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Current Location: Nanjing, China
“Monsieur, do not wake a sleeping lion? (Napoleon, on seeing China’s potential)

“What is ideology? It is a kind of spirit to make sluggish people industrious and intelligent people even more capable. The spirit should be started from inside the court and then spread all over the country to as far as the remotest corner of the empire? (The Final Imperial Examination Paper of Number One Student, Confucian Examination Hall, Nanjing)

Boat from Korea to China; cycling down to Nanjing

Rob Lilwall
2007-12-01 14:42:31

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the cyclists swarm... stop at a traffic light and you will soon be swept up in a spinning, silent pelathon of steel horses - rushing you into the midst of 6 lanes of moving traffic... astonishingly, you slip through the gaps to emerge unscathed the other side.

China. China. It is one of those places you know about from childhood, but it is unreal until you get here. It is different, vast, mysterious... like it has been hiding. The history is unfathomably long: whilst Hannibal was raising his army, China was already united; as Rome retreated from England, China was busy inventing such exciting contraptions as the wheelbarrow. For the overwhelming majority of human history China has been number one - not just in population, but also in economic wealth and scientific advancement ... to the extent that Samuel Huntington calls the past couple of hundred years of western dominance a "blip?, an anomaly in the history of civilisations... many commentators now believe the normal order of
things is being restored - China is bounding with confidence and strength to embrace the 21st century.

Whilst China in the past was the land of inventions - now it is the land of fakes. The markets are packed with imitation brands - some are so realistic that it is hard to tell the difference. I realise that those bargain North Face clothes I smugly bought on E-Bay and wore to keep me alive through Siberia (and which had mysteriously non-North Face zips which broke all the time) just might have originated here!

Riding down the east side of China (south from Beijing) is in a sense monotonous - endless flat roads, dusty villages, muddy paddy fields, rubbish filled ditches, chattering farmer cyclists with their interminable string of questions I do not understand. I attempt some truck surfing to break the monotony. Truck surfing is a fun sport in less developed countries - where, with timing of the essence, you grab hold of the back of a truck/tractor which ...