02 May 2024

China

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The Great Makeover of China

From strolling on a 2,000 year old wall to hurling along at 268mph on a train (not to mention seeing a sex change for poplars), Sarah Lucas charts China's countdown towards this summer's Olympics

1 Panorama of progress 2 The wondorous Great Wall 3 Terracotta Warriors

TRAVELLING AT 286 MPH, it takes seven minutes for Shanghai’s Maglev Express to whizz you from Pudong Airport to the centre of town.

Propelled by the forces of magnetism, the train is an accurate metaphor for the pace of change in China as it hurtles along the fastest route to economic expansion the world has seen.

Skyscrapers are shooting up like Japanese knotweed, old narrow alleyways, hutongs, are being demolished and female poplar trees in Beijing are having a sex-change so their fluffy white pollen doesn’t add to the usually polluted air. All the stops are being pulled out for this August’s Beijing Olympics.

To get a flavour of this vast, contradictory country, my friend Sandy and I took a 12-day trip from Shanghai to Beijing, which included a four-night cruise along the Yangtze River.

In Shanghai, where more than 17-million people live, competing for space in narrow streets, flats the size of a double bed and steamy restaurants, we climbed to the top of the legendary Peace Hotel, where Noel Coward wrote Private Lives, to find a room with a view.

Below, along the Bund, the riverfront business centre, skyscrapers from the past echo Art Deco Europe. More recent arrivals bloom like magnolias. Opposite, on the east bank of the Huangpu River, lies Pudong. Fifteen years ago this was the roughest part of town. Now, old agricultural land is buried beneath a smart, new financial district, dominated by Shanghai’s most conspicuous landmark, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower.

Drive to be the best

The city is like a film on fast forward. At the Lyceum Theatre, a troop of acrobats left me dumbstruck. Young men hurled themselves as fast as pistol shots, backwards through hoops. Tiny girls balanced on a set of chairs more precariously angled than the Tower of Pisa – trained by blood, sweat, tears and China’s relentless drive to be best.

There were about 150 people, mainly Americans, on our tour. We flew from Shanghai to board the Viking Century Sky at Maoping. She was moored in sight of the Three Gorges Dam, a hugely controversial project on China’s ‘river of life’ the Yangtze.

Naturally, it’s the largest hydro-power station in the world, built to control flooding and supply Beijing with water. Some 1.3-million people were ‘relocated’, as their present and past disappeared under water. While young local tour guides delivered the same script about how happy they were to live in spacious new apartments, all seemingly with a Yangtze view, there had been difficulties with elderly farmers, prised away from their land and families to live in city high-rises.

Though there’s less of the Three Gorges, 150 miles of imposing limestone ridges, than there was, the landscape is impressive.

The sun is said to appear so rarely dogs bark at it but we were fortunate.

A silver-grey light revealed mistshrouded mountains, steeply terraced fields and the occasional pagoda. But for scenic splendour, the Lesser Three Gorges takes some beating.

We boarded a smaller boat and sailed under Dragon Gate Bridge into the quiet Da Ning River. Towering canyons, with mushroom-shaped peaks, flank the waters. Chattering rhesus monkeys cling to sheer cliffs.

Life on board Viking Century Sky was comfortable and, like the rest of the trip, extremely well organised. The Chinese staff were so well trained they anticipated your needs before you’d even thought of them.

We went to Chinese lessons and were temporarily proficient in ‘not today, thank you’.

We moored at Chongqing, an industrial metropolis, where the smog is so thick it catches your throat, to see pandas. Lolling on their backs at Chongqing Zoo, they pickily munch at the tips of a particular kind of bamboo.

Given they’re anti-social and can’t see very well, it was surprising one of them had produced an offspring.

But there he was, six months old, crashing into his water bowl and falling over a lot.

Two thousand years ago China’s xenophobic first emperor, Qinshihuang, forced through large-scale projects, such as the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army (part of which is currently on display at the British Museum in London) with the same iron-fist determination as Mao did his Great Leap Forward.

We flew to Xian to see the vast army of warriors, archers and infantrymen intended to guard the tyrant’s tomb. Only 2,000 out of 6,000 have been excavated so far.

Thousands of visitors marvel at them each day.

Many more puff along the Great Wall of China, built expressly to keep the rest of the world out. A 6,000-mile long symbol of Qinshihuang’s paranoia, the wall stretched across China’s northern frontier like a dragon’s spine.

Tourism and politics are one

He would have been appalled by the wobbly Olympic logo at Badaling, the busiest section, proclaiming ‘One World, One Dream’.

If Shanghai is the financial centre of China, Beijing, a 46-mile coach ride from the Great Wall, is the cultural, educational and political centre.

While it’s officially glorious to be an entrepreneur, old habits die hard. In Tiananmen Square, scene of the 1989 massacre not taught in schools, we experienced state discomfort when a kite-maker in our group started to unfurl a red kite bearing the words ‘I love China’ in Chinese characters.

‘No!’ said a soldier. ‘No kites with slogans!’ Mao banned kites and, on the far side, his portrait remains prominent.

China is developing so quickly they say the national bird is the crane.

But, while luxury hotels spring up like dragon’s teeth, you can’t drink the water and people still spit in the streets.

In a rare free moment, our guide, Aihua, took us to a karaoke bar. His smooth Unchained Melody won the popular vote. Our companionable tour offered a glimpse of classic China and of a China where tourism and politics are one, limbering up for the Olympics.

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