Today’s character, 老师 Lao shī - teacher.

Intriguing uniform; when I saw the first few students in it, I thought they were tracksuited up for PE, but no, everyone was wearing it, for politics, Maths, ... I wonder if our students can get one? It’s not the height of fashion but it would be good to blend in a little better.

The welcome message when you walk into Beijing school no.8 - “the Establishment of Socialist Ideals”. Not quite Deus dat incrementum.

Use no.1 of the fourth floor function suite in the school - a hotly-contested in-house ping-pong competition.

Ping pong diplomacy all over again.

Below, a view across the Lake of Longevity at the Summer Palace. A deceptively tranquil scene- the place was heaving. Longevity remains of great value. (Bama in Guangxi is celebrated as a ‘village of longevity’ because it has so many centenarians. Is it the air? The tea? The magnetic fields? Tune in next week to find out).

It was a shame about the haze; it would have been even worse if boilers across the city were up and running, but central heating gets turned on on Nov 15 every year, (irrespective of the actual temperatures before or after that particular day). In winter 2017, the smog was so bad that burning coal for heating was banned, which meant uncommonly clear skies, but a lot of Beijing’s 21m people were miserably cold.

The elegant Bridge of 17 Arches runs across the lake to a small island. The number 8 was considered auspicious, hence 8 arches either aide of the central one, making for good fortune as well as aesthetic symmetry.

One of the million group tours was a curious, friendly party of nuns from Szechuan.

A smiling old man invited us to practise our Chinese characters on the stones, with water and a home-made calligraphy brush.

But were they all wide awake in period 5 as a result? Apparently not.

Like in every other country, teachers said their system is terribly complicated. There’s a mixture of state and private, but you only go private if you can’t get in to one of the prestigious state schools. Our partner, School no.8 in Beijing, is state-funded in parts, but private & profit-making in other parts, catering both for those aiming for a US university and for the (more prestigious) Chinese ones.

Entrance to Beijing unis is weighted heavily in favour of those from Beijing. The provinces are kept provincial. Different provinces get their A-levels marked differently. Odd to try and engineer things in this way; simultaneously, the pass mark for uni entry for girls can be lower than for boys, in an attempt to redress the inequalities resulting from a previous bit of failed engineering - the one child policy has meant girls are outnumbered and therefore unequally represented on higher education.

Welcoming students to this bit of the campus are twin king-size statues of Confucius and Socrates.

We drove past this amazing building yesterday, the hq of China TV.

The Wall was certainly spectacular, especially on such a blazing autumn day. I dare say that the packaging of the visit into a tourist experience - complete with coach park, cable-car, luge and tat stalls - allows the maximum number of people to come and visit, and generates valuable revenue, but like at Neuschwanstein and Stonehenge, it comes at the cost of charm. There’s no chance of a moment to yourself to take it all in; and the trouble is that when you come with the anticipation that you’re about to see something truly original and momentously special, the result is a certain disappointment. Perhaps we should have walked further and got further away from the hordes.

Mao said, ‘he who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man’.

Such was the amazement of many at the time (let alone now) on seeing the Great Wall that supernatural explanations were sought - the Emperor was said to possess a magic whip, for example, or a magic horse; or a tired dragon flopped down on the mountain top for a rest, a became a solid wall....

The panda is endangered because it is reproductively very slow, and because getting the necessary nutrition from bamboo (which is all they eat) takes ages. They spend so long eating there’s only sleeping time left. And they fight among themselves, so they are all in separate enclosures.

At lunch we were treated to a \240Beijing hotpot - quite a spread, though rather lacking in veg. The Chinese black pudding and the ox stomach were brought to the table shortly after this... And all washed down with chamomile tea.

School uniform update - there is one. For our concert outing this evening, the pupils ditched the sky-blue tracksuit and donned a standard navy get-up: blazer & tie.

The roof beams are particularly striking, with their beautiful green-blue-gold colours and their cleverly-engineered structure.

Here (as everywhere else on the tourist trail one went) there were countless tour groups waddling along obediently behind a miked-up leader carrying a follow-me flag on a long stick. The groups were not generally Western parties, but rather older Chinese tourists, an indication of the huge number of people of retirement age with leisure time on their hands. The age imbalance of the population is a serious concern. Plus of course these are the ones who only have one child to turn to when they reach the stage of needing looking after.

A devilish afternoon - togged up for the hallowe’en party up in the ping-pong room.

Famous Beijing duck for lunch.

And I had chicken feet for tea. Good job I hadn’t gone for the scorpions I’d seen at the market earlier, it might have spoilt my appetite

Character of the day, 鸭 yā, duck

Character of the day, 大 - dà, = big/ large

Connie, who helped at the hospital yesterday, was the first Chinese person I have met so far who had a sibling. Her family are Han Chinese but come from Mongolia - where the population needs encouraging, so the one-child rule didn’t apply to them.

Character of the day, 口 kōu, mouth/ entrance.

The hotter the weather, the faster the rice grows, so down on the Guanxi plain they harvest 3 times a year, but up in the hills, where we’re going on Weds, it is colder for longer and there’s only one crop a year.

I watched our guide Jasmine write a text message. For us, twitching your thumbs round the letters of keyboard is fiddly enough; she was drawing the characters one by one on a touch-pad square of screen. It looked like serious thumb-strain, not to mention very long-winded. There are so many characters that to get them all onto one keyboard must be impossible. There’s a complication to Chinese which I think I knew but had forgotten - you have to know the meaning of the character when you see it, and also how that character sounds, and there is no connection between the two. So you are effectively learning two languages. I know the connection between how English words look and how they sound isn’t always straightforward, but at least some common ground exists, and you can have a guess at how an unknown word is said aloud, based on how it’s written. This is not the case in Mandarin. Respect to our pupils.

And sliced white bread available at breakfast, and a toaster. Like nowhere else.

Shades of Jurassic Park in this landscape?! And apparently James Cameron took inspiration from this scenery for Avatar.

Thence to Yangzhou, to buy our ingredients in the market. Available (in addition to acres of amazing veg) were frogs, eels, cats, dogs, scorpions, pig, duck, pigeon, rabbit. All for sale, either alive or freshly butchered.

A lot easier to cook something delicious when a bossy chef is talking you through it stage by stage...

Happy diners.

And from the bottom, with Transformers

Via the local Brimble Hill-style school,

And as we biked along the road to get to the hot spring, there in the fields either side of the road were men and women squatting on their haunches to tend their little fields. With the extraordinary mountains looming over them, and their circumflex hats, the scene was straight out of a hundred-year old picture book. No one was pulling a two-wheeled barrow behind them, though. More like a motorised three-wheeler, piled high with green veg/ bamboo/ sacks of rice.

To Longji. Fatigue is setting in a little with Chinese cuisine, but caramelised taro was interesting. It is considered to be one of the first cultivated plants in human history, and good for blood pressure and immune health. Chinese Cornettos, however, are interesting in the wrong way.

Up early to see the sun rise over the rice paddy terraces of Longji. A spectacular sight indeed, a new entry in the great views-from-my-hotel-window chart. Although the sight is slightly less spectacular post-harvest than it would have been in spring, when the hillsides are a verdant green and the paddies are filled with shimmering water, it was nonetheless a majestic place.

The locals have totally different skin and features to the Han Chinese of Beijing, and are shorter still. The women were in traditional dress, and not just as a tourist attraction, said the guide. Jasmine from the travel agency pointed out more than once that there are 59 ethnic minorities within China, as if this was a party line she was expected to communicate. Whether or not this is an edict designed to instruct everyone what to be proud of, it remains a lot of different folk in one country.

It was very remote and poor, though the amount of building going on suggests that tourist income is improving matters. Or maybe the state is just paying for development, in the way that they pay some of the rice farmers to harvest late, even though the rice has bolted, so that some of the paddy-terrace spectacle remains for the late-season tourists.

The pupils at the international school and all the tour guides we met all had an ‘English name’ (their actual Chinese name being too much of a mouthful for English-speakers). Jasmine was one of the less incongruous ones, we also met Jerry, Princess, Esther and (my favourite) Wilma.

Guangzhou. A more relaxed city- none of the incessant honking, for starters - but vast nonetheless. 12 million people, in a province containing 21 cities and 100 million inhabitants. Massive downtown skyscrapers in a range of striking shapes and (at night) neon colours; much interesting architecture in this quarter, including a splendid library, Zaha Hadid’s opera house (‘two pebbles rising from the Pearl River’) and the ‘Red Box’ Guangzhou museum. Their orchestra played the music for the 2008 Olympics, they hosted the opening ceremony of the recent Asian Games. The city has grown spectacularly, upward and outward, in the last twenty years, and has some of the most pricey residential real estate anywhere in the world. Pity the newly engaged - tradition dictates that a couple must move in to a new apartment when they marry. How on earth to afford it? Much more conspicuous advertising here than in Beijing.

The city is home to 300,000 Africans, and the province to a large number of Muslims, who are viewed with considerable mistrust by the state, apparently. China detains any of them when they return from travel to Turkey or the Middle East, in order to determine if they have any sudden interest in extremism, and to re-educate them in Chinese values. Some are not even granted a Chinese passport in the first place. Like in Singapore, you can see these Official Values posted on billboards for the population to absorb, and there is nothing conspicuously socialist there, the list could just as easily have been the headings in a Great British Values leaflet.

Cantonese here, not Mandarin. Someone told me earlier that Mandarin was now compulsory in HK schools, which sounded like a threat to Cantonese. Our guide Oscar was not worried that his language was in danger, though, but then he speaks both, plus the provincial dialects, plus English, plus Japanese, so perhaps he can afford to be relaxed about this.

Pics are of the tv tower (tallest in China) - multicoloured during our misty river cruise in the evening.

And the ‘golden doughnut’. \240Opinions vary on the aesthetics of this one. On clear days, the reflection of the building in the river makes an auspicious figure of eight. The Italian architect apparently was inspired by an ancient, precious jade disc, and wanted to move away from the tyranny of the standard ‘western’ skyscraper (though this didn’t seem to bother the architects of the central business district.

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