Went to FuTian bus station which is located beside ZhuZiLin metro stop

and took the 12.20pm bus to Zhuhai (88 Yuan~USD$13).

The ticket price is relatively more expensive for a 2 hours bus ride. I guess probably because there are only 3 passengers in the bus

so they need to make up for it.

View Larger Map

From the map, shenzhen and zhuhai don’t seem too far away and it’s just an hour of boat ride from SheKou port to Zhuhai JinBei port.

Zhuhai is another special economic zone and has is famous for its very long coastline.

The city was ranked as one of the top places in China for retirement.

Got to GongBei bus station at around 2.30pm.

It’s Chinese new year season

It’s possible to walk from Gongbei to Macau on foot. Across the Gongbei port is Macau.

Lover’s road

Fisher Girl Statue, symbol of Zhuhai. A short story about the fisher girl

A pretty nice park

Took bus 99 which goes in a loop around the city to the NorthWest part and took bus 35 back to GongBei area.

Got a Zhuhai haircut for 25 Yuan. 4th hair cut on my trip so far.

Took the 8.30pm bus back to Shenzhen (100 Yuan~USD$14.50).

Sichuan food for lunch

Sichuan fish head

Kurt drove us around the city.
HuaQiang Bei area, a place which sells a lot of electronic goods.

Clubbing in Shenzhen.

From Changsha to Shenzhen is around 800 km away.

View Larger Map

Got to Shenzhen LuoHu train station at almost 9am in the morning. Took the metro

to BaiShiZhou. Shenzhen metro currently only has 2 lines but is expanding its metro system to 5 lines and further west to Shekou.
Kurt picked me up and we went for DimSum.

Crashed at Kurt’s place at NanShan area, just right beside SheKou port at the western part of Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is an interesting city. 30 years ago, the city was just a farmland with 300,000 people. But today the city is the 3rd most populous city in China with a population of around 15 millions and is one of the richest in China.

In 1979, DengXiaoPing was trying to pick a city experimenting with capitalism. Back then, Shenzhen was still a backwater town and the city was picked as a Special Economic Zone because the city is located at the edge of the country, so it won’t post a threat to communism and the city is also close to Hong Kong.

The city is a main manufacturing center in China. A lot of the OEM electronic manufacturers are based in Shenzhen. The city is also ranked as the top financial center in the world and has one of the busiest port in the world.

Met an old friend, LiNa who I have not seen for 8 years for lunch.

Took bus 1 (8 Yuan) all the way from ShiJieZhiChuang (Windows of the World) at Futian all the way to DongBuHuaQiaoCheng located at the eastern part of Shenzhen. I think the bus covered a distance of around 40 km.
View from the double decker bus

Took bus J1 back from the DongBuHuaQiaoCheng to SheKou area (9 Yuan). The route covered pretty much the whole Shenzhen from West to East. The bus J1 covered a horizontal distance of around 50km and that’s approximately how big is Shenzhen from the western part to the east. In most Chinese cities, I like taking the public bus and go around the city, especially buses which go across the city from an outer edge to another corner of the city.

View Larger Map

Coastal City (HaiAnCheng)

Went to a bar with live music with Kurt at the new district of SheKou. Shekou is inhabited by a relatively big expatriate community.

The weather in Hunan was cloudy and rainy this morning and yesterday.
Walked to Hunan Provincial Museum.

The museum is famous for its exhibition about MaWangdui, a Western Han tomb 2100 years ago. The body of Marquess of Dai is in the museum. This is one of the best preserved body from ancient times in the world, the skin was still moist when the body was found. She was buried in 4 layers of tombs with air tight seal and 80 liters of preserving fluid deep underground.
The outer tomb

Inner layer

Changsha is the capital of Hunan province and some of the high rank members of the communist party such as Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Hu Yaobang grew up around here. It’s a place famous for revolutionary events. There are many people who were involved in Chinese-Japanese war and Chinese civil war come from this province.

Xiang river divides Changsha into the east part and the west part. The city has a population of around 6 million.

LieShiGongYuan??????

Those who were martyred.

Hunan style noodle with beef (5 Yuan~USD$0.70). Ate 2 bowls of noodles.

Changsha city museum

Mao’s statue

Street peddlers beside the museum

Those street peddlers were selling all kinds of stuffs. On the left is a book called Human and Mother Nature and on the right is a book about the quotations of Mao. This is the Chinese way of doing business, anything goes as long as it makes money.

Former site of Hunan Communist party which was founded by MaoZeDong. Mao rent a house and lived here as well.

Took bus 1 across the Xiang river to the western part of Changsha.
Hunan University

Not far away is YueLu hill.

YueLuShuYuan. It’s one of the four famous ancient academies in China and was established during Northern Song dynasty. Academies were extablished in China during Tang dynasty 1300 years ago for scholars to study Chinese classics.

Took bus 1 back to the eastern part of Xiang river to WuYi square. I saw a guy was trying to steal something from a lady’s bag and I shouted at him and approached him. Another guy which is also the thief’s buddy came along and we had a fight. Those 2 guys are Uygur minority from Xinjiang province. I heard a lot of bad stories about Uygur people stealing things around in China but this is the first time I saw it with my own eyes.

Night view of Changsha city center

Went back to the hostel and some of the hostel employees also had some bad experiences with Uygur people.

Went to Changsha train station

and took a 9.50pm K9017 train to Changsha (147Yuan~USD$22, hard seat, 11 hours ride). The hard sleeping berth cost almost 300 Yuan which is quite pricey for a 11 hours ride so I just got a hard seat ticket from yesterday.

With LingChao at the train station, a local Changsha friend.

Took bus 606 to Wuhan University. A big proportion of bus drivers in China are female and this lady was wearing a high heel shoe navigating the bus.

Wuhan University

Took bus 413 to DongHu (East Lake)

and MoShan.

Took bus 401 all the way from the eastern part of Wuchang to the last stop at HanYang district.

Visited Wuhan uprising museum.

During Oct 10th 1911, Wuchang Uprising broke out and that led to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China.

The left is the military flag during that time and the right is the 5 color flag of Republic of China then. The five colors are representing the five major nationalities of China, the Han (red), the Manchu (yellow), the Mongol (blue), the Hui (white), and the Tibetan (black).

Decided to take the high speed train (GaoTie) to Changsha instead of the normal one. From Wuhan to Changsha it’s around 350 km. Normal fast train takes around 3.5 hours (58 Yuan) and the high speed train (175 Yuan) will take only 80 minutes. Actually it will take almost the same amount of time to get to Changsha from Wuhan because the high speed train runs from the new Wuhan station located at the northeastern part of Wuchang which is a far from Wuchang city center to the new Changsha south station located at the south eastern part of Changsha which is also far from Changsha city center. To get to the new Wuhan train station, it will take almost an hour by public bus. Took bus 315 and switched to bus 311 to get to the new Wuhan station.

There is bullet train every 20 minutes from Wuhan to Guangzhou.

Infrastructure project in China are amazing. The country is modernizing its infrastructures in a rapid pace and the train station look first class. However, behavior of human is hard to change and still needs time. The floor in the station is super clean but people still throw guazipi (skin of sunflower seeds) on the floor.

Got on the G1059 5.40pm train (175 Yuan~USD$26). For high speed train, it cost roughly around USD$9 for every half an hour ride.

The top speed is over 350km/h.

The train arrived at Changsha sharp at 7.08pm. The bullet train is similar to a metro system, the train stopped at in between stations on the way for less than a minute.

Automated exit procedure.

Automated ticket machine.

Changsha south station.

It’s weird that the south station only sells high speed train ticket. The new south station is quite far from the city center. Took a bus to the main train station in the city and switched to bus 132 to XiaDaLong stop in order to get to Changsha Hostel (35 Yuan~USD$5).

I was surprise to meet LingChao again at the hostel. We just met few weeks ago at a hostel in Beijing. He is from Changsha so he was my guide and brought me to try out Hunan cuisine which is called XiangCai.

On the left is LuShuiShiHeYi (4 combination) and right is a kind of spicy shrimp. Hunan cuisine is spicy and actually Sichuan cuisine originated from the combination of GuangDong cuisine and Hunan cuisine.

HuoGongDian is one of Mao’s favorite restaurant.

Mao loves stinky tofu and he mentioned that HuoGongDian’s Tofu smells bad but it tastes good.

Changsha is famous for its bar culture. There are many bars around the city and this is one of the bar street, HuaLongChi.

Wuhan is one of the biggest city in China with a population of around 10 millions and is actually the combination of three smaller cities, Hankou, Hanyang and Wuchang, each separated from the other by a river. Hankou is located at the northern party and is the business center. Wuchang is the education center separated by the Yangtze river (ChangJiang). Hanyang is the industrial center. The 3 cities were combined in 1927 to become Wuhan. The city is famous for its hot summer weather and flood.

There are 4 train stations in Wuhan. One each in Hankou, Hanyang, Wuchang and a brand new train station at the Northeastern part of Wuchang..Arrived at WuChang station around 9.40am in the morning.

Took bus 511 to Hostel Pathfinder which is located at the Wuchang district. Got a dorm room for 35 Yuan~USD$5.

There is a street in Wuhan called HuBuXiang which is famous for street food.

Wuhan is famous for ReGanMian (2.5 Yuan~USD$0.4).

Yellow Crane Tower (HuangHeLou) was built around 2000 years ago. Just took a picture from the outside.

The first Yangtze river bridge was built 1957, during the first 5 Year Plan of China and is 1.6km long. There is also a railway track within the bridge.

The river bank is always flooded.

Walked across the bridge

Took bus 401 to Hubei Provincial Museum.

The museum is divided into 10 different exhibits. There is an exhibit about ChuGuo which is a country around Hubei province more than 2000 years ago during the Autumn Spring period in China before QinShiHuang unites China.
Sword used in ChuGuo

There is also an exhibit about the tomb of Marquis Yi which was buried 2400 years ago.

Big bells used as musical instruments discovered in the tomb.

Even during more than 2000 years ago, Chinese are paying a lot of attention to offering sacrifices to God. I am not sure what kind of God do they believe in then but it’s interesting and has some similarities to the Old Testament.

Replica of the skull of Peking man (500,000 years ago), Nanjing man (350,000 years ago) and Java man (more than 500,000 years ago).

Jiang Han road, a famous pedestrian mall

and just perpendicular to it is JiQing street, another street selling clothings and stuffs.

View Wuhan in a larger map

Took bus 26 to the Shaanxi provincial museum.

The museum is one of the top museum in China. It has 300,000 objects with 8 floors. But only 3 floors are open to the public.

Introduction of Shaanxi province…

It’s separated into a few sections. One section is about the Neolithic period because the 6500 years old Banpo Neolithic village was discovered close to the city.
This vase is around 5000-8000 years old.

PreZhou area, where Xia and Shang dynasty was in power. (2100-1050BC).
Old Chinese characters inside the Ding, 3000-4000 years old.

Zhou Dynasty, the longest dynasty in China with 1000 years in power. (1000BC-250BC). During the Zhou Dynasty, Chinese philosophy developed and people like Confucius, Laozi and Mencius made a big impact to later generations.

Warring states period 475BC-221BC where there are a lot of wars going on before being united by Emperor QinShiHuang.

During Qin dynasty 221BC-206BC, QinShiHuang standardized currency

and measurement.

Every terracotta warrior has a different look.

During Han 200BC-220AD, China developed pretty well.
ZhangQian,

he was sent to explore the west and is the founder of silk road.

Short story about ZhanQian, he is credited as the person that opened up the silk road.

There were many wars and life was tough around 300 AD. I guess that’s why Buddhism started to become more popular then because people turned to Buddhism for consolation and peace.

During Tang dynasty (618AD-907AD), chubby woman is favored.

Tang beauties.

Took bus 521 to Xiaoyanta. Didn’t go in since it’s just another pagoda.

Lamb noodles for lunch (8 Yuan~USD$1.2).

Took bus 600 to Xian Economic and technology development district north of the city center.

Got on the train K242 at 7.31pm towards Wuhan (242 Yuan~USD$35, hard sleeping berth).

Took bus 306 from the train station to some of the tourist attraction in LinTong which is an hour away from Xian. First stop is to HuaQingChi (6 Yuan).

The place was once a favored place of holiday for emperors in Tang dynasty. Since it’s just another old residence, I decided not to go in.

Again took bus 306 to the site of Terracotta Warriors, BinMaYong.
Kneeling archer

The site was accidently discovered in 1974 by peasants digging well. QinShiHuang became emperor when he was just 13 and under his rule of just 36 years, he achieved much more than anyone else. He conquered 6 kingdoms in just 13 years, standardized measurements, currency and writings.

There are 3 pits storing the old artifacts and statue.
Pit 3

Pit 2

The first pit is the biggest one and has 6000 statues in it.

With Oscar and Ilenia, my dorm mates.

Bus 306 broke down on the way back,

Took bus 602 to Xian Jiao Tong university. Xian Jiao Tong university is pretty good for its engineering faculty.

Went to the train station to get a ticket to Wuhan for tomorrow. Today is the first day where passengers can buy the Zhengzhou-Xian bullet train. The train will start running on Feb 6th. Just few weeks ago the bullet train from Wuhan to Guangzhou was put into operation.
China has an amazing plan to build 13,000 km of high speed rail road. The country is going to spend one trillion USD to expand its railway network from 78,000 km to 110,000 km in 2012.

Article about High Speed rail in China.

China High Speed Railway Map

High speed railway Plan

The four north-south main lines:
1. Beijing – Shanghai 350 km/h
2. Beijing – Guangzhou – Hong Kong 350 km/h
3. Shanghai – Hangzhou – Shenzhen
4. Beijing – Shengyang – Harbin (branch Shengyang – Dalian) 350 km/h
The four east-west main lines:
5. Qingdao – Jinan – Shijiazhuang – Taiyuan 250 km/h
6. Xuzhou – Zhengzhou – Xian – Lanzhou 350 km/h
7. Shanghai – Nanjing -Wuhan – Chongqing – Chengdu 200 – 350 km/h
8. Shanghai – Hangzhou – Changsha – Kunming 350 km/h