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Departures
Pack your bags and pull the blinds: Our fall travel package has gone global. From China to Belgium, and Florida to Maine, there's a new world awaiting your arrival. And you'll be surprised by the St. Louis connections
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Chingling’s China Local teacher and China expert Chingling Tai has been leading tours there for 23 years—and what she sees changes every timeBy Jeannette Cooperman
Chingling Tai grew up in Taiwan, wondering about China. Her parents were “mainlanders” but had migrated to Taiwan. Trips home were impossible until Nixon’s famous visit opened the door. Then, in 1977, Tai braved the trip. “I went to China from Singapore and did not dare to say that I was from Taiwan,” she says, “because the tension between Taiwan’s KMT Nationalist Party and the Communist party was very high.”
Tiptoeing into the vast country that had always been a mystery to her, Tai expected to find poverty and government repression. Her trip was tightly controlled, but to an idealistic young woman, it presented a picture of real progress. “There were no locks on our hotel doors; they said we didn’t need to worry,” she recalls. “We couldn’t leave tips; people would chase after us and refuse to accept the money. I thought, ‘This is a society that is so honest, so equal—and crime-free! Everybody had at most three sets of clothes, and men and women dressed the same, in Mao jackets and trousers. You didn’t need to be so engrossed in material things.”
Six years later, in 1983, Tai moved to the United States to give her son and daughter “a better education and freer choices for their future.” While working on a master’s in comparative literature at Washington University, she led her first tour to China in 1984. The occasion was the fifth anniversary of the formal ties between Nanjing and St. Louis, which was the first U.S. city to have a sister city in the People’s Republic of China. Tai ushered dignitaries around the city that was the capital of six dynasties and, later, China’s Nationalist Republic. In the six years since her first visit, things had changed noticeably. Workers demanded tips, and because shops were still owned by the government, clerks had little inclination to wait on customers. Tai could move more freely around the country—but she didn’t always like what she saw.
Tai earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of Hull in England in 1987. As she continued leading tours to China, she paid close attention to signs most tourists ignore: indications of crime and prostitution and other social problems that had been suppressed when she first visited. China was loosening up, and in the heat of change, all the vices were gradually reappearing, like code written in invisible ink.
Then, in the 1990s, a free market took hold. Ambition replaced apathy, with retailers pushing their merchandise at every tourist. “Vendors followed us on the street shouting, ‘One dollar! One dollar!’” she says, surprised all over again. Now the Chinese were eager to practice their English and Westernize their culture. Tai could wear shorts in the street (if she so chose), and no one would look twice. Westerners were paying close attention to China’s problems—from pollution and population control to human-rights abuses—but were also fascinated by China’s rich cultural history and sheer size. China’s future could change the world.
Tai still travels to mainland China at least once a year, most often shepherding students, faculty and parents from St. Louis' University High School, where she has taught Mandarin for 20 years. She’s also guided all sorts of grown-ups, from Mayor Francis Slay to members of the Rotary Club. One traveler dubbed Tai “the General” because she so quietly takes charge, handling every exigency with a calm grace. Depending on Tai’s tour group, a Communist shadow still might trail along—but she takes charge of him, too, and manages to usher visitors into places otherwise off limits.
“If you want to see the real China, go now,” Tai urges. “The earlier you go, the better, because it is becoming the same as everywhere else. In Shanghai”—which in 1990 had no buildings taller than 14 stories—“there are now more skyscrapers than there are in New York.”
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Tai’s ideal itinerary begins in the obvious place: Beijing, cultural and political capital of China. Here is the Forbidden City, built in the 1400s and protected by a wall unlikely ever to crumble (its white lime bricks were sealed with glutinous rice and egg whites). Walking from end to end takes at least an hour and dazzles the eye: In preparation for the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing, workers are toiling 24/7 to restore all the breathtaking gold leaf to perfection.
“See the beauty of the architecture and the layout of the furniture in the great hallway, of course, but also the inner garden where you can appreciate the imperial family’s living style,” Tai advises. “The stone carvings of dragons refer to the emperor, who was thought of as the son of the dragon; that motif is everywhere. The phoenix is for the empress. Empress Cixi—you refer to her as the Dowager Empress—reigned for more than 40 years. In her living quarters, the phoenix was carved above the dragon to please her.”
It’s also in Beijing that most people visit the Great Wall, begun in the third century BC to hold back marauding nomads from the steppes. Wide enough for five horsemen to ride abreast, the wall twists and turns so often, its length is nearly double the 1,500 miles it spans, and the sight leaves Tai’s tour groups speechless.
To shop for antiques, she sends tourists to the Wang Fu Jing and Pan Family Garden districts: “You can spend days there! I always say I am going back alone someday.” For night life, “everybody likes to go to Shicha Hai for bars,” she adds. “This is a new place, and it is near some of the ancient courtyards.”
Visitors aren’t likely to need the Mandarin phrase wo mi lu le (“I’m lost”) in Beijing; the ancient city was built on a grid, and the modern highway is a circle, so places can be identified as “first ring” (closer to downtown), “second ring” and so forth.
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From Beijing, Tai often takes visitors to an ancient monastery on Song Mountain: Shaolin Temple, the legendary birthplace of the major Chinese martial arts as well as Zen Buddhism. Then she heads west to Luoyang for the Longmen Grottoes, where thousands of Buddhas were carved into the cliffs along the river; then on to Xi’an in central China, site of the most significant archaeological excavation of the 20th century. More than 2,500 years ago, China’s first emperor, Shi Huang Di of the Qin dynasty (the same man who ordered the Great Wall built) had 6,000 life-size terra-cotta warriors, horses and chariots carved for his mausoleum. Originally he wanted live soldiers buried with him, but was talked out of that plan. The terra-cotta warriors were discovered in 1974 when villagers drilled a well and brought up the head of one of the figures.
After Xi’an, Tai heads east and a bit south to Nanjing. Tai has been one of the forces keeping St. Louis’ relationship with her sister city alive, even cementing ties to a SLUH sister school. Nanjing is an intense city, filled with life and death: the tomb of the first Ming emperor, the site of the Taiping Rebellion and the monument to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, skeletons partly excavated. In 1958, the Russians offered to build the first bridge across the Yangtze River outside Nanjing, then declared the task impossible and left. So the Chinese built it themselves—and named their engineering marvel The People’s Bridge.
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“In China there is a saying: ‘If there is a heaven down below, it is Suzhou and Hangzhou,’” Tai says. She’s smiling at the whimsy—but she clearly agrees. Southeast of Nanjing, these two towns, located in neighboring provinces, are her favorite places. Suzhou, called the Venice of China, was built on the bank of the Grand Canal, and the gray wooden houses, with eaves curving upward as gracefully as a bird’s wing, face the street with the canal at their backs. Officials retired here and in their gardens sought a refuge from the world’s cares. “They fully used the land,” Tai says, “and their gardens work like picture frames: From each different window, you have a different scene.”
The Four Classical Gardens in Suzhou are the Surging Waves Pavilion, the Lion Grove Garden, the Humble Administrator’s Garden and the Lingering Garden, each made harmonious by a Taoist arrangement of hills, water, trees and pavilions. It’s said that their beauty is rivaled only by that of the women born in Suzhou: “The officials were from the upper class, with good culture and beautiful wives,” Tai explains, “so genetically, their daughters had a better chance to be beautiful.”
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Back east, Shanghai is China’s financial capital, and the yen flow fast. The Grand Hyatt Hotel here is the highest in the world, with its lobby on the 54th floor and a presidential suite that costs about $5,000 a night. China’s new bullet train will run across Shanghai in mere minutes and go from Shanghai to Hangzhou—a five-hour trip by car—in 45 minutes.
The night life at Xintiandi is just as fast, and a night cruise dazzles visitors with the city’s neon lights. Tai forces a pause, though, in the Jade Buddha Temple on the modern western side of Shanghai. The Chinese once believed jade to have the power to preserve the body from decay, and the temple has two Buddha statues carved of Burmese jade to convey immortality and peace, one sitting, the other casually on his side in a position called “lucky repose.”
Shopping here is best done in the Confucius Temple district, whose real name is Cheng Huang Miao, Tai notes. “It is ‘the city god’s temple,’ and the English didn’t understand. Every city in China needs a god to guard its city.”
Gods are easily come by in China: “Taoism holds that many things can become holy if they grow big enough or old enough; they gather essence and become powerful,” Tai explains. “The Chinese government just started to relax on religion—people now pray at the temples, and Christians are feeling less need to worship in secret. Those who grew up steeped in the Communist ideology are not quite believing in anything—but the pragmatic theories cannot fulfill spiritual needs. A lot comes with culture: Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, a concern for the afterlife, fortunetelling
and superstition.”
Numerology, too, holds power in China. Nine means longevity: The Forbidden City has 9,999 rooms so it will last forever and ever. Eight means prosperity: “A lot of Asians, even in St. Louis, have addresses and phone numbers with a lot of 8’s in them.” The number 4 is bad because its pronunciation sounds like the word for death, so Chinese hospitals have no
fourth floors.
In the south, visitors find “vegetables you can’t even name, because you don’t see them here” as well as water-grown foods like water chestnuts and reeds. One of the delicacies is “beggar’s chicken,” named because thieves would steal chickens from farmers, wrap each chicken with mud, dig a hole and roast it. “By the time it’s done, you break the mud and the feathers come off with it,” Tai says, “and it tastes so good it has become a delicacy. Now, though, the chicken is cleaned and wrapped in water-lily leaves, which give it a distinctive fragrance.”
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Tai’s parents were born in Changzhou, well south of Shanghai in the land of panda bears, golden-haired monkeys and tiny, fragrant yellow cassia blossoms. Yearning to be buried in their hometown, they returned from Taiwan in 1989, after governmental restrictions loosened.
This month, Tai returns to China for the second time this year—but now she’s off-duty, traveling with friends to Jiu Zhai Gou, in southwestern China. She’s been there before, and she was so taken with the heavenly scenery and gentle Tibetan ways that she vowed to see the place in every season.
“Snow-covered mountains, three beaches, four waterfalls, 141 lakes—and the water is so clear, you can see to the bottom,” she says. “The water is sometimes a deep green-blue, sometimes pale blue, sometimes jade blue, sometimes dark. At Peacock Lake, it’s like a peacock’s feathers. Tiger Lake reflects the color the trees turn.
“The places I have talked about are all Han people; that is the majority, 93 percent, in China,” Tai says. “But there are 55 different minorities in the remaining 7 percent, most in the southwest, near Burma. The influence of Thai culture is strong, and there are semitropical areas with heavy plantation growth.” China recently built a railway to Tibet, she adds, and the train has oxygen so passengers can adjust to the altitude.
Then, of course, there’s the extreme north, the Mongolian part of China, where tigers roam and water lilies and chrysanthemums wither and only the hardy plum blossoms—and then only pine trees—can endure the harsh winters. “The Silk Road goes through the Gobi Desert, takes you past ruins of the Great Wall and gives you an entirely different sense of China,” Tai says. “Muslims settled here and many look Mideastern—or have fairer skin and blue eyes.
“China is diverse in every way—scenery, climate, culture, people,” Tai finishes. “There are 3,000 years of history—more than 20 dynasties.”
You can’t absorb all of that on one trip.
You need 9,999.
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