Another Sojourn From Shanghai

Originally posted 21st April 2015

by The Pearl

Somewhere in the depths of my mind I had heard about Amoy, but never knew where it was and I think I had even searched for it on a map some years ago, without success.  Well on Friday we set off for Amoy in Fujian Province (known as Fukien or Hokkien in English, just to confuse you), because Richard had to be at the factory near there on Monday.  Amoy, a small island off the Fujian coast is called Xiamen in Putonghua (what we call Mandarin and that is the language spoken in Beijing) and that is where the planes fly to.  Xiamen is a victim of the Chinese problem of having one written language (Mandarin) and eight groups of spoken languages that use that mandarin script (the official line is that they are all dialects, but they are really totally different languages, such as Cantonese), as well as the languages of the ethnic minorities such as the Tibetans.  Xiamen was written in Mandarin as 下門, but if you read this in the local dialect of Min Nan (South Fujian) then the characters sound like Amoy.  At some point it was decided that this lowly name (meaning lower gate) should be changed to the grander Mandarin 廈門.  But in the local dialect these characters now mean “the Gate of the Grand Mansion” which doesn’t sound so hot for the name of a large city of 3.5 million people, so the Fujian name of Amoy has stuck. (It’s actually pronounced “ε̄-mûi” if you understand these things).

Hotel bedroom Xiamen

All clear?  Thought it might be.
Anyway we had been booked into a classy hotel for Friday and Saturday night (and for some reason in China they think it’s a good idea in such hotels that the person in the bedroom can see all that the person is doing in the bathroom).
As in most places in China major construction was underway – this tower block opposite

Tower Block opposite our hotel

Construction workers housing

Development plot

our 17th floor window was being built – the construction workers live in the temporary accommodation on site in the blue and white roofed buildings and we could see alongside this tower on the other side another piece of land ripe for development.
We’d asked someone at Richard’s factory that’s outside Xiamen what the tourist with a day in town should do and he recommended that we visited the Botanical Gardens in the morning and an island off the island of Xiamen called Gulang Yu in the afternoon.  As the island ferry gets booked up very quickly we set off in the morning to walk to the ferry terminal to get our afternoon ticket, before heading towards the Botanical Gardens which have an AAAA star national tourist attraction rating despite not being mentioned by our guidebook for China or being known of by the hotel for that matter…….

Virginia Creeper and Ipomoea (Morning Glory) are abundant

Pavement Car Park

Fujian Province is the part of mainland China opposite Taiwan, so we are talking a sub-tropical climate here, very similar to that of Hong Kong.  Virginia creeper covers many of the walls of the overhead roads and the softening effect made it look rather pretty.  And although the use of the car horn is considerably less than in Shanghai, which is used to bully any one else on the road, there did seem to be the same lack of regard for pedestrians here as back in Shanghai.  Like Shanghai, Amoy was a Treaty Port.  It had originally been founded during the Ming Dynasty and became a place of refuge for the Ming rulers once they had been ousted by the invading Manchurian Qings.  Other arrivees

Western-style architecture Amoy

were the Portuguese traders in the 16th Century, the British in the 17th, then the French and the Dutch, but all were chucked out in 1750 when the port was closed to foreigners.  The Opium War and the subsequent treaty a century later reopened the port to the British as one of the five treaty ports and other westerners reappeared, as well as the Japanese, who grabbed the whole lot for themselves in 1938 and kept it until 1945.  There is much evidence of European architecture on Xiamen, but the foreigners set up their main base on the small island of Gulang Yu and as a consequence it is full of grand colonial architecture.
There is another island off Xiamen known as Kinmen, only 2km away.  It was subject to a persistent bombing campaign throughout the 1950s and 1960s as it was, and still is, part of Taiwan.  How it managed to stay part of Taiwan so close to the mainland coast I do not know and I was completely unaware that this and other small Taiwanese islands are in very close proximity to the mainland.  You need a passport to visit – and if you want to go from Xiamen and come back again you have to have a multiple entry Chinese visa, which we have, so maybe if we go back to Xiamen we shall go and have a look and see if we can find out how they managed to survive as part of the ROC (Republic of China) rather than being absorbed by the PRC (The People’s Republic of China).  It sounds an interesting place still having Fujian-stlye houses which the mainland has mainly swept away in the past 30 years.

Street Cleaner with bamboo hat

Underside construction of bamboo hat

Being as far south as central Taiwan it is hot in Xiamen and anyone working outside in the streets or in the surrounding fields wears a “coolie” hat.  Now the word coolie is rather derogatory, and dictionaries give various origins of this word to describe labourers from the Indian sub-continent or from southern China claiming that it might come from a Gujarati sect of day labourers.  But to me it’s obvious where the word comes from: the hat worn by such labourers from this part of the world and not from India at all.  Made from bamboo it sits proud on the top of the workers head shading the head and the flat bamboo underside allows the hat to stand away from the crown of the head whilst letting air circulate and cool the head down.  Cheap and practical it’s a brilliant idea and in fact the concept has been copied somewhat in those individual head umbrellas you sometimes see in the crowd at Wimbledon.
After we had visited the Botanic Gardens and had lunch (of which more in later posts) we took a brief walk along the promenade before getting a taxi to the ferry terminal.  There was some sort of opera concert going on with a mini orchestra and ladies in pink costumes and an elderly audience some sitting down, others standing around keeping in the shade, by whatever means.

From one Island to another Gulang Yu from Xiamen

Restaurant Boat off Xiamen Island

We could see the island of Gulang Yu across

Is this Wally?

the water (and for people who have bought the Martin Handford books Where’s Wally? (Waldo, if you are from Canada or The States), I think I may have found him.  Some of the bushes in the park on the shore were cloud-pruned and for any friends from my Cuban sponsored cycle ride in 2013 it wasn’t as hot as we experienced in the Caribbean but seeing the line of cyclists (although small) in helmets and full kit – very unusual here – it did bring back some memories.

Cloud Pruned bushes

Line of Cyclists in Full Kit

Builders in Xiamen