Airpocalypse 2013 - smog in Shanghai - 包咳死

What's visible of the sun at 2pm on a smoggy day in the Forbidden City, Beijing

           It's no secret that the pollution levels in China are reaching dire levels, and that despite pressure from its residents and internationally, not too much seems to be changing. The government has tried to implement a few rules, such as cars with odd numbers on their registration plates only being able to drive on every other day, and vice versa, or some other rules like, cars with registration plates from other provinces only allowed to drive in the city within restricted hours. However, none of these seem to be making much of a difference, in fact, they appear to be getting worse every year. The measurement of the levels of pollution is given by the Air Quality Index (AQI), based on the concentration of air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and particulate matter (PM). The latter is frequently mentioned, because the particles around 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) and 10 micrometers (PM10) are thought to be responsible for the increased incidence of lung and other cancers in China's most polluted cities. In particular, PM2.5 is seen as the biggest problem, since its small size means that it can penetrate deeper into the lungs and is cleared less easily by the natural movement of mucus. 

        A collaborative study between American, Israeli and Chinese researchers recently published in PNAS estimated that on average, people who live in northern China have their life expectancy lowered by 5.5 years. It is estimated by the WHO that in 2010, 223,000 people died from pollution-linked lung cancer, and there must be many more from other cardio-respiratory related illnesses. Recently, the world's youngest lung cancer patient at eight years of age has been identified in China, and undoubtedly, the air pollution must have contributed to this tragic event.

          For the many smartphone users in China, there are a range of air quality apps which help to monitor the situation and give advice on which days are suitable for outdoor activities. They normally give two readings - one for the PM2.5 and one for the overall AQI, which is a combination of all the molecules mentioned. The WHO states that a healthy range for living creatures should be around 20 - 50, but it hovers around 200 in Shanghai on a daily basis. 

          When I first arrived, it took a few days to get used to, for example when I first ventured to find a local HSBC ATM (they are not as common as you would think, given that they have "Shanghai" in the acronym), I was recommended to take a taxi, but I looked on Google Maps and saw that it was only a 20 minute walk, so I thought "How bad could it be?" and set off in the general direction, thinking that I could take a scenic route in order to discover and familiarise myself with the local area. I quickly realised that there was not much of any importance in this direction, and that the main roads with quadruple lanes on each side were very busy, and tickled my lungs in a unsettlingly unfamiliar way that I had not experienced before. Generally, I felt like I was short of breath, and wanted to cough every time I tried to take a breath in. I decided to avoid walking along main roads in future, and became a metro devotee.
         I asked the others in the lab about whether they ever wore any masks, for which China is so famous, and they all laughed, saying that they thought it was unnecessary and ineffective. Generally, Chinese people seem to be more blasé about their attitude to the smog, just accepting it as a necessary evil to help them on their way to becoming a fully developed country. Some even boast that the Chinese immune system is so resilient due to the high levels of pollution. This is in contrast to the attitude I found in Korea, where people were ready to whip out their face-masks as soon as levels went near 100 AQI. 
          But the end result was that probably due to their influence, I never bought one when I first arrived. It was surprisingly easy to get used to the basal level of smog, and I didn't notice it after a while, even though average daily level that we have is considered "Unhealthy" by the WHO. It was not so bad on campus anyway, where the traffic was quite low, and even then, the smog was usually better in Shanghai compared to an inland city like Beijing, because we at least had the proximity to the coast and its ocean breezes to help dispel the particles. However, I was warned that in general the smog tends to get worse during the winter, when poorer people start burning coal and other materials in order to keep warm, because like other south east Asian areas, Shanghai buildings tend not to have central heating, and most people rely on switching their air conditioners to warm setting in order to keep warm at night. 
        So I got used to the smog and didn't really notice it too much, until the day came which we started referring to as "airpocalypse" (although there have been several of these in a range of different cities around China), which was such an unusually bad event in Shanghai that it ended up making the news, even internationally. We had originally planned a trip out on December 6th to the other campus, but as we woke to a thick, grey haze, we knew that our plans had to be cancelled. I knew it was bad as I walked to the lab in the morning and the visibility seemed to be ridiculously low. It reminded me of scuba diving in the murky quarry of Stoneycove during our training course in Leicester, where you couldn't really see where you were going til you got there! Visibility estimates were hovering around less than 20 m, and it was reported that apparently some people when they first woke that morning thought that they'd lost their sight! We all watched out AQI apps for any change in levels, but it just got worse as the day went on. It started at around 450 at breakfast, and by lunchtime it had broken the 500 mark, which was above the currently available scale - so the pollution was literally off the scale!

AQI levels going "beyond index" levels in Shanghai, while it stayed relatively normal in Beijing. WHO guidelines say 20 - 50 AQI is a healthy range!

          It turned out that due to freak weather conditions, including an unusual lack of wind meant that the daily smog that the city churns out into the air wasn't cleared properly from the whole area around Shanghai, up to other major cities, such as Nanjing, which incidentally was the only place in the world that was (slightly) worse off during those couple of days. The biggest insult of all was that contrary to the normal situation, Beijing seemed to be doing really well.

The view of the smog by NASA Satellites

          The internet community was furiously commenting away on all the social networking sites, and it even made it onto international sites like 9GAG:

Before and after shots of facemasks used in Shanghai made it onto 9GAG

           There was discussion of outrage at why the government wasn't doing anything. Some people in the lab thought the government ought to take proactive action to protect its citizens, such as artificially inducing rain, to knock all the particles out of the air. But hilariously, the government instead responded by politely informing the public of all the benefits of smog! 
1. It unifies the Chinese people. 
2. It makes China more equal. 
3. It raises citizen awareness of the cost of China’s economic development. 
4. It makes people funnier. 
5. It makes people more knowledgeable (of things like meteorology and the English word haze).
          This obvious exercise in "saving face" was regarded as completely ridiculous by many! Whilst I partly agree with point number 3, in general, it's a pained and transparent whilst weak-hearted attempt at placating the public. The only real positive I can think of from this spell of bad weather is that it provided an interesting few days for photography. People captured some spectacular images of the city during this time. This is one of my favourites:

Photography of the smog. View on Instagram or more awesome photos here

          It really did get worse throughout the day , and by the time we were making our way to the canteen for lunch, it was so bad that you could see it clouding up the dining hall. Even in the lab, it was impossible to keep the smell out, and it felt a bit smoky indoors. That didn't seem to stop some people who were still lighting up for a cigarette outside, obeying the call of their nicotine addiction. This completely flew in the face of logic for the amount of damage the smog must have been doing to everyone's lungs already. 
          When I got to my dorm in the evening, it turned out that the powers that be in the University decided that they ought to provide us with free face masks. My labmates later, dismissed these, since they could could immediately see that they were completely ineffectual, since the holes were too big to be able to filter out the damage causing PM 2.5. Since the free masks weren't given out to the home students, I do think that this was pretty much an exercise in guānxì (关系), to make the international students feel like they were being looked after by the Chinese university. I did get my hands on a proper mask the next day which my labmate Lu kindly helped me to buy from taobao, but my overall impression of the mask experience wasn't really that good. The mask got steamed up very quick, so it was moist and uncomfortable to breathe inside it, and people with glasses often complained that it made their glasses fog up. And even though the one Lu chose seemed good quality and had a bendable metal strip across the nose which could be adjusted to your face to create a tight seal, it was nigh on impossible to get it exactly correct, short of sticking it to my nose with glue. So as a result, most of the time there was still a tiny little slit through which the outside air could go in due to the vacuum created by my breathing. So sometimes I got frustrated with the fact that it was ineffectual and just took it off. But I saw many others with make shift masks that had much larger gaps. Optimism in the face of logic!
                It was a hard night's sleep as well, since despite closing all the windows and doors, the tiny particles still infiltrated the room through any gaps and slits. Thankfully, the following morning, it had seemed to die down, although there was now a huge white fog everywhere. 

The fog that greeted us the next day after the airpocalypse

          It initially had people worried as they woke, but the AQI was moving back down to it's previously normal levels. It turned out this was just fog. 
         Overall, it was just this one isolated incident during my stay. Some guys who live in the north of China said that in their home town it was like this every day in the winter, so it could have been worse. And it also meant that I got to learn a cool new Chinese phrase: 包咳死 (Bāo hāi sǐ) - "Guaranteed to cough to death"!

Beijing, The Forbidden City and The Great Wall of China (Sam's visit to China - Part II)

Before my visit, everybody told me that while Shanghai is the bustling metropolitan and the face of modern China, whereas Beijing is the more historical, grand city, steeped in a long history being the seat of many of China’s dynasties in its cultured civilization. People spoke with such gravitas and reverence about Beijing that I assumed it must be a superior version of Shanghai, with its years of wisdom and antiquity behind it. Maybe I built it up too much in my head, as our first impressions were that it seemed definitely to have age behind it, which meant that everything was old, had time to become quite run down and dirty, so it was a bit of a shock compared to smooth and tidy Shanghai! I did hear warnings that the smog was also much worse there on account of it being more inland and not having the same ocean breeze as Shanghai, and when Lu told us that the metro was busier there, I kind of laughed it off, thinking “is it actually possible for the metro to be even more busy?”. Well yes, unfortunately, it totally was.

Having got lost meant that we had more than our fair exposure to the metro when we first arrived, and saw people ambitiously piling in until there was no room to move, and in some cases, people being left on the platform (this happened to us too, later). Sam became fiercely territorial, and wanted to queue early for the entrance points on the platform.

But when we finally got to our hotel, which was quite comfortable (you get so much more for your money here), we settled in quite well.

Highlights of our trip included going to the Hutong area at Nanluogu Xiang (南锣鼓巷).

Lanterns at Nanluogu Xiang

This area was packed full of cool shops selling kitsch gifts and little snacks and eateries selling the latest food fashions, including macarrons and churros!

Churros! In China! With ice cream!

I have to say, we didn't come to China to have churros, but when we did, they were actually some of the most delicious churros I've ever had! So soft and chewy on the inside, with a thin layer of crunch on the outside, it was cooked to perfection. And it came with this delicious tangy ice-cream, maybe made with some buttermilk or yoghurt. I couldn’t believe it was better than what I remembered having from Spain! This is a foodie travesty, I know, but maybe the month of only Eastern food meant that my tastebuds had faded and suddenly everything Western suddenly tasted ridiculously delicious.

I also tried a local pancake-come-waffle type thing with a custard filling, made with a pretty panda imprint on the sides:

Waffle/pancake combo – how do they get the custard inside?!

It even had its own Starbucks, which although I was reluctant to go into, gave me the opportunity to do what I normally like, which is to try out the items added to the menu tailored to the local tastes (though not that many Chinese actually go to Starbucks, since it is expensive, and they’re not even a nation of coffee drinkers!). This meant green-tea flavoured frappucino and a very delicious green-tea and black-sesame flavoured swiss roll type slice, which I’d love to recreate at home:

Green tea flavour all the things!

Frankly, this place was so trendy, it was verging into the territory of “Gap Yah” type of places, but nevertheless, we couldn't resist the vibe of this place and also picked up a couple of things, including one of the many paraphernalia bearing the Chairman Meow meme:

 

Of course one of the compulsory stops was Tian’an Men Square which has sadly now only one week later become the site of a tragic crash, most probably linked to tensions with a minority Muslim Uighur group, who feel repressed under the country’s rule. Much is being made of the censorship in this country, so we don’t know too many details. All I know is that the social networking site bothered to post a short news bulletin on the story, yet all but the most politically benign comments have been censored:

 

Censorship on user comments under Weibo’s news article

The reason why the text looks so repetitive becomes clear with Google translate:

Translation of censorship

It seems that instead of deleting posts, they just replace the text with this nonsense! I love how the last comment about it being a traffic accident has been left in, even though the person might well have been being sarcastic! If anything is clear from this event, it is that it was no accident, and obviously politically motivated, since the driver ploughed right into the direction of Mao’s portrait and the main entrance of the Forbidden City, both emblems of Beijing’s power. But who knows what the people hired to monitor Weibo think.

Moving away from the politics, and getting back to our trip, before this unfortunate event, we had a lovely (if crowded) stroll through Tian’an Men Square, complete with ridiculously garish and unnecessary giant floral centrepiece, complete with its own guard (as always in China).

Ridiculously large floral centrepiece at Tian’an Men square

        After a brief walk round the square, we made our way into the Forbidden City, which was the exclusive complex for the imperial court and where 24 of China’s emperors had ruled for nearly 500 years.

On our initial entry, it was clear that the city still had some kind of military importance, because there were cordoned off areas and even basketball courts up just through the front arch. We were also greeted by some kind of military choir, singing a very well practiced and orchestrated song, presumably to boost army morale:

Carefully prepared military song delivered during a peak visiting time

Music and singing is very important in China, and military singers can reach quite a high standing rank in society, as we recently heard in the unfortunate case of Li Tianyi.

Further in to the Outer Court, you started to see the true scale of the place:

Outer court of the Forbidden City

All the buildings were decorated in a very lavish fashion:

An intricately painted recurring motif throughout the roofs of the Forbidden City

Carefully constructed figurines at the end of roof ridges

One of the great Halls

Overall, the Forbidden City was quite breathtaking in its size and grandeur, but I have to say, after you’d seen one building, you’d pretty much seen them all, so I'm not quite sure if it’s entirely worth the 60 RMB entry fee! Nevertheless, they know tourists will pay this.

Perhaps my views were slightly coloured by the unfortunate spell of heavy smog Beijing was during the week when we were there. It was so thick, that it was drowning out the sun, even on an otherwise cloud-free day, at about 2 pm:

An eerie-looking sun, blocked by the thick smog

It gave the sun a very eerie, orange glow, which almost made you feel like you were on another planet. It also somewhat ruined our later shots of the city view from the top of Jing Shan Park just north of the Forbidden City.

From the top of Jing Shan Park

Here, there were some beautiful buildings are the top of a little hill which had a great view over the Forbidden City.

Building at Jing Shan Park

As well as a random fruit bowl made out of a hedge!

Random fruit bowl hedge sculpture at the entrance to Jing Shan Park

But, I have to say that without a doubt, the best part of our visit was the trip to the Great Wall. We went on an excursion organised by Beijing Downtown Backpackers, on the recommendation of a friend who had recently been to China. They run several trips to different parts of the Great Wall and even offer an overnight camping trip to see the Wall at its most beautiful at sunrise and sunset, where there would be no other tourists around. Overall, I have to say, they seem like a great hostel, and run some really good excursions at great value for money. Our trip to a relatively far region of the wall (3 hours drive away from Beijing, with an English speaking guide, “body guard” to check on us that we all make it back to the pick up point, where they drove us back and dropped off some people at useful metro stations before taking us back to the hostel, all for about £28 per person! We paid more for our trip to Samaria gorge, which was closer, but maybe it was because it was longer (17 km vs 6 km on the wall).

            But what an awesome, yet challenging 6 km it was! We started off with a fair amount of people with us, as there were several other groups arriving at that time, including what looked like some athletic groups on tour.

Statue at the start of our walk along the Great Wall at Jin Shan Ling

We went to the section of the wall starting at Jin Shan Ling and ending at Simatai, which is a section that is partially restored, but some sections are still left untouched and authentic.

Originally a collection of ramparts from separate states, the walls were created and joined under the Qin Shi Huangdi (221-210 BC), with the same intention as Hadrian’s Wall, or “The Wall” in “Game of Thrones” (we made many jokes about keeping out “wildlings” as we went along). Out trip was going to take us through 22 towers over the 6 km, which were supposed to always be placed two arrow shots apart, so that all parts of the wall could be protected, provided each tower was adequately manned. However, it was not infallible, and eventually, the Mongols broke through in the 13^th century, and then the Manchu did also in the 17^th century.

The wall hugs the ups and the downs of the hills keeping its path regardless of the twists and turns of the countryside

As we went along, the Wall became progressively steeper, and less restored, so that at some points, we were almost walking on all fours!

The good thing about this part of the wall is that once the groups spread out, it was fairly quiet, and not at all crowded. This is a contrast to some other parts of the Wall, such as what I’ve heard of the section at Badaling, where it can be very crowded because it’s so close to Beijing, and consequently full of touristy sellers. We were warned about some “souvenir sellers” who apparently come up to you at the beginning of the hike and befriend you, and that if you don’t say to them “bù yào, xièxiè” (“I don’t want anything, thank you”), then they will follow you all the way to the end of the walk! Certainly there were not too many people trying to sell things, and initially we didn’t even really notice these two ladies latching on to us, one of whom can be seen here on the left:

One of the friendly souvenir sellers on the extreme left

To be honest, they were not too pushy or in your face about selling anything. They just seemed to be friendly helpers at the beginning, and spoke reasonably good English, so we didn’t really mind. They also seemed happy to take some nice pictures of us together, which Sam was very pleased about, as so often couples holidays are full of individual photos or bad couple selfies. They also helped us with some of the more perilous bits of the wall, where the ramparts were not restored or the walk was too steep. However, it soon became obvious that they really were going to follow us all the way to the end, and I was beginning to feel like their never-ending presence was starting to ruin the romance a little bit. Luckily, Sam stepped in and politely explained to them that we were not interested in buying any souvenirs, but we were very grateful for their assistance to us and for taking photos, and he was happy to reward them financially for their efforts. They seemed pleased with the offer of 20 RMB each that Sam made them, and then promptly scuttled off, never to be seen again by us, presumably having found another group to latch on to, while we were able to go on to take in the serene scenery at our own peaceful pace.

The beautiful climb down from the wall at the end of our hike

And what a joy it was. Even on the steps down from the Wall leading back to our pick up point was so beautiful, with the rolling hills covered in the rust and green of autumns colours, which shone through so vividly now that we were clear of the enveloping cloud of the smog’s oppressive haze.

Overall, I would rate this as one of the best experiences I’ve had in China by far and would recommend it to everyone. Sam was very glad that I’d dragged him along.

Have you been to the Great Wall? Which part? What is your favourite part of Beijing?