CHINAEUROPE AFRICAASIA 中文双语Français
Opinion\From the Readers

A railway journey that led to a lifetime story

By Bruce Connolly | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2017-07-19 07:04

A railway journey that led to a lifetime story

Tiananmen Gate in Beijing in late 1990's. [Photo by Bruce Connolly/chinadaily.com.cn]

Residential architecture showed the evolution of post-1949 socialist housing from earlier four to six floor redbrick 'walk-ups' to the 18-floor tower blocks steadily appearing through the 1980s. Modern for that time, tall commercial buildings such as the International Hotel at Jianguomen were gradually changing what had been an almost uniformly low-rise skyline. Construction had started on China World at Guomao in 1985.

Another notion quickly dispelled - most people were not dressed in conformist blue or green heavy cotton. Men generally wore white shirts, with women in light cotton summer skirts or dresses, some even in beautiful silk qipao.

I was staying at the Friendship Hotel in what was suburban Haidian, with its outdoor pool, tennis courts and a rooftop bar where the sunset over the Western Hills could be appreciated with a cold Tsingtao Beer! Outside the gates across today's busy Zhongguancun South Street was another world - bicycle carts carried melons, horse-hauled carts transported cardboard for recycling - and beyond a ditch an outdoor market had a range of vegetables quite unknown to me.

BACK TO THE TOP
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US