its way to becoming the world's busiest. It makes an old-timer like me long to be young again and live there to share in its drama. For 13 straight years, it has maintained a double-digit growth rate, as the largely vacant landscape on the eastern side of the Huangpu River has been magically transformed into the steel-and-glass financial center called Pudong. With more than 2,000 flamboyant skyscrapers, Shanghai is now a vertical village rather than the low-lying city of the 1930's, much of it built by Jewish merchants of Iraqi or Syrian origin like the Sassoons and Kadoories. The only echo of the Sassoons today is a Vidal Sassoon (no kin) hairdressing salon. But the Kadoories, who control the Hong-Kong-based Peninsula chain, are building a luxurious hotel on the Bund, the boulevard along the river.

The slightly pompous colonial buildings lining the Bund already house some of the toniest of the city's new generation of international restaurants, including the Michael Graves-designed Jean-Georges. Renowned chefs and obscure entrepreneurs from Britain, Singapore, Australia, the United States and elsewhere have flocked to Shanghai on the heels of the bankers and brokers, eager to serve you Italian, Japanese, Thai, German or Mexican food.

Foods from afar compete with heaping helpings of first-rate Chinese dishes, from Guangzhou, Sichuan, Hunan and of course Shanghai. Local river prawns, slow-cooked pork rump, hairy crabs (in season) and above all xiao long bao, the soup dumplings beloved in the United States, are all on offer in classic form.

The culinary renaissance is one reason, in fact, for Shanghai's re-emergence as a prime tourist destination, along with the city's refreshing green "lungs" - the many new parks and the thousands of plane trees in the former French Concession - its matchless new art museum, its Art Deco villas and office buildings, and the endless joie de vivre of its people. Gloomy, unsmiling and reluctant to make eye contact when my wife, Betsey, and I last visited the city a decade ago, they laugh and joke today, free at last to indulge in those old Shanghai pastimes, making money and spending it with abandon.

On the second morning of our most recent stay in Shanghai, we ran into Jean-Georges Vongerichten and his right-hand man, Daniel Del Vecchio, at the Westin Hotel's startlingly polycultural breakfast buffet. That happy accident led to a sampling of Shanghainese food at its most down-to-earth at breakfast-time the next day.

Near the corner of Changle Lu and Xiang Yang Bei Lu, not far from the museum, where banners were incongruously heralding an exhibition about Versailles and Louis XIV, we each polished off a half-dozen steamed, pork-filled soup dumplings, the size of a silver dollar, with perilously fragile skins, without spilling too much of the scalding liquid on our shirts. Unlike most of the other stalls, the place where we ate these actually had a few tables and stools, and even a sign outside. Its name: Maxim's.

Thicker-skinned dumplings, sheng jian bao, fried cheek-to-cheek in shallow iron pans and then steamed, were dusted with chives and black sesame seeds. We followed instructions to dip them in the exceptional black Zhenjiang vinegar. Eye-poppingly good they were, too, although Jereme (pronounced Jeremy) Leung, a member of our noshing group, speculated slyly that the frying oil had not been changed in years.

There were crepes at other stalls - delicate cong you bing, or scallion pancakes, and ji dan bing, a kind of breakfast burrito. To make that, a short-order wizard spread batter on a drum-shaped grill with what looked like a painter's spatula, broke an egg on top, added a dab of fermented soybean sauce