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| Men make a toast in Chongqing, China’s largest metropolitan area |
There are 32m stories in China’s largest city. This is one of them. I had gone to Chongqing partly on business, but mostly to find out why one of the world’s most populous metropolitan areas is so relatively little known, seldom visited and under-appreciated, even by the Chinese. Once there, I found myself an apparent victim of the sort of routine crime one associates with urbanisation, social dislocation and the loss of traditional values.
Chinese newspapers, novels and TV dramas are full of laments about such problems. To help fill the growing ethical void, the central government in recent years has sought to promote Confucianism and patriotism. But my misadventure came with a twist – one that revealed why Chongqing is different from China’s more famous cities.
Chongqing – formerly known as Chungking – has been a busy place for 3,000 years, thanks to its location at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers in central China. It was the country’s capital during the second world war and has lately been the beneficiary of a government drive to develop the inland region. Its GDP has grown by two thirds in the past four years, and job-seekers are pouring in. Chongqing officially became China’s biggest metropolitan area in 1997, when the central area was merged with surrounding counties. Today, the city is a 21st-century Manchester and Pittsburgh rolled into one humming, polluted megalopolis. Except that it’s hotter.
Chongqing is one of China’s three “furnace cities” (the others are Wuhan and Nanjing), with a humid, subtropical climate rivalling central Angola’s. The heat, along with Chongqing’s famous pollution, has helped put the forbidding city toward the bottom of tourists’ must-visit lists.
It wasn’t on mine at all. But when my wife and I – then teaching in Beijing – received invitations to speak at a Chongqing university, curiosity triumphed. We grabbed a cheap two-and-a-half-hour flight to the city’s newly expanded airport. The university sent two cars, a faculty member, two graduate students and several enormous bunches of flowers to receive us. We were whisked along broad motorways to a spotlessly modern hotel.
We barely had time to drop our bags before being whisked again to a vast and spicy lunch. Chongqing is famous for its forceful Sichuan cuisine, and especially its hotpot. At the centre of our large, round table was a simmering pot of spicy broth, into which a jolly waitress dumped various veggies and meats – as well as duck’s blood, chicken entrails and pig’s kidney. I swallowed blindly, not wishing to know more.
Before we knew it, we were whisked away yet again, this time to our first lectures. My mouth was burned so badly I had trouble forming words. Happily, the students were attentive, grateful and full of questions. Then tea with the dean, a quick tour of the campus and off to dinner – another caustic pot of flora and fauna, this time overseen by singing waitresses.
We staggered back to the hotel, stomachs gurgling, to an unpleasant surprise. In the lunchtime rush to drop our luggage, I had forgotten to remove a rather large amount of cash from one of the many zippered pockets in my new travel bag. The money was missing.
The best of the Three Gorges
The jewel of Chongqing’s cultural offerings is the China Three Gorges Museum, with 170,000 world-class Chinese bronzes, ceramics, paintings and other artifacts, some unearthed during construction of the giant Three Gorges Dam. The museum, opened in 2005 on the vast Renmin (People’s) Square, also devotes considerable space to the Ba culture that dominated the Chongqing region thousands of years ago, as well as to an exhibit labelled, rather bluntly, “Anti-Japanese Days”, which traces the city’s struggles during the second world war.
www.3gmuseum.cn
I was mortified. I kept quiet about my loss, but foreign credit cards are not widely accepted in China, so my renminbi shortage soon became apparent. Word of the alleged theft got out. Our faculty hosts complained to the hotel management, who vowed to investigate.
The next evening, after a gruelling day of lecturing and extreme eating, a man with the short-cropped hair and dark suit of a police detective marched into the restaurant where my wife and I were dining with yet more faculty members. He handed me an envelope stuffed with cash. I realised that he was not a cop but the hotel manager. He said he had been interrogating staff and reviewing security camera footage. No culprits yet, but if he did not soon have a confession he would call in the real police. Meanwhile, he said, “Please accept this envelope as a token of our embarrassment at your loss”. I protested but ultimately agreed, doubly mortified.
Another day of lecturing and eating, this one interspersed with sightseeing. Turns out there is much to see in Chongqing. A good place to start is the historic Chaotianmen dock, where the two rivers meet – and from which swarms of cruise ships leave for the Yangtze’s picturesque Three Gorges. We skipped the cruise, having taken one from a town upriver some years earlier. But down here, the river is also filled with enormous ocean-going freighters that have come 1,500 miles from Shanghai. Perhaps the best view of all this nautical bustle is from Eling (Goose Neck) Park, strung along a goose neck-like ridge 350m above the river junction. Go at night, when the city’s countless skyscrapers are ablaze with lights, but arrive soon after sundown, since those lights are extinguished early in the night to save energy.
Though Chongqing was bombed heavily during the second world war, many of its older buildings survived and others have been rebuilt as replicas. A mix of both can be found in Ciqikou old town, a Ming Dynasty porcelain-making district lined with quaint, painted-bamboo shop fronts. Most of the shops seemed to be selling souvenirs, as well as the sugar-coated fried biscuits much loved by the locals. Our hosts also took us to a gigantic Ming Dynasty edifice built into the face of a cliff near the river junction. Despite its period architecture, it was a shopping-and-dining mall completed only a few years ago.
For a dose of Chongqing’s wartime history, we visited the homes-turned-museums of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell, the US commander in China. Stillwell’s house was especially rich in period photos.
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| Carvings at Dazu |
My wife and I got back to our hotel to find a message that the police were waiting downstairs to interview us. No perpetrators had been found, so the matter was escalating. I was triply mortified. I grabbed my unfortunate travel bag to show as evidence and headed down to the lobby. Then I noticed an unfamiliar compartment. I unzipped it. You can guess what I found.
I thought the manager would kill me, but instead he and his staff cheered my good fortune. The police disappeared. I sheepishly returned the envelope of money we had been advanced. Mercifully, the dean and several colleagues arrived to convey us to the airport, with armloads of gifts and hugs all around.
Reflecting on the extraordinary generosity of our hosts, the smiles and goodwill we had encountered, I realised I had been wrong about this burg. Instead of an urban hell of crime and alienation, it is more like a reservoir of traditional values and genuine niceness. A place where cash stays in a hotel room.
In written Chinese, as I later learned, the character “chong” is similar to “qianli”, meaning a thousand miles. The character “qing” is the combination of “guang” and “da”, which connote vastness. Thus, “Chongqing” suggests vast tolerance and generosity. Not many cities are blessed with a name that fits so well.
Donald Morrison’s ‘The Death of French Culture’ will be published in spring 2010
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Echoes of art deco in the pick of Shanghai’s hotels
“There never was, nor ever will be, another city like Shanghai between the two wars,” the late Hong Kong-born tycoon Lord Kadoorie of Kowloon and the City of Westminster used to tell his son Michael, now chairman of the family’s Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, the oldest hotel company in Asia, writes Claire Wrathall. It was, he said, a place that combined “the attributes of both east and west ... with its good and its bad, and a paradise for adventurers.”
It’s therefore something of an event for the family that this month the HSH subsidiary Peninsula (pictured right, peninsula.com; preview rate from Rmb2,009 (£180) until February 28, 2010, including breakfast and airport transfers) opened a hotel in Shanghai, a 235-room property next to the British Consulate at 32 The Bund – the first new building on the esplanade for 60 years. With that in mind, it’s hardly surprising that its interiors reflect Shanghai’s art deco heritage. In fact, though, they’re the work of a Frenchman, Pierre-Yves Rochon, best known for his work with Four Seasons, for which the George V in Paris, Hotel des Bergues in Geneva and its new Florence palazzo are perhaps his finest achievements.
Rochon’s scheme in Shanghai would also appear to have taken its inspiration from the 1930s: lots of black lacquer furniture, angular chrome and clubby armchairs, right down to the Gaumont-style lighting and Marion Dorn-influenced carpets.
The monumental building, by the US architect David Wells Beer, has sought to conjure a sense of the 1930s with a sweeping marble staircase and imposing ballroom. Even the elevator is a custom-made replica of a 1930s Schindler cage lift large enough to “deliver a limousine” – should you wish to have one brought to your room. But compared with the real art deco hotels that have opened in old Shanghai, west of the Huangpu river, in the past few years – a response, one can’t help feeling, to the mad futurism of Pudong on the opposite bank – it can’t help looking imitative.
Of the newcomers, the most splendid – at least pending Fairmont’s reinvention of the Peace Hotel – is the Langham Yangtze Boutique (yangtzeboutique.langhamhotels.com; from Rmb1,500), which occupies a striking spiky structure designed by Li Pan in 1934 that once laid claim to be “the third largest hotel in the Far East”. With just 96 decent-sized rooms, however, it counts as small by modern standards. Its décor is inevitably deco, the building impressive, and even if you don’t stay here, it’s worth looking in to admire its majestic roof-lit staircase.
Also authentically 1930s is the 30-room Mansion Hotel (www.mansionhotelchina.com; from Rmb1,057) in the French Concession, which opened two years ago in a handsome white limestone building designed by the French architect Lafayette in 1932 for an notorious syndicate boss. This year, its owners launched a sister property, the 25-room Garden Mansion Hotel, which opened in June on Nanyang Road, in Jingan, in a building that dates back to 1939 and was commissioned by the family of the Chinese-American architect IM Pei.
For a sense of period living on a slightly less grand scale, Number 9 (+86 21 6471 9950 or book through travelintelligence.com; from Rmb700) has been converted from a smaller though still elegant 1920s villa in the French Concession, down an alley off a lane where elderly women still play mah-jong. It belongs to the Taiwanese furniture designer David Huang, whose grandfather owned the house prior to his flight from China in 1949, and though Huang hasn’t sought to decorate it in a particularly art deco style – eclectic is probably a better description – it has something of the decadent Shanghai of Ang Lee’s movie Lust, Caution about it, at least in an idealised form. There’s not much in the way of mod cons beyond wi-fi, so it practically goes without saying that it doesn’t take credit cards.
