This week I’ve mainly been in China, and have had little time to add new material to Omniglot. Normal service should resume when I return to the UK. I’m planning to do so towards the end of January 2026, but we’ll see.

A nearby street leading to Zhaoqing University

It was quite an epic journey to get here. I left Bangor at ridiculous o’clock far too early on Tuesday morning, and got a lift to Manchester airport with friends. Then I flew to Beijing on Hainan Airlines (海南航空) with one of those friends. The flight took 10 hours and went smoothly, though I wasn’t able to sleep much, so was very tired when we arrived in Beijing. After filling in some pointless forms, going through immigration and collecting our bags, we checked in for our flight to Guangzhou, which took about 3 hours. Then we took a rather rickety old bus to Zhaoqing, which took another 2 hours, and a taxi to where we’re staying. The whole journey took just under 24 hours door-to-door.

The building I’m staying in and the view from my window

I’m staying with M, the friend I travelled with, his Chinese wife YR, their two daughters (my goddaughters), Mia (5) and Isla (4), and YR’s mother. They’re renting a large, comfortable apartment in a new gated complex near Zhaoqing University (肇庆学院), where YR works as a teacher trainer. It’s quite a lively area full of students with plenty of places to eat and other shops, and the university campus has some quite picturesque parts, particularly the lake. It kind of reminds me of parts of Taipei, and even smells quite similar.

The lake on the campus of Zhaoqing University

There’s a much bigger lake near the centre of Zhaoqing which I saw on the way here. It’s called 星湖 (xīnghú) or Star Lake. I’ll go to explore the area soon. We were going to go last night, but got distracted with eating and other things.

Zhaoqing (肇庆 [肇慶] – zhàoqìng / siu6-hing2 in Cantonese) was established during the Qin Dynasty in the 1st century BC. It was originally known as Sihui (西会 [xīhuì]), and has also been known as Gaoyao (高要 [gāoyào]) and Duanzhou (端州 [duānzhōu]). Gaoyao and Duanzhou are now districts of Zhaoqing, and Sihui is a separate city. It became Zhaoqing in 1118 AD. It’s a port on the Xi River (西江) in Guangdong Province (广东省) about 50 miles / 80 km west of Guangzhou (广州).

The first and only other time I visited Mainland China was in 1991, when I spent nearly 2 months travelling around the south of the country. It has changed quite a bit since. Back then, travelling in China was an interesting experience, but not always a particularly comfortable one. The roads were full of bicycles, motorbikes, mopeds, buses, trucks, tractors, and even horses and donkeys, but very few private cars. The buildings were mostly grey, unadorned concrete, the air wasn’t particularly clean, except in rural areas, and foreign tourists were a novelty.

Me in Yangshuo (阳朔) in 1991

There were two currencies back in the 1990s: RMB (人民币 [rénmínbì]) for locals, and Foreign Exchange Certificates (外汇券 [wàihuìquàn]) for foreign tourists. There were restrictions on where you could visit, where you could stay and how you could travel, both for locals and tourists. FECs were used for certain hotels, flights, train tickets, and so on, and the locals were keen to exchange their RMB for FECs whenever they could.

Now there are fancy electric cars and scooters everywhere, there are a lot more local people and tourists, the cities are bigger and full of mostly smart, modern tower blocks, although you still see some unadorned concrete around, and they have built a whole network of high speed trains and many new roads. You could say that China is very much a work in progress, as there seems to be endless construction of new buildings, roads, railways, and so on. If you’re looking for a quiet, peaceful place to stay, most Chinese cities are best avoided.

There is only one currency now – RMB, and while cash is used to some extent, most people pay for everything with the WeChat app. It’s like WhatsApp, in that you can use it for messaging and calls, but has various other functions. Apparently shops and street vendors are keen to use WeChat as they get bonuses for doing so. Everybody has a QR code which you scan with your phone, which makes transactions much easier, and saves you having to carry around cash. I set it up before I left the UK, and finally got it working yesterday after getting hold of a local SIM card.

On the planes on the way here, I heard people speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese, and expected to hear Cantonese being spoken here in Zhaoqing. So far though, I’ve only heard a few people speaking Cantonese – most people seem to speak Mandarin as their first language. I’ve spoken plenty of Mandarin so far, but haven’t had any opportunities to speak Cantonese yet.

YR and her mum speak Mandarin and a variety of Mandarin from Guangxi Province where they come from. It sounds similar enough to Mandarin that I can sort of get the gist of what they’re saying. Apparently their dialect / language is known as Guangxi Mandarin or Jia Zhuang (嘉庄), as it is influenced by the Zhuang language [source].

Thanks to the Great Firewall of China, many of the sites I normally use are not accessible here, which makes things difficult. So unless I can find ways round this, I plan to spend my time here improving existing content on Omniglot, rather than adding new stuff. I will add some new pages when I have time and it’s possible to do so.

Before comning here, I made some bilingual English and Chinese name cards. They include a QR code which links to my page on Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/omniglot. I just found out that this site is blocked here. Oh well.