2015 China

30 March, Nanjing
Nanjing Time International Youth Hostel 220CNY

Take our advice: don’t visit Nanjing on a Monday; the major sites are closed including the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre and the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum. It took an expensive taxi ride for us to find out the former; and a cheaper Metro and electric car ride to confirm the latter. We did stand with a couple of hundred disappointed Chinese tourists peering through the gate of Sun Yatsen’s mausoleum, but that was all we got to see.*

It was not difficult to persuade a taxi driver to drive us across the Yangzi River bridge, but much harder to convince him to drop us on the bridge on the return journey so we could walk the bridge’s impressive length. (Tomorrow we will cross the bridge again, this time by train.) Travelchinaguide.com: “The Yangtze River Bridge, which was constructed between 1960 and 1968, is the third bridge built to span the Yangtze River ... As the longest bridge with the dual functions of highway and railway listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, it is the first bridge in China solely designed and constructed by Chinese. The significant double-deck construction is made up of the main bridge portion which spans 1,577 meters and the bridge approach which measures 3,012 meters. The upper deck of the bridge is a highway ... There are sidewalks on either side of the highway ... The lower deck holds a twin-track railway ... that allows two trains to run in different directions. The bridge has nine piers altogether, among which the tallest one is 85 meters with the base area of about 400 square meters, larger than a basketball court. There are 200 cast iron reliefs inlayed on the banisters on the two sides of the highway as well as 150 pairs of street lamps along the sidewalks on the main section of the bridge. Two bridge towers are located respectively at each end of the bridge each with a height of 70 meters ... The bridge at night is extremely charming. The illumination of 1,024 floodlights on the banisters, 540 halogen lights on the towers and 150 pairs of lamps of the sidewalks make the bridge look like a pearl string lying on the Yangtze River.”

[The Suicide Catcher in GQ.com makes for interesting reading.] 

* “Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925) holds a unique position in the Chinese-speaking world ... He is the only figure from the early revolutionary period who is honored as the “Father of the Nation” ... in both the People’s Republic of China, and ... Taiwan ... Sun received a medical degree from the Hong Kong College of Medicine ... converted to Christianity ... a symbol of his embrace of “modern”, or Western, knowledge and ideas ... It was a revolutionary statement at a time when the Qing Dynasty was trying desperately to fend off westernization ... By 1891, Sun ... was working with the Furen Literary Society, which advocated the overthrow of the Qing ... The 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War was a disastrous defeat for the Qing government, feeding in to calls for reform. Some reformers sought a gradual modernization of imperial China, but Sun Yat-sen called for the end of the empire and the establishment of a modern republic. In October of 1895 ... staged the First Guangzhou Uprising in an attempt to overthrow the Qing ... escaped into exile in Japan ... launched a second attempted uprising ... He launched seven more attempted uprisings ... Sun Yat-sen was in the United States when the Xinhai Revolution broke out ... on October, 10, 1911. Caught off guard, Sun missed the rebellion that brought down the child emperor, Puyi, and ended the imperial period of Chinese history ... on December 29, 1911 elected Sun Yat-sen to be the “provisional president” of the new-born Republic of China. However, the northern warlord Yuan Shi-kai had been promised the presidency if he could pressure Puyi into formally abdicating the throne. Puyi abdicated on February 12, 1912, so on March 10, Sun Yat-sen stepped aside and Yuan Shi-kai became the next provisional president ... became clear that Yuan hoped to establish a new imperial dynasty ... Sun began to rally his own supporters ... their party the Guomindang (KMT) ... Sun Yat-sen once more had to flee into exile in Japan ... In 1915, Yuan Shi-kai ... proclaimed himself the Emperor of China ... touching off China’s Warlord Era ...To bolster the KMT’s chances of overthrowing Yuan Shi-kai, Sun Yat-sen reached out to local and international communists ... Lenin ... sent advisers to help establish a military academy. Sun appointed a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek as the commandant of the new National Revolutionary Army and its training academy ... With Soviet aid, they trained an army of 250,000, which would march through northern China in a three-pronged attack, aimed at wiping out the warlords ... This massive military campaign would take place between 1926 and 1928, but would simply realign power among the warlords rather than consolidating power behind the Nationalist government. The longest-lasting effect probably was the enhancement of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's reputation. However, Sun Yat-sen would not live to see it ... On March 12, 1925, Sun Yat-sen died at the Peking Union Medical College from liver cancer. He was just 58 years old ... Sun's early death ensured that his legacy lives on in both mainland China and Taiwan. Because he brought together the Nationalist KMT and the Communist CPC, and they were still allies at the time of his death, both sides honor his memory” (asianhistory.about.com).