Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, China

Xishuangbanna is the southern-most region of Yunnan province, bordering Myanmar (Burma) and Laos. Only a third of the population here is Han Chinese; the majority are Dai, Hani, Lisu and Yao people with their own cultures and languages. The area is also home to Burmese and Lao people, so the region has a strong multicultural atmosphere. The principal city is Jinghong and we arrived here last Wednesday on a flight from Kunming. Laid-back Jinghong is located on the northern bank of the Mekong River and has a distinctly South-East Asian feel to it – warm with attractive coconut palm lined streets buzzing with motorbikes.

We spent a few pleasant days here before striking out for the more distant villages. In Jinghong we strolled around the manicured Tropical Flowers and Plants Garden and walked across the suspension bridge over the Mekong River just a stone’s throw from our hotel. We also checked out the cafes around Manting Lu, quickly deciding that our favourite was the Mekong that provided both Asian and western food, and free wireless broadband internet at the open-air tables under the street-side coconut palms. On this trip we are carrying a micro laptop that weighs less than a kilogram; a barely noticeable weight in a shoulder bag compared with our previous brick. It’s a lot more convenient and enjoyable to fire up our own laptop at a street side café and connect to the internet wirelessly than to use the usually smoke-ridden internet cafes in most cities. I’ll never forget the internet café in Dunhuang in Gansu province; the air inside was so thick and blue with the cigarette smoke generated by the horde of puffing young men playing internet games that after half an hour I could take no more and was driven out dizzy and nauseous.

From Jinghong we caught a minibus to the village of Menghun about 80 km to the west. This dusty, smoky, rough and ready township has unsealed streets shared by people, trucks, motorbikes, fume-belching tractor carts and cattle. We checked into a spartan hotel on the main corner and found a café that served excellent food. It was Saturday night and our purpose for coming to Menghun was to attend the weekly Sunday market that our guide book raved about. But we were doubly lucky as it turned out that there was to be a special regional dance performance in Menghun that very night, and so at 8pm we joined the throng of what must have been the town’s entire population rushing up a track to a grassed area where a large stage had been erected. The crowd of about 2,000 listened patiently to the succession of long introductory speeches given by local town leaders. Then a line of about 20 people came onto the stage to receive awards of recognition, probably for their roles in organizing the event. Each of them was wearing a red paper flower the size of a cabbage on their chest. Finally the dancing got underway; this comprised performances by different ethnic communities in the region. It was a classy show, featuring dazzlingly colourful costumes that contrasted starkly with the drab and dusty surroundings in which it was presented.

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Next morning we were up early, mingling with the people from the surrounding hill villages bouncing into town on their tractor carts for the market. This was a colourful affair too, with the women dressed in their finest and ready to buy and sell, and to enjoy what was obviously the highlight of the week. We enjoyed it too and pored over the myriad of fresh produce and manufactured goods for sale. Around noon we caught a minibus back to Jinghong, from there catching another to Ganlanba in the south-east. The latter was a hair-raising trip; the road hugged the tight loops of the Mekong River below, the bus driver was a maniac, and the bus itself had shock absorbers that had long since absorbed their last shock. But we made it into Ganlanba unscathed and checked into a hotel recommended by our guide book, but which turned out to be the grottiest hotel we’ve stayed in. Our fault for not checking the room more carefully when we arrived.Ganlanba itself is an attractive town with palm-lined streets, even more laid-back than Jinghong, and its main tourist draw card is its Dai Minority Park that showcases Dai architecture and daily life. But the following morning we decided to avoid this touristy spot and to seek out a more authentic Dai setting well away from tourist buses and trinkets. So we took a motorized trishaw to the Mekong River where we caught a passenger ferry to the other side. From there we walked down a country lane that passed through banana plantations and Dai vegetable farms and after 30 minutes or so we found ourselves in a small village of rustic and pleasing to the eye Dai houses where the only visible concessions to the 21st century were solar hot water units and satellite television dishes. In the yards of several houses we saw large steaming cauldrons. At one house the occupants invited us in, sat us down in front of their cauldron and gave us a cupful of bubbling brown liquid drawn from it. It turned out to be sugar cane juice they were boiling down to make sugar syrup or crystals.

Mission accomplished, we retraced our steps back across the Mekong to Ganlanba and then back to Jinghong on a slightly better bus driven by a slightly better driver. We were ready to move on from Xishuangbanna and this afternoon we laid out our map of China to consider where we would head tomorrow. We narrowed the possibilities to two options, but Lee Tuan then vetoed the 26-hour bus trip along the Myanmar border to Ruili, leaving the 50 minute flight on Lucky Airlines to Dali our way forward. That decided, we ended our time in Jinghong with dinner at the Thai restaurant on Manting Lu before adjourning one last time to the relaxing Mekong Café for coffee and a slice of brownie and to check our emails.

Yuxi, Yunnan province, China

From Nanjing we flew to Kunming in the south of China where a driver was waiting at the airport to take us further south to the rural city of Yuxi. It was a pleasant drive through intensively cultivated rolling hills and in places with plastic horticultural igloos stretching to the horizon. They made an impressive sight and must have covered an area of thousands of hectares and contained an enormous volume of growing vegetables and flowers.

The Yuxi municipality has a population of nearly three million people and is one of China’s most prosperous rural areas. It has a lot going for it; the weather is pleasant all year round, the local economy is strong, and the city is clean and green with tree-lined streets and manicured gardens and parks. And its lit-up town square is very impressive, occupying the equivalent of many city blocks and featuring a lake, bridges, an artificial beach with volley-ball courts, an enormous walking area used by the locals for evening strolls and mass ball-room dancing, a performing arts centre and concert pavilion, and a large statue to Ni Eer, a music-loving doctor born in Yuxi who composed the music that became China’s national anthem.

And the hot and spicy food here is great too. A variety of cooking styles is employed but the Hotpot seems to be the preferred method. We ate out at a different place every night and found ourselves seated around a large charcoal or gas-fired hotpot on several occasions. One night we had Chicken and the Foot of the Pig Hotpot, another night Beef and the Foot of the Cow Hotpot and on the final day of the class we were driven to a farm in the hillside surrounding Yuxi where we had Ostrich Hotpot. In each case, as well as the featured ingredient, the hotpot was loaded with fresh vegetables, mushrooms, chilies and spices, and sometimes noodles. The common factor was that the end product was always filling, satisfying and excellent. As each day of class also entailed a lunch at a different city restaurant, breakfast provided the only possible daily respite and we assiduously avoided that. But resistance otherwise was useless and our tummies were bulging by week’s end. On Saturday night when we waddled back into the Zhong Yu Hotel we saw that a “Body Contouring” service was being promoted in the hotel and we wryly noted that we had been body contouring all week but unfortunately of the convex, not concave, kind. It would be impossible to meet more friendly or hospitable people than those we spent the week with in Yuxi.

Yuxi’s affluence is underpinned by its agricultural production with a myriad of vegetable and grain crops produced in the vicinity. But the main crop in these parts is certainly tobacco, for Yuxi is the heart and lungs of China’s huge tobacco industry. According to an article I read in the China Daily, 1 trillion cigarettes are produced in China each year (a significant percentage of these in Yuxi), and the government collects a staggering US$1,000,000,000 per day in taxes from China’s several hundred million smokers. According to the same article, the World Health Organization estimates that there are 1.2 million smoking-related deaths each year in China. That’s about the total population of Adelaide, dead each year from fags!

The China Daily is the only English language newspaper widely available in the larger cities and it is an interesting read with serious articles on the developments taking place around the country as well as the more quirky happenings in the suburbs across the nation. An article in the Health Section that caught my eye last week reported on the work of a gerontologist who was studying ageing processes and behaviours in male rats with a view to advancing knowledge of ageing in the human male. When his findings were greeted with skepticism, the professor, obviously not one to eschew mere anecdotal evidence if it helped his case, questioned why there should be such doubt when many women easily saw the parallels between ageing rats and their husbands.

But I digress - back to Yuxi. It is tobacco that keeps Yuxi’s economy smoldering, and 6,000 people work at the local Hongta Tobacco Corporation's cigarette factory (the largest in Asia) that churns out fags 24 hours a day. One evening during our previous visit to Yuxi two years ago, our hosts took us there for a visit. We didn’t have to travel far, for the factory is located near the city centre. The factory throbbed away and the delicious aroma of tobacco wafted in the surrounding air. It is certainly the best-smelling factory I’ve ever visited. Near the entrance there is a large monument featuring 8 towering cigarettes that celebrate Yuxi’s premier industry, and a small park with bronze statues of men Yuxi admires. Men with enlightened attitudes towards tobacco. Like the famous Chinese poet (whose name I can’t recall now) who put his literary genius down to tobacco and who claimed that without a fag between his lips he could barely think straight let alone produce the dazzling works for which he is renowned. He keeps good company in the park. Busts of Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde and Rousseau are there too, along with their alleged favourable comments on the fine qualities of tobacco. Even in the local Buddhist temple complex there is a large plaque next to the Golden Buddha in honour of a former CEO of the tobacco factory, acknowledging the bounteous gifts he bestowed on the city in the form of freeways, bridges etc. It wouldn’t be smart to denigrate fags in these parts.

I did just that the following day. One topic I cover in my subject is a method for choosing between alternative investment options, and my example that I had prepared months before was a choice between opening additional beds in a respiratory ward, or conducting a Quit smoking support program in the local community to help avoid future hospital admissions. It was too late to change it, and as fate would have it, it was time to cover this topic the morning after the visit to the tobacco factory. I soldiered on, but for a few minutes I felt as uneasy as a margarine salesman at a dairy farmers’ conference. But any upset I may have caused was obviously soon forgotten and following lectures that day, two class representatives took us for a drive about an hour away to see another of Yuxi’s treasures, Fuxian Lake. With a circumference of about 200 km and a depth in places of 1,000 metres, the lake holds an enormous volume of crystal clear water, and the government has imposed strict controls to maintain its pristine condition. We had dinner at an open air café at the lake’s edge, following negotiations between our hosts and the café manager as to what fish would be prepared, and the price. The fish was boiled in a large solid copper pot with assorted fresh vegetables, and the pot was placed on our table when it was ready, along with bowls of local spices and wild herbs. It was a great meal and a serene hour with fishers setting their nets just off the shore as the sun set over the watery horizon.

Nanjing (Nanking), Jiangsu province, China

About 200 km north-west of Shanghai, Nanjing is the capital city of fertile Jiangsu province and one of the most attractive big cities in China with wide tree-lined streets running between soaring office towers and apartment blocks. Few remnants of old Nanjing remain, although long sections of the 33 km wall that once surrounded and protected the city are well-preserved.

Nanjing is also a University town with many universities of assorted types dotting the inner city and suburbs. We came to Nanjing last Monday on a 90 minute flight from Tianjin with China Southern Airlines, and checked into the Jingli Hotel just north of the city centre and overlooking the grounds of Nanjing University where my second class was held. The modern subway has a stop close to the lobby of the Jingli, so we made good use of that to glide into and out of the city centre just two stops down the line.

The Nanjing class organizer took us a on a drive to the north of the city to see the first bridge built over the lake-like Yangtze River that flows through here on the final leg of its journey to the East China Sea. Apparently the Chinese engineers built the bridge by themselves after their Russian allies left in a huff in the early 1960s, taking the designs with them. The bridge opened in December 1968 and was an engineering marvel for its time. One of the longest bridges in China, it has a 4,500 metre long vehicle roadway above a railway line that provided the first direct railway link between Shanghai and Beijing. The approaches to the bridge are highlighted by large, impressive socialist sculptures that tower over the heavy road traffic below.

Nanjing has twice been the capital city of China; first for about 300 years from the mid 1300s and second for a brief period in the early 1900s. Most westerners know Nanjing by its former name Nanking, and know of it for the hideous events that occurred here in late 1937 – the “Rape of Nanking” by the Japanese army. The Japanese invaded China earlier that year and in August launched an air attack on Nanjing from air bases in Nagasaki. They apparently reported the event under the headline “The First Magnificent Trans-oceanic Bombardment”, a rather ironic headline given the tragic fate that was to befall Nagasaki itself from the air eight years later. Karma Putrid.

In December 1937, after a brief stand-off, the Japanese army broke through the city walls of Nanjing and set about systematically killing and raping the population. Within four weeks, many thousands of Nanjing residents had been murdered (the chinese claim 300,000), often after rape and torture. The terrible events are chronicled without hyperbole in the excellent Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre, located just to the west of the city centre on one of the actual massacre burial grounds. Although the subject matter is grim, it is presented in a sensitive and professional manner, and this modern museum/memorial is a must-see if you come to Nanjing. We joined the long, silent, sober rows of normally animated and boisterous Chinese people who filed through the huge building. In one place a wall several stories high supports a stunning stack of thousands of indexed folders containing the evidence that was used in trials after the war to convict the worst of the war criminals involved in the planning and conduct of the massacre.

At the time of the Japanese attack there was a sizeable community of foreigners living in Nanking, and the Japanese, to a limited extent, respected the neutrality of these communities. This provided an opportunity for some of the foreigners to hide and shelter fleeing Chinese residents, and the efforts and personal risks taken by the former are detailed with gratitude in various displays in the museum. One in particular caught my eye because of its supreme irony. One of the most active and fearless foreigners to help the locals was a German citizen, and his efforts that saved many Chinese lives were recognized a year or two later in an ornate Certificate of Appreciation presented to him by the German Red Cross, and personally signed by no less than the leader of the German nation. Mr Adolf Hitler to be precise, who was himself soon to re-define evil. What would Oskar Schindler have made of this? It’s a strange world.

Nanjing has many large parks and gardens and today we caught the subway to the historically-significant Yuhuatai Park in the southern suburbs. This large park covers an area of nearly 400 acres and amongst all the attractive greenery and interesting pathways there are numerous monuments to various historic, revolutionary and heroic figures. Official sights in the park include The Tablet Pavilion With Emperor Qianlong’s Inscriptions, A Group Statue of Revolutionary Martyrs, The Tomb of the Troops Lost in the Revolution of 1911, the Eastern and Western Execution Grounds of Revolutionary Martyrs, The Tablet Inscribing Eunuchs’ Official Discussion, and The Spot Where Yang Bangyi Had His Chest Cut Open. We had better fortune than many who trod the grass here in decades past, thankfully emerging from the South Gate a pleasant hour or so later unscathed and intact. From there we strolled through a side-street lined with shops stocked with the freshest of produce before descending back into the subway to whiz under the full length of the city centre, popping up again just down the road from the Jingli where our bags were waiting to be packed for tomorrow’s departure from happy Nanjing.