Tianjin: The Unknown Megacity

Day 24, Grand Asia 2018

Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2018, Tianjin, China:

New York City has about 8.6 million people, according to Wikipedia. Tianjin, China, has 15.6 million residents. And yet I had never heard of Tianjin before cruising to China. For cruisers, Tianjin is best known as the port for Beijing, like Civitavecchia is the port for Rome and Le Havre for Paris.

On this cruise last year I took an overnight tour to Beijing, visiting the Great Wall, Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven. This year’s tours went to the same sites, so I opted for a tour of Tianjin today. The weather was nice and the air quality better than normal.

My favorite stop was the Yanliuqing Woodblock Printing Museum. It was full of colorful paintings created for the Spring Festival. Many depict activities of daily life, while others convey moral stories designed to teach children. We saw the techniques of carving the designs into woodblocks, followed by printing and then painting.

I took a lot of pictures and hope to try to replicate them in watercolor, which would give a different effect than the paints they used.

Tianjin was one of the first cities in China to open to the west, so it has an area of “concessions,” or areas specific to the British, Italians, Germans and others. Today the Five Avenues area, as it is known, is home to some former grand residences, set aside amidst the skyscrapers in most of the city center. We visited a former football (soccer to Americans) stadium that now is a park.

Lunch was a challenge for some on our tour, as the restaurant didn’t have any forks. We ate the traditional Chinese tour lunch, with the 11 of us around a big table with a lazy susan in the center, where staff placed about a dozen dishes. I washed it down (as usual) with a good Chinese beer, the local Harbin Ice, apparently an NBA sponsor.

The Confucius Temple was a calm space in an upscale shopping area, despite the skyscrapers encircling it.

Some afternoon stops disappointed me a little. I think it was partly due to our tour guide, a young man who spoke good English but wasn’t experienced in leading tour groups. He didn’t know some of the sites our organizer had requested, and therefore steered us wrong in trying to see them. We think we entered an antique mall through the back and never saw the shops we expected. We wandered one way down a shopping alley that didn’t have anything of interest to us, only to hear later that we should have gone the other way.

Our final stop was a surprise to me. It was the Ancient Culture Street, which I expected to depict early life in Tianjin. Instead, it is a tourist shopping area built in 1986 – a street with small storefronts on each side selling knick-knacks, Chinese clothes, art prints, calligraphy brushes and other things that weren’t of interest to me. I guess I am not the average tourist looking to take mementos home.

The Ancient Culture Street is on the banks of the Hai River, which flows through Tianjin. At places it reminded me of Paris, with wide walkways along the banks and interesting bridges. I had hoped to get a photograph of the Tianjin Eye, the 394-foot tall Ferris wheel built over the river, but we only caught a glimpse while on the bus.

By the time we embarked on the hour-plus drive back to the port, it was dark. On our way in, we had passed clusters of apartment complexes, 20-30 stories high that appeared empty. Yet many more are under construction. I was reminded that the national bird of China is said to be the crane – the building crane.

Back on the ship, Chinese acrobats entertained us at the nightly show with a demonstration of flexibility, balance and strength.