16/05 Nanjing:
Things I ate: I had an apple for breakfast, and then another local snack for morning tea. This one was a sort of rectangular fried patty of sticky rice, with black sticky rice in the centre. For lunch I had ganbanmian at a Xinjiang restaurant, which was quite tasty. This version had mushroom and garlic stems along with the tomato, capsicum, onion and lamb, and was not overly spicy. In the late afternoon I was beginning to fade so in place of those fried potatoes they have a snack stalls in Guizhou (I haven’t seen them here or in Beijing, what’s up with that?) I had some chips from KFC, and then I went to a Haagen-Dazs shop I had noticed yesterday. After very thorough perusal of the menu I determined that the best value was the ‘dessert set’ including a cake, a scoop of ice-cream and tea/coffee. The cake (a chocolate mousse on a base that was rather like flattened chocolate crackles) was not very exciting but the ice-cream - dulce de leche/caramel - was as good as expected. It was presented like a masterchef dessert, with green and yellow syrups that I think were flavoured with kiwi and some tropical fruit. The tea was twinings English Breakfast tea-bags but it was in a nice large pot and the tea-cup and saucer were fine bone china. For dinner I went to a fast food dumpling house where the staff were very helpful and I had pork and chinese cabbage dumplings, and egg/vegetable soup.
Places I went: today was a museum day. First I went to the Taiping Mueseum, which is quite near the hostel. It is not very clearly labelled, because there is also ‘Nanjing’s Number 1 Garden’ in there, so some of the signs say that, instead. The museum was quite interesting. At first it was a bit photo-heavy, but later, when the exhibition focussed on the period when the Taiping were based in Nanjing, there were more artefacts and things. My favourites were the documents like marriage licences, examination textbooks, and traffic regulations (carved in stone) - the ordinary things that showed they were just like any other government. There was also a bit about the foreign soldiers who fought on both sides, including one who joined the Taipings at age 20, fought with them for four years, and was dead by 33. The exhibition made very good use of space but I think if you didn’t know the basics of the story already it would be fairly confusing. There were general introductions at the beginning and at various points throughout but they were heavy on the spin and light on the useful information. Actually the whole exhibition was a lot more strongly ideological than the Taiping stuff in Guangxi, and it finished with a section on how it inspired other peasant rebellions, with quotes from Sun Yat-sen, Marx, and Mao. The garden was pretty in a very classical style. After that, I walked towards the south gate, where I had read that you could catch a bus to the Nanjing Massacre memorial. However, due to a combination of bad information and my bad handwriting, I couldn’t find the appropriate bus, so (after eating lunch), I jumped on one that looked likely and used the old lp map to try and get off at the right stop. Fortunately this worked fairly well, so I ended up at the memorial museum by three o’clock. It is a huge grey angular looking thing and all the grounds are pebbles, so everything was grey including the sky. It is free to go in. The museum did not suffer from the same problem as the Taiping one, in fact everything is explained in extreme, repetitive detail. This sometimes gets a bit breathless !!11!111-style (‘it’s a copy of the oath taken by Japanese soldiers like the ones in Nanjing!!’) but you can see why, given the material. I was particularly interested in the information about the donors of various bits of memorabilia. Many of them were from the Sino-Japanese Peace Society, and a number were from a Japanese soldier who, it turned out, published his unexpurgated diary of the occupation of Nanjing in the eighties and was promptly sued by one of his former comrades. The one thing I didn’t like about the museum was how all the testimonies in the first half of the exhibition were from men, then in the ‘special interest’ section there was one tiny corner with the stories of ‘comfort women’ but a huge corridor about the few foreigners who stayed and ran refugee camps. I thought that was a bit disproportionate (on the other hand, the Taiping exhibition didn’t mention women at all, unless you count the marriage certificates and the Taiping map of Nanjing which had ‘women’s barracks’ marked in many places - it’s a shame because that is quite an interesting aspect of their army, in particular). However one of the foreigners was quite interesting - she was a missionary who taught at the women’s university, but in 1941 she committed suicide. The top floor of the museum is about the rest of the war but I walked straight through that as I was getting tired by that time. The whole place is dark but it does not have the amusing chain-mail curtains like the Jinsha museum in Chengdu. After you go out of the museum bit you walk through the outdoors area of the museum, which includes two large squares, a sculpture garden, a trees-planted-by-foreign dignitaries garden, an excavation of a mass grave, a place to burn incense, a memorial hall with electronic votives, and a peace park. Meeting all these memorial installations one after the other, and including the two in the actual museum (a flickering light one and a water droplet one), it feels a bit ‘just pick one, already.’ I think I felt this because I don’t really get a lot of the symbolism they were using (although it did seem like they were using as many as possible to make sure something got across to everyone - there was even a cross - but the cumulative effect was distracting). It may also have something to do with the fact that I was so tired I just wanted a nice cup of tea and a lie down!
People I spoke to: when I was sitting in the hostel common area this morning, a guy carrying a mac laptop came up and asked if his friend could take a photo of us together with our computers - ‘like a family’! He also showed me a sticker on his computer that looked to me like pac-man but apparently represents Obama. There were some other people sitting behind me at the hostel, who were very irritating. Apart from being generally noisy, the one immediately behind me kept leaning back and banging into me - then discussing with his friends whether to apologise in English! I think even if I didn’t understand Chinese I’d be able to guess the import of ‘buhaoyisi’ from the context. Anyway, even when I am cranky with people in general, cute children seem to be able to make me smile. First there was one at the Taiping Museum who accidentally grabbed my hand when it was going for it’s dad. Then there were several running around outside the memorial, and when I was walking back to the bus stop a girl on an electric scooter with I think her grandfather waved at me. Only one person asked to take a photo with me today, at the memorial, and he was just waving at me so I asked him to repeat himself until he actually asked me properly. However most of the people there were quite subdued. At the hostel this evening I had a long-ish chat with two French women in the dorm, one of whom is living in north China for a year because her boyfriend is working there. There are only four foreigners in that city (of 700 000) so all the taxi drivers know where she lives without her telling them! Her friend has come for a visit so they are travelling for a bit. I also spoke to two Chinese men who are visiting, and discovered that everyone other than me had been given a key! (Monday: one of the Chinese guys left his so now I have one too.)
