Shanghai   Our second and final full day in Shanghai was Day 7 of the group trip. We knew only vaguely what was planned, including our maglev ride, but found out in the morning the sequence had been changed. We were told that the maglev goes at its highest speed "only in the morning" (I now have more precise information), so that we had to start out the day there, which was fine with everyone.

Recall from the last posting that we saw this map of the Yangzi River Delta (copy and paste in another window):

http://www.johomaps.com/as/china/yangtze_delta_eng.html

We said then that the maglev route starts at Pudong Airport, and was never built beyond one single other station in central Pudong at Longyang Road, essentially in the "middle of nowhere". It was because of the high construction expense, and some public protest, that it was never extended to Hongqiao Airport or beyond, as had been planned. The completed connection between the two airports would have made for a ride of only 15 minutes. Therefore, the actual route built is really only a shuttle between the airport and the connection to the Shanghai metro system at Longyang Road. We also have a localized map of the maglev route (Map by Paulcmartens) with speeds in mph only.

The word maglev is derived from the first parts of the words "magnetic levitation". It's a system of propelling a train, not on conventional wheels, axles, and bearings, but by magnets that gently raise the cars fractionally off of a guideway and then propel them forward. In other words, magnets provide both (upward) lift and (forward) thrust. As can be imagined, there is no friction with the guideway and the ride is smoother and somewhat quieter than on a wheeled vehicle, and maglevs can accelerate and decelerate faster, as well.

It might be less obvious that the power needed for lift is relatively low. It's the power needed for forward thrust that is much greater because of air resistance, or drag, which is the case with most forms of transport, and especially high-speed ones.

Started up in 2004, the Shanghai maglev, short as it may be, is the first commercially-operated maglev line in the world and the world's fastest train in regular commercial service. Although anyone who's flown in a jet plane has moved faster, riding the maglev is the fastest I've ever moved on the surface of the earth.

The record speed the Shanghai maglev ever achieved was 501 km/h (311 mph), but that's not a regularly used commercial speed. When speaking of commercial speed, "fast" can be defined in two ways. It can be the top regular speed, but also the average trip speed. The latter is always lower, by definition, because the train goes fastest when accelerating to start out, but has to decelerate to stop. This variation in speed is particularly acute in Shanghai because the present maglev route is so short, only 30 km (19 mi) long. In other words, it barely gets started before it has to stop, reducing the average trip speed.

I said we were told we "had to" ride in the morning because that's when it runs fastest. I've checked to get the accuracy of that statement. As it turns out, the train runs daily, morning to early evening, at two different highest speeds. It runs at the primary highest speed twice a day, between 9:00 and 10:45, when we rode it, but again in the afternoon between 15:00 and 15:45. It runs at the secondary highest speed during the other times, the "off hours", I assume to save money.

The "off hours" highest speed is a respectable 301 km/h (187 mph), when the trip takes 50 seconds longer than otherwise. You may smile when talking about seconds, but the route IS short. On those trips, the average speed is 224 km/h (139 mph).

But the top operational commercial speed that makes this the fastest train service in China is a heady 431 km/h (268 mph), which takes, and took us, 7 minutes and 20 seconds, or 50 seconds faster than in the "off hours". However, the average trip speed is "only" 251 km/h (156 mph).

It will not surprise that ridership is at about only 20% of capacity, considering the short length of the ride, the limited operating hours, high ticket prices, and that it ends up "nowhere", requiring an additional 20 minutes on the metro to reach Puxi. When we rode it, the other cars seemed rather empty. We, as it turns out, were seated in the pricier VIP seating area in the first car. When the train started out and the digital readout in the upper front of the car reached that oddly-numbered maximum of 431 km/h (Photo by Rintojiang), our group burst into applause, which was fun.

This is the maglev train waiting in the Longyang Road terminus (Photo by Yosemite). It's a Transrapid train, Transrapid being an arm of ThyssenKrupp in Germany, and is based on a patent dating from 1934. It has no wheels, no axles, no gear transmissions, no steel rails, and no overhead pantographs for power. It requires less power to hover over the guideway than it needs to run its on-board air-conditioning equipment. There are two arrays of electromagnetic coils in a line, one side of the coil is on the train, the other side on the guideway. During lift and forward thrust, the train floats on a frictionless magnetic cushion, and makes no contact whatsoever with the guideway. On the train, systems measure the distance between the train and guideway 100,000 times per second to keep the gap between the two halves of the coil at a constant 10 mm (0.39 in) and the clearance between the levitated train and the guideway at about 15 cm (5.91 in).

I find this information essential to understand the maglev, but I found it out just recently in post-trip research. As usual, the attitude of the director, and apparently of the group, seemed to me to be more along the lines of "let's ride the fast, pretty train" rather than knowing this sort of background. It makes you wonder to what extent it was actually a rail enthusiasts' tour of China.

Here is the maglev en route (Photo by JZ). Like a lot of high-speed rail, much of the short maglev line is elevated. I love to watch it seem to be voraciously swallowing the guideway as it moves! Here is a maglev train returning from Pudong Airport (Photo by Alex Needham). On our visit, we just did an immediate round trip, waiting in the train at the airport until it went back.

Although tickets had been purchased for us in the VIP cabin (Photo by Wikidapit) right behind the train driver's operating room (Photo by Wikidapit), I don't recall being able to see him in action. We did notice that the standard cabins (Photo by J. Patrick Fischer) were relatively empty. Click to take note of the digital readout, running at about the "slower", off-hour high speed of 301 km/h.

We'll end, as we often do, with a YouTube video of the maglev in action. The video consistently rounds out the top commercial speed of the maglev to 430 km/h, but for accuracy, it's 431 km/h, as the digital readout earlier indicated. The video is a little long at 13:52, so you may want to skip ahead—or not. Look for the following highlights:

6:05 - The most iconic view of the moving train to me is to watch how the train seems to be "swallowing" the guideway in front of it.

8:12 - There's no actual perceptible levitation or rising up on a magnetic field when the train starts. It just moves forward.

12:05 – The side view from the interior shows what very high speed looks like at ground level.

12:29 – An interesting contrast, very perceptible in the video, between the two speeds the maglev runs at, 301 km/h and 431 km/h.

Old City   The Old City, formerly known as the Chinese City, is actually where Shanghai began before the Concessions came. Look again (copy & paste in another window) at the sights map from the last posting and keep it handy:

http://www.onlinechinatours.com/uploads/city/city20110609880d8.jpg

Click to find the maglev's Longyang Road (Lu) station in the lower right and find the connecting metro line that actually brings passengers into the riverside part of Pudong as well as to Puxi. But our bus just followed Longyang Lu across the river to the Old City, whose circular road around it shows where the wall used to be.

Our visit to the Old City was very enjoyable, and had a number of facets. But again, I'd read about it in advance, and some things didn't seem quite right. I've read about it a lot more after the fact, and now I am satisfied I know what I need to know. I'll again describe it twice.

The bus parked a couple of blocks away from the upper center area of the Old City, and we walked, which is my kind of a visit. But we were immediately in a wonderland that was too good to be true. I know there are poor back streets in the Old City, since I've seen pictures, but this area was like we were in the China Pavilion of a World's Fair. I asked Wendy if these gorgeous buildings were new, and she agreed. But why? It was a similar situation to what we'd had in Nanjing that first evening, and there was no explanation as to why the area looked so nice. The only negative was there was a different street vendor every few steps selling yo-yos, toys that flopped on the sidewalk, an arm's length of silk scarves, you know the drill. We had lunch at a superb restaurant, visited the historic, but crowded, Yu Garden—the guide's tour was actually quite good, and I can't improve on it--and visited a silk museum and exhibition. Despite the ongoing heat, it was all very nice. But I found out very little about so many things.

My tour: If I'd had extra time—at least one more day--on my own, I'd have started with the city wall, a subject that has to be too good to pass up. I've found this c 1860 map of the Old City based on a 1553 map (Photo of map by World Imaging). You can locate here the upper center area that I said we were visiting, and also see the river at the upper right. The red circle indicates what I've now learned is the Dajing Ge Pavilion (Photo by World Imaging), which is today a museum encompassing the only remaining wall of the Old City. I did not get to see this, so we have to imagine this together. The museum also includes an ancient temple along with the remaining wall. As we'd said, most of the wall was dismantled in 1912. In 1959 the Dajing Ge Pavilion was listed as a cultural relic, renovated in 1995, and opened to the public.

Now, let's move to the area the group visited and find out more about it. I was confused when Frommer's told me that the City God Temple was a shopping area that adjoined the famous Yu Garden. Something just didn't seem right there. But after visiting Nanjing, where it became clear that the Confucius Temple was also a shopping and entertainment center, things became clearer. I've said that in Europe I've seen vendor's stalls dating back centuries attached to the side of market churches, and so I'm used to commerce appearing next to religious buildings. In Nanjing, we did see the Confucius Temple itself, from a short distance, which was surrounded by the entertainment and shopping neighborhood known as "Confucius Temple", so that led me to understand why this shopping area had a temple's name. So let me start from the beginning.

There is a tradition in China for a god to protect a city, and this god would have a temple in his honor within the city. Shanghai, in fact does have a temple near where we were, and this temple is dedicated to not one, but three city gods. This is the City God Temple (Photo by gruntzooki) in the Old City in Shanghai. We were not taken to see it, but I have to work on the fact that a temple is a temple is a temple. During the Cultural Revolution the temple was closed down and used as a jewelry shop, but restored in 1994 to its original use.

Now beyond the actual temple is the neighborhood called the City God Temple, which is like a contemporary bazaar, with shops, restaurants, and teahouses in a pedestrian zone. There are apparently over a hundred stores and shops here, and most are about a century old, so there is a degree of authenticity here, yet the neighborhood looks suspiciously modern, though in ancient style. It started as shops serving Yu Garden, which then were integrated into a single business that is now called the Yuyuan Tourist Mart, and is the largest retailing conglomerate in China. So with this knowledge, I know why we weren't seeing the back streets with power cables and lines of washing from house to house. It is quite commercial, but it also is the result of a banding together of local merchants. As I walked the neighborhood, I appreciated its attractiveness, but realized its lack of authenticity, which I'm sure is not the case with most visitors.

Now, as we begin to understand what we're seeing, take another look at our sights map and you'll see the temple, the garden, and the shopping area. All this additional information makes the walk through the area much more interesting for me.

Take a look for yourself. Here's a pedestrian street (Photo by Sitomon) in the City God Temple (Shopping Area) also known as the Yuyuan Tourist Mart. These buildings are handsome and go on for blocks and blocks, but their newness still puts me off a bit. Here's another view (Photo by livepine), and another (Photo by gigijin).

We had lunch in a very nice restaurant near this pond (Photo by Sitomon) surrounded by pavilions and teahouses. It was actually a very beautiful area, but again, one felt like one was at the China Pavilion of a World's Fair and not in a real city neighborhood. Do you agree that something like this can be too pretty?

While in this neighborhood we went to the museum and exhibition of silk. It was so interesting that it's worth its own entry in this Series 5 of articles, and will follow the entry on Shanghai. But before we continue, copy and paste this link so we can take a look at where we've been on this less-than-perfect map:

http://www.yuyuantm.com.cn/yuyuan/En/TouristGuides/map_en.jpg

If I'd been given this at the time instead of wandering around not knowing much of where we were I'd be able to identify more, but after the fact, we can identify some things in the Yuyuan Tourist Mart shopping area. On the lower right (click) I now find where the City God Temple is. On the lower right is the International Shopping Center in which the Silk Museum is located. If I hadn't bought anything there, I wouldn't have the receipt that tells me the Silk Museum is on the Old Jiaochang Road side of the building. I cannot locate where we had lunch near the pond, since this map doesn't seem to show a pond. And I don't have the name of the restaurant to guide me online, because we were NEVER given the names of any of the very nice restaurants across China where we had lunch, so if anyone wanted to ever duplicate a given dining experience, they have nothing to guide them. It's that same aspect of what otherwise was a rather good tour, despite all my bitching, that we were treated like children who didn't need to know the name of the place Mom and Dad were taking them to lunch. Anyway, while still on this map, look for some zigs, a picture of a mid-lake pavilion, and what here is described as a "Nine-bend Bridge".

That brings us to the famous and ancient Yu Garden, whose name irritatingly often appears as Yuyuan Garden. You have to know what you're saying to know why that's irritating.

The Yu Garden is historic and attractive, yet Frommer purposely gives it no stars at all. Their reasoning is sensible. It's overcrowded. I remember the modern garden in traditional style I visited in Hong Kong, which was open and airy. The Yu Garden (Garden of Happiness / Peace) is an authentic, traditional Chinese garden, and was built during the Ming Dynasty, completed in 1577. But there are so few of these traditional gardens, and this one is in the center of Shanghai and so accessible to visitors, that it's overexposed and, contrary to its name, no longer all that peaceful. Since admission is charged anyway, I think the garden should do what many museums do and sell timed admissions, where you buy a ticket in advance entering at a given half hour on a given day, but that has not happened. Still, our guide did well here, and, once you got your mind off the crowds, the visit was pleasant.

It's a much more compact garden than in Hong Kong, since it's in the compact Old City, and is divided by walls into smaller sections, so to some extent it's like walking from room to room, but outdoors. At least to keep traffic moving, one enters at one point and leaves by another. Copy and past this link in another window:

http://www.china-tour.cn/images/Shanghai/Yuyuan-Garden-Map.jpg

The entry to the Yu Garden is over that lake with the mid-lake pavilion. To get to both, you use what most people translate as the Nine Zigzag Bridge (Photo by Hans A. Rosbach), a delightful name for a delightful concept. You see, if the bridge were straight, evil spirits could easily find their way across it, so the zigzags are meant to confuse and disperse them. Doesn't that make sense? As for the number nine, if I remember the explanation accurately, ten is perfection and is reserved for heaven, so nine is the highest number that can be used, and that's reserved for royalty. You'll also recall the Nine-Dragon Wall I saw in Hong Kong, the original of which I'd still be seeing in Beijing. So why not nine zigzags here? (Photo by Hans A. Rosbach)

There are various pavilions and structures about. On the map, find the Nine (!) Lion Waterside Pavilion (Photo by Hans A. Rosbach). These are genuine period buildings, as compared to the modern imitations in the "mall" bazaar outside. There was also a large goldfish pond (Photo by Brandon Fick) that attracted a lot of attention. Click to really enjoy it. A long bridge leads up to a major building (check map) I now find out is called Dianchun Hall (Photo by Jakub Hałun). This view is from another angle (Photo by Hans A. Rosbach). And, given the many walls dividing the garden, I found particularly of interest the Dragon Wall (Photo by J. Patrick Fischer)—not to be confused with the Nine Dragon Wall mentioned earlier. Here, the dragon motif serves as a roof to the wall. This is a detail of the head (Photo by Mr. Tickle).

We end the visit to the Yu Garden with this YouTube video (3:35). You'll also enjoy the music.

Orient yourself again on the sights map you're holding in a separate window and follow our bus from the Old City straight up the road to where there's a green metro stop called Baoshanlu. This is the location of the former Shanghai North Rail Station (1909) we saw on the historical maps, now serving as the Shanghai Railway Museum, the only truly disastrous visit of the trip.

The former station housing the Shanghai Railway Museum (Photo by carpkazu) is attractive enough, but do notice the period steam engine in the courtyard to the right, which we'll get to in a moment. I've since read that the museum is on three floors, but it's good I didn't know that at the time, because the ground floor we were taken to see was more than enough. The exhibits were in Chinese, and the museum official waiting for us also spoke only Chinese. The four or so rooms downstairs had display cases of pictures, historical books, and artifacts relating to the development of rail transportation, particularly in Shanghai. But even if the displays had English subtitles, what the museum had to offer was so very boring, even to rail enthusiasts, that it would make milk curdle.

If I'd walked into the building on my own, I'd have been gone in three minutes. If the group had been by itself, it could have been similar, although sometimes you can't be sure about people. But what happened was that the museum official decided to give us a personally guided tour—in Chinese. The young man who was our local guide stepped up to the plate, took out a note pad, and as the group moved to the first display case on the wall of the first room, listened to the official while taking notes, then reproduced what was said in English. Even if the local subject matter were interesting, that's a boring tour. By the time they moved up a case or two, maybe a quarter of us were still around them and the rest of us walked through the other rooms seeing if there was anything of interest. There was very little. On top of it, the museum was not air conditioned. Some of us sat down on steps to rest among the dry-as-dust exhibits.

Who should have done something here? The poor kid who was the local guide couldn't make such decisions, and to boot, Chinese culture requires a lot of respect toward elders such as the museum official. Wendy, our cross-China guide, who was also wandering about, didn't do anything. The tour director should have been the one to have spoken up, but he was walking around idly taking cellphone pictures. I did ask him whose idea this museum was, and he did say the Chinese came up with the idea. (Fortunately the rail museum we'd be going to in Beijing was MUCH more interesting.) So who do you think picked up the reins?

I walked back to the slowly moving group, sidled between the few listeners, and when there was a break in the kid's translation, I leaned in to his ear. He looked at me like a deer in the headlights. Still, I whispered that this was boring, and that he should tell the official that we were very pressed for time and would have to leave soon. I turned away and assume he did this, because the group started moving faster. Still, it lasted at least another 20 insufferable minutes.

I went right outside, and that steam engine in the courtyard was the salvation of me and several others. One of our group had been a train driver (US: "engineer") on the Soo Line in Wisconsin for many years, and had driven this sort of engine. We had a flood of questions for him to answer. I realized I'd never actually stood beside the huge wheels of such an engine before, as he explained how the various parts worked. It was a mini-education. I remember asking what that metal pipe was that came down to point below a wheel, and he explained that that would shoot sand down between the wheel and the track in icy or snowy weather. How low tech! This experience in the courtyard with this sort of steam artifact from the past was in stark contrast to the high-speed trains we'd been riding, to say nothing of the maglev we'd been on a few hours earlier. It was Yesterday facing Today, all in Shanghai.

The bus backtracked south on the road we'd come up, up to Nanjing Road. Here, we got our daytime look down the pedestrian area, and then we turned down the three blocks to the Bund, where we were let off. Outside what I now know is the former Sassoon House. We crossed the wide road to the levee and climbed the steps to get the view. We only had about 20 minutes, and could have walked around, but we actually could see everything from where we were standing. If I'd had that extra day, if it hadn't been so hot, and if I'd known then which buildings were which on the Bund, I'd have taken a walk along its length, but if, if, if. Given the circumstances, I was satisfied with seeing the Bund and river, and as mentioned, hearing the Customs House tower strike four o'clock was a nice close to the visit to Shanghai.

Silk & Sericulture    The only thing that happened in Shanghai that I thought should have its own Series listing here in Series 5 was our visit to the Silk Museum. I'll say at the outstart that I find shopping stops that guides bring tours to (kickbacks, anyone?) to be worse than an abomination, and I have war stories to prove it. Egypt comes to mind. But in this case, the museum and exhibit were so fascinating—I've had to research and add only a few points—that I almost tripped over myself to move into the commercial showroom after the museum presentation.

Since our local guide brought us to the museum—we didn't even know it was on the itinerary (!!)—I had no reason to know its address or even its name. As mentioned above, the only reason I knew its address to find on the map on this posting was because I had the receipt for what I purchased there, and the only reason I now know its interesting name is because the capable woman who did the presentation gave me her business card after my purchase. As many Chinese do, she used a Western name when dealing with outsiders, so she was Tracy.

I find online that there are other silk museums, even in Shanghai, so this Museum of Jiangnan Silk near the Yuyuan can also be referred to as the Yuyuan Museum of Jiangnan Silk. When I was handed the business card, I paid little attention to the unusual word, and only now did I investigate it, and am pleased with what I found. Let me explain it this way.

We've seen that what to outsiders is the Yangzi River is in China the Chang Jiang. It's the longest river in both China and Asia, and word-for-word Chang Jiang means, to little surprise, "Long River". As we've seen, he also means "river", as in the Huang He, or Yellow River. It's awkward sometimes working with a language when you don't speak it, so I can't be more specific. Nevertheless, Chang Jiang can be shortened to just Jiang, and I assume that anyone hearing this knows the Yangzi is being referred to. So now, when we look at Jiangnan, we can tell that we're talking about the [Yangzi] River South. So what's that?

As it turns out, the silk shown in the museum, and available for purchase, is all locally produced, Shanghai-area silk, because Jiangnan refers to all the land immediately to the south of the lower Yangzi, including the southern part of the Yangzi Delta. If you picture an earlier map we had of the delta, Jiangnan includes all of Shanghai, and many other cities, including ones we've mentioned such as Nanjing, Souzhou, and Hangzhou. I find it comforting to now find out that the silk I bought in Shanghai is locally produced, a point that was not made when I was there.

I remember learning about silk in elementary school, but remained dubious. Why do silkworms eat mulberry leaves? Why don't they take to oak leaves, lettuce, grass clippings or use up some of the supply of that abominable kale? And you can't be serious that anyone can actually plan on untangling the silk on those cocoons. And isn't silk flimsy and delicate? How strong is it really? And if a person can't completely wrap himself or herself up as a mummy—someone else would have to close it off from the outside at the very end—how does a silkworm close off the cocoon all by itself? C'mon. It all seems so impossible. Is our collective leg being pulled using a lot of fairy tales?

Tracy started with a wall display of silkworms in jars and explained their growth. Later she showed how cocoons are processed, unwound, and installed on a machine to wind the silk. While silk making is a cottage industry in many places in the world, particularly Asia, and can operate on an at-home level like spinning your own wool on a spinning wheel, there is larger machinery in bigger commercial operations, and the museum had an operating example of one. Tracy also explained what happens when two silkworms decide to "build a house" together. Tracy gave a wonderful presentation, but let me now take what I learned from her and supplement additional information I've researched to offer my own presentation.

SILK: MY PRESENTATION Iconic Chinese products such as tea, porcelain, and silk have affected Western culture and civilization for centuries, if not millennia, and have affected languages as well, including English. Tea-time is recognized as a social event in the West, and the association of tea to China is illustrated by a phrase such as "not for all the tea in China". Chinese porcelain is so iconic that English even uses "china" and "chinaware" to refer to it. And silk, which was first produced in China, has shown its importance by giving its name to the Silk Road, the early commercial routes between China and the West. Silk, as the king (queen?) of fabrics, has come to represent the height of elegance. When a British barrister is appointed to the elevated legal position of Queen's Counsel (QC) / King's Counsel (KC), he or she is said to "take silk", based on the change of the gown required for appearing in court from cotton to silk. In North American usage, the term "silk-stocking" used adjectivally (a silk-stocking political district; the silk-stocking "crowd") has come to mean "wealthy" or "aristocratic". (The reference dates back to the late 18C, and rather than referring to the ladies' stockings of a later era—also an image of elegance--refers more to the stockings worn by the men of that period.)

Silkworms were first domesticated in China over five millennia ago and fabric made out of silk was first developed there. Given the long period of domestication, the silkworm is one of the world's most genetically modified animals, and the silkworm's capacity for silk production has increased over time by a factor of almost ten.

We don't usually get into the scientific Latin names for flora and fauna, but it's appropriate here, where we're talking about a bombyx, or silkworm. The domesticated silkworm is bombyx mori, and more about that name in a moment. It was domesticated from the wild silkmoth bombyx mandarina, which is obviously the Mandarin silkworm, showing its origin in China. The wild silkmoth to this day has a range stretching from northern India across China and the Russian Far East, including Korea and Japan, and it's known that bombyx mori was domesticated from Chinese stock rather than stock from the other countries. The industry remains centered in this area with China and India being the two main silk producers, together manufacturing over 60% of world production annually. The wild and domesticated moths can still crossbreed and sometimes produce hybrids. However, while the wild silkmoth/silkworm is related, the bombyx mori used for commercial production of silk remains unique in that it's entirely dependent on humans for its reproduction and is the only domesticated animal that doesn't also occur naturally in the wild.

Before we go any further, since we deal in words here, let's check some out as shown in this picture of a silkworm and cocoon on mulberry leaves (Photo by Srithern).

Word Etymologies The word SILK can be traced back to Asia. Let's do just that, but rather than going backward, let's go forward. We can start with something we've seen before here, in 2012/13, Ptolemy's World Map from the 2C CE, showing the Greek view of the world as reconstructed by cartographers over a millennium later. In the east we see the Indian Ocean, with an oversized Sri Lanka (Ceylon), followed by the Bay of Bengal and a small peninsula. Actually, this peninsula is all of Southeast Asia, so the last body of water is the South China Sea.

Now look at this detail. Click at the upper center so we can analyze wording. As we saw in the earlier posting, you'll find India extra Gangem, or India beyond the Ganges, for SE Asia, and India inter Gangem, India within the Ganges, for India. Except instead of India it says Indiae pars. This type of construction was favored on old maps. It doesn't show all of India so the phrase means "Part of India" Now swing to the right, and instead of Sina (rhymes with Tina, and is the basis for "Sino-" and "sinitic") for China, it says Sinae for similar reasons as with Indiae. Now move well inland into Sina to the top of the map, where, spreading across the crease, it says what we're looking for: Sericae pars. This is "Part of Serica", and it's Serica we're looking for.

Serica was the name used by the ancient Greeks and Romans for this country, and the name meant "land of silk", based on the major product that sustained its industry made by the "ser", or silkworm. The name is thought to derive from the Chinese word for "silk", si, and is the origin of the Latin and Greek roots for "silk", seric-.

Western cultivation of silk began in 552 CE when agents from Byzantium impersonating monks smuggled silkworms and mulberry leaves out of China. Some historians think that Serica and China were the same, and that Westerners approaching on the Silk Road over land believed they were arriving in Serica, but those arriving by ship on the sea routes of the Silk road believed they were arriving in Sina. Other historians believe Serica was inhabited by a separate people. But the etymology of the word doesn't come down to one interpretation or the other; it's who the Westerners BELIEVED they were dealing with, the people of Serica.

As the root "seric-" moved into English, it became the Old English word sioloc, and "silk" today. There is nothing unusual in finding words where R and L vary historically. Compare the L in English "marble" and Spanish "mármol" with the R of French "marbre" and German "Marmor". Thus R appears in the root "seric-" but L in "silk", and the word that describes the raising of silkworms commercially is sericulture, with R again.

What's that you say? You saw the picture of the COCOON and thought it looked like an egg? Funny you should mention that.

The French word coque means "shell", as in a clamshell, a nutshell, or . . . an eggshell. Related is coquille as in Coquille Saint-Jacques, which refers both to a scallop [shell] or the well-known dish made from scallops. English also describes a kind of clams as a cockle. Well, coque developed into cocon, and was then borrowed into English. Because French words are end-stressed, the English suffix –oon, which was a conventional form in the 15C to 17C, and still appears end-stressed in words such as "spittoon" and the somewhat archaic "octaroon", was added to cocon to form "cocoon". Et voilà, the eggshell image is indeed the basis for the "shell" the silkworm builds for itself. So you were right in noticing that!

Finally, what about the MULBERRY? Let's go back to name of the domesticated silkworm. The Latin name for the mulberry is morus, and "of [the] mulberry" is mori, so bombyx mori is literally "silkworm of [the] mulberry", and not of any other shrub. That means the translation, and complete name, would be in English the "mulberry silkworm". In other words, the creature is defined by the one and only thing it eats, so don't try feeding it anything else. And, although this is an exaggeration of the facts, it does prove a point: that silk scarf you're wearing is nothing but processed mulberry leaves, processed by our little friend the mulberry silkworm, bombyx mori.

Perhaps many of us have had the same meager experience with mulberries as I have had. We all learned the nursery rhyme and children's singing game:

Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning. / So early in the morning.

I read that it's attested to from the 1820s, first in Scotland. And in New York, I'm well aware of the main street in Little Italy being named Mulberry Street, which I find was listed on maps since at least 1755 and was named after a mulberry grove on the site. That would have been my entire association with mulberries, except that I finally came across some. As described in the last paragraph of 2010/23, on my last day in Australia I was taking some free bus rides in Perth, to see the city. The last stop of one bus was in a small park, and there was a 15-20 minute layover. I walked around and found a couple picking berries off a couple of large bushes, which they told me were mulberries (Photo by Tark Siala). I'm not sure how legal it was to harvest berries in a public park, but they would have otherwise gone to waste. They offered me some, and they were sweet, and very much like blackberries. While they start out whitish-green, when they're red they're OK, and when they're black (like blackberries!) they're best. Of course, there weren't any silkworms eating the mulberry leaves there (Photo by Gorkaazk), but they can have the leaves, I'll stick to the berries, shown here in various stages of ripening.

Silkworm Cultivation Just what is the story of silk and silkworms? Silk is a natural protein fiber produced by certain insect larvae that form cocoons to undergo complete metamorphosis as a pupa within the cocoon, and then to leave the cocoon as an emerging moth (or butterfly). Types of silk are also produced by several other insects, most obviously spiders, which we'll discuss a bit at the end.

A silkworm is about the size of one's pinky, or perhaps a child's pinky. It’s nothing more than the larva (or caterpillar) that will become a moth. A larva is a distinct juvenile form before complete metamorphosis into an adult—the moth. Not only is a larva's appearance very different from the adult form, it often has unique structures and organs that the adult doesn't have. Female silkmoths are about 2-3 times bulkier than males because of all the eggs they carry. They lay these thousands of eggs, they hatch in about 14 days, and the larvae feed on mulberry leaves (Photo by Armin Kübelbeck) they are given, their natural food. They eat constantly, continuously, and voraciously. Those in the picture are 21 days old. After about 35 days and four moltings, the caterpillars—OK, silkworms—are 10,000 times heavier then when hatched, and are ready to start spinning a cocoon.

There are two glands in the silkworm's head that produce liquid silk and force it through openings in the head called spinnerets. The extruded liquid silk forms two very thin filaments that are coated with a water-soluble—that's important—protective protein gum called sericin (again, the same root as in sericulture). The liquid silk and sericin solidify on contact with the air and the sericin acts as a glue to first hold together the two extruded filaments and then, as the cocoon is woven, to hold together the entire structure as new silk is laid upon old, and to give the cocoon its rigidity (Photo by Kwz).

The silkworm finds some sort of a corner for support, such as two twigs coming together or perhaps the corner of a box that it's in. Just picture locations you've seen spiders spin webs in. It first weaves a net to hold itself and the cocoon. Then, totally in contrast to the image I had of someone trying to wrap himself up as a mummy building outward, the silkworm builds from the outside inward, and has no trouble in building and enclosing itself in an egg-shaped cocoon. It moves its head from side to side in a figure-eight pattern to get the job done.

This is an excellent time-lapse YouTube video showing eating and spinning. The first part shows how voraciously silkworms eat the mulberry leaves, but do remember, this is time-lapse (although the time-lapse lets up after a while). A group of them has to be fed bushels of leaves every day. The video is a little long at 4:05, so you may want to skim. The spinning, which actually takes 2-3 days, starts at 1:56.

The cocoon is made of a very fine, lustrous thread of raw silk about 300-900 m (1000-3000 ft) long. About 2000-3000 cocoons are needed to make one pound (0.4 kg) of silk.

Silk farmers put aside part of the crop to allow nature to take its course and let the silkmoths develop to breed the next generation of caterpillars, but as they exit, the cocoon is ruined for silkmaking. This time-lapse YouTube video shows a silkworm hatching into a silkmoth. It runs 1:28 but you may want to skip ahead to where success is achieved at 1:22.

Processing Silk But the farmer harvests the bulk of the cocoons. The first thing to do, as was made quite clear by Tracy in her presentation, is very low-tech—actually much of the silk-making process going back thousands of years is low-tech and simple. It involves a pot of boiling water, into which a batch of cocoons is thrown. This has two consequences, both necessary to produce silk. First it kills the silkworm, so there'll be no silkmoth burrowing its way through the fibers and ruining them. But the second consequence surprised me, as logical as it is. We said the glue that holds the cocoon together and stiffens it, sericin, is water-soluble, and the boiling water dissolves it, or most of it, making the cocoon as pliable as a cotton ball. It's all so simple.

The next step is also amazing in its simplicity. When you need thread off a spool, you find the loose end, let the spool sit on the table, and pull upward. As you do so, the spool bobbles and does a little dance as it spins around. That's exactly how a cocoon is unraveled. To find the loose ends of the wet cocoons, you rub a brush along several of them, and the brush sweeps up and grabs several loose ends at once, and that's how you get started.

Then comes the process that I've since learned is called reeling. It can be done at home on a simple wooden device—silkmaking can be a cottage industry—or on a larger metal machine in a factory, one of many in a long row reeling silk. The museum had one such machine. On a table surface was a basin of water into which several cocoons were put. The filaments from the cocoons were drawn up through an opening that was like a hole in a button, and then collected on a rotating drum above. That's it, in a nutshell.

One point might make you wonder. Why several? Well, while silk is one of the strongest natural fibers—have you ever tried to tear a piece of silk fabric?--one single filament from one cocoon is very fine and too fragile for commercial use, so several are pressed together to form a single thread. The museum was using about six; I've read that anywhere from three to ten individual filaments can be used to make a thread. Here you see filaments being drawn from several cocoons upward (Photo by Kwz) while they bobble and dance in the water as they unwind. Because they're so fine, it's the dark background that makes them visible.

I've also read just how it works, and that, too, is quite simple. The filaments being pulled upward are under tension as they go through a small hole and other guides up to the drum. As they do so, the tension and guides press the still wet filaments together removing much of the remaining water, and the residual sericin left in the fibers re-glues them into one thread. What collects on the revolving drum is known as raw silk.

Thus, essentially it is just one long filament of silk in a cocoon, and it is made to unwind as though off a spool. I also read, though, that in practice, short bits from where the cocoon was just getting started, as well as the final silk closest to the center are of much lower quality and are discarded.

The Ick Factor Gird yourself. As is the case with other insects, silkworm pupae are eaten in East Asia and South Asia. If it's any help, it's not the silkworm larva we've been seeing that's eaten, but the next stage, the silkworm pupa (Photo by Blueberry87). It's served in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and India as a delicacy. Tracy also pointed out this fact as she was pulling a cocoon apart and removing and discarding the pupa, but she also said, no one would eat what she was discarding—it's wasn't fresh. Well, travel does put other cultures under a microscope.

Two Silkworms After the initial demonstration, Tracy brought up a potential problem. It's not uncommon for two silkworms to work together and "build a common house". A cocoon containing two silkworms is somewhat larger. But as you may imagine, two silkworms spewing silk in a small, enclosed space, while it does make a cocoon, the silk is as tangled and as unusable as most of us thought all silk would be in the first place. What to do? It's very interesting.

If it can't be unwound, it can be spread out, which is what Tracy started to do with the double cocoon in her hand. It doesn't tear, it doesn't stretch like dough, but can be gently pulled in each direction as it spreads out. In a moment, it was as big as a cake plate, and then we walked over to a card table with three other women standing around it. Four pairs of hands easily maneuvered the cocoon to the size of the card table, at which point they pulled it down around the corners of the table to hold it fast. Tracy asked for volunteers to do it again. I usually am not a volunteer, but I was really "into" this, so I tried, but being less skilled, the four of us amateurs ended up causing large holes to spread open in the center. But still, our work was tucked in at the corners of the table as well.

Tracy explained that several layers of cocoons like this would be assembled together in a cloth casing to make a comforter. At this point, I remember what a woman in our group had said on the bus earlier, that when she'd been in Shanghai earlier, she bought one, and it was, just as they claim, not only lightweight—it's only silk, after all—but warm in the winter and cool in the summer. This is the point Tracy made as well.

We have a YouTube video of a silkmaking presentation. It runs 4:10:

0:10 – He shows silkworms in jars to explain their life cycle, as Tracy did. I think my presentation here was more illustrative.
0:42 – Notice how rigid and egg-like the sericin makes the cocoon.
1:28 – Watch him pull a filament from a single cocoon, even though it's dry. And of course, it's so thin you can't see it.
1:45 – He shows a double cocoon.
2:12 – At the reeling machine, he now uses the customary brush to pick up the ends of the wet cocoons. Right after that, notice groups of cocoons dancing in the water as they're unwound to the revolving drums above.
3:16 – Watch the stretching out of the double cocoons over a table. Tracy didn't use the intermediate step of stretching over a curved form.

Personal Purchase You may have noticed a retail sales area in the video in the background, right after the comforter-making demonstration, and the museum had one as well. While I do little shopping when traveling, and bristle at being brought to shopping venues on a tour, I was fully absorbed by this demonstration. While I have a nice down comforter at home, I thought it would be fun to try a silk one made right here in this area. They were only really selling the comforters, and many of us bought one. They were packaged in vacuum-packed plastic carriers to fit in one's luggage. But some of us, including me were suddenly interested on getting a complete set of silk bedding, as they had a large sales area for that (also another with silk clothing). I was assigned a young salesgirl who used the name Ellen. There were lots of sheets with floral patterns, particularly popular in China, but I like solids, and found a beautiful white-on-white set called White Bamboo that shows a repeated design of white bamboo on a white background. The set included the comforter cover, bottom sheet, and two pillow cases, and came in all sizes, up to the king size that I needed. They offered to ship the set, with the comforter, quickly, but I said I wouldn't be home for a while, and wasn't in a hurry, so the shipping charge was reduced. Before our group left, the package was ready to be picked up by the shipping service.

Three weeks later (23 days to be exact), I'd been back in New York for a while when the package arrived. I unwrapped it and put it on the bed, but had what turned out to be a cultural problem. The bottom sheet, which was of double thickness, didn't come down over the mattress at all, but ended at the edge of the bed on all four sides in a thick piping. Ellen had provided me with her email, and I wrote to her twice, asking about the bottom sheet and about washing. This is a condensed composite of her two replies, where she did her best in English:

I am Ellen. In China we all the flat sheet, we use it for bottom but maybe we have different culture. Other one you can put the flat sheet under the matress, use the matress fasten the sheet. The cover you can machine washable with gentle wash with hairshampoo or babyshampoo, and air dry no machine dry, no irorn. Quilt you do dry clean no machine wash once a year. thanks for your question. we are hornor to service for you.

It was a pleasant correspondence. I found out about cleaning, and I realized I was in a cultural timewarp where Westerners are used to have their bottom sheets reach under the mattress, or nowadays, even be fitted, but that's not Chinese custom. Still, the bottom sheet didn't keep still through the night, and I found a solution I'm very pleased with. I went online and bought a long strip of very wide elastic, wide as your hand, and also a spool of silk thread, which didn't have to be silk, but did seem appropriate. I sewed a swath of elastic on each corner of the bottom sheet, diagonally, to reach under the mattress, and it works well. Only now, as I reread Ellen's letter, something like that must have been what she was trying to say by suggesting I "put the flat sheet under the mattress and use the mattress to "fasten", that is, hold, the sheet.

One other problem arose, which I also solved. It's comfortable and exotic to sleep between sleek silk sheets, but that sleekness was working to my disadvantage, because overnight the sleek comforter would slip sideways on the sleek flat sheet and half the comforter would end up moving left or right to the floor. So, about one-quarter of the way from the foot of the bed I sewed a piece of broad elastic to both sides of the comforter, and ran that under the mattress as well. Now the comforter obeys my every command, and making the bed each day is simply a matter of going to the four corners and pulling on both sheets. Easy.

Spider Silk & Gossamer We said at the beginning that other insects spin silk, and obviously spiders come to mind. But spiders make spider silk, which is of a different quality, and while they occasionally use it for cocoons for their young, they mostly build webs as nets to catch insects. They can also suspend themselves from above using their silk, to the consternation of many. Now for the following, forget spider webs and picture a spider connected to the end of a silk thread.

Many small spiders—they have to be small for this, perhaps even young spiderlings—also use silk threads for what is called ballooning, more accurately described as kiting. Kiting is used for dispersal, which we can look upon as air travel. They exude several threads into the wind and allow themselves to be carried away like an (upside-down) kite. They rarely get far, but that's how spiders reach islands; they've also been caught in ships' sails. The extremely fine silk used by spiders for kiting (ballooning) is called gossamer

I find two things of great interest here. First, I finally know what gossamer is, and understand why something very wispy, fine, thin, light, delicate, filmy, or insubstantial is referred to as being (like) gossamer: "the child's hair was like blond gossamer". A common reference is to "gossamer wings", which, with this new understanding brings an irony to mind. If you say a butterfly has gossamer wings, isn't it ironic that the butterfly just left its own cocoon made of a kind of silk and you're saying that its wings are as thin as silk? Gossamer is also the name of a light, sheet, gauze-like fabric popular in wedding dresses and decorations. So the word gets around.

The second point of interest is in the derivation of the word, because it involves a total and compete transfer of meaning, which can confuse the unwary. It starts with the fact that apparently, spiders go kiting (ballooning) particularly in late fall, when spider threads, that is, gossamer, can be found floating in the air, or found having fallen on shrubs and lawns. So gossamer is associated with autumn.

There's often a period of warm weather in autumn, known to many as "Indian summer", an American term that's become popular in Britain, replacing "St Martin's summer", and in France, as l'été indien is replacing l'été de St-Martin, both a reference to St Martin's Day, November 11. So now gossamer is associated with the suddenly warm period of autumn known by various names, including Indian summer.

Americans readily associate November with Thanksgiving, and sometimes humorously talk about "Turkey Day" or "Turkey Month". But elsewhere, geese were traditionally served in November. It's possible in German to refer to November as Gänsemonat, or Goose Month. In Middle English, a weather concept similar to "Indian summer" was combined with the concept of eating goose in that period so that the warm weather was called gosesomer, or goose summer. It was like talking about Indian summer and blending that with Goose Month.

So it was during gosesomer that the spider silk was frequent. And this is where the meaning shifted from one to the other and gosesomer/gossamer was transferred from the time of year to what was encountered AT that time of year, and the spider silk was called gossamer instead. A transfer like that is not as weird as you'd imagine. Hypothesis: the spider threads were called "gosesomer spider threads"—the first part sill a reference to the season—and then the phrase was shortened to just gosesomer, but still referred to the threads. That's the unusual story of how gossamer gets its name.

Here's a painting on the subject. It's called Indian Summer (1875) by the Polish artist Józef Chełmoński and shows a Ukrainian peasant woman lying in a field with a thread of gossamer in her hand, and more flying about.

Qingdao   The next morning was Day 8 of the group trip and we went to Hongqiao station, leaving Shanghai for the ride to Qingdao. It was not that fast a train, and took a good part of the day. You can find the route on the rail map we've been using (Map by Howchou). Note the location of Qingdao on the peninsula in a geographic area we've discussed extensively in the past. Qingdao is on the south side of the Shandong Peninsula (Map by LERK作成) and was the center of the German Concession there.

QINGDAO HISTORY: EARLY 20C While Germany did want a naval presence in the Pacific, it also wanted to establish a colonial presence in Asia, and in 1898 it managed to obtain from China a 99-year lease on a concession known as the Kiautschou Bay Concession. At this point we have to clarify two names, that of the city and that of the bay.

The modern pinyin romanization of the city's name today is Qingdao (Q=CH). In the German romanization of this earlier date it was Tsingtau and the English romanization was Tsingtao, which counted as the Western postal name. This latter form is still used for the famous beer manufactured there. All three spellings rhyme with "how".

As we'll see on a map in a moment, Qingdao lies to the east of a large bay. On the west side of the bay is the city romanized in pinyin as Jiaozhou, and Jiaozhou Bay shares its name with that city. But this has older spellings as well; Kiaochow and Kiauchau in English and Kiautschou in German. The German spelling was used in naming the Kiautschou Bay Concession. (Bucht=Bay; Ehemalig[es] deutsches Schutzgebiet=Former German Reserve; Gelbes Meer=Yellow Sea).

Qingdao and its harbor, aside from its military importance, was intended from the start to be a model colony. Its administration and infrastructure were meant to show the other colonial powers and China—and the German people themselves—an effective colonial policy. After they took over the impoverished fishing village called Tsingtao, they outfitted it with wide streets, good housing, government buildings, electricity throughout, a sewer system, and a safe drinking water supply, something that was rare in Asia at the time and afterward. The Concession had the highest density of schools and the highest per capita student enrollment in all of China. Primary, secondary, and vocational schools were paid for by the German government and German religious organizations. Furthermore, it was under the German administration when what is now Tsingdao beer was first manufactured in the city (more later).

But it didn't last. During WWI, Japan, which was an ally of Britain, captured Qingdao in November 1914, and took it over, but that didn't last, either, since it reverted to Chinese rule in 1922 after eight years. When war came again, Japan re-occupied Qingdao in 1938 until the end of WWII. But especially when considering that other concessions in China ran from the 1860s through WWII, a long period to influence the culture, and that Germany's Concession lasted only 16 years, 1898-1914, Germany had a considerable influence on the city, particularly noticeable in its architecture.

We have some ephemera dating from the German period. News was provided for the large German community and garrison by three German newspapers, including the Tsingtauer Neueste Nachrichten or the Tsingtau Latest (Newest) News, also known as the Tsingtao Sin Pau. This is Volume 1, Number 1 dated 1 November 1904. It was published until 1914.

Postage stamps were issued for the Concession including this 20-pfennig stamp from 1901. It shows the imperial yacht Hohenzollern II from 1892. Local coinage is represented by this 10-cent coin from 1909 labeled "Deutsch[es] Kiautschou-Gebiet" or German Kiautschou Territory. (I cannot explain what sort of cents these were.)

Picture postcards were in their height of popularity in this period, and we've used several in the past to show buildings and street scenes, particularly in Tianjin. Here instead, we have some that are in a much lighter vein. This c 1910 greeting card translates as "Greetings from Kiautschou--from your retired sister Frieda". This c 1900 card features a map of the concession. And humor and parody were always popular in postcards. This one, c 1900, features a clash of cultures when sailors come ashore. A monkey sits on a snack-bar roof labeled "Restauration zum fidelen Matrosen" or "Jolly Sailor Tavern". The vertical sign proclaims that here in China, they're selling "Wiener Würstchen" or "Vienna sausages". While the sign on the left says they have "Berliner Weiße", or "Berlin White [Beer]", a light summertime favorite, the Chinese waitress is carrying fistfuls of steins as they do in Munich's Oktoberfest, and they're labeled HB for Munich's Hofbräu. The Chinese drunk next to the barrel is also drinking HB while a German sailor tugs at his queue. You can only guess at what the sailor in the center is planning.

But Tsingtau in that period was more sober than that. Before I left for China, I found this map that I printed out and took with me, and I found it very fulfilling while I was there. It shows Tsingtau in 1912. If you want it in a separate window, use this link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Image-Qingdao_city_map_1912_in_german.png

If you remember that the bay is to the west, you'll see that the open sea is to the south. If you recall that the British in Shanghai had their Edward VII Avenue and the French had Avenue Foch, there should be no surprise whatsoever the extent that streets in Tsingtau bore thoroughly German names, including imperial ones. Click to enlarge, so we can inspect some locations. Of course, as in Shanghai, all these names are gone and replaced with Chinese names today.

Start with the Bahnhof / rail station. Germany built the local railway and station, and it's still there. The rail connection to the harbor is gone, but note the Tsingtau Brücke. In Hamburg we talked about the Landungsbrücken, or landing stages. In other words, it's a pier, heavily used at the time, today just decorative. An octagonal pavilion was built on the end in 1930, but we'll get to that shortly.

The Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) in 2008 made available to Wikipedia's Wikimedia Commons 100,000 historical pictures covering 20C German history for free public use. They're added to the Wikimedia Commons database of over three million items, which we've used on this website in the past. There are a lot covering Tsingtau, but I've chosen only the two that follow that I feel illustrate the city street scene best in that period.

Ufer is "shore", used here as "shore road", and you can find the Kaiser Wilhelm Ufer along the harbor, which changes its name at either end. This is still a beautiful road with very nice views. One block north is Prinz-Heinrich-Straße. Note how wide the c 1910 street is, the power lines and street lamps, and the typical Central European architectural style of the buildings. There's even a Friseur (hair salon) at the right. Two blocks further north in is Kronprinzenstraße (Crown Prince Street) with some villas, and still a lot of open area.

Above this is a cluster of streets named after German cities, Berlin and Bremen horizontally, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, Lübeck and Hamburg vertically. Note the large vacant lot at the eastern end of Bremer Straße (Bremen Street), because we'll refer back to it shortly. Above this is a cluster of smaller streets, still named in German, but with Chinese references, including Peking (Beijing) and Tientsin (Tianjin). Another German map confirmed what I suspected, that this is die Chinesenstadt, the Chinese City, that we'd seen elsewhere. This is where the original village of Tsingtao/Tsingtau lay. Note also the name Sifang on a street, since we'll see that name shortly again as well.

QINGDAO HISTORY: MID-20C Before we get to our visit of Qingdao, we also have to take another look at some extraordinary history that took place in the middle of the 20C. We've referred to it only in passing in the past, particularly in regard to cathedrals in Harbin and Tianjin, but should say a little more here, to round out the story with the destruction here.

Once the present regime took control of China in 1949, both nationalism and ideology led to the desire to eradicate Western presence and influence in China. This was extreme during the Korean War (1950-1953), when foreigners were imprisoned or expelled and property was defaced, and ballooned to madness during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1971).

The prime example in Qingdao was Saint Michael's Cathedral (Catholic), built 1931-34 on top of a hill on that vacant lot at the east end of the former Bremer Straße, and today called the Zhejiang Road Catholic Church. It was badly damaged and defaced by Red Guards, and then abandoned. Two Red Guards climbed to the top of the twin-steepled cathedral to remove the crosses topping the steeples. The irony of the moment was that, as the crosses fell to the ground, so did both men. Justice sometimes appears just where you least expect it. The original crosses were rescued by local Catholics and buried. However, the 2400-pipe organ, which had been one of the two largest in Asia, was also destroyed by the Red Guards.

The Chinese government subsequently repudiated the Cultural Revolution and quite correctly declared it an appalling catastrophe. The government then funded the cathedral's restoration in 1981, and new crosses were manufactured for the steeples. There is no word that the organ has been replaced. In 1992 the cathedral was listed as a Provincial Historic Building, and in 2005, city workers repairing water pipes accidentally found the original crosses buried not far from the cathedral. They are currently stored in the north transept.

VISITS TO QINGDAO: REAL & IMAGINED I knew long before leaving home that things would not go perfectly smoothly in Qingdao. I wrote more than once to the director to see if we could visit some of the city, and maybe even visit the Tsingtao brewery, but to no avail, nor did any inquiries during the trip yield any progress. I, and anyone else who was interested, just got more of that "it's not in the itinerary" attitude. On top of it, I knew we'd be staying at a hotel way out to the east of center city, so even evening strolls would do no good. I just realized then that it was like in Souzhou. We didn't see any of that town, because we were there for a factory visit. But of course, we didn't spend the night there, either. We were in Qingdao also for a factory visit, the next day, and we drove through the center of the city, and did spend the night, but saw little to nothing. It was frustrating, but I've managed now to make lemonade out of the lemons. We're going to do both a real tour, and an imagined one.

Qingdao, at least the older, ex-German part, including the beach area along the shore continuing east to our hotel, IS an attractive city. It's been declared the most livable city in China. Frommer gives it two stars (maximum three), and praises the unique combination of German and Chinese architecture. But it points out that many of these buildings are dispersed, and most of the old villas in the former German colonial neighborhoods near downtown are hidden behind high walls, so there are limitations.

The train from Shanghai pulled into Qingdao sometime between 3-4 PM. I knew from Frommer that Qingdao Station, built in 1901, was an artifact, recently remodeled, left from the German period and blended with a Chinese style. Frommer called it a classic European structure with a 35 m (115 ft) period bell tower. But it looked like I was going to lose out. The local bus picked us up at an exit that turned out to be on the west side, but I was disoriented as to where the front was. We drove in an arc around the station and a couple of blocks away in order to move eastward to the hotel, and I asked the local guide if we'd at least see the front of the station. That request didn't evoke a "not in the itinerary" response, since we'd be passing in front of the station anyway, but from a distance. I saw what I wanted, but from a moving bus, which is far from ideal. At least I could appreciate its very traditional German style (Photo by Li Chao), including the original tower and gable, plus its more modern additions. Try taking all this in from a moving bus. But the station goes down as eked-out Win #1.

Almost immediately we were going along the shore road, now called Zhongshan Road, and passed something by almost as quickly as we'd passed the station. It was a pretty harbor view, but I remember it only because the guide did point out an island in the bay, the small Qingdao Island. As it turns out, qīng in Chinese means "green" or "lush", and dǎo means "island", so this little island had given its name to the entire city. I do remember noticing more in the bay while looking at the island, but she didn't talk about something rather important, so the next information is a later reconstruction of mine.

This is the historic harbor (Photo by Bridget Coila) as we saw it. Click to inspect Qingdao Island and the slender causeway to its left that connects it nowadays to the mainland. But you can't miss the pier and pavilion in the foreground, and we remember the pier from the historic map. As you can see from the people walking on it, it's a popular destination today. It's called Zhan Qiao, which apparently translates mundanely as "Loading Pier", and was the first wharf. It was started in 1891, so it predates the German period, although has often been lengthened. It now stretches 440 m (1444 ft) into the bay. Well after the German period, in 1930, an octagonal pavilion was built at the end of the pier called Huilan Ge. The pier with its tower is considered by many as the official symbol of Qingdao. For this reason, it appears as part of the logo of Tsingtao beer (Photo by Prince Grobhelm). I would say that learning now about the pier and tower we saw looking at the island is Win # 2.

These two wins conclude the "Real Visit" of Qingdao. Just as we had to add an imaginary visit to a temple and wall remnant in Shanghai's Old City, the rest of what we'll now "see" in Qingdao is our "Imaginary Visit", as I got to see none of the following. So as our bus rides the 15-20 minutes out to the hotel, longer in rush-hour traffic, let's "wander" around downtown.

We have three historic Qingdao buildings representative of German architecture. This is the Hua Shi Villa (Photo by Gisling), which Frommer gives one star and describes as a "Bavarian medieval castle built in 1903". Also somewhere downtown is the Former German Administrative Building (Photo by Gisling). Only the Chinese writing and flag belie that this building isn't in Central Europe. And Frommer gives a full three stars to the Former Residence of the German Governor (Photo by Brücke-Osteuropa). It was built 1905-1908 in the style of an old fortress. It had become a hotel, and is now a museum. Frommer says that much of the stained glass, dark woods, and plush furnishings have survived, including a green marble fireplace with ornamental tiles. It also has an original 1876 grand piano. We just have to imagine all of this.

Finally for our imaginary tour, we have two churches. As is so typically German, one is Protestant (Evangelical) and one is Catholic. The Protestant Church (Photo by Gisling) gets two stars. Completed in 1908, Frommer describes it as being in the style of a Western medieval castle, a squat yellow structure with a red tile roof and pretty green bell tower with clocks on three sides, so this picture seems to do it justice. You can climb the tower to see the original bells, which still toll here (reminiscent of Shanghai). It was spared destruction during the Cultural Revolution, since few knew it was a church.

The Catholic church is one we know already, Saint Michael's Cathedral (Photo by Noraft), already described as being at the top of a hill downtown. It's the largest example of Romanesque Revival architecture (Photo by Noraft) in the province (here, the West Front), resembling a German 12C cathedral. The replaced crosses at the top of the two steeples are in evidence. Curiously, it was built well after the German period, from 1931-1934.

It would have been nice to visit the Tsingtao Brewery, where you tour the plant and then are treated to a beer tasting. True, I've toured breweries—in Einbeck, south of Hanover/Hannover, the home of bock beer, and in Tampa—but doing it again here would have been an appropriate visit. But again, Frommer gives that tour just one star. It's China's second largest brewery, with 15% of the domestic market, and has a history as varied as that of the city, with as many flip-flops.

It was founded in 1903 as the Germania-Brauerei, or Germania Brewery, by the Anglo-German Brewery Co Ltd based in Hong Kong, which owned it until 1916. After Japan took over the Concession in 1914, the company was liquidated and taken over in 1916 by a Japanese company. (This company has distinguished descendants, since it was split in 1949 into two famous brands of beer, Sapporo and Asahi.) But after WWII, brewery's ownership passed in turn to China, first to the Nationalist government, then to the Communist government, then to private hands. In 1993 it was merged with other breweries to form the Tsingtao Brewery Co Ltd. Tsingtao Beer was introduced to the US in 1972 and soon became the top-selling Chinese beer there, maintaining this leadership ever since, The Tsingtao brand is sold in 62 countries and accounts for more than 50% of China’s beer exports. The brewery initiated the very popular Qingdao International Beer Festival in 1991, which has run for two weeks at the end of August ever since, attracting over a million visitors. Thus, although with many variations in between, the German beer tradition lives on in Qingtao in the form of Tsingtao beer (Photo by Derbrauni)—with the pier's pavilion on its label (click).

Our Imagined Visit is now over, and we're back in the bus going east on the coast road. Let's finally look at a map of Qingdao today. Copy and paste this link in another window:

Find the station and the nearby (St Michael's) Cathedral. You can see where we passed the pier and pavilion, and also the little island. We continued some 15 minutes on the coast road, and then went inland several blocks to the Zhanshan Garden Hotel. Only now that I see this map do I realize that its location is just SE of a certain Zhanshan Temple, and is apparently named after it, but we couldn't see the temple and remained unaware of our neighborhood.

The hotel was modern, comfortable, and lovely. It had a nice restaurant. It's described as a summer resort hotel. And to my mind, it was totally inappropriate. Although its website describes it as being right in the center of Qingdao, they're apparently talking about a more modern, resort-style center, and not the historic center. It was located in a beautiful, leafy, residential neighborhood essentially in the middle of nowhere. With a well-located hotel, you have the option of an evening stroll in the local neighborhood, as in Shanghai. Here, at most you'd see some local houses.

I'd checked out the restaurant and was satisfied to come back for dinner. I later found out that all but four of us managed to work their way back down to the coast road, either on foot or by taxi, to go looking for restaurants. I thought they were foolish, but to each his own. Although I enjoyed the stay at this hotel, I still think it was a waste of time. We didn't come to stay at a resort, but to see China.

I've already described dinner here. One couple from our group was just leaving when I arrived, and I started out as the only one in the restaurant. The menu was also in English, and among some very odd foods, I found an appetizer of fritters and a main course of pork dumplings with sweet-and-sour soup on the side. This was the soup that I described earlier as being served in a "bathtub" of a tureen, and fortunately someone else from the group joined me in an attempt at getting close to finishing it. At least we enjoyed some Tsingtao beer, but all in all, I can't say I was enthusiastic about our visit to Qingdao.

Day 9 Our ninth day can be simply described, a factory visit and then the train to Beijing. We'd been told the name of the factory and that they're one of two that produced rolling stock, but nothing else. Would we go by train? By bus? It wasn't deemed necessary to tell us until we were already underway. And I now can see we went the long way 'round.

Look at our map. Find the Sifang ("Four-Way") District of Qingdao—we mentioned a related street earlier—in the north of town. Plot how you would drive northwest from the hotel to get there. Well, that's not what we did. The bus driver went all the way downtown, passed right near the rail station, and then went north about 45 minutes. After the visit we retraced our way back to the station for the train to Beijing and an evening arrival in the dark.

The Sifang visit was to the Bombardier-Sifang Transportation Co, which makes high-quality coaches for high-speed trains. Bombardier is from Canada and makes a lot of passenger train coaches for North America and Europe, and many subway cars. Here it's been in a joint venture since 1998 with the Sifang Locomotive and Rolling Stock Company. We were received in my opinion somewhat indifferently by its General Manager from Europe who spoke a bit, I felt, less than fully enthusiastically. Perhaps if the group had included some US politicians with checkbooks in hand, as the director had originally planned, there would have been more enthusiasm. My notes say that he told us this was the most profitable and most efficient of all Bombardier plants, and produced two train coaches a day. 180 of their trains (Photo by Alancrh) are running today in China. I find it interesting how their trains seem to be so much more pencil-nosed than the others. We then spent quite a bit of time walking through huge hangar-like buildings where the cars were made.

Before we left Sifang to go back into town, we had the usual company-provided lunch, but this time it was quite unusual and in my mind, the very simple dessert was the high point of the Sifang visit. You're sure to smile when you hear that lunch was not in the lush-and-plush restaurants that we'd been taken to, including by these companies, but instead in the company cafeteria here. But don't laugh, it was a nice experience. As usual, we were told nothing until we got there.

It was after the lunch time for the workers, so the cafeteria was empty. The two dozen of us sat at three picnic-like benches, with the gleaming stainless-steel cafeteria line off to my right. Would we be going through the line? Who knew? Finally, the cafeteria ladies in hair nets appeared with bowls of apples for each table. This lunch was to be low-key. I assume this reflected the attitude of the General Manager.

We didn't go through the line. The ladies soon appeared with carts of food trays whose sections had already been filled with rice, vegetables, meat. There were chopsticks of course, although I think they did manage to come up with a fork or two for those that needed them. We had a pleasant lunch chatting with each other.

Then, like the bowls of apples they'd brought before, they appeared with bowls of dessert. I'll describe it as sesameed yams. Each bowl was filled with bite-sized, cooked yams covered with sesame seeds, served chilled. It could have been some syrup that held the seeds on, but was more likely honey, or a combination. The dessert was ambrosia! We picked out pieces with chopsticks, and it was a very pleasant end to an otherwise diffident visit. On to Beijing.