Holiday Plans!

Making a mad dash to finish the script - today? - since we want to go up to China next week for a week.

Only to Guangzhou however.  I MUST SHOP!!!  And I want to go back to Rosie's wonderful riverside restaurant in Shamian Dao since I haven't been there since I was robbed and it was hard to enjoy her fabulous seafood while so stressed. And I want to take a riverboat cruise around Pearl River Delta AND take Keith to Bao Mo Gardens,  (If I weren't in a hurry, I'd link you to these posts.) which he has never seen.

AND while we're at Bao Mo Gardens, I want to point over the river to show him the site of the city of Pan Yu, the oldest city in the world, even older, by thousands of years, than Ur and Sumer and all the rest of those present-title-holders in Mesopotamia.

Yup, the oldest city on earth is today a bare stretch of weed-covered earth on the banks of Pearl River right next to a huge industrial complex, across from Bao Mo Gardens, in a suburb of Guangzhou called - undoubtedly in a faint historical echo - Panyu. 

You won't find any advertising for this Marvel however, nor anything whatsoever written about it, nor can you get near it, since it's all a deep dark secret that Beijing doesn't want mentioned ...

... but you can't keep this lady down.  I can winkle out anything, including word that, in an act of 'the dirtiest of dirty politics', China won't let archeologists excavate because the Hun of the North like to think of the South - Canton - as "deepest, darkest, most primal Africa" with inhabitants who are little better than monkeys, and so are angry to discover - as they have since discovered to their very great disgust - that the famed Jade Emperor who invented Chinese civilisation - and did it right there in Pan Yu too -  was A Monkey From the South!

And I also know that Pan Yu came about, around 10,000 years ago, as the trading wharf for foreigners and their 'boats' who had begun to arrive, eventually in droves, to SHOP!

And shop they all did because right there, nearby, on the banks of the Pearl River, there were once entire cliffs of green and white jade that these "monkeys from the south" carved into weapons, money-tokens and jewelry ...

... PLUS they had ever so many acres of fragrant trees that seeped out fragrant resin and so, being very clever little "monkeys", managed to invent incense sticks ...

... and thus the world beat a path to their door and they became very rich and powerful "monkeys" whose influence, culture and material goods spread right across China. And thus it was that Chinese Civilisation came about and it was all thanks to Pan Yu, the city that lasted for many thousands of years, starting out as a simple trading wharf  but which kept growing and growing until it ended up as The World's First Giant Shopping Mall.

So, after 10,000 years of almost constant SHOPPING, you probably understand that, despite my vow to stop consuming so much, Guangzhou calls to me so loudly saying "Come Shop".

Yes, I hear you, Guangzhou!!!  Don't worry! I'm coming!