Ningbo, Zhejiang, China

The Chinese have a penchant for monster civil works projects, like the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, and the Qinghai to Tibet railway line.  And that’s without even mentioning the Great Wall, which I now have.  And now there’s another to add to the impressive list, at Ningbo in Zhejiang province near China’s east coast, a couple of hundred kilometres south of Shanghai.  There the coastline cuts a long way inland, forming the huge Hangzhou Bay.  Previously the large volume of freight traffic moving between Ningbo and Shanghai had to take the tortuously slow journey around the bay, but the Chinese fixed that by building the longest sea bridge in the world, 36 km long, that cuts across the sea and takes two hours off the trip.  After a five year construction period during which several large-scale engineering innovations had to be nutted out, the bridge opened in mid 2008, designed to last for a hundred years and to withstand the typhoons that whip the Bay into a wild frenzy in the wet season.

Fortunately it was merely windy when we crossed the bridge today in a circuit from Hangzhou to Ningbo, across the Bay, and then back to Hangzhou.  It was my day off before my second teaching stint beginning tomorrow in Hangzhou.  My first was last week in Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, about two hours inland from Shanghai.  Wuxi is a prosperous city, much of it undergoing redevelopment, and with pleasant lakeside parks and gardens.  Pity about the air pollution though.  Only a few historical remnants remain, along the “Grand Canal” that once cut across China from Beijing to Hangzhou.  Wuxi’s also home to one of China’s largest Buddhist complexes at nearby Lingshan.  We’ve never seen such grand Buddhist buildings and structures – though the place has a definite theme park feel to it.  But bravely resisting any kitsch makeovers is a 1,400 year old gingko tree near Xiangfu Temple, now propped up by the arboreal equivalent of a walking frame.

When it came time to move on to Hangzhou, that didn’t take long on the shiny fast train we boarded.  It scooted along at 340 km per hour.