Road Trip and Air-Raid Sirens

59 hours travelling; UK – Amsterdam – China. Three whole weeks confined to one hotel room. Ten invasive covid tests done. Two last minute changes of plans. Two cancelled flights. One road trip across southern China from Xiamen to Guangzhou. Two drivers and 7.5 hours later, I arrived at my new apartment, tired, relieved, emotional, and happy.

I was so excited to leave my quarantine hotel and start the next bit of my adventure. There will be a post on that to come.

Checking-out was anti-climactic. I was given a golden envelope with my release letter and a fapiao (the Chinese version of an invoice), and just like that, I was free! I think I was hoping for something more substantial and congratulatory to mark the end of it all but I was just free to leave. It was a little surreal.

I had been informed by my employer that a driver would be waiting. I ‘nĭ hăo’ed him but he was reticent in his response. It was going to be a quiet journey.

Two silent hours later we reached the Guangdong border where we picked up another driver, evidently to share the driving load of the remaining five and a half hours. This driver greeted me with a ‘hello’ but then they proceeded to speak VERY loudly to each other in very blurry sounding Cantonese. I’m not convinced they actually were Cantonese but I couldn’t place the dialect. Did I mention that they spoke VERY loudly? I know the Chinese are prone to sound a few decibels louder than most, something akin to that Simpson’s episode where Lisa asks some Russians for directions. Thank goodness for earphones.

Only twice did we stop for a comfort break. At the first service station, I needed a green health QR code to go in. I was unfortunately data-less so couldn’t enter. No matter. At the second service station, the driver pointed at the bush. I smiled and declined.

Travelling almost non-stop at 120kph on China’s extensive highway system was very smooth and otherwise uneventful. For a country with 1.4 billion people, these roads were clear. I guess people prefer to keep the traffic in the cities. We only had to break hard once because of a burst tyre in the middle of the road. We passed two very large Chinese army tanks which were quite intimidating. I was amazed at how so many criss-cross stilted highway junctions stood brutally above rice paddies and small farm holdings. We passed through a dozen long tunnels which cut into several mountains along the way. Everywhere you could see incredible bamboo scaffolding which propped up old buildings and supported new ones. As day turned to dusk, the haze across distant mountain ranges dispersed a fiery orange light across the sky. A picture from a phone camera could never do justice to a sight like that.

And as quickly as the dark of night fell, we were soon bathed in the twinkling lights of Guangzhou. Within minutes, I caught my first glimpse of the city’s iconic Canton Tower and couldn’t contain my excitement.

A moment later, I was unceremoniously dropped outside my apartment building and the drivers swiftly left. With key card in hand, and all my suitcases in tow, I made my way up to my new apartment. Outside the door was a freshly delivered take-away, organised by my employer to welcome me home.

Yup, I said it, home.

And now it’s Saturday 18 September – time for some air-raid sirens.

Mini history lesson

Several places in China were leased to many countries to provide international trading posts to the world. Arguably the most famous are Hong Kong and Macao, though people are often unaware of the plethora of other leased territories and concessions across China over the centuries. The British (incidentally, HK was not the UK’s only concession…), French, Germans, Russians, Japanese, Italians, Portuguese, Belgians, Austro-Hungarians, and the US, all had concessions and leased territories of some form over the years.

In the early 1900s, the South Manchuria Railway was leased to Japan. In years to come, Japan was a growing empire, and with rising political tension in Mainland China, they seized the opportunity to invade Manchuria, the north-eastern most area of China which borders the Korean peninsula (at the time already annexed by Japan).

On September 18, 1931, Japan staged a bombing on their own South Manchuria Railway which they would in turn blame on the Chinese. This provided them the pretext to formally invade the state of Manchuria on a large scale. The war would last a little over five months, after which Manchukuo, as it became known, remained a puppet state of Japan until the end of WWII. To the Chinese, it’s called the September 18 Incident. In Japan, it’s called the Manchurian Incident.

It is very much a sore point in China’s history. It is still commemorated across the country today and uncomfortably documented on social-media for the Chinese to ‘never forget’ the atrocities inflicted upon its citizens by the Japanese.

To mark the day, then, several of China’s largest cities made use of their city-wide air-ride sirens. In precise, three-minute intervals, a warning siren, air-raid siren, and the all-clear, sounded across the city of Guangzhou from 10:40 this morning.

It was poignant and haunting and an interesting way to start my day and mark the beginning of my time in my new apartment.