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Travel Guides 1999







 

We started our travels in Paris and there used the Michellin Guides to Paris and Paris Environs. Since an eclipse of the sun occured in the middle of the summer we read about that. But the "big read" was about China. We really did read almost all of the guides listed below.
 
Travel Guides

Lonely Planet China
Architecture of Ancient China
Exhibition of Chinese History
Sidney D. Gamble's Photographs
Places of Interest in Beijing
Beijing: Glimpses of History
China Travel Kit Series: Beijing
Ancient Temples in Beijing
The Former Imperial Palace in Beijing
Yuanmingyuan Park - An Eternal Monument
The Summer Palace
Suzhou
Nanjing China, A Tourist Guide

Fiction
  Crossing to Safety
  A Dream of Red Mansions

Biography, History, and Politics

  The Collision of Two Civilizations
  East and West
  God's Chinese Son
  The Life of Confucius
  The Search for Modern China
  The Last Emperors
  Woman in World History
  Wild Swans

General China
Lonely Planet China

A great book. We've come to really like Lonely Planet Guides. They have everything we want except photos. For that we usually buy a city book. In China there are good maps of each city sold for about 50 cents outside every train and bus station and they complement those in LP which usually are only detailed for the center.

Highly Recommended

Architecture of Ancient China

Traditional Chinese buildings are of wood, not stone; that is why very little of ancient China is left. What was not destroyed by the simple passage of time was destroyed by invaders and revolt, the latest and greatest of which was the Cultural Revolution. Here we get an idea of the construction and the symbolism used.
 
 

 

Exhibition of Chinese History

On Tiananmen Square is the main history museum. It is organized by dynasties and they have wonderful historic and beautiful objects. This is the official guide to the museum. It is nice, but not as nice as the four volume version.
 

Turbulent Years: China Before and After the May 4th Movement 
  (Sidney D. Gamble's Photographs of China 1908-1932

On our first visit to the History Museum it was closed but in the special exhibits hall next door was a wonderful exhibit of photographs. Sidney Gamble, the son of Mr Gamble of Procter & Gamble fame, travelled China taking the photos. He was organizing YMCA charity as much as anything else. When the communists took over they kicked out the YMCA and Gamble's photos were forgotten. The modernization of China has made it politically correct to mention Gamble and show these photos.

Beijing

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Places of Interest in Beijing

This government issued guide is interesting as a compliment to Lonely Planet. Lots of obscure details.

Beijing: Glimpses of History

China Travel Kit Series: Beijing

As above: a government issued guide interesting as a compliment to Lonely Planet. Lots of obscure details.

Ancient Temples in Beijing

Not as good a book as you might expect. But as we spent seven weeks in Beijing and wanted to see everything, this helped fill some gaps.

The Former Imperial Palace in Beijing

The "Forbidden City" as most people know it, must be the most famous site in Beijing and probably in China (the only competitor is the Great Wall.) It perhaps should be called "Museum City" because it is much more than a palace complex. Within its walls are temples, parks, and other museums, such as the Clock and Painting museums. This was a pretty good guide, bought on our first visit, studied greatly, and reused on our second visit. Incidentally, our first visit was on a hot day of late summer; the second on a very clear but very cold day of a very early winter.

Yuanmingyuan Park - An Eternal Monument

Even emperors want a new house. French kings tired of Versailles and moved to Fontainebleau. When Europeans came to China they brought new ideas and in the late 19th century Italian and other architects were hired to build a "renaissance" royal compound filled with modern (for the times) villas. It didn't last long; later British and French troops burned much of it.

The Summer Palace

This was a very, very old country estate that was modernized by the late and last dowager empress. The Chinese say (and I doubt it) that money that should have gone to the Imperial Navy went into building this lavish palace. Who knows. But it's a great tourist attraction and the book has lots of lovely photos

Les Dernieres rues de Pekin (Beijing Hutongs)

In French. "Hutong" is untranslatable, so the French Author, limited to a few words for the title, didn't try too hard. A Hutong is literally a narrow alley, but by extension it refers to the courtyard houses accessed from the alleys. The nature and extent of this type of "subdivision" is unique to Beijing; no other Chinese city has anything close to it. With the modernization of Beijing that has accelerated and accelerated these last 25 years more and more hutongs have been leveled to make way for large high-rise apartment blocks. Only a few are left, and more and more, they are bought and upgraded by the extremely rich. Wonderful photographs in the book.

Other Cites

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Suzhou

A nice photo book that makes the gardens of Suzhou look better than they really are. Suzhou is well worth a visit but its publicity propaganda accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative. The latter being that the city is very large, very polluted, and largely very ugly. On top of that the gardens in many ways are not well maintained.

The positive does overcome this: the gardens are lovely and especially impressive in their variety. The typical tour group sees one or two in a morning or afternoon visit. We saw all of them, and some twice, over two visits to Suzhou. The typical visitor never hears of, let alone sees the ancient bridge shown on the cover of the book. A visit there (in 1999 & 2000) could give you a real feel for ancient China.

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Nanjing China, A Tourist Guide

Produced by a government agency, and as such filled with lots of statistics and otherwise poorly organized and out of date.

Nanjing is the unknown gem of China. There is so much to see and do. Lots of it was, until recently, connected with politically incorrect movements: The Tai Ping revolt and commonwealth, Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists. This book covers only some of that. In the course of many visits in two years we were always finding something newly rebuilt or newly opened.

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