Bussing Through Chunqing

After Xi'an, we spent a day in Chongqing, the crown city of Sichuan province. It used to be spelled Szechuan province, famed for its spicy food and Bertold Brecht's play, "The Good Person of Szecuan". Sichuan is a remote mountain province, roughly 1200 miles west of Shanghai, on China's coast, and the sort of place that an official would be sent to for exile if he fell into disfavor in the old days.

That being said, what we experienced was a set of contradictions. Chongqing may be somewhat difficult to get to because of sharp, if not high, mountains surrounding it, but the city proper has 12 million people, and the munincipality (it isn't part of any other Chinese province) has 34 million people. The Yangtze River is navigable as far as Chongqing, at least when the river level is up. After the Three Gorges Dam and locks are completed, it will be reachable by river traffic at all times.


It is definitely as hilly a city as Xi'an was flat. There are large beautiful bridges across the river gorge and the tributary gorges. There is lush vegetation everywhere too, and you might easily think of it as a mountain city. In spite of that, its elevation is only 1152 feet at river level.

When I think of mountain cities, I think of cool summers and snow-laden winters. This is not the case with Chongqing. The temperature is known to often reach 40 degrees Celsius and is listed as going as high as 47 degrees C. That's 115 Fahrenheit. What the guide said is that with so little air conditioning, when the temperature reaches 40, work officially shuts down, but it's amazing how often the temperature hovers at 39.

Fortunately for us, the temperature was very moderate on the day that we were there.

The images in this post are not mine, by the way. It's hard to take good pictures from a moving bus.

Historically, Chongqing is important as the seat of Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese Nationalist government during World War II. The Japanese managed to conquer all of the lowland East of China, but were never able to force passage up the Three Gorges to Chongqing. But they were able to send aircraft, and bombed major portions of the city and its facilities. Consequently, there are very few historical buildings there, and much new construction.

One of the things we visited in Chongqing was a western-style supermarket. The first we'd seen. It was on an urban city street that seemed pretty familiar and western. It was mostly familiar, down to the candy and tabloids at the checkout stand, along with the laser scanners. Fixed pricing saves time, and that seemed important in Chungqing, where the container barges leave every day with more goods headed for the West, be they textiles or semiconductors. People still use cash, though. I bought some batteries for my camera.

As an aside, the overwhelming predominance of cash transactions gives the Chinese government a revenue problem. They have very little ability to collect, say, a sales tax, because so much of the business in China is conducted on a cash basis, with little paper trail. For instance, every meal we ate was paid for by the tour guides in cash. There were 49 people in our group. I didn't see the guides, who handled the transactions, stop at any ATM's to get more cash, either.


We also went to the Chunqing zoo and saw pandas. They were very cute. The pandas and the other animals at the zoo had an uncanny knack for showing me their backside every time I put my camera on them. I don't have a lot to say about pandas, though they were a big hit with our group. Oh, and that's actually a photo I took.