Daylife in nanjing12/20/2023 ![]() There’s a fairytale park with hotels, yet like all Evergrande projects brought to a standstill. Aside from huge residential blocks, there’s a huge mansion park surrounded by golf courses, and all the license plates are from Shanghai. Taicang is Shanghai’s playground for the weekend. Some porcelain shards are the only tangible evidence left, the rest destroyed in rebellions or bulldozed for shopping malls and factories. The museum shows the city’s rich history in the Yuan and Ming Dynasty, recreated with scenes and boats. The new museum and library (built next to each other) are a typical sign of development in China, with modern architecture that wouldn’t look out of shape in Shanghai. Yet facilities look great Sharing bicycles and huge new avenues. Taicang is up next, and it would have looked more flattering in the sunshine, but winter clouds are what we have, and everything looks sombre because of it. Another Nike store in Shanghai does not impress me, but a guy in a lower-tier city talking about how to make the perfect baguette does. He is a baker himself, and shows photos of his French baguettes and tells me how to make the perfect crust. In Kunshan, we were drinking coffee in an independent shop, when another customer tells us it has only been a decade since Starbucks first opened here, and now the block has almost forty coffee stores. The cities Kunshan (昆山) and Taicang (太仓)’s biggest benefit is often described as “well, it’s close to Shanghai”, or “yeah, there is a Starbucks.” There seems not much to do, but these cities are well-developed, thanks to their factories and close connection to Shanghai. Some elders who know a few words of English want to make small talk, while mothers push their kids to use English with me, and record and share it on WeChat. There’s one KFC, one Starbucks, and one Pizzahut. The city itself is trapped between the river and the mountains. The taxi driver took us to the city’s name-giver, a mountain called Jianglang (江郎山), and on the way there he spoke about his youth, how back then these highways weren’t there, and how people were just happy if they could eat and send their kids to school. Its population of 613,000 people falls under the jurisdiction of Quzhou (衢州), 40 kilometres east. Online, I can only find a few images of it, and everyone I tell about my travel plans has never heard about it (Chinese friends included). I try my luck at Jiangshan (江山) in the Zhejiang (浙江). But at the end of the day, I’m still not sure how to feel. More into the city center I find a wet market, and people are surprisingly friendly. A green-yellow-blue police station, a Greek temple, a yurt. There’s a pagoda which seems to have been built only a few years ago, and exercising seniors, young parents with their kids, and middle-aged guys photographing fauna with SLR-cameras.Įach city block seems built in a different decade (and different philosophy) - with odd buildings here-and-there. The park is one of the top attractions and it’s well-maintained. Is it going to be hard to get a fresh impression of lower-tier cities?īut there is life in Danyang, alright. The whole scene is rather… grey, dingy, and just like those Google images I saw. I see a canal occupied by a caravan of cargo ships. I left the new train station, turned a corner, and stopped dead in my tracks: I’m looking at those same grey photos from Google and Baidu now. China has 388 county-level cities like Danyang, and 293 prefectural-level cities like Zhenjiang. It’s under the administration of Zhenjiang (镇江). I picked Danyang (丹阳) in the Jiangsu province. The main attraction on TripAdvisor is a local park or pagoda, and sometimes there’s a blog from an English teacher that sums it up as: “I taught a year of English in this city, wouldn’t recommend it.” Trying to break preconceived notions These cities are often described as “dingy”. When you search for lower-tier cities on Google or Baidu, you get nothing but grey skies above a wide river, a park with leafless trees, and maybe an aerial photo of a new harbour project or monotone residential area. ![]() Each day life is lived there photographs are taken, dinners are eaten, and children are born. I look these cities up on Wikipedia and discover that millions of people live in each of these, I feel ignorant, but also intrigued. I know Shanghai and Nanjing, but not the six stations in between. I had never heard of that place, and it’s the same thing when people tell me they’re from Kaifeng (开封) or Weifang (潍坊) - or when I’m looking at the high-speed train map of China. Last week, a colleague told me she’s from the same hometown as Zhou Enlai (周恩来 the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China): Huai’an (淮安) in Jiangsu province (江苏省).
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