Lost Horizon

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
--André Gide, French author

We're heading up to Shanghai tomorrow for a couple of days and then down to Hong Kong for the weekend; after that I head back to the States for a couple of weeks. So, lest I leave you with the notion that Zhongshan is nothing but green gardens and butterflies, I thought I would blip a picture of the Eastern District of Zhongshan before I leave, just to keep everything in perspective. This is our urban landscape, and it is very similar to what you see all over China.

Before I arrived in China in 2004, I had the romantic notion that China was all about beautiful ladies dressed in traditional clothing, men in their utilitarian uniforms, school children in blue caps singing national anthems, and rolling hillsides dotted with ancient temples and the slanted roofs of traditional Chinese houses right out of the textbooks. I had pictures of the Great Wall sweeping across the landscape and the Yangtze River flowing through the mountains. Clearly, I had not done my homework, nor was I prepared for what I would see when I got here.

This picture very clearly describes modern day China, and although Zhongshan is considered a small city (of only about 600,000 people), it's a microcosm of what's happening all over the country. When we head up to Shanghai tomorrow, the view will be similar, but instead of seeing five and six story buildings stretching off into the distance, we'll see 20-30 story buildings mixed in among skyscrapers that go on as far as the eye can see. The construction will be similar, but there's far more of it in Shanghai; the cranes are everywhere on the horizon there. It's interesting to note that the majority of the world's cranes are currently operating in China; I count at least 20 looking out the window here today, and this is only one small section of one very small city in all of China!

The housing complexes here are very typical for China's cities. Clearly a developer bought a tract of land and put up housing all exactly the same. Next to his development, another developer bought a tract of land and put up his version of the same, and so on and so on. You can see on the left of the photo that another developer is putting up a series of much taller buildings, and so it will continue until the landscape of Zhongshan is similar in even more ways to the sprawl of Shanghai.

Looking at the residential housing stretching out to the horizon, it boggles the mind to think that every unit in every building is occupied, but the construction continues and the units are purchased, either as homes or investments. This is when China's massive population comes strikingly into focus. The building boom, which has been going on for at least the past ten years, is bound to slow eventually, but as to exactly when is anyone's guess.

Although we've enjoyed some beautiful sunny days recently, the gray skies in this shot are also typical, reminding us that China is still very much an industrializing nation. Zhongshan is located in the Pearl River Delta, a low flat area filled with canals and rivers all running to and from the South China sea. The ports on the southern coast near Hong Kong are some of the busiest in the world, making Guangdong Province a vital place of industry, import and export. Workers from all over the country flock here to find work, and with two of China's main industrial centers, Guangzhou to the north and Dongguan to the east, the Guangdong Province is one of the most economically lucrative in the country. Recently, the trend has been to move new industry inland, a worthy effort by China's government to "spread the wealth" around where it is badly needed.

You'll recognize the pool and gym building in our complex from my blip on May 17, 2012, and you can just see the beginning of our very green and lush garden. Our little compound was one of the original building projects in this area and thus secured a good amount of land with which they have done beautiful planting and impressive landscaping.

We're holding our own amidst the encroaching urban sprawl, which threatens to overtake our green haven. I sometimes like to come up to the top floors of our building and look down on our beautiful garden and then out across the city toward the East, through the gray and out beyond the construction to see if I can ever find the end of the buildings and locate Zhongshan's lost horizon.