Shanghai and Nanjing

View of Pudong from the Bund in Shanghai.

April 12, 2026

I've fallen behind because all Google products are not allowed in China. My VPN was not crafty enough to allow me to easily use them, and Karl's travel plans have kept us moving quickly. We took the train from Beijing to Shanghai. 

View of the Bund on the Huangpu River in Shanghai.

The Bund is the famous waterfront promenade in Shanghai that is sometimes referred to as a museum of world architecture. The buildings are colonial-era banks, hotels and consulates with the famous Fairmont Peace Hotel and the Customs House. This area's heyday was between the 1860s and the 1930s. The buildings all have plaques on them describing who built them. I could have spent all my time wandering around looking at them.

Outside the Shanghai History Museum.

We saw two museums for Karl's course. The Shanghai History Museum was a new museum to us located in the former Shanghai Race Club building, another historical colonial relic. The bottom two floors contained bronzes and jades, which were not what we were there to see. The upper floors' museum collection tells the story of Shanghai's history through the utilitarian lens of the Communist Party. The students were tasked to find examples of "top-down" and "bottom-up" popular Chinese nationalism.

Painting at the entrance to the Memorial Hall to the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

The first time we came to this location in 1992, there was just a historical marker on the wall of the building. When we came nine years ago, the government had created a museum of a few rooms with artifacts and pictures. We were surprised to see the Party has rebuilt it on an even grander scale. And there were lots of Chinese tourists educating themselves on the Party's glorious beginnings. This painting is interesting because it is a grouping of key communist historical sites. We have been to most of these buildings on this trip. The pagoda on the hill was the one we saw in Yan'an.

We walked back to our hotel from the museum through the French Concession. We talked with this Uyghur man selling fruit from a cart. He doesn't look theyway you might expect a Chinese citizen to look. He is from Xinjiang in Northwest China and that population has Turkish roots.

We climbed 382 steps to get to the top of the Sun Yat-sen mausoleum.

We took an overnight trip and backtracked toward Beijing to spend a day in yet another former capital of China: Nanjing. Through China's 5,000 year history, they claim to have had four ancient capital cities: Beijing, Xi'an, Nanjing and Luoyang. We are visiting three of the four. Nanjing was the capital for six dynasties including the Ming. We came to see Sun Yat-sen's (China's George Washington) mausoleum, the Ming tombs, the Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders (that really is the name) and to see where the Treaty of Nanking was signed that ended the First Opium War. The building at the head of the stairs contains a seated statue of Sun looking very much like the Lincoln Memorial

Grove of trees covering the burial mound of the Emperor Zhu Yuangzhang and his wife.

We also visited the Ming tombs in Nanjing which immortalize the founder of the Ming Dynasty and his Empress wife. There is another set of stairs to climb to see a large building, but we learned that he was buried with his wife on a hill behind the building that is covered with trees. After seeing the Taj Mahal and many grand memorials over these past few months, I liked the contrast to this simple yet equally beautiful burial mound.

This is not to say the Ming tombs are not ostentatious. This is the Stone Elephant road that leads to the mausoleum. It has 12 pairs of massive stone animal statues. The first pair is standing, the second pair is seated. They represent a procession leading the emperor from the material world to the afterlife. They represent the emperor's power and the vastness of his empire.

Statue in front of the Nanjing Massacre Museum of a mother and two children running from a bomb.

Like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC or the Hiroshima Peace Museum in Japan, the Nanjing Massacre Museum is another museum with a tough topic to cover. The purpose of this museum is to document the truth, educate the public, honor the victims and promote peace. It has the feel of a patriotic education site. The displays are mostly pictures and descriptive narrative. The numbers stated of those harmed are not agreed upon by scholars. It is a sobering experience nonetheless.

This photo is in the museum educating the public on the end of the First Opium War. The treaty was signed in August of 1842 on board a British warship docked in the Yangtze River in Nanjing. This event seems like it should be old news! But the Party has memorialized it with a new museum declaring how China's century of humiliation was overcome by the Party. 

We had some free time before we needed to catch our train back to Shanghai, so we went on our own to the Fuzimiao Temple. The temple grounds hold the Confucian Examination Hall, one of two sites where students could sit to take the Imperial Examination. They sat through nine days of examinations in order to qualify for elite government positions.

This picture shows a sock a student wrote notes on to take into the examination. Cheating on tests has been a problem for centuries! 

 

 

Summer Palaces, New and Old

 

The New Summer Palace

April 4, 2026

The New Summer Palace was the luxurious summer retreat for the Qing Emperors. It was also Empress Dowager Cixi's home away from her Forbidden City home. 

Notice the bats on the Summer Palace windows. In Chinese, the word for bat is a homophone for the word for fortune or blessing. So, bats are a recuring motif in the architecture of the palace.

The Long Corridor was built to allow the Empress Dowager to enjoy strolling in the garden in rain or sunshine. It has over 14,000 paintings depicting scenes from classical literature, historical figures and birds and flowers.

This one portrays a scene from Journey to the West, but it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Our guide said it was done by "crazy teenagers."

Fortunately, many of the paintings survived.

The first Marble Boat was built by Emperor Qianlong. It was destroyed by Lord Elgin during the Second Opium War. The Empress Dowager rebuilt it ironically using money that was earmarked for the navy. Although both boats were described as marble, they were both made of stone painted to look like marble and neither boat could float!

There were plenty of boats that could float on the man-made lake. The first time we came, we took a boat ride. This time, we enjoyed the flowering trees.

This map depicts the Old Summer Palace or Yuangmingyuan. We have not been to this historical site and thought it was just a collection of ruins. We were surprised to find the 350 square hectare park filled with local tourists. We learned it is an important national symbol for China. It represents the peak of Qing Dynasty architecture contrasted with the peak of the Century of Humiliation China endured. 

The Old Summer Palace was a collection of Western-style Baroque buildings and traditional Chinese style architecture. It was known as the "Garden of Gardens." The buildings held the greatest collection of China's 5,000 years of treasures ever concentrated in one location. During the Second Opium War, it was burned and looted by an Anglo-French Army. Victor Hugo famously wrote, "one day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned." His was a rare voice of conscience for the time.

For a long time, the remnants of the buildings were removed by locals who repurposed them for their own needs. The CCP, has preserved the Palace Grounds as an important patriotic education site. 

There were plenty of visitors taking in the historical education! Karl assigned his students to talk with two local visitors to find out why they were there and what they learned from their visit.

These statues are not the originals. The originals were looted, five of which are still not located while the others are in various places around the world. The statues are Chinese zodiac heads on human bodies, and they formed a "hydraulic clock." Each hour the corresponding head would spout water to tell the time. They are one example of many looted objects around the world. Of the estimated 1.6 million Chinese artifacts now located in 47 museums outside of China, roughly one million of them came from the Yuanmingyuan. Should they be returned to their original owners or allowed to remain where they are now?

This wall is the remains of a mosque Emperor Qianlong built for his favorite Uyghur concubine, Xiang Fei in hopes of easing her homesickness.

This Wanhua Maze was commissioned by Emperor Qianlong and designed and built by Jesuit missionaries in 1749. The Emperor and his concubines enjoyed the maze. Eunuch's would hold lanterns and it was a popular Mid-Autumn festival tradition. It too was destroyed but rebuilt in the 1980s.

Finally, we got to go to the US Embassy and receive a briefing from one of Karl's former students and former Pacrimmer!