Chinese boats

I recently returned from a vacation in China in which I avoided contracting the avian flu and hung out with pimps and ho’s.  I took a variety of transportation methods in China, including planes, subway trains, automobiles, rickshaws and an odd combo of motocycle with rickshaw.  The last was my favorite.  I did not, however, get to take any boat rides on this trip.

China does have some interesting boats.

Case in point:   This is the Dowager Empress Cixi’s Marble Boat.  She took all the funds that were supposed to be spent on the Chinese navy and had this marble boat built instead in Kunming Lake in Beijing.  She was even worse at docking than I am and ran aground her first time out.

Critics have been excoricating her ever since for wasting the country’s military funds on such a frivolous folly. 

I would like to present an opposing view.  Take a look at the details of this boat: the carved marble, the stained glass windows, the millions of tourists visiting yearly.  Built in 1888, still standing today, having successfully survived the British, the Japanese, the Kuomintang, the Communists, the Cultural revolution and the Chinese in general.

Now lets think about the Chinese navy.  Umm.   Do they have one?

Here’s where they practiced in Cixi’s day.   So, somehow, they felt that a navy could practice on a lake (or, as we’d call it where I’m from, a pond), but as long as they had the money it took to build a marble boat in a land where labor is extraordinarily cheap they could have bought the equipment to beat, say, the British?  Or maybe the Japanese?   Please, just put down the opium pipe and back away from the history book.

Here’s a nice quote that I think puts it in perspective:“Most people hate the Old Buddha (Cixi) for diverting the naval funds. How unjust! Any navy we built in those days would have been destroyed in the first battle. Which of our enemies would have helped us build a fleet capable of destroying a single ship of theirs? They would have sent our fleet to the bottom of the sea and then charged us with the costs of the action, as they always did! As it is, the Old Buddha’s palace still stands — they say there is nothing equal to it in the world! Could anyone, Chinese or foreign, of our generation duplicate it?”   Professor Ch’eng, quoted in Blofeld’s City of Lingering Splendour, 1961

Also at the Summer Palace were these boats, waiting for spring to come when they can carry tourists up the canals to Souzhou Street, a venicelike shopping area which would have American liability lawyers salivating like Saint Bernards.