Open any history book or article about Shanghai and you’ll probably read something condescending along the lines of “Shanghai was a backwater fishing village until the foreigners came in the 19th century.” And it evokes a visual image of fishermen on the banks of an empty yet huge river delta, ready to be modeled by […]
Chinese characters allow for elegant naming. Just take a character from each destination and add what it is. The highway from Jiading to Songjiang: 嘉松公路 (JiaSong Highway). The bridge from Suzhou to Nantong: 苏通桥 (SuTong Bridge). And there’s the HuiHang Ancient Road (微杭古道). The Hui is from Huizhou (徽州) in the Anhui province, the Hang […]
A friend told me her parents, during the 70s, buried gold jewelry to hide it from the Red Guards. Really deep in the ground. They dug for it decades later but couldn’t find it. Their house is now set to be demolished, so they’re about to make a final dig, and see if they can […]
When you take a PCR test in China, it’ll take 3 to 12 hours before the result comes out, so before our trip to the Shandong province, I several tests in Shanghai to ensure I always had a 24-hour result when I left my living compound, took the train to Suzhou, and to take the […]
We saw plenty of cicadas in the forest and Weihai — louder and bigger than in Shanghai. In many parts of Shandong, cicadas are eaten, and we spotted several people ‘angling’ for them — using a rod with some dough on the top — to be taken home to be fried. Everyone asked said they’re […]
After a few days in rural Shandong, Weihai (威海) hits different immediately as we get off the train — people and suitcases everywhere. It’s full of an obvious type of people: tourists. And immediately I wonder if the people in those rural areas who cited covid for the lack of tourism are just wrong, and […]
The Great Wall of China was built over centuries and one of the oldest segments ran through the Shandong province, from Jinan (济南) to Qingdao (青岛): Great Wall of Qi (齐长城). It lacks the fame of the Great Wall in Beijing built in the Ming Dynasty (this is the one that comes to your mind […]