Nanking—flowers, lakes and history

Press, 20 August 1982, Page 14

Nanking—flowers, lakes and history

The third stop on the tour made by NAYLOR HILLARY of six Chinese cities was Nanking. Its beauty left a deep impression.

Through Western eyes, Nanking js surely the loveliest city in China. The wide Yangtse River forms its doorstep; its backdrop is tree-covered Purple Mountain.

The express train, from Shanghai takes less than five hours to reach Nanking, a drop in the vast distances of China, yet Nanking is a world away from the bustling city. Nanking is a city of lakes and flowers, and history. Many of its monuments have survived changing fortunes. The city has often been a temporary capital of China, most recently under the Kuomintang Nationalists between 1945 and 1949.

The city wall is almost intact — 33 kilometres of it. 12 metres high and nine metres wide. Four huge city gateways still stand. Each is a series of courtyards, or “killing grounds,” where enemy troops could be admitted and confined, and killed at leisure from high ramparts. Inside those ramparts now a restaurant in a crypt hung with stalactites serves hot plum juice, a local delicacy, for the plum is the city flower.

A new Nanking is rising beside’ the old. A large observatory perches on Purple Mountain, a vast new telecommunications building dominates the centre of the old city, although it is about to be dwarfed by a 37-storey hotel, a joint venture with Singapore Chinese. Appropriately for a city on the bank of one of the world’s greatest rivers, Nanking is home to the East China Institute of Water Conservancy, a vital organisation in a land where water is often scarce, but floods can still devastate the countryside. The new Ding Shan Hotel, almost alongside, often had no water in its bathroom taps and toilets. A

matter of conservation? Nanking’s pride is its bridge over the Yangtse, one of only four on a river more than 4000 kilometres long. The bridge was built between 1960 and 1968 and carries 160 trains a day on its lower deck, as well as cars, pedestrians and cyclists on a top deck. With approaches, it is nearly six kilometres long, Straddling a river 1500 metres wide and 70 metres deep. The bridge is high enough to survive Yangtse floods and to allow river shipping unimpeded passage. The bridge authority runs conducted tours for visitors, eager to explain that what was once a two-hour ferry trip has become a train ride of a few minutes. In a hall under the bridge was . one of the few prominent statues of Mao Tse-tung still on public display. The bridge is a critical link in China's transport system for the Yangtse, flowing west to east, divides the huge country in half. Nanking, secure on the south bank, has frequently been the capital of Chinese rulers who have been driven from Peking and

the north by uprisings or foreign invasions. The first Ming Emperor was buried outside Nanking in the fourteenth century with his wife and 40 concubines. The approach to his tomb is flanked by 12 pairs of stone animals similar to those that are much better known on the approaches to the later Ming tombs outside Peking. (That Emperor was known posthumously as Tai Zu. the Great Progenitor).

The tomb is on the flank of Purple Mountain. Further east on tlie mountain is the mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist leader who expressed a wish to be buried near Nanking. His memorial still treated with reverence, is approached by 392 steps and the way is paved with blue and white tiles, the colours of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Government that was overthrown by the Communists in 1950.

Nearby on the mountain is the sixth-century Linggu Pagoda, nine storeys and 61 metres high, rebuilt , in steel and concrete by the Kuomintang. Pagoda and mausoleum face each other across a vast' sweep of trees, softened by-

mist and dust that almost hides the river and city a few kilometres away? In the nineteenth century Nanking also served for 11 years as the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a vast popular uprising, religious in its origin that disrupted China between 1843 and 1868 in one of the most violent and least understood wars in recorded history. China’s communists remember the Taipings with approval for their programme includes such measures as an equal distribution of land. A museum of Taiping weapons and documents, and a few rare old photographs, has been set up in Nanking in a fourteenthcentury palace built for a Ming General. An oddity in the museum is a photograph of the English soldier, General Gordon, later to become a Victorian hero as “Gordon of Khartoum.” As a solider of fortune, Gordon was one of the European officers employed by the old Manchu dynasty in Peking to help put down the Taipings. Nanking shows another face in its parks, the face of China at play — skylarking, even — an uncommon sight in a country where jaded indifference or grim resolution often - seem to be the only public expressions. At Xuanwu Lake families and groups of spirited young-

sters were hiring boats and using them to ram each other amid a splashing of oars. The atmosphere was that of a working cla'ss that has suddenly found it has the leisure to play — rather like the Avon boating of a century ago in Christchurch. the park also offered roller skating, delicious ’ ice blocks, and piped music that included the soundtrack of the film “Last Horizon,” the story of Shangri-La. The smaller Mochou Lake near the river also had boats for hire, but its great charm was an elegant statue to the Princess who gave the lake its name, a name that is said to mean “don't worry,” Mochou came from Luoyang (the subject of the next article in this series), northwest from Nanking. In the time of the Southern Qi Dynasty, nearly 1500 years ago, she is said to have sold herself into slavery to- pay for medicines needed desper-

ately by her sick father. This signal demonstration of Confucian family devotion is still remembered with approval by Chinese under their new rulers.

Nanking; by day is fascinating and often beautiful, in spite of its dust and in spite of the decay of some of its finest buildings in the old European settlement areas. Nanking by night, in spite of its three million people, has little of the modest entertainment that is re-emerg-ing slowly in the coastal cities. Tourists joking loudly in an attempt to brighten an evening after a rather tedious gymnastics display Were told: “Nanking ;is now quiet and going to sleep. Visitors should go home and sleep quietly. • too.” . 5 • Perhaps that is fair advice for tourists. It would .be unkind to disturb the Great Progenitor and his 40 concubines under- the. shadow of Purple Mountain. '