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Tag: history

Off the beaten track: East meets West in Kaiping, Guangdong

Off the beaten track: East meets West in Kaiping, Guangdong

  On our way to Hongkong we stopped in Guangzhou, from where we did a little side trip to the tiny village of Kaiping (roundabout 600,000 inhabitants, therefore a village, clearly). Obviously, not a lot of tourists do that, at least not Western tourists. We hardly saw any. The main attraction around that area are the imposing towers, the so-called Diaolou. They were built by emigrant Chinese, who returned wealthy from overseas. They found their hometowns threatened by raiding bandits and regular floods….

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Xi’An and the Terracotta Warriors

Xi’An and the Terracotta Warriors

  Roundabout thousandonehundred kilometers and only five and a half hours on the train after we had  left Beijing, we arrived in Xi’An. To cover this distance would have taken at least 24 hours on the Transsiberian Train. Luckily, we took China’s high speed bullet-train, called “G-Train”, which flew with 300 kilometres an hour past big and growing cities that no one has ever heard of who hasn’t been to China. Xi’An is just another eight and a half-million-people-metropolis. There…

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