Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [42]
But it was old Qingdao that I’d come to see. For the first seventeen years of the twentieth century, Qingdao, or Tsingtao as it was then known in English, found itself under Imperial German control. The Kaiser had wanted to base his Far East squadron in Qingdao and the Qing Dynasty said sure, fine, whatever, and ceded the city to the Germans. This, of course, was not Imperial China’s finest hour. The Germans arrived, built a city of strasses and schusses, beer gardens, and churches, and not long after finishing the city’s masterpiece, the Tsingtao Brewery, the moment when their re-creation of a quaint Bavarian town was complete, the Germans proceeded to screw everything up and lose World War I. Sadly for the locals, instead of Guten Tag, they soon found themselves learning how to say Konnichi Wa, as the Treaty of Versailles turned the city over to the Japanese, who remained until 1922, before returning again in 1937, when they began to do really, really bad things to China. Upon reflection, the Chinese probably had some more choice words for the Japanese than Konnichi Wa.
Nevertheless, by the time Mao finally wrested control of the city from the Nationalists in 1949, Qingdao, despite being bopped around by the vicissitudes of history, remained essentially intact. One misty morning, I set off for the old town, following a scenic waterside pathway that led me past the Marine Beasts Performance Hall and Aquarium and the city’s famed beaches. The air was redolent of the sea and fried seafood. As the sun burned through the morning haze and the giant containerships offshore blew their fog horns, I watched people fishing from the bluffs and noted a few hardy old-timers out for their morning swim. I was on the Number 1 Bathing Beach, and I settled down to watch them, these Communists at leisure. Many officials, I’d been told, had their villas in Qingdao. I wondered what they did to amuse themselves.
“You want Jet Ski? Parasailing?” asked a man sporting flashy shades as he sat beside me on the stony beach. “Special price for you.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, trying to imagine the Politburo parasailing.
“Today is Saturday. Tomorrow everyone go home.”
Excellent, I thought, envisioning riding a train while actually seated.
My companion moved on to try his luck elsewhere and I wandered down the beach, now and then stopping to watch people waiting for the waves to bring in clumps of seaweed, which they then bagged, because seaweed can be very tasty. In the distance, enormous vessels maneuvered in and out of Qingdao’s port, the fourth largest in China, and I tried to ascertain whether the ships coming in rode higher in the water than the ones going out.
Soon, I found myself in a part of the city that reminded me very much of Nuremberg, a city in southern Bavaria where my father had lived for some years in the nineties. I walked up streets half expecting to find a sign informing me that I was ambling up the Kaiserstrasse, but of course the signs don’t say Kaiserstrasse, they say…Well, I had no idea what they said. Nevertheless, were it not for the busy stalls selling dried fish and the tinny Chinese pop music and the soldiers in olive uniforms with red stars, you might think you’d found yourself in Germany. Okay, maybe in a German Chinatown.
I walked up a hill to St. Michael’s Cathedral, which I was looking forward to visiting. A few months earlier, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association had appointed two new bishops. I’d found this a little vexing as I tried to recall exactly which provision was it in Canon Law that had designated the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association as the appointer of bishops. Wasn’t it the Pope who decided such things? The Pope thought so, too, and he had expressed his concern. Soon after, the Chinese government had released a statement asking the Vatican to stop interfering in Chinese internal affairs. The selection follows the will of all clergy and believers in the Chinese