24 hours in Tianjin

Beijing is a behemoth. It sends your head spinning and leaves you gasping for air. The city can be exhilarating – there is always a playful shout coming from somewhere, a joke being loudly told not far away from you – you find yourself walking its streets for hours on end just to know it a bit better, curious about what you’ll find at the bottom of the next road.

But Beijing can also be exhausting. You lose control of your own movements in the metro at rush hour, getting swept along by those on the march home; you often find yourself lost on its vast highways. When the sun beats down while you linger at traffic lights and you remember that Xiao Shu – the Minor Heat – has just passed and that the big dog days – Da Shu – are still to come, you realize you need a break from the place. And getting out of the city for a day or two is better than shutting yourself away with the curtains drawn and the air conditioning rumbling.

After a pressure cooker blast of Beijing, the city of Tianjin, just half-an-hour away by bullet train, feels like a fresh breeze. The weather hasn’t changed, but the atmosphere has.

You come out of the train station on a bend in the Haihe River and you want to lounge on the steps by the water, rub cool water on the back of your neck, pull your walking boots off and gaze at the tops of skyscrapers that look like they were commissioned by Citizen Kane. You haven’t eaten, you’ve a heavy bag on your shoulders, you should check in to your hotel soon but you just want to wander around. Already, you can tell it’s possible to breathe easier here, the trees that line the streets seem to give more shade than in the capital; there are breaks in traffic that allow you to cross the road when you want.

And then you remember that 16 million people live in Tianjin. The third largest city in China, it’s a bit of a behemoth too. So it’s almost absurd that I find this city – which contains more people within its boundaries than many European countries – relaxing. But I do. It helps that you can use the majestic Haihe River – regarded by locals as the “mother’” of Tianjin – as a kind of spinal cord, meandering past part-time fishermen and kids with ice cream, branching out into a near-by avenue when you need to find a specific building or street in the bustling Heping district.

If you are only here for 24 hours and you want to explore while you eat, you don’t have to look far to find a street vendor.

Giant cicadas whose collective hum dominates the daytime in both Tianjin and Beijing are picked from the trees and silenced, fried in spices by the side of the road and sold by the paper cup for 10 yuan. You eat them, wings and all, in one mouthful and savor the taste. All I could hear in my head was the crunch as I bit down on them. As I ate them strolling past the statues in Central Park, I got a couple of waves from bemused-looking locals – the bearded man eating insects for lunch while they had picnics of fruit and chicken was maybe giving them a laugh.

An hour later, after wandering through a museum on Tianjin’s history, located in the basement of a department store, I emerged onto Kunming Road to order youtiao– deep-fried dough sticks – wrapped up inside jianbing guozi – a type of crepe made with mung bean flour, egg and green onion. Like a renaissance man, the vendor slathered the roll in a variety of sauces using a collection of paint brushes before he handed it to me.

That kept me going for a few hours until the sun went down and it was time for guotie, dumplings filled with minced pork, cabbage, scallions, ginger, rice wine and sesame seed oil. A woman with a smile as wide as a Beijing highway gave me a heap of them with a dose of vinegar on a doughnut-shaped plate that fitted snugly around a plastic cup full of iced tea, allowing me to explore the stalls of jade and pipes in Ancient Culture Street while I ate and drank.
Translation apps make the life of a traveler a million times easier – and they must make the lives of locals who have to deal with the strange grunts of the traveler a lot easier too. When you pass someone fishing on the river, you can ask how it’s going and they can find out where you’re from and why you’re here. When you’re completely lost in the midday heat, it’s close to being a life saver. But there’s a point fairly early where you hit a brick wall with a translation app. You’re kind of communicating with the other person but not truly understanding one another, you’re typing frantically on a screen instead of looking the other person in the eye and taking them in. This is a roundabout way of saying that I need to stopping messing about when it comes to learning enough Chinese to get by.

Tianjin has often been a city in demand. The British, French, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, Italian, Belgian, Japanese and North American (…and breathe) empires all wanted a piece of the place over the years. During their attempts to exploit and profit from China’s vast “market (read “people”) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they all used Tianjin as a trading outpost, building forts and intermittently attacking the indigenous inhabitants.
You can still see the legacy in the Italian-style town, the Five Avenues with their villas and St Joseph’s Cathedral, also known as Old Xikai Catholic Church, built by French missionaries early in the last century.

If you swear by the Lonely Planet guide to Tianjin, the old British buildings are “impressive” and “imposing”, Marco Polo Square is “attractive” and St Joseph’s is “fine” as in it’s a work of art. They’re all worth having a look at, but if you came to Tianjin and studied them alone, you wouldn’t learn much about the modern city or its people.

What’s most attractive about Tianjin is what’s alive and contemporary. China House, a mad colorful work in porcelain by Zhang Lianzhi, is derided by Lonely Planet as tacky and in “questionable taste” and, yet, with its playfulness and vibrancy it does a much better job of putting today’s Tianjin in context than a church built by European missionaries. Its mosaics are vast and its structures only seemingly without purpose, and maybe that made Lonely Planet a bit nervous.

The residents who center their social life on the Haihe River; the haze that shrouds the skyscrapers at night, punctured by laser displays; the porcelain house; the troupes of elderly citizens dancing below and atop bridges at dusk – there’s a music in the air which is invigorating, and it isn’t one that wallows in the past.

And there’s the food… Ludagunr, or Rolling Donkey, is a role of glutinous rice packed tight with sweet bean flour. It gets its name from its apparent resemblance to a donkey rolling on the ground and kicking up dust. The sugary paste sticks to the roof of your mouth as you eat, giving you a kick. I don’t know if it was a good idea or if it’s the done thing, but I had one of these for breakfast as I crossed the Haihe River early on the Sunday, my eyes fixed on a couple of clock towers, wanting to compare the Italian district in the morning with what it looked and sounded like at night.

Like Beijing, Tianjin can turn your head, but you’re not afraid of missing something, or being hit by a delivery driver on a moped, when you do turn it. You can take your time to appreciate the place, even if you’re only staying for the night.

Contact the writer at maxwell@chinadaily.com.cn