The Fast Track to Tianjin's Roots

By High-speed Train to Tianjin, China

Originally Published in the Jakarta Globe, 18/03/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/the-fast-track-to-tianjins-roots/364266

The sleek white train slips smoothly out from under the arched roofs of Beijing’s South Train Station. Speed, time and the outside air temperature are registered on a digital display at the front of the carriage – within seconds we are doing 60kmph, then 70, and upwards, past 100. Outside it is just 3C, but the carriage is warm as we streak through the outer suburbs of the Chinese capital past smokestacks and factories. Wintery sunlight slants in from the right and soon we are passing farmsteads, electricity pylons, flat brown fields and ponds scaled with ice. Six minutes into the journey and we are already out of the city and doing 325kmph. I am riding what is reportedly the fastest conventional twin-track train in the world between Beijing and the neighboring city of Tianjin.

 China, covering half a continent, is a land of long rail journeys, and the trains that make these transcontinental trips are exceptionally well-run. But none of the long-haulers have the wow-factor of the speed-machines that make the short run from Beijing to Tianjin. Until recently the 114 kilometer trip took an hour and a half, but in August 2008 a new line was opened and the journey time was slashed by two-thirds. The trains that shuttle back and forth every half-hour have an average top speed of 330kmph – though the record is an eye-watering 394.3kmph.
 I have barely settled into my seat when the smooth transition from suburbs to fields repeats in reverse: smokestacks, factories, then a river and a forest of glass skyscrapers. Exactly 29 minutes after slipping out of Beijing we slide to a halt in the echoing cavern of Tianjin Station...

***

 But is there actually anything at the end of the line to make this turbo-charged trip from Beijing worthwhile? On this chilly winter’s day I step out of the cozy cocoon of the carriage, pull on my hat and gloves, and set out to see what Tianjin has to offer.
 Lying near the mouth of the Hai River, Tianjin has always been the key maritime gateway to Beijing. Britain’s first official mission to the Manchu court arrived through Tianjin in 1793, and by the end of the 19th Century various foreign powers had been granted trading concessions in the city.

 Shivering in the sharp sunlight I dodge the taxis that crowd the station forecourt, skip over a steel bridge across the Hai River, and seek out what remains of the concession era architecture. The streets are neat and orderly, and here and there a bank, church or hotel in unmistakably European style looms over the pavement – all balconies and colonnades. But as so often in 21st Century China it can be hard to sift the authentic from the fake. What I think is a hundred-year-old French townhouse reveals itself as a cunning concrete construction, the frontispiece of a new housing development.

 There is more of the new as I double back north to the riverside. Here enormous glass towers rocket into a pale sky. Tianjin might be overshadowed by Beijing, but it is still China’s sixth largest city, close to the forefront of recent economic growth. I hurry along the walkway beside the wind-ruffled river, passing old men in flat caps, fishing in the icy water.
 Crossing the neoclassical Bei’an Bridge – with golden Venuses on the parapets – I continue until I reach the Monastery of Deep Compassion, a 17th Century temple where enormous Buddhas stand in smoky halls. The forecourt is busy with old women, lighting incense sticks and bowing before the images, but it’s too cold to linger so I follow the river back to the south.
 The original walled garrison city of Tianjin stood on the west bank of the Hai River, guarding one of the most important junctions for waterborne traffic in China. To the east trading junks charted the coastal waters and plotted courses to more distant lands – Japan, Vietnam, and even Indonesia. Meanwhile the river gave access to the Grand Canal, the inland waterway that linked Beijing to the southern Yangzi Delta.
 Traces of this centuries-old city still stand. One road in from the riverside is Guwenhua Jie – “Ancient Culture Street”. Once again it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake, but the pedestrian street is a mass of red lanterns, dragon-chased roofs and kitsch Chinese trinkets. Through a narrow arched gateway between the souvenir stalls is the Temple of the Goddess of Seafarers. I’ve visited temples dedicated to this same deity in Indonesia, and curiosity draws me inside. Much is familiar, though in wintery Tianjin there is no soft tropical heat; here the incense smoke coils into cold, dry air.
 At the end of Ancient Culture Street I take a break from the chill for delicate cups of green tea and a plate of steamed meat dumplings – baozi, a Tianjin specialty – then pull my gloves back on and head for the heart of the old city. The Drum Tower, a double-tiered pavilion atop a cube of gray stone, is the last remnant of the old fortifications. The walls of old Tianjin were destroyed, not by bulldozing modern developers, but by vengeful European soldiers. In 1900 a peasant uprising, known as the Boxer Rebellion, saw attacks on foreigners across northern China. When the crumbling Manchu dynasty offered its support to the rebellion a multinational European army attacked in response. The victorious Europeans leveled the old walls when they captured Tianjin.

***

 Heading south from the Drum Tower – pausing in a covered arcade to buy manhua, another Tianjin specialty, a twist of sweet, crispy fried dough – I return to shining streets and towering office-blocks. It will be dark before long; temperatures will plummet far below freezing, and it will be time for a 330kmph ride back to Beijing.
 Tianjin is far more manageable in size than the capital. In a chilly afternoon I have made my way through its sights – and with that 29-minute train ride it has been easier to reach than many outlying suburbs of Beijing itself. And there are plenty of traces of the old here to make the trip worthwhile – though as so often in China the boundary between restoration and recreation, between heritage and theme park, is hard to pinpoint.
 But as the sky pales in the west, I stumble into a completely different quarter of Tianjin. Taking a side road in the direction of the river I find myself amongst bare, black-branched trees. The road becomes a dirt track, plied by old men on bicycles. This, it seems, is the plot for some new development; the narrow alleyways are only just being cleared.
 Out on the wasteland I see men in heavy coats and peaked caps. Their bicycles are propped against nearby trees and each man holds a small yellow-beaked bird. As the sun sets behind the skyscrapers, the men fling the birds skywards. They rocket up and up vertically in the cold air, and then, at a whistled command, turn summersault and plummet in a long sweeping dive to their master’s hand and a pinch of grain. It is a simple, timeless sport, and watching them as dusk falls I realize that for all the high-speed trains and skyscrapers the old China is always there to be found, not in “Ancient Culture Streets” or over-restored temples, but in places like this...

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Savoring the Taste of Amritsar's Holy Nectar

The Sikh Holy City and the India-Pakistan Border

Originally Published in the Jakarta Globe, 10/03/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lifeandtimes/savoring-the-taste-of-amritsars-holy-nectar/362865

A roar rose from the crowd: “Jai Hind!” Up with India! From a hundred metres away an equally passionate response bounced back like an echo: “Pakistan Zindabad!” Long live Pakistan! The sun was slanting across the Punjab and I was pinned in the middle of a mass of flag-waving Indian patriots. Just to the west exactly the same thing was going on – except there the flapping flags were those of Pakistan. On the road beneath me abnormally tall Indian soldiers with ridiculous red headdresses were prancing, preening and high-kicking like cockerels. On the same road, just beyond an imposing gateway, similarly attired Pakistanis were going through the same theatrical motions.
 Something very strange was going on here. I was at the Wagah Checkpoint, the only official crossing in the entire length of the hyper-sensitive border between India and Pakistan. But the evening border-closing ceremony that I was watching looked more like an exercise in camp choreography than a display of bitter enmity...

***

 I had arrived that morning in Amritsar, the major city of Indian Punjab. The Punjab is the breadbasket of north India, and the train that brought me from Delhi had rolled over rich yellow plains. Irrigation canals stalked by long-legged cattle egrets carried water to fields heavy with maize and millet, and herds of dirty-white cows raised storms of pale dust on rutted tracks.
 Amritsar itself was the archetypal North Indian city. A mob of hungry rickshaw (pedicab) drivers besieged me at the colonial-era station and the streets were a maelstrom of bikes, trucks and buses. But there is something that makes Amritsar special. This is the holiest city of the Sikh religion.
 Sikhism, the newest major world religion, was founded in Punjab in the 16th Century by the man revered by Sikhs as the first Guru, Nanak. Rejecting both the major faiths of the Subcontinent, Guru Nanak declared “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim”. His new religion was monotheistic, rejecting idolatry and the Hindu concept of caste, but also many of the strictures of Islam. Today there are around 25 million Sikhs worldwide.

 After escaping the rickshaw drivers I headed for the old city, following a thickening flow of pilgrims to the heart of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple.
 I left my shoes at the gate, covered my head with a bandana – as required – and stepped across the threshold into a world of gleaming white marble. Ahead lay a great square pool of water, shining in the midday heat. Pilgrims in saffron turbans fell to their knees on the polished tiles, pressing their palms together and bowing their foreheads to the floor. They were praying towards a building at the very centre of the complex: reached by a narrow causeway and seeming to float on the water was the Harimandir, the Golden Temple itself.
 Amritsar, meaning “Pool of Nectar”, takes its name from the tank that surrounds the temple. The earliest shrine here was built in the late 16th Century by the fourth Sikh Guru, but it was expanded and embellished repeatedly over the centuries. Today it is the most important pilgrimage centre for Sikhs from around the world.
 All Sikhs, no matter how wealthy, are expected to do charitable service in their gurdwarras (temples). In the halls around the temple cheerful volunteers were working in communal kitchens, preparing free meals for anyone who was hungry – pilgrims, tourists, and the local poor, regardless of their religion.
 Most of the men had tall turbans and thick beards. The final Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, sanctioned five obligatory symbols that would make Sikhs instantly recognizable. Known as the Five Ks, these were kesh, the uncut hair and beard; kanga, a comb, worn tucked beneath the turban; kachchhera, a knee-length undergarment; kara, a steel bracelet, and kirpan, a sword or dagger.
 Guru Gobind also compiled the Sikh texts into the holy book of Sikhism, the Guru Granth Sahib, declaring that the book itself would be the eternal 11th Guru. A copy of the Granth is kept in the inner sanctum of the Golden Temple where a party of black-turbaned priests were keeping up a continuous recitation. The walls of the temple were lavishly decorated. It was like being inside a maharani’s jewel box.
 After being the centre of a powerful Sikh empire in the 19th Century, Amritsar and the Punjab fell to the British colonialists, and in the nascent independence movement that grew in the early 20th Century the region saw its fair share of unrest. In fact, one of the key events in India’s independence struggle took place just a few hundred meters from the Golden Temple.
 Shedding my bandana and recovering my shoes I made my way to Jalianwalla Bagh. This garden is an open space, hemmed by the close-packed walls of the old city – just as it was on April 13 1919 when a huge crowd, swelled by ill-fated pilgrims, gathered to protest a draconian new act passed by the British, which, amongst other things, banned protests of this very kind. After a short stand-off troops led by one General Dyer opened fire on the unarmed protestors. Hundreds were killed, but the massacre helped to galvanize the wider independence movement. 
 But independence brought bloodshed to Amritsar that made the carnage at Jalianwalla Bagh look positively tame. When the Subcontinent was partitioned between Muslim Pakistan and officially secular but Hindu-dominated India, the Punjab too was sliced in half and a new, arbitrary border driven through the belt of agricultural land between Amritsar and the neighboring city of Lahore. Across North India Muslim refugees headed west and Hindus and Sikhs traipsed east. The migration was accompanied by horrific communal massacres. Refugee trains from the west arrived in Amritsar station with not one passenger still alive; trains from the east arrived in Lahore in a similar blood-soaked state.
 Partition left Sikhs separated from many of their holy places in what became Pakistan, and it also left two huge countries with a shared history but a spectacularly troublesome modern relationship. Nuclear rivalry, religious animosity and a bloody past – none of it made the Wagah Checkpoint, some 20 kilometers west of Amritsar, sound like a place for a family outing. But as I emerged from Jalianwalla Bagh it seemed as if that was just where dozens of sightseeing Indian families were preparing to go. I joined them, catching a ride in a minibus out through the fields and villages, and soon found myself in the thick of the cheering crowd on the viewing terraces as the soldiers postured wildly down below.

 It was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. The soldiers preened and puffed in a caricature of huffing fury. They stomped and strutted to face their Pakstani counterparts – with timing of such perfection that close, and friendly, cooperation was obviously required – then whipped around and marched away, noses in the air like teenage drama queens. All the while the two crowds cheered and waved their flags as if they were at a football match. And then, as the sun finally slipped down behind the sagging palm trees in the direction of Lahore, the two flags were lowered, the gate was slammed shut and the performance was over for another day. Pakistan and India might not be the best of neighbors, and the countryside around Amritsar might have a terribly blood-stained past. But amidst the rancor the daily border-closing ceremony at Wagah, with all its pantomime silliness, is still guaranteed to raise a smile – and smile I did, all the way back to Amritsar in the dusk...  

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Hard Labor in a Ghostly World: East Java's Sulfur Mines

A Journey to the Ijen Plateau, East Java

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 03/02/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/culture/hard-labor-in-a-ghostly-world-east-javas-sulfur-mines/356302

The rising road is a mess of pebbles and potholes, and the engine of my motorbike strains as I wend my way between the ruts. It is an hour since I left the neat, sleepy little town of Bondowoso, riding first between luminescent rice terraces and red-roofed villages, and then uphill into the forest. A few more lumps and bumps, a few more steep switchbacks before the road suddenly levels and a view of a lost world opens below. Surrounded by dark ridges is a swathe of rolling forest under a veil of yellow haze. Welcome to the Ijen Plateau.

The chain of volcanoes that runs the length of Java ends in style in the mighty Ijen-Raung Massif. Rocketing from the rice terraces this mighty complex of peaks – flanked by the 3332-meter Gunung Raung in the west and the 2800-meter Gunung Merapi in the east – can be seen from Bali on a clear day.

Rolling down through the trees I reach sleepy Sempol, the main village of the Ijen region, home to the men and women who work on the surrounding coffee plantations. On the outskirts of the village is the Arabica Homestay, a guesthouse owned by one of the coffee companies, and the overnight base for my journey to Ijen. More than 2000 meters above sea level the air here is fresh and invigorating, and a cup of sweet local coffee is all I need to recover from the bumpy ride from Bondowoso before I head out to explore.
Beyond Sempol the road rises through tiers of glossy-leaved coffee bushes. When I reach Pos Paltuding, the trailhead for the hike to the Ijen crater itself, the sky has darkened. It’s hardly ideal weather for an afternoon stroll, but I set out along the trail anyway. Within minutes a torrential downpour has begun, and I duck beneath the dripping roof of a concrete shelter beside the path.
Despite the inclement weather the trail is busy – not with hikers, but with workers, surely some of the toughest men in Java. The Ijen crater is an active volcano, and it produces a continuous supply of high-grade sulfur, an important ingredient in sugar production and pharmaceuticals. The mining operation here continues as it has done for generations – completely without mechanical aids. Some 400 men head up the steep slopes each day to collect sulfur from the crater, and then carry it in wicker baskets along the five-kilometer trail to a weighing station at Pos Paltuding.
As I sit shivering in the rain I watch a steady stream of workers trotting downhill, loaded baskets balanced on creaking bamboo poles across their shoulders.
One of the men takes a break to join me. His name is Aripin. He is 41 years old. While the workers on the surrounding coffee plantations are ethnic Madurese, Aripin says, those who work on the mountain are mostly Osing Javanese from the Banyuwangi region. Aripin himself comes from the village of Licin on the volcano’s eastern slopes. He carried his first load of sulfur from Ijen at the age of 12, following his own father.
Aripin explains that he is paid for the sulfur by weight – Rp 600 per kilogram. Most men carry two loads of between 60 and 100 kilograms every day. I try to do the math on my fingers. Aripin helps me out: “I make about 80,000 rupiah most days.”
This puts his income above that of many graduate office workers in the cities, but when I point this out Aripin laughs: “Are any of those office kids strong enough to do this job? I don’t think so! The money is good enough, but you need both mental and physical strength. How much you make is up to you; you can’t do well unless you can motivate yourself.”
Aripin works fifteen days out of each month, sleeping with the other workers in a hut on the mountain slopes. The other fifteen days he spends with his wife and two small sons in Licin. “I can make enough money to live on in 15 days.”
The rain is still sheeting down, and an early twilight is falling. “Come back in the morning,” says Aripin; “the views are better.” It is sound advice and I follow him back down the muddy trail.

***

The mountains are dark facades in the dawn under an empty sky. I hurry uphill, falling in with the gangs of sulfur carriers. The trail winds through the pines and to the east a view over thickly forested slopes opens. I pass Aripin heading rapidly downhill. He was awake at 4am; he has already lugged his first load up from the crater.
I reach the rim as a morning haze is creeping up from the forest. The slopes here are bare of vegetation, and far below I can see the cobalt-blue lake that fills the belly of the Ijen crater. Rising from its shores is a plume of thick white smoke.
The trail down to the crater winds steeply over a landscape like builders’ rubble. Long trains of men are sweating uphill under heavy loads.
A man named Saudiq pauses to catch his breath and chat. He is carrying 70 kilograms, the first of his two daily loads. The strongest workers of all, he says, can carry as much as 125 kilos. Like Aripin, Saudiq has no complaints about his income. “It’s enough to live on,” he says with a wry smile, “but this is hard work…”
Just how hard is obvious down at the sulfur vents: with nothing but old handkerchiefs for protection from the hellish fumes men are hacking at the fresh, candy-colored deposits and loading their baskets.
“I usually make about 2 million rupiah a month,” says one man, pausing from his work; “one million for food, and one million for fun!” he adds with a suggestive leer. It’s not a job I could ever do – walking back up the steep trail to the crater rim carrying nothing more than a camera is enough for me!
The rain has returned when I reach the trailhead, and I head east on a steep, deteriorating track. The dripping forest is full of furious insect noise, and I recall the tale a National Park Ranger back at Pos Paltuding told me: travelling along this same road by motorbike one moring, he saw a black panther emerge from the undergrowth. It watched him for a long, fearless moment before vanishing into the trees.
I am too busy concentrating on the dreadful road to look out for big cats. Rivers of rainwater gush along the ruts and my bike bounces over fist-sized rocks. Finally the road levels, and as it does the rain suddenly stops. I am in the village of Licin, close to Banyuwangi. Ahead of me the dark hills of Bali rise above a slate-gray channel, and behind, fading into blue cloud, is the eastern wall of the lost world of Ijen…

© Tim Hannigan 2010