The China Journal - Day 40

As anyone who has been to China can attest, its cities can be some of the most dreary and dull places one can visit. Crowded, polluted, neglected, and lacking any real sense of character, attempting to discern one city from the next might very well be an impossible task. Needless to say, cities in China are best avoided. This is more easily said than done, however, if you consider that a population of 200,000 is considered small, and most transit routes link up with major urban centres.

Despite the odds against us, we have managed to spend a considerable amount of our trip outside of cities, which has allowed us, in fact, to get a much clearer idea of what the real China is like. That being said, I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about all of the cities we've wisely avoided, so I've taken the time during our twenty-hour traind ride to Shanghai to compile a list of my favourite descriptions of Chinese cities as quoted from the May 2009 edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook:

Suzhou (pop. 5.71 million)

Communist rule has spawned some mightily unattractive cities and disfigured many more, and like all modern Chinese towns, Suzhou has had to contend with destruction of its heritage and its replacement with largely arbitrary chunks of modern architecture.

Shenyang (pop. 7.2 million)

Shenyang's City Government has made enormous strides to rid Liaoning's capital of its reputation as an industrial city that could have been a model for William Blake's vision of 'dark satanic mills.'

Datang (pop. 1.1 million)

Surrounding coal mines may have ruined its chances of winning any beauty pageants...

Jingdezhen (pop.312,400)

Overlooked by tall brick chimneys and disfigured by swathes of squalor and incessant demolition, Jingdezhen is where China's much-coveted porcelain is fired up...