...and it took me to China
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2009
1
5
Trip End
Feb 19, 2010
Xining, Qinghai, China
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Just weeks before my arrival, rampaging mobs had murdered at least a hundred people on the streets of Urumqi as tensions exploded between Uighur muslim and Han Chinese populations. Rumours spread by text and email about what people of one group had done to another (rape and murder) seemed to have helped spark the grim events, so mobile phone signals and the internet were still blocked when I arrived. Nevertheless, it would have been great to stay and explore the province as reports I heard from other travelers suggested that the Uighur people in the small outlying rural towns are incredibly hospitable. But I had to press on to Xining and start acclimatising for Tibet.
China is not short of rapidly expanding cities like Xining. New apartment blocks seem to spring up overnight to house the ongoing population influx from rural areas. There is nothing much exciting about Xining, but it attracts travelers as a starting point for travel into Tibet since the rail link was completed in 2007. It's also high enough that you can begin acclimatising to altitude a little.
But maybe a nondescript city with few tourist sights was a good place for my first taste of China. The most ordinary things can still be extraordinary to a westerner experiencing China for the first time; and it was my first chance to form impressions of Chinese people. The bathroom salesman who I shared my sleeper carriage with on the train to Xining had proudly told me how friendly Chinese people are; and this is what I immediately found. Without their willingness to go out of their way to help a stranger, I'd have never found my hostel and would have spent my first night in a Chinese city sleeping on the street!
As my bathroom salesman friend showed with his talk of the greatness of Mao and what a strong nation China is, their friendliness towards foreigners may in part be down to a national confidence and self-belief. Their government ensures its citizens know they are the oldest civilisation in the world, they have a strong government dedicated to its people thanks to the revolutionary legacy of the great Mao; and they are in the process of becoming the world's superpower.
I will have much more to say about the opinions I formed about Chinese culture, politics, people, its place in the world and the dramatic changes it is going through in later posts. Those ideas had barely started to form in my few days in Xining, but they were still days of great excitement.
I was excited to be in one of the world's largest and most ethnically diverse countries with the world's largest population. I was excited by the prospect of learning the millennia of history of the world's oldest civilisation, and the decades of history of one of the world's most formidable political systems. And I was excited to be witnessing a country going through astonishingly rapid economic growth and cultural change on its way to eclipsing the United States as the world's economic and political superpower.
