The Far East: Day 10 - Reflections on China

Another hot day with temperatures peaking at 32C, combined with how tired I was after two days of quite a lot of walking and the prospect of a very long Sunday, led me to take Saturday pretty easy once again. I got some laundry done, and caught up on a few emails.

In the evening, we headed to Liqun, the best place to try the city's signature dish: Peking duck. The restaurant itself is near the centre, but it's down one of Beijing's traditional alleyways, or hutong, and it's hard to imagine anyone stumbling across it by accident.

The ducks are dried and then roasted on the spit over a real wooden fire: you can see them cooking as you come in. This is not crispy duck; it is roasted to a time-honoured recipe. It's served with hoisin sauce, cucumbers and spring onions; traditionally, one takes a few pieces of duck and a few vegetables into a wafer-thin pancake, wrap it into a parcel, and eat.

It was sublime; quite possibly the best meal I've had in decades. You haven't experienced duck until you've had proper local Peking duck.

Since this was my last day in China, I've decided to reflect on a few things about China before they become distant memories. Some of this is a bit random, but I hope you find it interesting.

Language: Mandarin Chinese is one of hundreds of languages in China: what makes Mandarin special is that it is taught nationwide as the de facto national language. Mandarin, or putonghua as the Chinese call it, is based on the native Beijing dialect. It's a difficult language to get used to speaking, mainly because of the tones: exactly how you stress a word changes its meaning completely.

What makes life more difficult is that, while in the major tourist attractions you can get by without much, if any, knowledge of Mandarin, getting *to* the tourist sites can be the problem since taxi drivers speak not one word of English. Getting anywhere thus requires having the Chinese characters of your destination written out to show the driver, and usually a phone number for the taxi driver to talk to the restaurant or whatever to figure out how to get you there. Fortunately I got along alright, only having to venture into a taxi on my own twice.

Roads and taxis: If you think you've seen bad driving, you haven't. Not until you've been to Beijing and witnessed the sheer terror-inducing ride in a Beijing taxi can you understand the madness.

It is, quite literally, every man for himself. The concept of lane discipline is only obeyed when moving at high speed, and then not even very well. Use of indicators is scant; use of horns is apparently mandatory. No-one has *any* patience: drivers will overtake indiscriminately on whatever side they see a space, and cars cut in quite happily without warning. I am amazed that I didn't see any accidents.

This is, at least in part, down to the big but poorly designed roads. Junctions are invariably too small, so everything's too compressed and the bends end up being insanely tight. There are bus stops on off-slips, so buses are cutting back onto the highway across traffic going off. It's quite common to have on-slips and off-slips pretty much crossing each other, and in any case slip roads usually aren't very long, so cars are expected to accelerate and decelerate in no distance at all. 

That might not be so bad if there weren't much traffic. But with 22 million citizens and 9 million alien residents in Beijing, there is a huge amount of traffic. There are four huge ring roads: the largest of these is about 80 miles long, which is only 2/3 the length of the M25, giving an indication of how dense the city's population is.

It's even worse at street level, especially as a pedestrian. The American rule of permitting right turns (Brits, think left) on red lights means that even when there is a green man you can't trust it. The traffic is even more undisciplined here and you really need your wits about you just to cross a road.

Subway: By contrast the subway is a model of efficinency. The main problem with the subway is that it's not dense enough yet - there aren't quite enough lines to be able to get everywhere as easily as you might like, with a particularly noticeable lack of diagonal lines.

What puzzled me about the subway was the behaviour of passengers. Every interchange station, where two lines meet, was teeming with passengers and huge numbers seemed to be changing trains. However, the stations in between were quiet, almost eerily so: few people got off or on, and the train remained full of people. So where is everyone going? Maybe the answer is they're going to the suburbs, but it seems unlikely; even getting off or on at Tian'anmen West or East, which should surely be the two busiest stations, was a fairly quiet affair.

There are a huge number of subway lines under construction, as well as high-speed rail lines and motorways, so the situation will undoubtedly be different in a few short years. Indeed, it seems the only constant in Beijing is change.

The 2008 Olympics: The Olympics have undoubtedly left a huge legacy in Beijing, though not all of it is good. On the one hand it vastly accelerated the pace of investment into the transport network, which is undoubtedly a good thing. But the stadiums lie empty, as vast white elephants, as do neighbouring hotels built for the games. I cannot believe that Beijingers really needed so many new hotels.

The vast array of western shops that were built have not done good business, and many are shutting down to make way for the kind of family-run businesses that would have been there before they were simply bulldozed. I guess this is good, but it would have been better if they'd never been demolished in the first place. Anyone who's ever complained about British planning law being too slow need only look to Beijing to see the effects and dangers of having an inadequate planning system.

Money: The Chinese currency, officially known as the yuan but usually called either renminbi or kuai, trades at around Y9 to £1. However, almost everything is done with notes: the highest-value coin is a Y1 piece, which is worth about 10p, but that's rarely used. Instead, Y1 notes are commonplace, with the highest denomination I've seen being Y100. It's quite nice not having to fiddle about with coins too often; on the other hand I have a wallet stuffed full of notes whose combined worth is at most £20.

Not that I've had to spend much: I'm not paying for accommodation, so all I've been spending is for tourism and the occasional meal - though my hosts insisted on paying too often. It will be a bit of a shock getting to Japan and having to spend money hand over fist.

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I am sad to be leaving Beijing, but I have had a great week looking round no fewer than five World Heritage Sites, and all while in the hospitality of my cousin. I will admit that, left to my own devices, I would have been unlikely to consider visiting China: it's simply too big and too scary. But having the advice of a local made all the difference.

On the other hand, I am greatly looking forward to exploring Japan by train: I have wanted to go on the bullet trains for years and years, and I can't wait!