Xian, Shaanxi province, China

The city of Xian, about 1,200 kilometres south-west of Beijing, was China’s first capital. Around 200 BC, feudal warlord Qin became the first man to unify China and he immediately declared himself Emperor. Qin obviously had a fairly big opinion of himself, and 700,000 slaves were put to work for decades to construct a tomb fit for an Emperor, guarded by thousands of terra cotta warriors and horses. These were to protect Qin in the after-life. Each warrior's face is unique, and to our surprise one of them looked uncannily like Dick.

Qin was quite partial to big projects - he was also the man who started construction of the Great Wall of China. When Qin died he was buried in the tomb and many of the workers who hadn’t yet died were entombed with him. But barely a year or two later, enemies broke in, set it afire and went on a smashing spree. Amazingly, the site then remained forgotten and undisturbed for around two thousand years until the mid 1970s when farmers digging a well unearthed terra cotta pieces from the tomb below. One of the 20th century’s greatest archeological discoveries soon followed. Since then, many of the pieces have been carefully excavated and painstakingly restored, and are now displayed in the pits where they were discovered, at the fabulous Terra Cotta Warrior Museum about an hour by bus from Xian. The site was listed on the World Heritage Register in 1987, and is currently visited by about 20,000 people every day.

We visited the museum on Tuesday, the day after arriving in Xian on overnight Express Train Z19 from the Beijing West Railway Station. There’s quite a bit to see in Xian city itself too. It has an impressive Bell Tower and Drum Tower, both built around 1380 AD during the Ming Dynasty. We climbed both and listened to the bell and drum performances respectively given here throughout the day. The chime bells in the Bell Tower are replicas of those unearthed from Emperor Qin’s tomb.

Xian has a sizeable muslim community and we spent an afternoon and evening walking through a muslim neighbourhood where we inspected the excellent Xian Great Mosque, originally built in the 8th century AD during the Tang Dynasty. We had lamb kebabs and flatbread for dinner at a roadside café and Dick did a deal on some nice silk scarves in the nearby muslim merchandise market.

Xian has many significant archeological sites other than Qin’s tomb, but we had squeezed all we could into our available day and a half, and soon found ourselves heading out of Xian towards the airport to fly south.

Beijing, China

Our Air China flight from Hangzhou touched down at the huge new Beijing Capital Airport early Thursday afternoon. Beijing has several of the top tourist sights in the country and there’s plenty here to keep visitors occupied for a week or more, but we had only three days. Top of our list was the Forbidden City, the enclave of several former Emperors of China, their families, and the thousands of workers and hangers-on necessary to support their lifestyles. A lot of renovation and paint work have been done here over the past few years and the place is looking great. We spent a few hours on Friday with a million or two other visitors walking through building after building and courtyard after courtyard as we made our way through this grand site.

We also strolled through nearby Tiananmen Square, and Dick and Lee Tuan filed past the body of Mao Tse Tung in his mausoleum. The queue to the mausoleum snaked around the Square for about 5km but was mercifully fast-moving. Every 10 metres or so, attendants shouted instructions and quoted rules through megaphones. No skimpy clothing, no flippers (thongs), no cameras, no phones, no talking in the mausoleum, no large handbags etc. NO LARGE HANDBAGS!! Lee Tuan had a very large handbag, which from that point on we squashed in half and did our best to make look like a purse. But we were sprung barely a few steps from the entrance, with Mao’s body almost in sight. Having visited here before, I offered to be the evictee and was sent scurrying, handbag over shoulder, across the enormous cleared area in the centre of the Square, under the watchful gaze of a million eyes from the queue. What’s that westerner done to get thrown out?, I could hear them all thinking as I slinked my way towards the perimeter.

The crowds were even bigger at the Badaling section of the Great Wall of China on Saturday. We hired a car and driver to take us there, and a Guide also came. Actually, to call her a guide was a misnomer as she was quite useless. It turned out that she had never been to Badaling (the most visited section of the Wall) before, didn’t like walking, and was uncomfortable with heights. She was horrified when we told her how far we intended to walk and she kept trying to lead us off the Wall and back towards the car. She also continually asked other tourists for directions. We knew the place better than she did and constantly had to look out for her to make sure she didn’t get lost. Finally she said she could walk no more and we agreed the place where we would return to pick her up when we had finished.

On our way back to the Jade Garden Hotel in the city centre we stopped briefly at the Olympic Centre in the northern suburbs to admire the Birds Nest Stadium and Water Cube. We ended the day with a stroll through one of the few remaining Beijing Hutongs, old winding residential alleyways that were once mainstream but which have now been almost entirely replaced with wide avenues and modern apartment blocks.

One of our favourite places in Beijing is the Temple of Heaven Park. This sprawling, serene, manicured park is a magnet for local families and visitors and contains some great tree-lined avenues and structures, including arguably the most beautiful building in the whole of China, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Originally built in 1420 during the reign of Ming Emperor Yongle, the building has been redesigned a few times since then. These days it is a round structure covered with a triple roof clad with azure glazed tiles and topped with a golden sphere. We came to the Park on Sunday and spent a pleasant couple of hours wandering around. A young man introduced himself and asked if he could walk with us for awhile to practice his English conversation. Surprisingly, unlike most of his fellow students, he aspires not to be a businessman or international banker, but an artist.

And of course no visit to Peking would be complete without a Peking Duck dinner, which we enjoyed on the top floor of the Silk Market immediately after I had been tricked yet again by the cute but wily sales assistants in the clothing shops below.

Eclipsed in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China

While we were busy seeing the sights in Shanghai, the earth and moon continued on their paths towards a rare alignment on the morning of 22 July when the moon would totally block the sun over a narrow band across eastern China for nearly six minutes, the longest total solar eclipse anywhere in the world for 150 years. Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, 80 minutes by train to the west of Shanghai, was on the path of totality and it was to here that we headed when we left Shanghai on Monday.

Until the 6th century AD, Hangzhou was a small fishing village but it became a busy commercial centre following the expansion of the Grand Canal southward from the Yangtze. It prospered during the Tang Dynasty and rose to become the nation’s capital in the Song Dynasty. However the city’s fortunes suffered a bad reversal in the late 13th century when it was overrun by Kublai Khan’s Mongol hordes. But this didn’t stop Marco Polo describing Hangzhou as “without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world” when he passed through just a few years later.

The Hangzhou of today is no longer the most splendid city in the world but it remains a beautiful, green metropolis and certainly one of the most pleasant and visited cities in China. Hangzhou’s No. 1 jewel is its serene 65 square kilometre West Lake Park in the city centre. Beautifully landscaped, it attracts thousands of tourists daily who saunter around its shaded waterside promenades and along its winding garden paths. We spent a day doing exactly that on Tuesday, despite the uncomfortable heat and humidity at this time of year. We took a boat across the lake to a couple of small islands in the centre, visiting such sights as the Bamboo-lined Path Leading to Serenity and the Three Pools Mirroring the Moon.

This morning, eclipse day, we were up at 5.30am to check the weather. Unlike the previous days, the sky was blanketed with cloud, consistent with today’s weather forecast of thunder, lightning and rain. We dejectedly resigned ourselves to not seeing anything other than enveloping darkness when totality came. But our spirits lifted at 8.30 when the cloud cover thinned somewhat and the sun shone through, enabling us to see the moon begin to move across and ultimately block the sun entirely. The large crowd gathered around West Lake buzzed with excitement when totality came at 9.35am and the normally blazing sun was replaced by a corona-surrounded black disc that hung in the sky for 5.5 minutes, and which at this stage could be viewed with the naked eye. Then there was an eruption of Oohs and Ahs as the first shards of sunlight shot from the top of the disc, momentarily giving the appearance of a diamond ring before more light flooded back down and daylight returned instantly.

Given the ugly weather forecast, we felt very lucky to have seen what we had and we later adjourned to the Lakeview Restaurant for lunch, just in time to avoid the electrical storm and rain that swept in and lashed Hangzhou for the next hour. In the late afternoon, seeking respite from the unrelentingly oppressive weather outside, Dick introduced us to Shanghai Rummy and we played that for a couple of hours until it was time to return to the Lakeview for an eclipse celebration dinner in the 7th floor restaurant overlooking West Lake.

Mission accomplished in Hangzhou, we returned to our rooms in the lakeside Overseas Chinese Hotel and turned our thoughts to tomorrow’s flight north - to Peking.

Shanghai, China

We arrived in Hangzhou, China, at 11pm last Tuesday on a flight from Kuala Lumpur following an earlier flight that day from Penang to KL. In Hangzhou we made enquiries and preparations for our viewing of the solar eclipse on 22 July, then on Thursday morning caught a fast train to Shanghai to meet our American cousin Dick who was due to arrive from the USA in the early evening. Dick is a keen traveler and “eclipse chaser” and we agreed to meet in China, hopefully see the eclipse weather permitting, then show him around some of the sights in China for a couple of weeks.

Swine flu is a big topic in Asia at the moment and the airports in the region have installed walk-through passenger temperature scanners. Those travelers who create an orange to reddish image on the screen or who foolishly sniffle or sneeze as they pass are taken aside for closer examination and face the unhappy prospect of a 7-day enforced stay in a hotel or quarantine station. Such an outcome would ruin our eclipse viewing plans so it was with some trepidation that we hurried past the scanners, looking as cool and un-fevered as possible.

Ever ready to meet customer needs, a shop at the Kuala Lumpur airport was selling packets of “Bye-Fever”, a concoction apparently guaranteed to lower the body temperature for several hours and certainly long enough to get past the scanners. We didn’t buy any; I glanced up at the ceiling-mounted security camera and imagined men in white coats in the control room, rectal thermometers already in hand, peering down at the customers gathered furtively around the Bye-Fever and radioing instructions to the guards to round them up and bring them in for inspection. When we touched down in Hangzhou the Captain instructed everyone to stay in their seats as health officials would be coming aboard to take the temperature of each and every passenger. After a delay of several minutes the health officials, all wearing face-masks, came aboard and instructed everyone to stand, drop their daks and bend over.

Just kidding. What actually happened was that after a delay of several minutes the Captain announced that the officials had decided, after all, not to come aboard, and we were all free to leave the plane. Inside the terminal we came first to a long line of desks behind which stood face-masked health officials, and further back were a couple of men pacing up and down, wearing the sort of outfit I imagine you would if you were about to clock on to your regular shift in the plutonium reprocessing lab at the local nuclear power plant. Were they suspecting Ebola virus as well? But I shouldn’t make light of the situation – it was good to see such a careful, professional response to a serious public health issue. We handed over our swine flu declaration forms and the women who questioned us were reassured to learn that although we were Australians, we hadn’t been near the place for the past 10 days. They waved us through and we proceeded to customs.

At Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport, Dick emerged from Immigration just before 7pm after a long flight from Boston via San Francisco and stepped for the first time into the People’s Republic of China. We caught the magnetic levitation train back into the city centre, a journey of about 11 minutes rather than the usual hour in a taxi. It reaches a top speed of around 450 km/hr, a little disconcerting at first to realize you’re travelling at half the speed of a jumbo jet although only just a metre or two above the ground. Once in the city we checked into the New Harbour Service Apartments and later walked around the corner for dinner – we quickly skipped past the Oily Top Level Geese with Enterovirus on the menu and ordered roast duck, pork, noodles and green vegetables.

We spent a few days sightseeing in Shanghai, possibly the liveliest city in China and certainly the one with the most impressive, even slightly intimidating, clusters of high-rise apartments and office blocks. We visited the excellent modern Shanghai Museum in People’s Square and browsed through the shops along the Nanjing Pedestrian Mall that stretches all the way from People’s Square to the Bund, the latter a neighbourhood of elegant colonial era buildings that line the western bank of the Huangpu River. On the other side sit the soaring skyscrapers of the Pudong new economic zone. At night, both sides give impressive but quite different views of the river and Shanghai skyline. We also spent a few hours at the Yuyuan Garden and Bazaar. Suzhou, a city about two hours to the west, is reputed to have the finest classical gardens in China. This may be so, but for visitors without the time or inclination to go there, the Yuyuan Garden is almost as good and a must-see if you come to Shanghai. The nearby Bazaar is a sprawling, touristy market set inside classical reproduction buildings and is worth a browse too, particularly combined with a visit to the Garden.

One of the best aids to any visit to Shanghai is its great subway system. It’s gleaming, efficient, fast, easy to work out and inexpensive to use. Apart from the shopping malls, Shanghai streets are not particularly easy to walk around but the subway system makes travelling across this huge city a breeze.

We took a fascinating boat ride along the Huangpu River, initially passing the soaring Pudong skyscrapers, then the heavy industrial infrastructure that lines both sides of the river further upstream. We passed multiple power stations, shipyards, nests of dock cranes, freight ships and Chinese navy gunboats. Eventually the watercourse widened dramatically as we entered onto the Yangtze River just before it flowed into the East China Sea. Some of the water flowing past us had started its journey on the Tibet Plateau, 6,000 kilometres to the West.

Just an hour or two to the west of Shanghai are several “water” towns. These were established centuries ago and feature canals that snake through the towns and were used to transport goods and people. Today the only craft that ply these waters are small wooden tourist boats catering to the thousands of tourists who visit every day. On previous trips to China we visited Suzhou and Wuzhen. On Sunday we caught a bus to Tongli, another of the water villages that gets good visitor reports. It was a pleasant place but the weather was almost unbearable – the temperature was around 40 degrees C and the humidity was about 90%. Weather-wise it was one of the most uncomfortable days we’ve ever experienced and we didn’t spend a lot of time walking on the baked cobblestone streets and over the arched bridges along the canals.