Nanjing

Sun Yat Sen on Purple Mountain

The Shenzhen energy management company I was visiting on this trip arranged for me to check out a subsidiary (as well as some of their health care & educational facility clients) in Nanjing — & I was very interested in doing so for reasons that went well beyond energy management. I’d never been to Nanjing before, but of course was well aware of its importance in Chinese history over the past century, and far into the past. Luckily, my hosts were exceedingly hospitable, and arranged a visit to the former KMT headquarters in the city; to Xuanwu Lake, and a stroll along the path linking its islands; to Soong May-ling’s (i.e., Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s) villa on Purple Mountain; and to Sun Yat Sen’s Mausoleum on the mountain – a place I’ve always wanted to visit! (And keeping with the climbing theme of recent postings, we hiked up the 392 steps on Purple Mountain necessary to reach it.) They also arranged a visit to the Memorial site of the 1937 Massacre, a place already vivid in my mind from Iris Chang’s intense book The Rape of Nanking and Lu Chuan’s powerful film The City of Life and Death. So you can see that this was a tremendously educational visit….. and I am really very, very grateful. I’m sure that you’ll be reading more about the Shenzhen company in future postings.

On this visit I was also reading Qiu Xiaolong’s latest Inspector Chen detective novel, entitled Don’t Cry, Tai Lake. You might remember my August 2007 posting noting previous Qiu novels about Inspector Chen Cao, the gourmet/poet/police inspector from Shanghai’s Police Bureau, and this one was particularly relevant since it had pollution as a major theme in the story. The novel has some strong parallels with the real-life case of Wu Lihong, an environmental activist punished for his efforts to bring about pollution control at the chemical plants lining its shores. I’ve enjoyed all of Qiu’s novels in the Inspector Chen series, and found this to be one of his better ones.