I got up, worked out, and had my last Chinese breakfast at the very American Cafe Costa down the street. Then I took a taxi to the Maglev – very cool to go 300 km/hour, super-smooth and quiet.
Maglev Train to the Airport
301 km/hr
Check-in and security were a breeze this time, and I was lucky enough to be upgraded, so I spent my time in the airport waiting in the First Class lounge. The toilets here are always an adventure – this one was more confusing than a VCR.
Japanese Toilet
Great Business Class seats on Continental, but it’s never good to see a system reboot on an airplane…
We landed an hour early and Tony Vendetta drove me home.
The first meeting, at China Telcom Shanghai was really fun. We got caught in terrible traffic and the taxi got lost, so we were a bit late. The regional subsidiary of China Telcom has 20,000 employees and a gorgeous building in Pudong, an almost completely new area on the east side of the Huangpu River. Xu Gian Gang, from the Public Relations department met us in the lobby and we were quickly escorted by a young woman to a special elevator (where another to the top floor, where another attendant waited), then out and down a wide corridor to a Reception Room. It was furnished just like the rooms we’ve all seen on TV through the years.
Henry Kissinger and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao
The Reception Room at China Telcom Shanghai
We waited for a short time, until a series of people came rushing in telling us that “he is coming”. He arrived with an entourage, but was dressed casually, had a big welcoming smile and immediately made me feel at home, despite the very formal setting. Mr. Zhang Wei Hua is an Eisenhower fellow who has moved up through the ranks, including doing a stint in the U.S. During that period he established a peer-to-peer network from China to the U.S. to eliminate the cost of transport for all of the new Chinese internet users accessing U.S. sites, and established four POPs throughout the U.S. He also created a service structure for multi-nationals with a Chinese presence to single-source their Chinese communications infrastructure, moving all of their Chines-related business to China Telcom while saving them money and simplifying their infrastructure. Today, he is focused on the “four screen” experience. TV is an area where China can leapfrog the U.S. because there is no cable infrastructure hampering next generation services. Today, Shanghai customers can access their TV and other services (information like weather, home monitoring systems,..) through their computer, TV, mobile and – soon – an iPad-like touchscreen device called Magic Touch. It was a fun meeting, both the venue and surrounding formality and the content. It was familiar territory having spent so much time at Comcast.
With Zhang Wei Hua
We then had a Japanese lunch with Yong Zhang, who proved to be smart and charming. I’m looking forward to seeing him in Philadelphia – I can’t imagine he’s not a perfect candidate to be a Fellow.
Then we went to another “park” this one a garage converted into a center for creative companies. There we met with Marc, who is running a game company, starting up an ecommerce company, and was a founder of Tudou.com. He’s been in china for 11 years. At this point I’m hearing the same things from most people, and Marc confirmed a few of them. First, you can start a company on almost nothing and get much farther before (if ever) you need outside money. Second, the culture is very different, and companies that are “Chinese” are very hierarchical – that’s how Tudou works and Marc left because it was clear he didn’t fit, but he’s still on the board and his wife is the Chief Administrative Officer. We also had a brief conversation about Tibet – he biked from Lhasa to Nepal with Gary Wang. I wish we’d had more time to talk about that.
But off we went to the last meeting of this trip, a homecoming of sorts, to the Pennsylvania Center, where I put a face with Jim Curtis’s name – he was very helpful in setting up meetings – and Ning Shao.
After relaxing for a bit at the hotel, I was planning to go to the World Expo. But I’m getting a cold and decided to go to the Bund instead, which was perfect. It was a nice evening, humid but not too hot and with a breeze coming off the river.
The Bund
The view from the Bund of Pudong is something.
Pudong from the Bund
The crowds are amazing. A mix of locals and tourists (mostly Chinese). Then I walked down Nanjing Road, a major shopping street, which was also mobbed. and caught a taxi (all by myself!) back to the hotel for my last night in China.
Tao is a widely known and respected entrepreneur here with backing from Sequoia China. Reviews started much earlier in China because of the lack of credible sources of information. Tao spent 10 years doing IT consulting in the U.S. then went to Wharton and returned to china with the goal of doing his own thing. He was a Zagat user and saw that their paper-based review process would be much better as an online – he mixed Zagat with the Amazon book reviews that he depended on, the idea of reputation from eBay, and the power of Wikipedia. Like Yelp, Dianping started with a restaurant focus but now covers almost everything. They’ve just started a Groupon-like model (hasn’t everyone?) that is already extremely successful.
An aside: the elevators here are small and slow…
Morning Rush Hour Line for the Elevator
Next we went way out to a software park, a government-subsidized office building for technology companies, to meet with Peter He, Founder/CEO of Qoolu, a kids club startup. This is Peter’s third company in China, but his first on the Internet and the first consumer-facing. He also spent sometime working to open China for Barracuda Networks, so we had anti-spam stories to swap. His take is that it is extraordinarily difficult for foreign companies without a huge brand (Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble) to enter China, and that it costs at least $10m and takes 3 years. That echoes what I’ve heard from almost everyone here who’s done it or tried to .
Peter was very candid about the challenges of each business he’s done, including the current one. Like many entrepreneurs here, he started Qoolu as angel investor, with a development team creating product while he was still working. These teams are extraordinarily cheap – a decent manager can be had for $2,000/month, with 5 or 6 developers for half of that each.
Peter He and I at Qoolu offices
Back into town, we went to Softbank China to meet with William Bao Bing. Despite claiming to be tired, William was like a fire hose, spouting quality insights non-stop for the entire length of our meeting. He’s doing deals in many places and shared a deep understanding of almost every Internet market. From a cultural/management perspective, he sees the main Chinese advantage as speed. The Chinese approach is much more fluid here than in the West (another recurring them), with solid high-level strategy paired with fast execution and shifting, but no planning. The only competitive advantage on the Internet here, where anything can and will be copied quickly.
Finally, we went to another out-of-the-way spot to talk with Sam Flemming, another ex-pat and entrepreneur. Sam started CIC, a word of mouth analytics and consulting company in 2004. As noted above, China was way ahead of the U.S. and Sam saw that people here were going to message boards to research products. He used the same approach to develop the initial system, then got lucky when he spoke at Ad:Tech 2005; he met a classic early adopter from Pepsi who became the company’s first client. Today they have clients including Pepsi, Nike, Intel, L’Oreal, and 90 employees. He self-funded the company initially, did a very small angel round, and have been profitable since day 1. It’s a great model to emulate.
From CIC we rushed over to meet with the wife of a friend of a friend to have awesome dumplings at Din Tai Fun. It was a great time – Mary is a firecracker – an intense, smart, beautiful California girl. She’s an animator for DreamWorks, and goes back and forth between Pasadena when she’s working on a movie and Shanghai when she’s not. It was a great change of pace – like a night out with a girlfriend. And I got the perspective of the person who deals with all the day-to-day family life issues here.
Yes, I’m still alive. Just extraordinarily busy, and trying to sleep enough to keep from getting sick.
I like Shanghai – it’s a lot like Manhattan, tighter downtown, smaller streets, more European, cleaner, and less polluted. English is prevalent and it’s easy to get around. There are tons of ex-pats. Charles had a family emergency, so I have a new translator/guide Alice Guo. She’s on top of all of the logistics. I’m staying in the Shanghai Hilton, which is fine but a bit tired, and has the longest waits for the elevators ever. It’s soupy here, but much cooler than it was last week, when it was over 40c (104F).
I had four meetings:
Steve Mushero, an American who founded China’s first cloud computing company, ChinaNetCloud, still in its infancy and chasing an enormous opportunity
George Godula, Managing Director of MHDirekt the Chinese subsidiary of an international direct marketing company that also has an arm Web2Asia which is essentially an incubator/angel fund
Doron Kalinko, founder of Motion Global Limited which runs eyeglass ecommerce sites in 16 countries, though you’d never guess it from their web site
Steve Leong, a Managing Partner at Mustang Ventures. He’s on the board of Wanmo.com, which is in the display space (sort of Traffiq + Turn, for you display advertising geeks)
Steve made a number of interesting points in a long and free-ranging conversation. The most fundamental was the difference in the Chinese and Western ways of thinking about planning. The Chinese tend to make decisions sequentially, they react to what’s happening and optimize at each step. Westerners tend to make a plan then re-plan when things change. Traffic patterns in Beijing and Berlin represent the differences well. I’ve seen it in scheduling – everything is completely fluid here, even with the most senior people. It’s also reflected in the Chinese approach to contracts; it seems completely natural to them that things change and that contract terms become irrelevant.
George is an Austrian who came here to open the Chinese office for his company. They are now trying to take western media concepts (e.g. SeamlessWeb), adapt them to the Chinese market and put a team and some money around them. This is a flavor of a major recurring theme – it will be interesting to see if it works. George confirmed that click fraud runs in the 30-40% range here still – incredible. And I learned that you can buy almost any list you want with anything about anyone here. For example, when foreigners get a work visa, they have to do a health check-up. You can buy a list that includes all of their names, addresses, phone numbers, incomes, blood type, and whether they have AIDS. Of course, none of this is legally sanctioned, but it’s easy to get. Whoa.
On the way to our last meeting, I saw a car wash. It’s a bunch of guys with a pail of water, they don’t have automatic car washes here.
Doron is an Australian who’s a classic entrepreneur, bootstrapping his company using interns and getting people to work for free for six months to start. He has two partners and 50 employees (you have to cut the employee numbers by about 3 to get a rough equivalent in the U.S). They’re trying to figure out how to bring on more professional management to scale the company, but seem likely to give up the control and equity they’d have to to get someone really good. I see this situation every week in the U.S. too – the only thing that’s different here is the cost structure, which is very forgiving.
Finally, I met Steve at one of the ubiquitous Starbucks in the city. (I was told and it seems to be true that every Starbucks employee here speaks english – the service in Starbucks is consistently better than in any other store or restaurant I’ve been in. They’re also outrageously expensive and always crowded.) Steve knew and could articulate the development of successful internet services here and how the sequence differs from the U.S.’s. For example, reviews Dianping.com (essentially Yelp; I’m meeting with their CEO here too) started here three years earlier, but ecommerce is just starting to take off. He was also the first person I’ve met who has a real grasp on the structure of the internet economy and specifically the advertising ecosystem, which is very different from the U.S.’s. He shared a startling fact: Alibaba blocks Baidu. That’s like Amazon blocking Google. Search isn’t the on-ramp to the internet here like it is elsewhere – there’s a real battle for the consumer still.
Once this trip is over, I plan to do a series of posts that synthesize my learnings:
Culture
Politics
Search and Google in China
Internet advertising in China
Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep current with these brief notes and catch up on all the days I missed!
I woke early, worked a bit, ate a quick breakfast and was on the road to the airport by 6:45a for a 9:00 flight. It felt very different leaving Tibet than it did arriving. Driving in, I was filled with eager anticipation. The two lane road from the airport to Lhasa – with one portion dirt and rutted – promised the Tibet of my imagination and belied the bustling reality wide streets and shopping malls, the development and difficulties. Driving out, I grieved for the Tibetan people and their culture. I wish I could have stayed much much longer.
At the airport, I hugged LhacBa goodbye and we both said we’d keep in touch. I left him a small gift. I do hope to see him and his family again someday, and maybe even help him build a business. Here’s a small start: if you want to go to Tibet, definitely contact him – his phone is 136 1899 7012 and his email is lobsangTB@yahoo.com.
Chinese airport security involves the same procedures as the U.S. with the addition of each person being wanded individually. It is extraordinarily slow. The flight on the first leg of my trip to Chengdu was late, and I had to run through the airport to catch a connection to Shanghai. Which is more complicated here because you have to re-check in and get your boarding pass stamped when you transfer.
Lhasa to Chengdu to Shanghai
I landed in Shanghai, got my bag, and the hotel car that was supposed to be waiting wasn’t. A week earlier this would have concerned me, but I knew I could easily take a taxi, so I wasn’t concerned. I did get it straightened out and took a car in, which took about an hour.
It was mid-afternoon and I intended to go see the Bund at night, but I was exhausted again and ended up falling asleep early.
After a good night’s sleep and a quick breakfast at the hotel, we set off for the Potala Palace, a UNESCOWorld Heritage Site. The Palace was first built in 637 as a meditation retreat by the 33rd King of Tibet, Songtsan Gampo – the founder of the Tibetan Empire. Then the Great Fifth Dalai Lama Lozang Gyatso added on significantly starting in 1645 to house the Government. Every Dalai Lama since then lived there, and their tombs are there as well. Although almost all of the scriptures and works of art were destroyed or removed during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai did protect the building. Today it is a museum, although many Tibetan pilgrims mix with the Chinese tourists to pray before the many many Buddhas. It’s less like visiting a museum and more like visiting a Catholic church in Italy. Getting in to see the palace is a real pain – you have to get a ticket for a specified time and get out in a specified time. We got entry at 9a. I had to show my papers to get in.
The building itself is awe inspiring. It is huge and high, dominating the landscape. You have to walk all the way up, about 1,000 feet, which is a long way in this thin air.
It's A Long Way Up
Inside an intricate series of assembly halls, chapels, and galleries is filled with various Buddhas.
At every site like this, the Tibetans make their devotions. They murmur, supplicate themselves, bowing before various images. They contribute yak butter to burn in the lamps, water, or tea for the Buddhas. They place bits of barley or even large sculptures to absorb blessings then come back to pick them up later. They creep under shelves leaden with scriptures. They touch their heads to particularly holy spots. (At Sera monastery, below, they get black marks on their children’s noses to keep their children from crying in the night. They believe that as babies their souls still can see their past lives and it scares them so they cry. The black marks scare away the old lives.) They turn prayer wheels, hang prayer flags. They even come from all ends of Tibet, prostrating themselves at every step. They ask for blessings for all living beings – not just all people, but all plants and animals, event insects. They ask for blessings for their families or specific people they know or know about. Lastly, they ask for blessings for themselves. Every family wants to give a nun, or better yet a monk, to Buddhism. This isn’t a weekly event, a book they read. It is central to their lives in every way. Every home has a shrine, where fresh offerings are made daily. The concepts of karma, reincarnation, and luck come out constantly in conversation, in the way Tibetans think about things. When Tibetans die, the body is kept at home for three days. The soul leaves the body at the moment of death, but hangs around for 49 hours. During that time the family offers the body tea when they drink it, so the soul knows it’s being thought about. Once the soul has moved on, the body is cut up into pieces and laid out for the birds to eat. The dead body gives life to the birds. The principles of Buddhism infuse every aspect of the Tibetan culture.
After the long climb and walk in the rain, I was very wet and getting cold and tired. So we went to a completely local tea house. It was packed with old Tibetans taking a break from their walks around the palace. While LhacBa went to get us some tea, I sat down on one of the tiny benches, and clumsily banged the table with my knee, spilling some tea from the glass of an old man sitting across from me. He scowled and I felt awful and worried. But I managed to pantomime a joke about how long my legs are relative to the small benches and tables and that got a bunch of them laughing. The woman sitting next to me came up to my shoulder blade (maybe) and she and the very old and very smiley man she was with thought the whole thing was hysterical. They asked me, I think, where I was from, and when I said America, I was suddenly everyone’s best friend. Tibetans love Americans (and the French). LhacBa was surprised to find that I had made so many friends when he returned and we ended up hanging out there for a long time, talking with everyone. There’s a nail in the corner where customers hang a bag with a cup and bowl because they come back every day. I can see why – it’s a kind of socialization that I wish we had at home.
Tea House
LhacBa Listening to My Music at the Tea House
Because it was still too early for lunch, we walked – clockwise of course – with the locals around the palace. Most of the walkers were older Tibetans who do the circuit every day, many with hand-held prayer wheels.
Man with Hand Prayer Wheel
Prayer Wheels
I stopped to go to the bathroom, which was brand new and surprisingly clean. (Toilets in China really are almost all gross, even in nice office buildings. Many of them are squat toilets. And I will never get used to the fact that the doors are generally propped open. The Chinese approach to hygiene is to avoid touching anything. So they often don’t close the doors to the bathrooms or stalls. Typically there’s only cold water and no paper towels, only automated dryers that seldom are in working order. And if you go, carry toilet paper at all times). This bathroom was a very tasteful slate, but the “toilet” consisted of one long trench with five stalls over it and a steady stream of water that intensified to a”flush” every 30 seconds or so. Hmmm.
Along the way we also passed an exercise park, which is quite common here. These parks are filled with old Tibetans doing balance exercises, and the stairmaster! (Sorry the video is sideways.)
After our walk, we met our driver and went to lunch. He joined us this time, and made a bunch of jokes about how much LhacBa eats (a lot) and that my banana lassie would make me fall asleep in the afternoon. He had me in stitches despite the complete language barrier.
Next we went on to the Sera Monastery which tied with the visit to LhacBa’s home the night before for the highlight of my entire trip. Sera is very popular with tourists because from 3-5 each afternoon the monks debate in a spectacular way. We went earlier, and got the treat of sitting with over a hundred monks as they prayed. Amost 6,000 monks lived in Sera before the Cultural Revolution, and now it’s about 500. Outside the assembly hall there were a dozen Tibetans prostrating themselves. Inside, there were about 8 tourists when we arrived, and we joined them to sit on a 4″x4″ on the floor to the side of the door. This is what the monks sound like.
You can’t take photos, but here’s one from Wikipedia which is close to what it looked like:
Monks at Sera
It was an extraordinarily moving experience. As an atheist, I find the ubiquitous Buddhism slightly disturbing – particularly in its most superstitions forms. But the monks praying was deeply soulful and moving. I’ve been lucky enough to have had a few experiences in my life in which I felt a tie to something much bigger than myself, that I would describe as deeply spiritual. Two were in churches – one in LeCorbusier’s Ronchamp and the other in Chartres Cathedral (forget trying to capture an image that even hints at that space). This was similarly moving, but also more powerful. You could feel something very real happening.
When the monks pray in this way, they only eat one meal a day. Startlingly, after we’d been there for about 15 minutes, 10 or 12 of the youngest monks jumped up and ran out of the hall. They were running to get food to serve. Every monk had a bowl, and first it was filled with butter tea. And they each got two rounds of fried bread. For a second course, their bowls were filled with yogurt, topped with white sugar.
Unfortunately, the mood was broken by an onslaught of loud and obnoxious Italian and Chinese tourists. The buses had arrived for the photo opportunity, and 50 or so people tromped into the temple, wearing shorts and hats (both rude), talking loudly, and even walking between the rows of praying monks. Although LhacBa didn’t say much – he never said a bad word about the Chinese or anyone in all the time we spent together – I could feel his fury. He did tell one man to take his hat off. I can’t imagine – no matter how nutty I think a lot of it is – how it must feel to experience every day such disrespect.
We quickly took off to tour the temple. We circled the the monks as they ate to reach the chapels, and I got a big grin from one of the oldest. Generally, they look unusually happy, with deep smile lines. They are very playful, joking and pushing each other impishly.They are completely approachable – many times in our two days LhacBa would ask them a question, or just hang out for a while and talk.
Monks Hanging Out
We went outside to wait for the monks to move to the debating courtyard. First we took a look at a construction site near the assembly hall, where young girls were carrying stone to build walls. Women are as common as construction workers here as men are.
Girls Work Construction
There is a shrine in a separate building that the people circle. The image of Buddha is said to have emerged itself rather than being created (there are a good number of these around).
Shrine at Sera Monastery
Monks Leaving the Assembly Hall After Praying
Debating such questions as “what is the meaning of religion” is a very typical teaching method in the monasteries. At Sera, there is a special courtyard for a particularly dramatic version. The younger monks gather in pairs, one seated and one standing. The standing one asks questions of the seated one. The debates can get very heated, with shouting very animated movements, but the monks also laugh and are clearly having a great time. I wished very much that I could understand them.
Monks Debating
It started to rain and we left after about 15 minutes, leaving the hoards of tourists clicking photos (I felt a bit uncomfortable being among them).
After a brief rest at the hotel, we set off again for dinner, walking through the park across the street from the hotel. The park includes a fitness area, where an elderly woman was working out on a bright yellow mechanical version of a stairmaster, basketball courts, and a football stadium. Today, the stadium is a military encampment, filled with army tents. I wanted to take a photo but my guide freaked out completely when I took out my camera and said that they’d take me away if I took a photo. He was genuinely fearful and hustled me off quickly. It’s quite an experience as an American to be prevented from taking a photo. Services like FILL IN can change the world.
We walked to dinner near the Bharkor, at Lhasa Namaste Restaurant, which served excellent food – Tibetan, Nepalese, Indian, Chinese, and Western. I had the best Tandoori chicken I’ve ever had, and a delicious tomato soup (easy to order here because the word is the same in Tibetan!). Unfortunately they played horrible music too loudly and the decor was right out of a cheezy New Jersey Italian place, complete with fake brick walls. We got into a conversation with a couple sitting at the next table – his goal was to someday be a driver for tourists.
After dinner we walked over to the huge square below the Potala Palace to see the great night views, with a show of spraying fountains. But I was exhausted and decided to go back to the hotel before that started. I did get some good photos of LhacBa and his cousin.
LhacBa and His Cousin
On the walk back it started raining and LhacBa said the he could see in my face that I was tired, so after LhacBa haggled with a couple of drivers, the three of us climbed in a rickshaw and rode the last couple of km back to the hotel. I slept very soundly.
[A note on sources: I'm no expert on Tibet, Buddhism, the Cultural Revolution, or any of this. These posts are based on what I've read, observed, or been told. If you know better, please comment.]
I lay down to take a nap yesterday afternoon, fully intending to get up, wander around and have dinner. I didn’t wake up until 5:30 this morning!
I had breakfast at the hotel buffet, which was fine but didn’t hold a candle to the Hilton’s in Beijing. There are mostly American and European tourists here, of a particularly annoying self-important breed. Lots of Gore-Tex and hiking boots (clearly brand new) and overly-loud discussions of prior exploits and advice for altitude sickness. I’m lucky that the altitude doesn’t seem to be affecting me, beyond getting winded just jogging up a couple of flights of stairs – but these folks made me feel slightly ill.
I met LhacBa and our driver at 10. It rained hard until about 3 – it’s the rainy season. We went first to the Norbulingka – the summer palace – founded by the 7th Dalai Lama in 1735. The 13th Dalai Lama built three more palaces and the present Dalai Lama built the last one in 1956. Three years later, His Holiness escaped to Nepal from this palace, with 30,000 Tibetans holding off the Chinese army. Unfortunately, the entire complex was heavily damaged. I’ll leave the details to the guidebooks (I’m using Lonely Planet’s and like it a lot).
It was everything aesthetically that I’d imagined. Most interesting was the present Dalai Lama’s New Summer Palace. It has a lot of the original furnishings, including a console radio, his mother’s bathroom, his audience room, and many prayer rooms. The palaces are protected by the United Nations (thank you!) and there are seals on the cabinets to prevent them from being opened. I was shocked that the thousands of tourists clomp through the rooms with wet feet on the original (and gorgeous) Tibetian rugs! On the whole, everything here is very relaxed: people hang out with the monks on their seats behind the cordons, nothing is protected well yet everyone seems to behave.
The Norbulingka
One of the monks was a friend of LhacBa’s and he gave me some cheese to eat. It was very odd, like no cheese I’ve ever had: slightly sweet yet sour like yogurt, hard but in a shape you might make with a cheese wiz spray can. I was a bit nervous about eating it, but certainly didn’t want to offend a monk, so I hate half. He had a kitten on his chair.
Some of the guides are Chinese who don’t know, or choose not to tell, the correct history of the Tibetian sites. Monks are forbidden to correct them.
After the Norbulingka, we went to have lunch at the New Mandala Restaurant, a Nepalese place with a good view of the Barkhor – a square and market in the middle of Lhasa. It was just like home – vegetable curry, dahl, rice and lassie. LhacBa knows the servers at the restaurant and there was lots of good-natured teasing. One of the waitresses sang randomly (and beautifully) as she worked. LhacBa also, throughout my trip, would sing as we walked.
The most interesting thing was watching the stream of people of every type go by, including mothers, grandmothers, monks, nuns, tourists (not many of those today due to the hard rain), and the soldiers. The most unsettling things were the machine-gun equipped soldiers and cameras on the roofs – the intensity of the scrutiny increased after unrest in 1998 and 2008 (I hope that link is good, it’s blocked here). I should mention that taking photos of the soldiers is prohibited. As is taking photos inside the monasteries (a rule I understand, respect and intend to follow).
Tibetian Baby on a Mother's Back
Soldiers policing in Grey Raincoats
Prayer Flags and Machine Guns over Barkhor
We zoomed around the Barkhor due to the rain. I wanted to buy an umbrella, but when we stopped at a stall with a few and asked the price, she said 70 yuan and we walked away – LhacBa said the price should be 25 and she was trying to cheat me. Farther on, near the end of our circuit, he borrowed one from another merchant who was a friend of his. I hope he took it back later.
We spent quite a while in the Jokhang. Built starting in the 640s (I didn’t forget a 1 in front of that), it was desecrated in the Cultural Revolution, but has been undergoing restoration since 1980. In front of the Temple many pilgrims prostrate themselves. Inside are a series of chapels with many statues of various Buddhas, from across the ages. All have offerings of butter lamps, water infused with incense, flowers, fruit, and money strewn before them. There are riches from benefactors from Taiwan, Mongolia, and even China throughout. Tourists mingle with praying pilgrims.
Butter Lamps
Prostrating Pilgrims
Mountains over Jokhang Temple
We had extra time and attempted to see the local carpet factory, forgetting that it’s Sunday and therefore it was closed. So I went back to the hotel for a brief rest before dinner.
LhacBa, his cousin and I went to the Shangrila for dinner, well known for it’s very hoaky but charming performance of Tibetan opera. It’s a very typical folk style of singing and dancing, not opera as westerners would think of it. There was a buffet where I got my first traditional Tibetan food – bits of barley flour fried in yak butter and brown sugar, rice fried with ginseng (both were good but very sweet and rich), barley beer (yuck) and butter tea (very strange; it’s oily).
We walked to and from the restaurant through the Tibetan part of Lhasa, which is completely different from the Western part of the city. The population of the city itself is about 250,000, up from about 100,000 25 years ago. Although the official statistics put the Chinese population at roughly 12%, it is clearly more like half. The Tibetan area is like other old cities with narrow winding streets.
Typical Street Scene
Line of Rickshaws Waiting to Take People Through Giant Puddle
Furniture Shop
Oldest Nunnery in Tibet
Typical Street
People live in compounds of 30-40 apartments, with an extended family living in each apartment. On the way home, LhacBa invited me to his place to meet his wife, baby, and Auntie, who is a nun.
The apartments are a series of small rooms, with low ceilings. There was a small chapel, just big enough for a small bed, decorated with Buddha statues, traditional paintings, etc. where Auntie spends her days praying. I was welcomed in the living room, where a long bench covered with cushions and Tibetan rugs served as a couch and seating for a dining table. The walls and all the furniture was covered with traditional Tibetan decoration. Although small, it felt very warm and comfortable. I met LhacBa’s charming and beautiful wife, 2-month-old baby, and Auntie. The level of hospitality was not to be believed. I was offered tea, the same sweet yak cheese that the monk gave me in the morning, and chewing gum (LhacBa’s mother runs a small concession selling chewing gum, drinks, etc.). One sip of tea and my glass was refilled. While drinking I couldn’t help but think about the fact that water needs to be boiled for 10 minutes here to kill all of the bacteria, because it boils at a lower temperature due to the altitude. But there was no way I wasn’t going to drink that tea and eat that cheese!
Tibetan Cheese
When it came time to leave, huge handfuls of cheese, and more chewing gum were thrust upon me. We stopped at the mother’s shop on the way back to the hotel so I could say goodbye to his wife (she had left mid-visit, with Auntie caring for the baby) and meet his mother. It was a wonderful visit and I’m very grateful for the family’s generosity.
Skipping by everything I missed, here I am. I’ll catch up blogging over the next few days I hope (I had intended to go in order!). I want to capture this while it’s fresh.
It’s raining in Beijing today. I got up at 4:30 and was headed to the airport for a 6:55a flight. Good thing I was early. It took me a while to find the right line in the astoundingly huge terminal. I checked in and headed off to go through security. After getting through the short line I was sent to a special security line. That was even shorter, but when it came to be my turn things ground to a snail’s pace. My documents were reviewed for almost 5 minutes (there really isn’t much to look at).
Papers to Enter and Do Most Anything in Tibet
Then I went through the scanner. Every bag was looked through. Every tiny bottle sniffed. I was hand-scanned and patted down including having to sit down so my feet could be inspected). It made the U.S. process look lightweights. I was very glad that i had remembered that I had a bottle of water in my bag when I saw others in a bin back at the first security check. By the time I reassembled everything and made my way to the gate, through a corridor so empty and so long that I started to be concerned I was in the wrong place, they were boarding. Over an hour to get through check-in and security!
But soon I was sitting in the window seat of an Airbus 330 (with a bonus empty seat next to me) on my way to the Land of Snows, the roof of the world. Tibet is the only place that I’ve dreamed of going since I was a child. Tintin in Tibet was my very favorite book in that beloved series, and I have a thing for mountains in general. It’s going to be fascinating to see (what I’m allowed to) of the political situation. My only disappointment is that I don’t have the time to take the train there. This time.
I’ve wanted to come to Tibet since I was 8 or 9 and read. I can’t quite believe it. I’ve already, during the 60 km drive from the airport to the Four Points Sheraton in Lhasa, seen monks in red robes spinning prayer wheels, a thousand-year-old Buddha, women with straw backpacks, low stone houses.
Yaluzangbu River
The flight was a quick hour and a half, we circled around the mountains to the north, over the Yaluzangbu River and landed at Lhasa Gonggar Airport in the foothills of the Himalayas. In China, you see Chinese and English everywhere. Here it’s Tibetan and Chinese and almost no one speaks English. I managed to find my way to my waiting guide (after braving the squat toilets). It was easy to connect – I was the only westerner in the airport.
Suddenly It's No longer Chinese and English, It's Tibetan and Chinese
I lucked out completely with my guide, LhacBa. He is Tibetan and speaks English extraordinarily well – better than most of the Chinese I’ve met. He also speaks Nepalese and Chinese. He taught himself English by listening to music. I’ll forgive him that his favorite is Bon Jovi.
LhacBa
We left the airport with a driver in a 4×4. The airport is about 45 km from Lhasa as the crow flies, 60 km driving on the 30 km limit “excellent” road. It was 100 km but the Chinese built a 4 km tunnel under the closest mountain. As soon as we were across the river, everything I had seen in Herge’s illustrations, photographs, and movies was real. It sits now alongside a decent 2-lane road and new cars, and it’s mixed in with people wearing jeans. But it’s still here too. I can’t wait to see more, see the Tibetian end of Lhasa.
Nietang Buddha
We stopped along the way to see the Nietang Buddha, which was carved into the cliff face in the 1000s.
There were prayer flags and lucky scarves everywhere. The area was sort of junky but clearly important to the Buddhists and maintained religiously.
Prayer Flags
The drive was particularly fun because, during our discussion about music, I pulled out my iPad as an easy way to see if LhacBa liked any of the same music I do. Neither he nor the driver had ever seen an iPad. Or an iPhone. They’d never even heard of Apple computer. Watching the two of them playing with the iPad was worth the trip in and of itself. I so wish the I hadn’t felt it would be rude to video them – Steve Jobs would have enjoyed it too. LhacBa got it instantly, giggled, and was soon facile. It took the older driver a bit longer. One of the things they did was look through my photo album. That led to me explaining Halloween, boogie boards, and a host of typical American experiences. I think that they know me better already and feel more comfortable than they would have by the end of the trip if all of that hadn’t happened. Just great.
We arrived at the Four Points Sheraton at about 1:30p. I’m taking it easy to acclimate. Many, or even most people have issues with the altitude here. I feel fine so far, but since I got up at 4a, I need to rest anyway. I’m going to eat, write, read, and maybe take a nap before heading out. My official “tour” starts tomorrow morning at 10, but LhacBa is on call if I need anything today. I’m planning not to call but to just wander around a bit.
In a happy surprise, there’s painless wired Internet connectivity here!
My sleep improved a lot, I managed to stay up until about 11p and didn’t wake until after 5a. In the morning I went over to the mall near the hotel to buy a transformer, but it turned out that they didn’t have one. They did, however have wifi! It was great to get my email on my iPhone, even if I couldn’t reply. Then I took a taxi to the Forbidden City.
The Forbidden City was built in the 1400s and was home to 24 Emperors, ending with the Last Emperor in 1912. It is enormous, with almost 1,000 rooms and housed almost 10,000 people.
The Forbidden City, viewed from Jingshan Hill (Wikipedia photo)
Today, it was mobbed with thousands of almost exclusively Chinese tourists. The Forbidden City definitely doesn’t show China at its best. The entire area was filthy – dirty and with trash everywhere. I had read in my guidebook that Chinese from the provinces might stare at me; not only did they stare, they also took photos.
While making my way toward the very long ticket line, I was stopped constantly by people hawking things or wanting to act as a guide. I had no intention of buying anything or hiring anyone so I just kept walking. For some reason though, one guide cut through the clutter and I agreed to hire him for the equivalent of about $10. He skipped the line somehow and got me a ticket and off we went. It turned out that he was a Ph.D. student at Beijing University and had just given a dozen visiting professors from Boston University a tour. He was good, although I didn’t get much out of the city – the buildings are there, but there’s almost nothing in them. And the Southern parts have been restored without much sensitivity. At the end of the tour I was funneled into the high-end gift shop where the supposed nephew of the Last Emperor does calligraphy. I hate that stuff. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see and stand in the place where so much history happened. The only furnished room is the Emperor’s honeymoon suite, where he and his bride met, with the Double Happiness theme.
Double-Happiness, Worn from Vistors' Touching It
Across the avenue from the main entrance to the Forbidden City is Tiananmen Square – which is enormous. Again, there’s not much to see there. As someone said to me in Shanghai, the Chinese could teach Texans something about big.
China Today: Bicycle, Rolls Royce, and Tiananmen Square
At the end of the tour, I met my new translator (Charles had a family commitment to attend to) met me at the North entrance. We walked forever until we were able to get a taxi – they’re not allowed to stop near the Forbidden City entrance to prevent traffic jams. I mentioned, as we were walking the third long block to where they’re permitted to stop, that there should be a taxi stand or special lane so that people could get taxis. She said, in a puzzled sort of way, that then there would be traffic jams. Looking inside her reaction, you can see a couple of the differences in the typical Chinese vs. American way of thinking. First, she sees the collective benefit of no traffic jam as outweighing the individual cost. Second, she assumes that the authorities have it right whereas I assume that I do. We did finally get a taxi and headed to a banquet lunch with people from CEAIE, the organization related to the Ministry of Education that is Eisenhower’s partner in China and responsible for my scheduling.
These meals take place in private rooms around a big round table with a lazy susan overflowing with every kind of dish – just like in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. The food was very similar too. There is a very specific seating arrangement for these events, which is one of the formalities that are the ying to the more typical causal yang in Chinese manners. It wasn’t managed well this time, as my interpreter was seated far from me – I think that Charles would have asked to be seated next to me. The lunch was hosted by Jiang Bo, Secretary General of CEAIE, and attended by Fellows Liang Gui (Director General of the Ministry of Science & Technology’s Torch High-Tech Industry Development Center) and Feng Hongjuan (Research Fellow at the China Reinsurance Corporation). I was happy that 2010 China Fellow Li Hongwei, a professor of Marxism Theory at, CCPS, joined us too. Particularly because almost all of the conversation turned out to be in Chinese, and she was the one who would let me know every know and then what the topic was. Despite not understanding most of what happened, it was a very worthwhile as both Jiang and Liang made generous offers to use their networks for introductions for me when I return in November.
After lunch, we took the subway to my first meeting of the day. It’s a great system, with about 7 lines, air conditioned stations and trains (except the first line). There are incredibly long stairs down to the stations. Ads are projected on the tunnel walls as the trains speed between stations. And there are video monitors in the train – this trip playing an infomercial for a nail clipper with a plastic case that catches the clippings. Really. I enjoyed riding the subway because in the middle of the day it’s filled with kids and their grandparents, both of whom seemed to enjoy me too.
Steps to the Subway
Vincent Gong is a Business Development Director at TripAdvisor. Before that he was at Hyatt for 10 years and was the online marketing manager for Howard Johnson (a 5-star chain here!). Vincent is absolutely charming, and this was a great rubber-meets-the-road meeting. Vincent knows the market inside and out and shared some interesting statistics.
70% of U.S travel is for leisure, 30% for business; China is the inverse
Average stay U.S. 6 days, China 2 days
Advance booking U.S. 25 days, China 3 days
Cancellation rate in China 35-40%
No guarantees in the Chinese market, it’s all cash (so there’s no Priceline, Hotwire, or Hotels.com model)
70% of hotel bookings in U.S. happen online, only 20% in China – it’s all done on the phone
TripAdvisor is entering the China market the right way, giving local management complete leeway – even the site name is different here. This seems to be a critical element of a successful China strategy, since so much is different – not just the cultural elements, but the internet and payments infrastructure too.
Next we met Nobert Chang, a serial entrepreneur. He’s an ethic Chinese who came here as an adult (I met a lot of these). He built a mobile gaming company that he sold to Sony, stayed on there for a while, and is now building another startup. He took us to a brand new hotel for coffee, on the 80th floor – nice place with an amazing view.
View (and pollution) from The Lounge on the 80th Floor of the Shangri-La Hotel
After a confusion about which Hilton I was staying at (this was constant the entire week – my hotel was new and taxi drivers don’t know it yet), Australian Fellow Jason Yat-sen Li and his delightful wife Lucy picked me up for dinner. We went to a charming Hunan place in a a courtyard in old Beijing. It was cool enough The food was excellent, and not at all like the Hunan food I’ve had in the U.S.
My power problems and an insane schedule led to be getting behind in updating, but I’m finally starting to dig out today.
Sunday night I didn’t sleep much. I was told to stay up until 10p the first night and made it to 9:45 before crashing. But I woke up at 2:45 like it was morning. I had breakfast at the hotel, they have absolutely amazing buffets here. And met my I met my translator, Charles Jiang. We took the first of what would be many taxis to meet Tomer Rothschild at a Starbucks (they’re everywhere in Beijing like they’re everywhere everywhere else).
Tomer is a Wharton MBA who’s been in or around China and Taiwan since the ’90s. Among his experiences, he worked at Bally Total Fitness opening China.
Bally’s joint venture with the China Sports Institute (part of the state, as is almost everything else here) was a very typical failure.
There is extraordinary brand consciousness here – especially in things that “show”, like cars, handbags, etc…
Things are changing at a furious pace
A huge opportunity exists for new lifestyle products like wine, baby products, restaurants, spas, etc… People are looking for ways to spend their money.
There’s a tidal wave of Chinese students going abroad to study, because the top schools admit less than 1% of applicants so there are extraordinary students who can’t get it, there is prestige in going abroad to school, and more progressive parents think the education is better outside of China.
The government is critical here in a way it simply isn’t in the west. And it’s borders are wide and blurry.
Best line, in reference to driving: “the hardware is great, the software is a mess.” Absolutely true, the Chinese are not the best drivers. I saw three accidents in my first 24 hours here.
The we took a long taxi ride to the “Silicon Valley” of Beijing, where Google, Microsoft et al have office towers near Beijing University and Tsinghua University. Other than the lack of Indian and caucasian faces, and the vertical rather than horizontal buildings, it could be Palo Alto – it has the same feeling. We had lunch at a Chinese “fast food” place. The food could have been from the Chinese place in the strip mall at home (actually, it’s excellent). We’ll see how it stacks up to a Chinese feast – supposedly I’ll be having one of those tomorrow. Then we went to Innovation Works to see Chris Evdemon and the famous Kai-Fu Lee.
entrepreneur at Innovation Works
Chris is a successful Greek entrepreneur and angel investor, who is now Investments & Business Development Manager at Innovation Works. He started an international computer skills testing company in Greece and sold it. Before coming to China he spent some time in Singapore. We spent most of our time talking about the early stage investment environment in China.
Shanghai angels are more mature, Chris is President of a group there that is 10 years old.
There’s an interesting conundrum in that the very best seed opportunities are super-local and the angels can’t find them and they don’t know how to access the angels.
After coffee with Chris I had over an hour with Kai-Fu. He was extraordinarily open and generous – I can understand why he is so beloved here.
The Innovation Works business model started out somewhat like Idea Labs’ – they would identify opportunities and put team together around them. That didn’t work because entrepreneurs are too independent and didn’t graft to someone else’s idea. Today they are more like an incubator, taking very very early stage ideas and putting their resources around them.
There are three key challenges that Innovation Works can help with: 1) Hiring engineers, which isn’t a challenge for them. Over 100,000 have sent in resumes to Innovation works. (Yes, 100,000 resumes. Welcome to China). 2) Figuring out the right business model 3) Making very senior level connections.
There’s a mis-match between both young engineers’ and sea-turtles’ expectations and reality. They think they’re ready to be CEOs and few are. He thinks that the attributes of the stand-outs, who will make good entrepreneurs are initiative, self-awareness, and business sense.
We then spent a while talking about Google. I’m going to do an entire post about the search environment and Google after I’ve met with more people.
me, Kai-Fu, and Charles
My final meeting on Monday was with Francis Goh, Search Director @Neo Ogilvy. It was great to get the rubber-meets-the-road perspective from Francis (and thanks to Barry Lloyd for the introduction!). Francis explained a lot of how Baidu works, which will go in that separate post about search.
It was a long, good first day.
Finally, a few early observations about Beijing.
It’s ugly. I love cities. Dirt, noise, crowds – none of that bothers me. But there just isn’t much that’s aesthetically pleasing about Beijing. That’s a big surprise.
It’s not nearly as hectic as I thought it would be. It is busy and there’s a mix of cars, bikes, and pedestrians that you wouldn’t see in the west, but it’s not frenzied.
It is hot here right now. Horribly oppressively hot and humid.
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