GUANGDONG
(Kwangtung)
PROVINCE

The people of Guangdong Province, known to the outside world as the Cantonese, have always been independent-minded and proud of their distinctive dialect and customs, often very different from those of north China. The exotic eating habits of the Cantonese are, for many northerners, conclusive evidence that they are the products of intermarriage with the snake-eating 'barbarian' natives who once inhabited the area. The province has been a source of rebellion for centuries, and the appearance of large numbers of Europeans off the Guangdong coast in the early nineteenth century served to make it even more volatile.

The first European settlement on the China coast was established by the Portuguese in 1557 at Macao, to the south of Canton, the provincial capital. Then came the opium traders and the first Opium War in 1839, a result of which Canton, or Guangzhou as it is known in China, was opened up to foreign trade and Hong Kong island was ceded in perpetuity to Britain.

Guangdong was the starting-point for the biggest uprising to occur in China in the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion, led by a peasant born in the province named Hong Xiuquan, who proclaimed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ and wanted to establish a 'Kingdom of Heavenly Peace' in China. The rebellion was finally crushed in 1864 only with the help of the foreign powers who decided that they would prefer to deal with the corrupt and weak Manchu dynasty than with the unpredictable Taipings, even though they did claim to be Christians. Another famous revolutionary born in Cuangdong was Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the revolt which toppled the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and established the Republic of China.

Guangdong is the ancestral homeland of most Chinese people living overseas. The Cantonese have been emigrating for a century and a half, mostly to Southeast Asia and North America, but just about every country in the world seems to have a Chinese community these days, and virtually all of them are composed of Cantonese people.

South China was once settled by aboriginal tribes who were systematically driven out or killed by the Chinese as they advanced down from the north more than 1000 years ago. Pockets of these people still exist in remote areas of south China, including some in Cuangdong. The province saw some of the most furious factional fighting during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960S, during which period it was virtually sealed off from the British colony of Hong Kong. However, after 1978, with the rise of Deng Xiaoping and the decision to adopt an 'open door' economic policy, contacts between Hong Kong and Guangdong began to multiply once more. Almost every family in the southern portion of Guangdong has relatives in Hong Kong, and huge sums of money are remitted back into China by them every month.

In addition, many Hong Kong people make regular trips into China and bring with them consumer goods not readily available on the mainland, including colour televisions, jeans and cooking oil, to give to their relatives. 'Bourgeois' influences are therefore very strong in the area. Hong Kong television has a large audience in south China despite numerous attempts by the provincial authorities to pull down the 'fish-bone' TV antennae people suspend over their houses to catch the latest episode of Dallas or Charlie's Angels.

Many Guangdong people see Hong Kong as a sort of paradise or refuge, and hundreds of thousands have escaped to the British colony over the years in the hope of building better lives there. There was a particularly large surge in the number of refugees in 1979 and 1980, when an estimated 500000 Guangdong people moved to Hong Kong, either legally or illegally.

Canton (Guangzhou)
This is the first city that most travellers to China visit, but to really appreciate how extraordinary Canton is in the context of China, it should really be left to the very end of the trip. The heavy influence of capitalist Hong Kong, apparent in just about every facet of the city's life, along with the innate 'different-ness' of the Cantonese, makes Canton something special.

Generally speaking, Canton is a messy, dilapidated City. Most of the buildings seem to be pre-1949, or else sub-standard post-1949, and everything looks in need of repair and a coat of paint. The city's saving grace is its colour and vitality (that is, by the standards of China; compared to Hong Kong, life in Canton crawls along at a snail's pace, which many consider to be one of its attractions).

The best thing to do in Canton is just to walk round the streets as much as possible and soak in the atmosphere. Watch a street barber in action, people queueing for coal, women washing clothes under public water pumps, cyclists on the crowded streets, sampans on the Pearl River, the large free markets, the hawkers selling their wares there is something happening wherever you look. If you are in the right place at the right time, you may see some black-marketeering in progress suspicious young men offering foreign cigarettes or calculators for sale. I once came upon a few youths operating a gambling stall near a ferry terminal three cards face down, place a yuan on the one you think is the king and, if you win, you get your money back and the same amount again. I won two yuan.

The best streets to walk round are down by the river. The small island of SHAMIAN (sandbank) is interesting. It was the foreigners' enclave in the old Canton, and is filled with houses of worship and once-elegant villas, churches and mansions which are now looking ramshackle but proletarian. There are two bridges leading to the island, both of which in the old days were closed to Chinese not actually working there. A thick undergrowth of waist-high ferns along the centre of the main street on the island used to be a favourite haunt of young couples in the evenings until the unromantic city authorities chopped them all down.

Near Shamian is the CULTURAL PARK, a wonderful place to visit in the early evening. You pay a small sum to get inside and can then wander about, listen to a variety performance, watch people roller skating or playing chess, stroll through art exhibitions or just people-watch. The park is full of people every evening, and provides a welcome centre of entertainment in a very crowded and amusement-starved city. Make sure you go early - it closes at 9.00 p.m. Also close to Shamian is the QINGPING MARKET, famous for the wide variety of wildlife on sale, including at least one endangered species - the pangolin (a sort of Chinese armadillo).



Apart from walking, the best way to see Canton is by bus. These are usually crowded, but if you get on at the terminus, you can be sure of a seat. There are also ferries crossing the Pearl River to other parts of the city.

No matter which hotel you stay in, a visit to the DONGEANG HOTEL is an absolute must. It has become a symbol of the new New China, of the 'open door' economic policy and of the more tolerant attitude towards 'decadence', although the hotel's management would probably be appalled at such a description. The Dongfang's nightclub and its Hong Kong-style restaurant have to be seen to be believed. And surely no trip to Canton would be complete without a few rounds of Space Invaders in the games room. You can have your hair done in the exclusive hairdressing salon, or else relax in a real sauna, in 1981, the management even installed some poker machines to keep guests amused, but they were removed after only a couple of weeks when someone realised that they constituted a form of gambling.

Close by the Dongfang Hotel, opposite the entrance to Yuexiu Park is another smaller park called the PUYUAN (orchid) GAROEN which, apart from being very beautiful, has a connection with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing. In the early 19705, Madame Mao decided she wanted to tell her personal story to someone, and chose the American Sinologist and academic Roxanne Witke. She granted Ms Witke a series of audiences in the Puyuan Garden which is filled with thousands of orchids, and reminisced about her long life as an actress in Shanghai, her journey to Yan'an, her meeting there with Mao and her rise to power in the 19605 at the extreme radical end of the political spectrum. Ms Witke eventually wrote a book called Comrade Chiang Ching, based on these interviews, in Spite of the intense pressure from the Chinese leadership to stop its publication.

Of the regular tourist sights, the most interesting are the GUANG-DONG HISTORICAL MUSEUM, which is in the five-storey pagoda on the top of a hill in Yuexiu Park, and the SIX BANYAN TREE TEMPLE. The trees have disappeared, but the temple stands, apparently the place where a Buddhist monk named Hui Neng delivered the Platform Scripture, the most significant Chinese contribution to the Buddhist canon. The temple is to the south of the Dongfang Hotel, near Haizhu Road.

Canton is, of course, famous for its Cantonese cuisine although, these days, the best Cantonese food is available not in Canton, but in Hong Kong. There are a number of very pleasant garden restaurants around the city where you can sit and eat a meal, or have a morning tea with Cantonese dim sum, dumplings and delicacies which come in dozens of different varieties. The best are the Nanyuan Restaurant (120 Qianjin Lu), the Beiyuan Restaurant (439 Dengfeng Bei Lu) and the Banxi Restaurant (151 Xiangyang Yi Lu). If you want to eat in the classy foreigners' sections, you should always book in advance. If you want to rough it with the locals, go early.

Cantonese food may be better overall in Hong Kong, but Canton still beats the British colony in the field of exotic dishes, mostly because of a lack of legal inhibitions, which prohibit the sale of dog meat and other such items in Hong Kong's restaurants. If you like to try some unusual foods, the best place to go is the Wild Game Restaurant (Ye Weixiang, 249 Beijing Lu) where the menu reads very much like a zoo guide.

Always book before you go.' the restaurant is very popular, especially with Hong Kong Chinese. Dog meat is the specially, and the menu, thoughtfully printed in both English and Chinese, includes such mouth-watering dishes as 'grainy dog meat with chili and scallion sauce' and 'dog meat ready to be cooked in earthen pot over charcoal stove at table'. If you're unhappy at the idea of canine cuisine, there are plenty of other things to go for braised python, civet cat, bear's paw, 'steamed old cat' or perhaps 'braised guinea pig (whole)'. Most meals at the Wild Game Restaurant begin with Dra-gon-Tiger-Phoenix Soup, a concoction of snake meat, cat meat and chicken. Monkey dishes are a regular item, and for those with hearts of stone, it is possible to go and view the ingredients cowering in cages near the main door. Just in case you ever have a spare monkey and feel like having a go, one waiter said that the animal should be drowned and then boiled for three to four hours. Cantonese cuisine used to be famous for live monkey brains served straight out of the monkey's skull on to your plate, but it is now rarely heard of. 'Eating live monkey brains is very cruel,' the waiter said. 'But we do serve them boiled.'

Other tourist sights of interest are: the NATIONAL PEASANT MOVE-MENT INSTITUTE (Zhongshan Lu) where Mao taught for a few months in 1926, the CANTON ZOO (Xianlie Lu), the CATHOLIC CATHEDRAL (in a back street close to the river, east of Renmin Nan Lu) and the HUAISHENG MOSQUE (Zhongshan Lu).

The most common excursion from Canton is to the town of POSHAN (Buddha mountain), about 20 miles (32 kilometres) to the west. Visitors are usually shown a ceramics factory, an arts and crafts workshop and a large ancestral temple which is now purely a tourist spot. Another excursion is to the CON(,HUA HOT SPRINGS about 50 miles (80 kilometres) north of Canton. The springs are in a pleasant mountain area in which a number of tourist hotels and villas have been built. lt is said that China's present leader Deng Xiaoping spent several months here after ho was purged for the second time in April 1976.

People travelling on their own will need to know that the Public Security Bureau is on Jiefang Lu. That is where you have to go to apply for your travel permits and visa extensions.

Bus and trolley bus routes
The No.3 trolley bus travels between Yuexiu Park in the north of the city to the Cultural Park near the river.

The No. 31 bus starts near the railway station and heads south, passes the Cultural Park and crosses the river via the People's Bridge. The No.7 bus starts near the railway station and heads southeast down Jiefang Beilu and Beijing Lu, ending up at a river wharf at the eastern end of town.

How to get there and where to stay
Canton is probably the city with the best connections in China. There are planes, trains and hoverferries to and from Hong Kong, and if you are really pushed for time and are willing to pay the price, it is possible to rent a taxi to take you to the border. The China Travel Service operates daily buses to and from Zhuhai, a little town within walking distance of the Portuguese territory of lolacao.

The best hotel in town is the Dongfang Hotel, favoured by businessmen because of its wide range of facilities and its location just opposite the Canton Export Commodities Fair building. The hotel has dormitories as well as. luxury suites. (Take a No. 7 bus from the railway station, arid get off at the second stop.) Other hotels regularly used by foreigners include the Baiyun (on Huanshi Lu) and the -Renmin Daxia (people's mansion; 207 Changdi Lu).

Budget travellers usually Stay at the Liuliua Hotel directly opposite the railway station, where a dormitory bed rents for six or eight yuan, depending on which wing you choose. The Liubua is a good place to meet other budget travellers and to gather the latest information on the China travel situation.

Shenzhen
Just across the border from Hong Kong, Shenzhen is being developed as a 'special economic zone' to attract foreign investment, and is also becoming a major destination for day-tours organised by the China Travel Service in Hong Kong, for which no visa is required. People who join one of the tours and think they are going to see China might as well not bother. Shenzhen is trying so hard to emulate Hong Kong economically and socially that it hardly seems ike a part of mainland China any more.

A large amount of construction work is under way in the town. Several hundred Hong Kong companies have signed manufacturing deals, making use of the cheaper, socialist labour.

For the casual tourist, there is not much to do in Shenzhen except 10 look at the chaotic bustle of the town, have a meal and then cross the border back into Hong Kong. But at least you can say, if you do it, that you have been to China.

How to get there and where to stay
Shenzhen can be reached by train from Hong Kong or Canton. There is only one hotel which takes foreigners the Bamboo Garden which is a joint venture with the Hong Kong company, Millie's. But it's not really worth staying. You might as well continue on to either Hong Kong or Canton and spend the night there.

Hainan Island
Hainan, lying off the south coast near Vietnam, is the second-largest Chinese island after Taiwan. For centuries, it has been a place of exile, and even today it is suffering from economic neglect, a scruffy sub-tropical backwater with coconut palms, beaches, picturesque mountain tribesmen and poverty.

The first inhabitants of Hainan were presumably the ancestors of the mountain people, the Li and Miao tribes, who have been retreating ever since the first Han Chinese appeared from the mainland. The traditional attitude of the Hans towards minority peoples is probably best summed up by the fact that, in the f9205, a batch of the Li people were rounded up and displayed in cages in a park in Canton. Despite such abuse, the minorities have managed to retain their own separate cultures and languages.

The Li people, who number about 8()()ooo, have seven different dialects but no writing system. Traditionally, they had a very easy- going code of sexual morality. Young people moved out of home early and had free sexual relations, and girls only married when they became pregnant. The Chinese Communists have imposed their puritanical moral code on the Li people during the past 30 years, but the more permissive sexual customs continue to some extent. Another Li custom was the tattooing of women's faces. One local told me that there were two explanations for this: some people say that it was considered beautiful, others say that the tattoos were first put on attractive girls to discourage Han Chinese from kidnapping them.

The Miaos, who number only 40000, live in the remote motto-tam areas of central Hainan. Some are Protestants, most are apparently nomads, moving from one place to another in search of wild game. Most of the Han Chinese on Hainan seem to have immigrated to the island from Fujian Province a couple of centuries ago. Another wave of more than a million migrants arrived in the 19505, many of them Cantonese people brought in to administer the island. Hainan's population in mid-1982 was 5.6 million people.

The Japanese occupied Hainan during the Second World War, and slaughtered thousands of people suspected of being sympathisers or members of the Communist guerrilla bands who formed the main resistance force. Monuments have been placed near some of the mass graves around the island. The most famous guerrilla band was the Red Detachment of Women which became the inspiration for one of Madame Mao's appalling 'revolutionary operas' during the late 19605. After the war, the Communists continued to fight the Nationalists, and parts of central Hainan were 'liberated' as early as 1947. The main Communist forces, under the command of Marshal Lin Biao, invaded the island in 1950, and the remainder of the Nationalist garrison was evacuated to Taiwan.

Despite its excellent geographical location, varied natural resources and pleasant climate, Hainan is desperately under-developed. The island used to be covered by large tracts of virgin forest, but huge areas have been short-sightedly chopped down, leaving much of the centre of the island barren and highly susceptible to soil erosion. In 1978, the average annual income of peasants there was about 50 yuan, one of the lowest in China, and although the authorities claim that this tripled to 150 yuan by 1982, the people on Hainan are still very poor. In 1980, the island administration was given permission to start soliciting foreign investment, and a number of projects were started, including an oil palm plantation and a duck farm set up by an Australian company.

The authorities have big plans for tourism on Hainan, and obviously see it as China's future Hawaii, At present, things are very primitive and development is likely to be slow, but the potential is there, There are some beautiful white-sand, palm-fringed beaches on the south coast near Sanya, and some of the mountain scenery in the centre of the island is magnificent. One problem for tourist development, however, is the presence of large numbers of military (particularly air and naval) bases on the island, both to watch Vietnam and to patrol the South China Sea, full of islands claimed by China and other countries. The whole western coast of Hainan is supposed to be off-limits to foreigners, and military units are very much in evidence almost wherever you go.

Travel around the island is not difficult, There is a comprehensive local bus network, and there are towns at regular intervals along most of the main roads, The local Chinese hotels along the way range from basic to filthy, but they are cheap, while the China Travel Service Operates hotels in some places.

HAIKOU is the island's main city and the site of the only civilian airport on Hainan. The centre of town is cluttered and frenetic, and probably resembles the Hong Kong of 40 years ago. Private enterprise seems to have taken over the streets, with hawkers selling all sorts of things incense, clothes, door charms to drive away evil spirits, 'decadent' music tapes imported from Hong Kong, peanuts, coconut sweets, mangy bits of meat covered with flies. Transport around the town is easy. There are motorised pedi-cabs everywhere which are cheap and fast, but agree on a price before getting in. The streets are still alive in the evenings, and there are a couple of large markets where you can eat at food stalls.

Just outside Haikou is the TOME OF HAT RUT, a Ming dynasty official who unwittingly sparked off the Cultural Revolution. A vice-mayor of Peking, Wu Han, wrote an opera in the early 19605 called Hai Rui Relieved of Office in which an official spoke up for the people before the emperor and was exiled, Chairman Mao interpreted the opera as a personal attack on himself (as it almost certainly was) for purging the former Defence Minister Peng Dehuai in 1939. An article published in 1966 criticising the opera is generally seen as the first shot in the Cultural Revolution, during which the Opera's author, Wu Han, was persecuted to death and Hai Rui's tomb almost completely destroyed by vandals. It is now being restored.

Down the east coast, there are the towns of WENCHANG and JIAJI, and the XINGLONG STATE FARM inhabited largely by overseas Chinese and Vietnamese-Chinese refugees who fled from Vietnam in 1978. The state farm guesthouse features a huge villa built in 1970 on the orders, it is believed, of the late Marshal Lin Piao. The villa, designated huilding No. 1, carnations the biggest bed you've probably ever seen and a superbly decadent marble bath that is large enough to hold a party in. You can rent the villa if you want. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, visited the farm in 1970, and stayed in Room 202. The Vietnamese refugees there are a sad bunch of people, many of them angry and frustrated at landing up in China while many of their relatives are busy building new lives in the United States. Life is very hard in Hainan and they are very poor but, after all, they are refugees and are being treated much like ordinary Chinese peasants. Their tragedy is that they know that life can be different.

On the south coast is SANYA, the location of a large naval base, but also the prime potential site of Hainan's future tourist industry. The Dongfang Hotel in Canton is planning to build a branch hotel here, but the best place to stay will always be Lulformo, a resort a few miles outside town which features nice old villas, large rooms, a good restaurant and a beach a few minutes' walk away. Building No. I is where the Communist leaders., including Liu Shaoqi, have stayed over the years on their visits to this far-flung corner of their empire. Another good beach nearby is at DAOONGHAI.

From Sanyo, a road leads north through the mountains back to Haikou, passing through the minority-populated areas. Many of those in the main towns, BAOTING and QIONGZHONG, are Li people, but they are already very Han-ised. The real minorities live up if' the mountains. In Qiongzhong, the hotel is close to the river. The local department store sells nice machine-made Li material very cheaply, the hand-made variety seems to be very expensive, at least for foreigners.

How to get there and where to stay
Most foreign tourists fly into Haikou from Canton, and direct flights from Hong Kong may be possible sometime soon. There are also ferries from Canton and from Zhenjiang, a town north of Haikou on the mainland. The Canton ferries leave from the Zhoutouzui ferry terminal southwest of the People's (Renmin) Bridge and take about a day to get to Haikou In Haikou, you may be able to get a room at the No 1 District Guesthouse (Qu Yi Suo) on Fuhai Lu inside the local Communist Party headquarters Accommodation there is spartan, but the grounds are very peaceful and beautiful Otherwise, there is the Overseas Chinese Hotel (loser to the centre of town which is cheap and dirty There are plans to build a large mordern hotel just outside Haikou called the Qiongzhou Hotel, complete with swimming pool and some sort of horse-racing track, and the first 200 rooms in this project are scheduled to be open by early 1984.