Results tagged “greatwall”

     

We're always fascinated by old pictures of China--we love seeing the tangible change in photographs from eras past. And since we can never get enough, here are a few more pictures from a wonderful photoset taken nearly thirty years ago.

You know what's longer than the Great Wall of China? Apparently, the Great Wall of China! According to the BBC, two-year government study has now found that China's symbol of "Get out! Intruders!" actually stretches a good 3,800km more than previously thought. The newly-discovered sections of the wall were built during the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644) and go from Hu Mountain in Lioning province to Jiayu Pass in Gansu province. The project will continue for another 18 months, presumably in an attempt to discover more wall and give marathon runners a loooot more ground to cover.

Those who are bravely traveling to Beijing to catch the Olympics and want to squeeze in some sight-seeing along the way will want to take note. Thanks to WildChina Blog for the updates:

1. The torch relay from August 5th(today!) to 8th will involve the China Millennium Monument(中华世纪坛), Temple of Heaven, the Badaling Great Wall, and Jinshan Park. During this time, sites will be closed partially or entirely, and trips there may be difficult.

Continue reading "Great Wall closed for Olympic biking event"

Our parents and sister just visited China for the first time. We won’t bore you with the details on what we did in Shanghai, but since many of you are hosting visitors and/or visiting China for the first time for the Olympics, here are some of the highlights from our travels to Beijing including suggestions for elderly and disabled (something we couldn't find anywhere else online).

The Italians are famous for their invention of romance and pizza. The Chinese are famous for expertly copying the Italians. And now along with Dolce and Prada, romance and pizza have been copied in time for Valentine's Day. Perusing the delivery menu of Deli Roma Pizza, you will be delighted to discover the 10" Love Pizza–heart-shaped and extra cheesy for 98 RMB (buy-one-get-one-free, in case you don't like sharing, also comes with chicken wings and 1.25 L of Pepsi or 7up).

Four Chinese from Hubei have just opened a restaurant in the world's most dangerous city — Baghdad — reports the London Times. Edited highlights:

This World AIDS Day, we witnessed an extraordinarily well-coordinated effort by Chinese media to raise AIDS awareness among the populace and to communicate the resolve of the central government to win the battle against the disease. This small sampling of stories that appeared in state-run English-language media is enough to give you an idea of what went out on Chinese news: President Hu: HIV/AIDS not scary President Hu tells HIV carriers, communities not to be...

If tourism officials have their way, visitors to Beijing in 2009 will not only have to climb the Great Wall of China, but also the Great Wheel, says Ben Blanchard of Reuters. At 208 metres tall, the Great Wheel will be the world's largest ferris wheel — higher and bigger than both the London Eye and the Singapore Flyer which opens in March next year. Our eyes were drawn to these lines in the Reuters...

A few months ago, we informed you of the latest information about the 15th edition of CBS' Survivor: China, to be held...in China (surpise, surprise). In a few short weeks, the show will debut after filming its episodes during July and August. As the stentorian narrator in this early promo for the show says, "For the first time, a major American show goes behind the Great Wall to shoot entirely in China. It's a place...

OK, we all know about the Great Wall, the Great Firewall and the Great Green Wall. All that is old news now. Get this: China is now building a 6 million yuan, 40-kilometer (25-mile) long, 1 meter (3.3 feet) high wall around Dongting Lake in Hunan Province to guard against the 2 billion field mice that have been on the run from the flooded Yangtse River. Already, the mice have destroyed about 520,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of crop land when rising water drove them from their burrows. And even the enterprising businessmen in Guangdong who sought to help by bringing the mice en masse to the dinner table did little to mitigate the situation.

Down-side of Chinese in outerspace: Finding out the Great Wall isn't actually visible to extraterrestrials.

Pioniers, a minor league team in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 2007, he was signed by the Beijing Tigers of the China Baseball League (more info here). The CBL season already over, Kim recently answered some of our questions via email.

It is now official: The Great Wall has been chosen as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World in an unprecedented global vote that drew nearly 100 million internet and telephone voters. In fact it received the most votes among the 21 finalist sites (not very surprising as China has one of the biggest internet populations?). Other sites that have been recognised as new wonders include:

Image of the Great Wall from Laurence: Will it be counted among the new 7 wonders of the world?

If you’re like us, you probably have a habit of collecting crap and hoping that one day it might be worth something. If so, June 20th will be your lucky day. The People’s Bank of China is issuing a commemorative 300 RMB Olympic Coin. Even more exciting is the fact that they are only issuing the very Olympic number of 20008 (c’mon it’s only one zero off) of these 10cm in diameter coins. That is approximately 1 coin per 75,000 people in China. According to our college economics class, a small supply and a high demand should equal a very high price.

2200 years is a long time to get around renewing anything, but we say better late than never. Forget the seven wonders of the ancient world, it's time, in the 21st century, to let the people of the 42nd century know what we consider to be the seven wonders of the world. The Great Wall of China is one of the top 10 finalists:

According to the most recently published data, on May 7, the top 10 were the Great Wall of China, the Acropolis in Greece, the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico, the Coliseum in Rome, the Eiffel tower in Paris, the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, Petra in Jordan, the statues on Easter Island, Britain's Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal in India.

Continue reading "Will the Great Wall be one of the New Seven Wonders of the World?"

Shanghaiist needs a massage. On Saturday we took part in the 2007 Great Wall Marathon, a race of 42.195km (26 miles), including two stretches of about 9km each on the Great Wall itself. The rest in the countryside. About 1,300 runners — a lot of Americans, some South Africans, Australians, Mexicans, Dutch, Danish, British, a few French ... and even four goats and an Olympic female mountain biker from New Zealand — took part in the marathon. We all started at 7.30 am ... and seven hours later, Shanghaiist completed the race, with sore legs and sunburned shoulder. But how proud we were!

Shanghaiist thinks there aren’t enough cars in Shanghai. The air, quite frankly, is incredibly clean. There’s nary a spot of traffic. And really, couldn’t taxi drivers be more conscientious by honking their horns just a LITTLE more often? Shanghai needs more cars. Definitely. And what better place to encourage additional consumption than the Shanghai Auto Show!

Last fall, we told you about the China Bowl — the NFL preseason (American) football game between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks scheduled for early August in Beijing. In February, we told you about all the China Bowl plugs we saw during the international broadcast of the Super Bowl. And just one month ago, we told you about the three Chinese kickers (one named "Rambo") the NFL was training with the hopes that at least one of them could suit up for the China Bowl. We even had one reader email us to see if we could confirm the date (we had heard anywhere between August 7 and 9) — because he had already booked plane tickets for his brother-in-law, a huge Pats fan, to come to Beijing, but was worried he had him schedule to fly back before the game even started.

Photo by spiky247 taken from the Shanghaiist photos page. To see your photos on our photos page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

A few weeks back, Shanghaiist batted around the question, “what would you suggest to someone with only one night in Shanghai?” Think we just found our answer. In the June issue of Conde Nast Traveller, the magazine highlighted 20 locales worldwide as the latest additions to its “journeys of a lifetime” series. One in particular was right in our backyard, figuratively speaking of course. In an entry titled “Dine a deux at the upper Cupola”, Traveller featured a magnificent restaurant/dining room, The Cupola, located on the city’s historic waterfront, offering a sumptuous dining experience with equally breath-taking visuals to match. This is what the magazine had to say about The Cupola:

Photo by Shanghai Sky taken from the Shanghaiist photos page. To see your photos on our photos page, use Flickr and tag your photos "shanghaiist". Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

Chinese holidays -- or "golden weeks" -- have always confused Shanghaiist. The "official" days always seem to be announced at the last minute (like less than two weeks before the actual holiday) even though based on past holidays you can pretty much guesstimate when the golden week will be. Adopting a "when in China" stance, many foreign companies in China wait until the last minute to tell employees what days they will actually have off. The end result is a mad rush of about a billion people to get out of town. Thank God for ticket agents.

Let’s open up the old Shanghaiist mailbag. Our good friend and clever moniker-maker “Simon Templar” writes:

Image of internet police from ESWN.

Oh sure, Shanghaiist goes to the red light "hairdressers" for a nice long wank just as much as the next guy (as long as the next guy has never been once), but we also like experiencing what you "norms" have at the massage parlours of Shanghai -- a massage. We have a new favourite place. At the north east corner of Changle Lu and Shaanxi Lu, behind several medium sized trees is a set of two buildings inside which unlimited massuers will pour out of holes in the walls to beautify you in any way you see fit (Map from SmartShanghai).

Shanghaiist liked this little article from Business Week which focuses on the innovative architectural landscaping that is going to make certain places look less shitty remake China from the ground up. Yessirree, we've got the National Swimming Center in Beijing, the new Beijing International Airport, the Shanghai World Financial Center (which looks like a huge sewing pin or snazzy bottle opener for giants), Shanghai's planned Donghai bridge that will connect us with the outlying islands, and the Dongtan eco-city on Chongming Island (the first phase to be completed in 2010, the whole thing by 2040 ... which means just in time for Shanghaiist to retire in what we hope will become an eco-Brooklyn on the Yangtze). There's also some less monumental but also interesting concepts, like "The Commune", eleven avant-garde villas by the Great Wall which we think is being run as a hotel, and what to us is the best of the lot -- the "Linked Hybrid", a residential complex which will house 2,500 people in 700 geothermally heated and cooled apartments that will be connected at a certain floor with a ring of cafes. Though we had problems opening up some related web pages, we think it will also include a movie theater, a kindergarten, and parking for all those extra Bentleys.

Shanghaiist is always relieved to hear that we’re flying out of Hongqiao rather than Pudong airport. First, Pudong is just so far away (anyone know if they’ll be extending the Maglev anytime soon?). Second, the food at the Pudong International Airport is … well, we don’t want to bring it up again (literally). Not that Hongqiao is brimming with quality dining establishments, just that it’s so much quicker to get there from the city and it’s often for a domestic flight, so you don’t feel the need to kill time by eating.

America's favorite action star and advocate for the mentally handicapped, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, isn't the only US governor on a trade mission to China this week. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is here too, just nobody seems to notice. AFX reports: