Visiting Wuhan: Gilded Water Towers

“Traveling for work is odd. There’s an element of exhaustion, often nothing feels real and the luck of combining earnings with exploration feels a tad too good to be true.” -Old Sean

A Beijing Return

After a couple of weeks vacationing in Seoul, South Korea, I’ve returned once more to China. Originally, I left China in an attempt to avoid deportation, a contingency plan that was rendered moot after my Beijing company rehired me.

My new job involves a lot more travel. I’ll be moving from place to place within China, verifying franchise locations for my company. And though I’ll be traveling much more frequently, I’ll continuously return to Beijing for paperwork, debriefings, normal English teaching and to see the friends I’ve made here.

An Overview of the Past

Since arriving in the Far East, I’ve been flung around a lot. Within China, I’ve seen much of Sichuan, Chongqing, Beijing, Tianjin, Jiuzhaigou, Chengdu and a few smaller settlements.

I’ve also been lucky enough to travel abroad a bit further. ’ve thrown myself over to Sri Lanka for some explorations.  And South Korea was a wonderful treat. 

But overall, I’ve mostly managed to stay rooted within the Middle Kingdom.  

That being said, China is gargantuan.  It’s one of the oldest and largest countries on the face of the Earth, with one of the three most diverse biospheres on the planet.  It has history compounded upon itself. Additionally, it has, for virtually all of recorded history, been some sort of regional if not global superpower. 

So I have a lot more to still explore. 

Based in Beijing

In Beijing I’ve spent considerable time and effort learning to love the city.  I’ve joined a gym with members I can’t talk to. I’ve gone clubbing by drinking at a concealed speakeasy, with wall-moving, Scooby-Doo-level bars secret panels. I’ve also visited obscure restaurants, such as Paulaner Brauhaus, the Whisper Bar, Mr. Shi’s Dumplings, and Zhang Mama. 

Furthermore, I’ve seen the more popular zone in Beijing. I’ve visited the glorious Temple of Heaven and various temples during meandering hikes to Sanlitun. With a few expat friends, I’ve visited the enormous plazas around the Olympic Bird Nest. 

With Christmas celebrations coming up, I’ve been assigned to finish a couple of jobs before the holidays truly kick in.

To the Lakes

But Beijing wasn’t my sole recent destination in China. 

My first new job assignment involved visiting Wuhan, China. My company was considering funding and franchising with a series of schools in the area. It was my first assignment upon returning to China.

I should mention at this point that I was wholly unqualified for this work. I’ve never worked in any franchising department before. Industry appraisal is not a skillset I offer. And I was completely unable to read the various Mandarin documents sent to me for review.

I arrived in Wuhan and met up with a woman named Li, who was happy to show me around the area. Li brought me to the school I would be observing, which was located inside an enormous supermall. There were layers of white walls bathed in florescent lights with enormous curtains of ivy tumbling towards floors below.

I was seated inside the school, where glass rooms held squads of young children practicing after-school English lessons. I sat in to observe the teachers, writing down notations, testing the students’ levels and offering additional mini lessons when asked.

The Wuhan Pitch

When lessons were over for the day, the English-speaking staff members offered to show me around Wuhan. I dropped off my luggage in a hotel and got the chance to see large swaths of the city.

I was clearly being schmoozed. The teaching staff of Wuhan brought me to a fancy dumplings restaurant and then brought me past a popular plaza decorated in a glowing Christmas tree made entirely of enormous, multi-colored balloons.

I was then brought to a couple of nice bars, where a variety of small cups with alcohol rotated past on a huge Lazy-Susan table. The drinks, which were sweet, piled up quickly. By the time I returned to my hotel by bike, I was having trouble staying on the sidewalk.

Visiting Wuhan Sights

The following day, I had the majority of the morning and afternoon to myself. The school asked to to attend a second location, but all the classes were still after-school extracurricular language lessons. I wouldn’t be required to arrive and observe until the normal school day was over.

Visiting Wuhan can be a little tricky, since the city isn’t built on a grid. Wuhan is a waterway supercity, divided by the Yangtze and Han Rivers. As a result, everything is accented by lakes, ponds, rivers, bridges and other water features. Everywhere I went, there was a new body of water reflecting white light from a clouded sky.

The first thing I wished to see was the legendary Yellow Crane Tower, one of the top symbols of the city.

It’s impossible to miss, since there are billboards advertising it throughout the city. Additionally, much of the downtown area souvenir shops promote the tower for tourists visiting Wuhan. The Tower itself is the end-piece of a rather large park area filled with memorials and some other temple attractions.

The plaza area and the tower itself are quite gorgeous. The yellowish roofs of the pagoda structure are flanked by smaller buildings and a large whirlpool of tourists around the base. Entry is a little expensive, around 65 yuan, but the crowds made visiting somewhat unpleasant.

Museum Moments

I ended up spending an hour exploring the beautiful grounds before wandering away. I next made my way to the Hubei Provincial Museum. The museum is famous in China, and one of my coworkers in Beijing recommended that I visit.

It turned out that I was lucky to be carrying around my passport, since the Museum security required I show it before entering. I was doubly lucky once I got inside, since a fair number of the exhibits have English translations.

The museum is full of unique artifacts, including bronze bells with odd rivets, pulled from an intact tomb. There are also deformed, fossilized skulls, ornate vases and long, softly-lit displays of paintings, calligraphy and ceramics. Many of the exhibits are of vital importance to Chinese culture. They are forbidden to be displayed abroad.

The Sword of Goujian

However, the famed centerpiece of the museum is the legendary Sword of Goujian. The blade was found among 2,000 other relics during the excavation of a series underwater tombs. The tombs had been underwater for over a thousand years and buried for over 2,500. However, the blade was pristine. The copper blade, one of the last relics of the nearly mythological Spring and Autumn Period (771 to 403 BCE), remained sharp and untarnished.

The blade, in a word, is supremely cool. It’s a dark gold-bronze color with an impressively detailed repeating rhombus pattern. The stylized guard is inlaid with blue and turquoise decorations. The writing on the blade has eight characters in a language called bird-worm sealed (or seal?) script, marking the sword as the personal blade of the King of Yue. It is thought the blade belonged to the legendary King Goujian, who ruled the Kingdom of Yue from 496 to 465 BC.

The blade was bizarre to see, something almost surreal, plucked out of the river of time and dropped into a modern realm.

Amongst the City

 After touring the museum, I found myself some lunch, munching on steamed buns in a small park while overlooking the sparkling, slightly choppy waters of Dong Lake.

Afterwards, it was time for me to get to work. I took a rideshare to the next school location and observed several more classes, received more paperwork I couldn’t read and interviewed various teachers. I was asked to teach a couple of lessons, one as a guest for the children and another as a training session for the teacher. While this was technically outside my responsibilities, I didn’t mind.

I finished the evening with Li, who picked me up to sample foods in the Wuhan Night Market.

A Final Day

For my last day visiting Wuhan, I attended early weekend classes. Before heading into work, I had about an hour where I visited the immense Guiyuan Buddhist Temple. The temple itself is a typical Chinese pagoda. But the figure at the temple is impressive. A massively tall statue of a serene, hooded Buddha with two faces looking opposite directions stands with a wreath of divine flames spiraling around his head(s).

Once I got to the third school location, I spent the day appraising classes, joining the school’s employees for lunch, reading some of their curriculum and obtaining even more paperwork I couldn’t read. The school was nice enough to get the children together for a short performance, which they had done earlier as a Christmas show for the parents.

The signing was in English and it was shrill and wildly off-tempo. But I was hired in China as an English teacher. If I’m not listening to shrill English during the holiday seasons, I’m probably not doing my job.

One the singing was done, I was invited to an early dinner eating Hot Pot. After that, I gathered my small backpack and returned to the airport. My time visiting Wuhan was somewhat frantic, trying to cram in work and tourist activities at once. I’ll be happy to rest back in Beijing.

Once in Beijing, I’ll be sorting through the company reports with a translator before providing my slightly-unqualified recommendation to my boss.

So back to Beijing.

Until the next trip,

Best regards and excellent trails,

Old Sean

Written December 14th, 2017

Looking for amazing things to do when visiting Wuhan, China? Take a look at the Leftfade Trails destination recommendations for the area.

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