一个英国佬眼中的南京——COPY FROM 分享

南京。

For those not wanting to read the long version. I went to Nanjing. It was nice. There was lots of history stuff and western food. I met up with some British friends. There are pretty photos below. The end.
For those more intrepid and with more time to kill, read on….
I haven’t updated my blog for a while simply because nothing very interesting has happened. I taught lessons and got into a routine. I showed my students clips of Shaun of the Dead and V for Vendetta for Halloween and Bonfire Night respectively and learnt some amusing Chinese idioms. This week however my students had three days of mid-term exams which sucked for them but was great for me as I had five days off to travel! The more astute of you will have realised from the photos below and the title of this post that I visited Nanjing, the city formerly known as Nanking.
Nanjing is an eight hour train ride north-east from Jiujiang. It’s name literally means Southern Capital. This is because it has been at several points throughout history the capital of China, often alternating with Beijing which, as you can guess, means Northern Capital. This means the city has a long and fascinating history from ancient emperors to the Chinese civil war to the industrial present. This makes it a prime example of something I’ve noticed extensively in my time here. Pretty much everything I see and experience can fit neatly into one of three categories, imperial historic China, Maoist China or modern China. The divide is really quite sheer.
I arrived at 7am on an old sleeper train at Nanjing station. I then took the brand spanking new metro to my hostel. The metro system there really is swish and also disturbingly cheap. It costs 20p a journey, I didn’t spend more than £2 on public transport my entire stay! For this price you even get full mobile signal in the stations and on the trains, London Underground take note. I dread to think how much the system is subsidised by.
After dumping my stuff I hightailed it to the ‘Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders’. The only thing the city is famous for in the west is the ‘Rape of Nanking’. This was the horrifically brutal first two months of the Japanese occupation of the city in 1937 when an estimated 300,000 Chinese people were slaughtered and around 20,000 women of all ages were raped. Pretty much every imaginable atrocity was performed by the Japanese Imperial army during this period. Some have even termed it the second holocaust of the second world war. This grand, beautiful and peaceful memorial was erected in 1985 and contains one of China’s best museums.
I found the memorial fascinating on two levels. The events memorialised show the bestial depravity humanity is capable of and remain a stark reminder of the horrors of war and the dangers of armies left to run amok. The most horrific thing I read was about two Japanese officers who raced to be the first to kill 100 Chinese citizens. They reached 105 and 106 but they didn’t know who’d reached 100 first so they just casually upped the competition to 150.
The memorial itself though also gave a rich insight into the Chinese approach to history and foreign policy mindset. The museum’s epilogue photographed below was particularly fascinating. It was also interesting to visit the place and read all the high language of peace and reconciliation between China and Japan just after the recent spat over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands.
The memorial also praises 22 members of Nanjing’s international community at the time who saved tens of thousands of refugees by setting up an international safety zone. Although this was extensively ignored by the Japanese troops it still saved countless lives from the slaughter. The leader of the safety zone organising committee was a German businessman, John Rabe, who worked for Siemens in the city. He was also a member of the Nazi party and was personally awarded by Hitler for his humanitarianism during the massacre. I don’t know of many nazis who have been exalted for saving the lives of thousands of innocents.
After the memorial I went to a traditional tea-house themed restaurant recommended by my Lonely Planet guide. There I had pigeon and mushroom soup, a local delicacy I believe. I then spent the afternoon wandering the nearby Xuanwu Lake park. This was an immaculately maintained park spread across several islands in a large lake. The weather was glorious and the park beautiful. I wandered around the lake until one of my fellow British council friends finished his lessons for the day. With weary feet I headed into the centre of the city where we ate more traditional Nanjing food followed by genuine Italian ice cream….such good ice cream….
The following morning I continued the western culinary trend by eating a full English breakfast. It wasn’t ‘full’ in all honesty, there was a distinct lack of baked beans, hash browns and black pudding but it was an English breakfast nevertheless.
This brief western excursion quickly ended as I spent the morning visiting the Confucius temple. Confucius is kind of a big deal here, there’s even a big statue of him in my school. His philosophy still heavily influences thought here, much as Aristotle and Plato’s influences ours. The temple had some beautiful classical chinese architecture, some interesting signs on the history of Confucius and a nice garden. Pretty standard Chinese historic fare.
I then visited the Imperial Examinations Museum next door. For hundreds of years the huge bureaucracy of China has chosen its civil servants using an incredibly difficult and arduous exam. At one point the exam took 9 days and required intimate knowledge of classic Confucian texts, political philosophy and even agricultural science. It also required impeccable skills in calligraphy and poetry. Contenders from all over the empire came to Nanjing after years of solitary study to pass the exam. They were crammed into rows and rows of tiny rooms with a thin bench and a small desk. They did not leave for days and did not even stop to eat. Cheating was rife, roofs leaked and occasionally fires broke out trapping examinees. Many failed but if you exceeded you could be exalted to a high position with wealth and power. Thus even a relatively poor but hard working student could potentially become great. It seems China hasn’t forgotten it’s tradition of arduous exams as my students face a sadly not very dissimilar fate.
After this I met with some other British councilers who were also visiting for a few days. We visited a massive school two of my Nanjing colleagues taught at. It had half as many students as my school but was over four times larger. It also has the best high school softball team in China apparently. We had a very British evening; played a bit of footy and then drank in a cheap bar. A fight even had to be broken up by the police, how nostalgic.
Friday was a bit of a failure of a day. I arose late and it was raining. I visited the Zhonghua Gate in the early morning. This massive bit of masonry is one of the best preserved parts of the giant city wall that once surrounded the city in the Ming dynasty. The characters on the gate were drawn by Chiang Kai-shek which was pretty cool but the rain meant you couldn’t see very far and dampened any excitement over Chinese bricks I might have had.
I next attempted to visit the recommended Nanjing Museum. Apparently it is famous for its use of Engrish/Chinglish, i.e. very bad Chinese translations of English. However after traipsing half way across the city and following the signs that pointed me there I was unable to locate the museum. I asked a nearby stall owner where the museum was and he pointed at the massive construction site opposite (reblogged from Dan Knight below) and told me ‘没开’ which means ‘not open’. Damn straight it wasn’t open, it didn’t even exist anymore.
I then tried to find the ruins of Nanjing’s equivalent of the Forbidden City to no avail. I got myself completely lost so grabbed the metro into the city. It was raining pretty bad at this point so I took shelter in a Costa coffee I stumbled across and spent nearly two hours drinking coffee and reading up on quantitative financial mathematics on my phone. As you do…
I had arranged to meet the British councilers for dinner but when I arrived at their station in the suburbs I discovered I’d bought the wrong ticket. I managed to explain my predicament to a nearby policeman by holding up my ticket and shouting ‘不对’, which means not correct (I think). After escaping the station we then had to wait for English corner to finish. Then we had to wait some more for some people from Suzhou to arrive. This all took longer than expected so by the time we arrived at the restaurant at about 9.30pm it was closed. As was every other eating establishment in the surrounding area, people like to eat early here. We managed to find some grub and went to an expat bar to get some cocktails.
It was really good catching up with the others and comparing our various situations. I definitely have the largest class sizes and I seem to teach more hours than nearly everyone however I am not required to do anything else whereas lots of the others are always being asked to organise random activities. I’m also grateful for my location as I think it’s just the right mix of developed so I’m not in the sticks but not so developed to prevent me getting a true experience of Chinese life and culture.
We ended up staying up so late I missed the train home so crashed at one of the Nanjingers. In the morning I had to dash back to my hostel to check out on time and avoid paying for an extra day. I made it just in time thankfully.
The afternoon that followed was unexpectedly random but also an endearing example of Chinese hospitality. As I was desperately trying to pack, a random Chinese dude, who’d just arrived in the city and was taking over my bed in the dorm, sparked up a conversation. He was visiting the city as well and had the afternoon free as he was meeting his friend that evening. He asked if I wanted to have lunch with him. There is an infamous Nanjing dish, duck blood soup; it was recommended by Lonely Planet and not being one to try something new I wanted to give it a go. My new Chinese associate, Ping, proved useful in ascertaining where we could try this delicacy. It was pretty tasty in all honesty and surprisingly unbloody. The blood was more in the form of black pudding than liquid in the soup thankfully. Ping and I bonded over lunch and I invited him to join me for the afternoon.
After our cultural culinary experience we headed to Zijin Mountain scenic area (it’s sounds much better in Chinese). There we met a Nanjing local who I’d been put in contact with. More precisely I know Matt who I teach with who knows his Chinese professor who is from Jiujiang and knows an English teacher from one of the other schools here, who Matt’s professor asked to look after us, who knows a friend whose husband works in Nanjing who in turn has a friend who speaks English. This last person, Mr Ma, had been given my phone number and had offered to show me round. So I turn up at a metro station to meet a man I do not know with another guy I literally just met. Neither of them thought this was weird. This is China.
Mr Ma is a teacher at a Chinese naval college. He teaches naval history so he was an excellent guide to the historic Zijin mountain. This mountain hosts two particular historic sites: the Ming Xiaoling tomb and Dr Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum. The first is the grand historic resting place of the first Ming emperor, the second is the equally grand but much more modern resting place of the first President of the Republic of China.
Ming Xiaoling’s tomb is reminiscent of the forbidden city. This is because it is a mock palace with all the necessary buildings even though no one ever lived there. It was fully intended as a testament to his power and wealth. It was originally guarded by 5000 troops and took 24 years to build. Some gravestone huh? There is a long path up to the mausoleum in the shape of Ursa Major (the big dipper to the less pretentious). This is lined by flowers, trees and statues of animals and soldiers. It really was beautiful.
Dr Sun’s mausoleum is no less grand. It is a combination of traditional imperial and modern architecture with a wide long set of stairs up through two formidable gates to the grandiose tomb at the top. The whole area is in the shape of a bell for some symbolic reason I forget. It is interesting to think this is the final resting place of the man held responsible for overthrowing the Chinese emperor and ending the monarchy. The close proximity of the tombs of these two historic figures I found interesting. The Chinese tradition of glorifying their leaders to the state of almost demigods has a long pedigree.
After all this there was only time to quickly grab some KFC before another 8 hour train journey musically accompanied by snoring old men and crying babies.
So that was my trip to Nanjing. Thank you for reading this ramble.