“Rare are the artworks who can tastefully combine ancient icons in modern formats. The creators are commendable for anchoring the past while shoring up the future.” – Old Sean
Another Asia Round
I love capitalizing on travel time.
With Shanghai off the bucket list, I made a point of visiting nearby Nanjing next. These aren’t exactly huge trips I’m making; just little two day jaunts. My Sunday workday is technically still a half-day, so I can afford, time-wise, to occasionally hop around a bit.
Now, to head off some confusion, Nanjing and Nanking are the same place with different spellings. But my train ticket into the city said Nanjing, so I’ll be spelling it that way from here on.
Nanjing has a dubious claim to fame on the world stage, though its historical iconography isn’t a happy one. Despite being an ancient city and one of China’s four great capitals with a compellingly long history, modern Nanjing is best known for its tragedy. As one of the retreating “capital cities” China gradually used to move inland, Nanjing was an early casualty in the Japanese-Chinese Pacific Theatre during WWII. The Rape of Nanjing, as it came to be known, is the stuff of utter nightmares and a lasting fuel for animosity between China and Japan.
Regardless, I wasn’t in the city for the historical horrors. I was there to lounge.
Recreated World Wonders
I ended up flying into Shanghai, meeting up with my friend Emily before taking the train into Nanjing. It’s a really short ride, only an hour which I slept through. The first sight seen are some abstract wavy buildings with parallel white curves lounging outside the train station.
The first (and really only) major tourist thing I wanted to do was visit the Grand Bao’en Temple.
This is a truly unique attraction in terms of its contemporary nature. Created as a reconstruction of the Ancient World Wonder, the Ming-Dynasty Porcelain Tower, the Temple is a large courtyard surrounded by a neo-Buddhism museum. The Museum hallways are absolutely worth a walk-through, with modern arts styles melded with ancient Buddhist icons.
The ground is cut away to clear glass, revealing the original ancient foundations beneath, alongside chips of ancient, glazed pottery on the dusty brown stone. The walls are alit with soft-lit statues and entire rooms are dedicated towards slight surreal cinematically-inclined experiments.
The Grand Bao’en Temple’s centerpiece is a startling modern pagoda, extending upwards to reveal wonderful, yellow-autumn views of the city.
The Qinhuai River drifts slowly nearby, its depths scoured by restful fishermen hooks along the banks. The outer ring of the temple grounds include prayer bells fluttering in the wind, chiming as a person walks by.
Elsewhere in Ancient Cities
After finishing up at the temple, we made a point to grab an early lunch before taking a sleepy walk along the ancient city walls, ducking through occasional archways leading into the city’s more traditional areas.
The city of Nanjing, especially when compared to Shanghai, is a rather peaceful urban sprawl.
Further exploration led to the largest green zone in the city, the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, a huge green belt with odd, solid statues of guardian animals lining the trails. Traditional Chinese buildings abound and trees are carefully manicured throughout the park.
The best sights in the winter include prideful, small trees that retain their vividly red leaves despite the rest of the park being bare. Small creeks are everywhere and the smell of Osmanthus trees waft in the air. Local cats are found lurking everywhere, giving tourists mildly mistrusting looks before trotting or slinking away.
The park was a short visit and I was admittedly feeling pretty tired by this point.
Recrafted Hutongs
We finally moved to visit one last traditional area; a Chinese tourism and shopping street. The street, named Lao Mendong, is a nice area with shallow ponds, thin streams and Christmas lights currently strung through trees.
Streets of these kind can be found throughout China, and they’re always nice. I was fortunate that it was a weekday and found the cobbled stones and sloping roofs with very little foot traffic. The area sells some crumbling peach pastries I’m fond of.
On that note, it was time to return to Shanghai. Nanjing was just a swift one day visit. I had a couple of other things I was looking forward to checking out, but since it was a Monday, a great many destinations were closed. Overall, it was a very relaxing exploration.
Returning to Shanghai
Back in Shanghai, I had one more day before needing to worry about my flight home. In the morning, I mostly just slept until lunch. At which point, I was craving pizza.
Living in Hohhot has not been kind to me on the pizza front. They make it, but due to Chinese preferences, most pizzas are devoid of vital marinara sauce.
Which, I mean… just… why bother at that point?
So I whined until I was recommended Home Slice, a New York-style pizzeria that sated all my pizza-based needs admirably. They have some great pizzas, though the crust is a little tough. The actual style is crisp though, and the sauce is great. I had a great time speed eating three large slices all by myself, washing each piece down with another piece.
TMNT really had life figured out.
Next, I checked out the Shanghai Bank Museum, which displayed Shanghai’s financial history. It’s a cool little visit, very classy with large vault doors, old security lock-boxes and some interactive games and photos. The photos were my favorite, as they show you what you would look like as a visitor to the bank in the 1800’s. What they failed to mention was that all photos come out with a person dressed as a woman.
I make a very grumpy, bearded woman.
Art Tours
Moving on, I joined Emily on a visit to a local art exhibition. The exhibit was housed on the banks of the Huangpu River in a building known as the “West Bund Artistic Center” in English. This exhibit was a lot of interesting abstract and film-oriented pieces. There were nets woven of rope, paint smeared thick on punctured canvas and my personal favorite, a broad-winged wicker airplane with internal lights and numerous “confiscated” scissors spearing the structure to comment on the ludicrousness of our world.
This piece was created by Cai Guo-Qiang and named Bon Voyage: 10,000 Collectables from the Airport, 2004. The excerpt, which I’m posting here to remember is:
“This work represents the uneasy and absurd world that we live in, where enemies may come out of every direction, big or small, and weapons may be in our own pockets. The dichotomy lies in our inability to travel and survive without the system that has created this situation.”
I fly and travel a lot. I promise, the world is certainly absurd.
The film portion of the museum was doubly strange, with projections of talking heads on demented doll-like bodies, interviews with uncomfortable, uncertain Scottish children in specific poses making commentary on abstract art and a double-mirrored camera that made it appear your ghost was standing next to you.
It was uncomfortably trippy.
Afterwards, we took a short walk along the river before heading to a pretty nice Italian place know as Centrale, where dinner was a pleasant, quiet affair.
We wandered down the street visiting a fairly new bar with a small tank filled with three restless sharks, each roughly the size of a fire hydrant. Then I went and found some chocolate pancakes, because that’s the kind of excellence I want to exhibit in life.
Following this, I joined Emily while meeting one of her co-workers at a posh hotel before finally returning to grab my things for the long flight back to Hohhot.
And that’s about it. I’m not planning too many more trips in the near future due to trying to save for the Chinese Spring Festival, but I might make little jaunts over the next couple of weeks.
We’ll see.
Until then,
Best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written December 10th 2019
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Ten years ago, I abandoned my military surplus store backpack for a Farpoint 40 Osprey Travel Pack. I’ve never replaced my bag since. The backpack has been with me around the world, through my departing Beijing and onwards through trips across Europe and South America. I have nothing but praise for Osprey Products.
