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Touring Shanghai, Wuxi and Kwangchow
When my wife and I arrived in Shanghai as scheduled, we met with our friendly interpreter, Mr. Sha, who advised us of the severe hotel room shortage in Shanghai. He had secured for us the only room left in the city – Mr. Nixon’s room in the Ching Chiang Hotel, where Bob Hope had also stayed during his visit to China. Our “room” turned out to be an apartment with two huge bedrooms, a reception room, living room, dining room, sunroom, kitchen, and attendant’s rooms. The next day we moved into a similar suite but took only the bedroom, as we didn’t have a large enough entourage to make use of the rest of the rooms.
Later, when we arrived in Wuxi, after a short train ride from Shanghai, our friendly interpreter met us with the strange news that there was a severe shortage of hotel rooms in Wuxi. But he was able to secure one room for us – a suite on the top floor overlooking the lake and the park.
Each night in our hotel at Wuxi we sat at a table “reserved for lady who eats three plates of steamed greens.” My wife astonished the local gentry with her propensity for eating salad. She switched to steamed greens in the interest of hygiene. We tried the Mao Tai rice wine and couldn’t finish the first thimbleful!
Their travel system worked well. We were handed about carefully from city to city, were met by an interpreter and were escorted to the sights by our driver. We also wandered freely through the cities, ate in the recommended restaurants, and generally felt like V.I.P.s. Tour groups looked at us with astonishment and outright jealously at times. We truly did feel for them in the restrictive confines of their packaged tours.
We visited a jade and ivory carving factory, a research center for needlepoint, a doll-making factory where their current project was thousands of Santa Claus pencil sharpeners, a silk thread factory, a people’s commune, a cloth-weaving factory, and a tea plantation. We wandered through dozens of famous parks and gardens, took boat trips on the lakes, visited friendship stores and antique stores and browsed through city center shopping areas, department stores, bookstores, bazaars and markets.
Between cities, we were “shown off” as the interpreter said, and “met” in special waiting rooms (with tea, of course). The train offered soft seats and a plant on each lace-covered table. We enjoyed a thermos of tea for one jaio (about 7 cents US). On a five-hour trip between Wuxi and Kwangchow, we shared a compartment with a Chinese honeymoon couple from Hong Kong. They asked us to share a banquet in the dining car, and we were served one chicken, one duck, one fish, a plate of fried oysters, a plate of steamed vegetables, soup, scrambled eggs with something mysterious in it, beer and tea. It was enough for six, but hardy travelers that we were, we made do with it.
The finale was the trade show in Kwangchow. Soon we would exit to Hong Kong and then return home after almost two months of travel.
As we expected, Kwangchow was a bustling city. Again, there were no hotel rooms available except our nice corner room with a porch, overlooking the huge garden. People from all over the world, with their pink badges flapping in the wind, visited the show from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. and from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m. The jewelry section had discussion rooms similar to those we encountered in Beijing, but flooded with buyers and tons of merchandise. We met some old friends from the Company in Beijing and two soft-goods buyers from Phoenix, Arizona.
We toured the rest of the fair again and again to see the machinery, planes, boats, medical equipment, foods, medicines, textiles, clothing, metals, electronics, watches and much else. The Chinese are good merchants and had retail shops scattered all over the trade fair for single item purchases. Money exchange desks were everywhere with “Visa” signs hung over the counters. We tried to buy some gift boxes but someone in Los Angeles had an exclusive.
We did not purchase any jewelry at the fair, as the selection in Beijing was sufficient for our first foray into the People’s Republic of China. From Kwangchow, we hopped a 20-minute flight to Hong Kong on China Air Lines. As we returned to Arizona, we were already looking forward to returning to China the next year.
