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The bloodiest war of 20th-century Asia was the Second Sino-Japanese War, or as it’s known in China, the War of Resistance Against Japan. You know it as World War II. (Okay, technically it eventually became part of WWII, but you get it.) Notice the word “Resistance”, reminiscent of the European resistance against the Nazis. Like Germany, Japan was looking to absorb neighboring lands to access natural resources needed to fulfill the needs of its densely [Read more…]
After a day in Tianjin, I was on the homestretch of my trip with 2 final days in Beijing. On these 2 days, the weather warmed up enough that I felt comfortable unzipping my jacket and leaving off the hat and [Read more…]
In the morning, at the train station in Beijing, I finally had my first (and last) chocolate croissant of the trip. (A week earlier, I had gotten a plain croissant in Shanghai.) If anything proves how different China is from Europe, it is the fact that I only came across one chocolate croissant on the whole trip.
You say you want a revolution? After the disastrous 19th century, the Chinese people did. The Qing Dynasty realized it had no choice but to reform and modernize. Unfortunately for them, there was nothing less modern than China’s 2,000-year-old imperial system. (And in an era of nationalism, it didn’t help them in the least that they weren’t ethnically Chinese.) Over a period of many years, the people began to rise up and revolt throughout the vast [Read more…]
I will admit right off the bat that Tianjin was not the most exciting place I went on my trip to China. But it’s a major city just a short high-speed train ride from Beijing, so how could I resist spending a day [Read more…]
