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| China Impressions II - Tales of Three Cities |
Beijing  is China's preeminent city, hosting more travelers than any other city in China--and for good reason, since no other city offers so many marvels, ancient and modern. Where else in China (or in the world, for that matter) can you gorge yourself on crispy Peking duck, walk the Great Wall like a modern sentinel, crisscross the haunting expanses of Tiananmen Square, and freely explore the splendors of the Forbidden City, all in a day or two?
While serving as the capital for imperial dynasties from the Ming to the Qing, Beijing has had its pick of the empire's glorious creations, many of which it has guarded over the centuries. Beijing was the capital in the 13th century, when Kublai Khan built his palace there and Marco Polo first paid a visit. It reigned supreme from the 15th century, when the Ming rulers built the Forbidden City, to the 18th century, when the Manchu rulers built the Summer Palace. Beijing continued as the capital up to 1923, when the last of China's emperors was evicted from the Forbidden City. It was reanointed as the city of China's rulers in 1949, when Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China. No city is more important in recent Chinese history, and more of that history is on display here than anywhere else.
The Forbidden City still stands at the center of Beijing, its golden tiled roofs and vast white courtyards glittering in the sun like an ancient giant's crown. The Summer Palace has survived, too, at the northwest edge of the city, as has the Temple of Heaven to the south, along with dozens of delicate monuments, old temples, and the courtyard houses in little alleyways (called hutongs) that were once the hallmark of ordinary city life.
Add to this Beijing's and China's number-one attraction: the Great Wall, Asia's answer to the pyramids and China's paramount monument to its romantic and turbulent past. As the popular saying has it, "You haven't been to China if you haven't stood on the Great Wall."
Beijing's temples, parks, and historic sites all sing wonderfully and powerfully of the dream that was Old Cathay, but in the same hallowed space there's a new Beijing taking shape. Just outside the exquisite walls of Beijing's historic monuments, steel and concrete are steadily replacing silk and carved wood. This transition can be jarring. Beijing is transforming itself before our eyes-reborn as the capital of the most populous (and potentially most powerful) nation on Earth.
For some visitors, this reconstruction in the old capital is more a tragedy than a triumph, but the modern cityscape imparts to the city much of its energy. Construction projects tromp through this Beijing of the future like mechanical Godzillas, pounding antiquated neighborhoods into oblivion block by block. At dawn, the city parks are still filled with Beijingers sleepwalking through their old tai chi exercises, but the surrounding streets are now packed with millionaires as well as street sweepers, with Mercedes as well as bicycles, with enterprising touts as well as destitute beggars. Beijing today is two cities in one, a crazy scroll of skyscrapers and shacks, of Pizza Huts and teahouses, unwinding in a chaotic sprawl.
Beijing is in the midst of remaking itself on a scale that can scarcely be believed, and this rapid modernization against a backdrop of ancient treasures gives Beijing a wild East-West flavor that is exhilarating. It is a city with two faces, both of which are endlessly fascinating to the foreign traveler. With all its celebrated historical attractions, Beijing may well be the capital of China's past, but it is also the vibrant capital of China's future, and it is here that you can see in broad and determined strokes both what China has been and what it will become. [Frommers.com]
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Shanghai  If one simply counts heads, this is the biggest city in the biggest country on Earth. If one simply scans statistics, this is China's capital of commerce, industry, and finance. But numbers don't tell the whole Shanghai story. Shanghai has a colonial past more intense than that of any other city in China, save Hong Kong, and this legacy gives it a dramatic character, visible in the streets today. But the city is not only a museum of East meeting West on Chinese soil. Shanghai has overnight become one of the world's great modern capitals, the one city that best shows what the whole nation is becoming at the dawn of the 21st century. The very pulse of Shanghai is the pulse of Asia's future. Shanghai has not always been much of a delight to tour, but it is now.
During the 1990s, Shanghai was torn apart and rebuilt during the economic boom that shook China to its foundations. One in five of the world's high-lift cranes were at work in the streets of Shanghai, raising tower after glass-and-steel tower in the ruins. Shanghai resembled the largest construction site ever conceived, and it was not always a pretty sight for travelers. But this first great phase of modern reconstruction has passed, and a new, more vital Shanghai has emerged. It is a city that a visitor can comfortably enjoy and explore for the first time since those romantic days of the 1930s, when old Shanghai was a notorious playground for foreign adventurers and a free trade show for overseas taipans and exploiters. The landmarks of Shanghai's colonial period shine through for the first time since the Communists came to power 50 years ago and worked their own duller magic on the cityscape.
Today, there are large neighborhoods of foreign architecture, wonderful for a stroll, where Europeans, especially the French, once resided. Shanghai's great river of commerce, the Huangpu, is lined with a gallery of colonial architecture; known as the Bund, it's grander than any other in the East, and much of it was recently refurbished and is open to the curious visitor. The mansions, garden estates, country clubs, and cathedrals of the Westerners who made their fortunes here a century ago are scattered throughout the city, and there's even a synagogue, dating from the days of an unparalleled Jewish immigration to China. Shanghai's foreign legacy is epitomized by the Peace Hotel on the Bund, the 1929 creation of a Jewish millionaire, today a masterpiece of Art Deco--a relic of the Jazz Age. These are not the typical monuments of China, but they are typical of Shanghai.
The East has a Western flavor in Shanghai, but at the same time the creations of a strictly Chinese culture have not been erased. A walk through downtown turns up astounding traditional treasures: a teahouse that embodies all that was old China; a classical garden as superb as any in Beijing or Suzhou; an "old town" as quaint and chaotic as any in China; active temples and ancient pagodas; and a museum of Chinese art and artifacts that is universally acclaimed as China's best. Though the pace of new Shanghai rivals that of New York City and its nightlife and cafes now echo the sophistication of Paris, though the architecture and avenues recall 19th-century Europe rather than old Cathay, this is still a Chinese city to the core.
Shanghai is also a city for shoppers (Nanjing Road is the number-one shopping street in all of China), but it is especially the place for those who want to see the future of China. Across the mighty Huangpu River, which served as old Shanghai's eastern border, a truly new Shanghai is taking shape. Known as Pudong, this Shanghai East boasts its own modern attractions: the tallest hotel in the world, China's largest stock exchange, and one of the highest observation decks in Asia, the Pearl of the Orient TV Tower. Not to be outdone, old Shanghai has its own legions of new skyscrapers, too, and a booming collection of fine international restaurants, several of them taking over the rooftops of the colonial gems lining the Bund and the mansions that had gone to seed in Shanghai's French Quarter.
Incredibly crowded, densely packed, Shanghai is the raw center of China's commerce and industry. It has energy and confidence, and it has new dreams. Its polluted rivers are being cleaned up. Greenways and new parks are emerging. Historic neighborhoods, both Chinese and colonial, are being spared the bulldozer and transformed into avenues of shops and cafes. New theaters and cultural centers are attracting top performers from China and abroad.
Shanghai still has a long way to go to become the New York or Paris of China. It is not yet as prosperous as Hong Kong (its nearest rival), nor as international. But the raw complexity of Shanghai is its charm. Sipping a cocktail in a new French restaurant positioned high on the rooftops over the Bund, you can look across the river into the future of China, at the burgeoning Manhattan of skyscrapers in Pudong where a decade ago there was nothing but mud flats, rice fields, and village huts. Only in Shanghai are so many worlds--East and West, past and present--this elevated and pinched together, shoulder to shoulder, like a Picasso mural. This is present-day China on a grand scale, where you can breathe in the exhilaration of a new century for Asia. [Frommers.com]
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Guangzhou (Canton)  , It all began with the Silk Road, when some merchants transported silk and other luxuries by sea through the sheltered port of Guangzhou, a city in the present-day Guangdong province of Southeast China. From southeast Asia more merchants came to do business, selling pepper, nutmeg, and other spices, bird's nests for soup, and aromatic sandalwood for incense. Gradually they were joined by traders from farther afield: The Romans arrived in the 2nd century BC, followed by the Arabs in the 7th century AD, and the Portuguese in the 1500s. By the late 18th century, a host of European countries had set up trading houses in Guangzhou where they negotiated the purchase of tea (especially the British, who called Guangzhou "Canton," an anglicized version of the Portuguese cantão).
Tea became so important to the British that they soon needed much more than they were able to get in trade for manufactured goods and woolen cloth. So they took control of the Bengal opium market, and private British companies were soon making fortunes supplying opium to the Chinese in return for tea. The Chinese authorities tried to stop the opium trade, and in 1839 this resulted in the first of the Opium Wars. Defeated, the Chinese were forced to cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain and open treaty ports like Shanghai to foreign trade and influence.
Guangzhou lost its pivotal importance as an international trading hub and went into decline, during which time tens of thousands of Cantonese left in search of a better life. Among the scholars who found an education overseas was Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who led the movement to overthrow the Manchus that culminated in the 1911 Revolution. Guangzhou next became a hotbed of revolutionary zeal and a battleground between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists. Following the 1949 Revolution, the city reinstituted its biannual trade fairs (April and September), but it wasn't until the open-door policy of Deng Xiaoping in 1979 that the port city was able to resume its role as a commercial gateway to China.
Today Southeast China is at the center of the social and economic forces that are reshaping China. Because of its rapid modernization during the 1980s and '90s, many parts of Guangzhou no longer evoke the original easygoing port city whose skyline was dominated by a 7th-century minaret, a 10th-century pagoda, and a Ming dynasty tower. Today high-rise blocks and new highways dominate the old town, while new suburbs, bristling with skyscrapers and shopping malls, advance toward every horizon along new expressways - fed also by a new metro, a second railway terminal, and a modern sea terminal. Fortunately, the city has preserved some of its heritage in the splendid parks and busy temples, in some excellent museums, and in the colonial mansions on Shamian Island. [Fodors.com]
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