Guangzhou (广州)

I honestly don’t know what I expected out of Guangzhou, but had I, no doubt I would have been disappointed. For those of you who may not have a grasp on Chinese geography, Guangzhou is the capital city of Guangdong province and sits a few hundred kilometers from Hong Kong.

To get there, we took a train from Hung Hom station in Kowloon to Guangzhou East Railway Station. The trip took about an hour and forty-five minutes, with a disproportionate amount of that time in Hong Kong SAR. The route shares tracks with the light blue East Rail Line of the MTR, and as such crawls along said tracks so as to disturb MTR traffic as little as possible. And when you cross into Mainland China though, heavy rail is separated from light rail and the train speeds up dramatically.

Crossing borders (since Hong Kong and Macau maintain their own immigration systems), we exited Hong Kong first in Hung Hom Station. Upon exiting the train in Guangzhou, we went through Chinese immigration.

Finding somewhere to eat, we went to Beijing Street (北京路), which was actually more for shopping. I suppose it’s similar in notability to Shanghai’s Nanjing Street. Instead of finding dim sum, which was what we were hoping for, we stumbled into an Argentine restaurant. Resisting the temptation to test their Spanish, I found the waitress asking why I can’t speak Cantonese, since the two friends I was with we doing all the ordering while I stayed silent in the corner. The food was okay. It wasn’t great but I suppose it wasn’t bad either. Though we were looking for dim sum, getting away from Chinese food for a bit was nice.

Beijing Street itself was a little piece of history from what I could surmise. Based on the name of the street, I would think that in some way or another, the northern direction of the road more or less led to Beijing (over a thousand kilometers away). Similarly, I would surmise that Nanjing Road in Shanghai leads to Nanjing in one way or another (a couple hundred kilometers east).

What brought this to mind, because a name is often just a name, was that the center section of this (pedestrian) road was covered in glass. Looking in, it looked like an old pathway, perhaps the old Beijing Road hundreds of years before it was surrounded by shops galore. There were signs describing what was beheld, but my Chinese proficiency pales when confronted with text.

From there we descended to the underground and looked to see what there was to do in conjunction with stops on the metro map. There seems to be nothing famous in Guangzhou (at least to the likes of the Great Wall or the Terra Cotta Warriors). As people upon people kept passing by, it became clear that this was just a big city with lots of people.

Finally, we settled on the Second Workers’ Cultural Palace. It looked like an interesting enough place to go. After waiting in line for the ticket machines and finding that our machine didn’t take bills, we found another machine, bought our tickets, and entered the metro.

In short, it was crowded. I felt a hand on my face the whole journey. I used to think that people were kind of impolite on the Hong Kong MTR system. As the main example, letting people out of the train car before entering makes sense in terms of politeness and just plain old logistically. No two things can take up the same space, so letting people uncram themselves from the subway before you cram yourself on is just good sense.

Getting off of the subway with much effort, we went back to street level, scrambling to find the Second Workers’ Cultural Palace. After much roaming, we finally asked a security guard where it was, and he replied, “It’s right here!” Looking around us, there was a halfway dilapidated shopping center with big characters along the top “市二宮.” It was disappointing but funny at the same time.

Back in the metro, we settled on the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, because, actually I don’t know why. I guess we were kind of looking for something with substance, so we went. It was like every other Sun Yat-sen memorial I had been to. Inside was a museum that we didn’t enter and the whole time it was raining.

Back in the metro, we proceeded onto Chigang Pagoda. By the time we exited the station, the sun was already falling, so we didn’t go all the way to the site. We viewed it from a distance and then went back to the station. Along the way, you could see the new spiral tower they were building for the 2010 Asian Games hosted by Guangzhou.

The TV & Sightseeing Tower, as it has been dubbed, is not open yet, but the structure is finished. It was so tall that the top could not be seen because of cloud cover.

To get back to Guangzhou East Railway Station, we took another (extremely) crowed metro ride. People were crowding the entire station shoulder to shoulder, and to transfer trains, we had to circle around the platforms in that crowd. It was so packed that to get out of the train, I had about nine inches of room in which to squeeze out of. Luckily, I was able to push myself through and not get lost in Guangzhou.

The day ended as it started—with a train trip. I’m glad I didn’t spend an extra day or two in Guangzhou, because there was nothing to see. And according to another group of people who tried to go out at night, there was nothing to do.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.