Tibetan sky burials sound very odd, exotic, macabre. After being shown a sky burial ground by a native who takes part in them, my mind began to twist round and see them as normal. Just as many Tibetans do - I don’t know figures, but it is widespread. A sky burial goes like this.

The funeral party meets at the house of the deceased and his or her family. They have some sort of a gathering (I’m imagining, similar to an Irish wake). Then the friends and other villagers take the body of the deceased to the sky burial ground. This is a gentle grassy place, a little way up on the edge of a hill just outside the town or village. Close relatives of the dead person stay at home.

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On the bus from Zoige to Langmusi, I met a girl who for all the world looked Han Chinese, but turned out to be Tibetan. She had reasonable English, and was well turned out in the fashionable way that city Chinese are. She was an accountant in a government-run Tibetan medicine hospital in Zoige, on the way to visit a friend for the day, it being a Sunday.

Two interesting things. Her first language was the Amdo dialect of Tibetan, but she was only taught to read and write in Chinese at school. Now, in her mid 20s, she was finally starting to learn the Tibetan alphabet.

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Everywhere in the People’s Republic of China there is building. In Shanghai, deep foundations of new skyscrapers. In Songpan, new apartments paid for by the government to relocate people from slumy areas. And north of Songpan, a newly upgraded highway across into Gansu province. The only problem is, it isn’t finished yet.

The bus left at about 7am. The first part was easy, and after one last stop to pick up passengers in another small town, we entered the area where they’re rebuilding the road. Rebuilding it, that is, as we drive along it.

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At the moment I’m in Tibet.

No, I don’t mean the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), I mean historic and ethnic Tibet. TAR is the province occupied by China which contains Lhasa, and which we lazily often refer to as “Tibet” in English. Tibet proper also includes all of Qinghai province, and parts of several other Chinese provinces. Tibetan people making a political point refer to themselves as living in Tibet, even if they don’t live in TAR. As a tourist this is good news - it is much easier to visit the non-TAR parts of Tibet, than suffer the complex web of permits and travel restrictions in TAR itself.

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If you fall off the eastern edge of the Himalayan mountains, the first major city (population 4.1 million) that you come to is Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province. You’ve heard of it from the spicy Chinese food, called “Szechuan” in the west.

Rosemary and I spent 5 or 6 days based around there. A few of those were visiting a Buddhist holy mountain, and the largest Buddha in the world - I’ll write about them in another post.

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Just a quick post to say what’s happening. Rosemary is flying back to Shanghai tomorrow, and then home later in the week. I’m in China for another 10 days, heading tomorrow into Northern Sichuan. I’m writing some more about things we’ve seen in the last week, but won’t put them up until I get some more photographs out of my camera.

We took the magical modern teleport from Xi’an to Chengdu. 18 hours in a train a bit too much for Rosemary, and saving a day was useful.

I wandered round the airport looking for an English language newspaper. A shiny glossy building with high ceilings, much nicer than Heathrow. Clear layout and signs, clean toilets. Well, I guess Xi’an is the capital of a province of 38 million people, so I don’t know why I was surprised. But I was.

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Two emperors, roughly 2000 years ago, supervised the creation of their own burial treasures before they died. One (called Qin Shi Huang) created an entire pottery army, in formation, with infantry, cavalry, chariots, archers and a command section. The other (called in various places Han Jing, Liu Qi, or Jindi, I can’t quite work out his name) created pigs, horses, goats, carts, pots, peasants, managers of food supply and representations of judicial functions. Han Jing the yin to Qin Shi’s yang. Which would you take?

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Most people wouldn’t have seen it, but it instantly caught my eye. I saw this (picture left) last week in Shanghai, on the corner of Shaanxi Lu and Huaihai Zhonglu. It’s an animated advertising hording, which as you can see was mostly black with a cartoon Penguin and the words “Welcome to”. The mirror writing gives away that the Pepsi logo is a reflection of a sign opposite, and is only noticeable in my photo. The Penguin wasn’t moving at all.

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It's always a bad idea to have expectations. There's been lots of hype about how fast Shanghai is developing - accelerating out of poverty, and into a world class city. And it's true - Rosemary was here 20 years ago, and is amazed that you now can't cross the road without being killed, that everyone is fashionably dressed, rather than in Mao costumes. However, I had higher expectations. This is because I'd [been to Kunming](/2003/03/post-52/), far away provincial capital of Yunnan, and was surprised how developed it was. So I thought Shanghai would be more like Tokyo than Bangkok.

Actually, it is quite dirty. There isn’t the century-long burnt in elegance of a European capital, the clean efficiency of a Japanese megalopolis, or much culture backing the poverty, as in Bangkok. Shanghai has old-style department stores with goods and prices that people don’t want. It has no large open spaces. There are lots of new buildings, but they don’t look like they’ve been built terribly well. The forest of new skyscrapers are (to me - Rosemary liked them) tacky, and the main city is badly laid out.

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