Zhu Pin felt like a stranger in his home country.Starting from Guangzhou, he traveled by train for several days, and the endless land of the motherland shocked his heart.The vast land - from Guangzhou in the south, where Zhu Pin's father was born, to Beijing in the north, where Zhu Pin will go to school, there are more than 1,100 miles.The history of the motherland is as long.His father repeatedly told the history of his hometown for three thousand years.Everything has a history of three thousand years.Even for the Chinese peanut sticks that Zhu Pin bought in San Francisco, the label on them claimed that they were made with a process that was three thousand years ago.In fact, the history of China can be traced back four thousand years, about 2700 BC.At the same time, China's population is so large that it is jaw-dropping.No one knows how many Chinese there are.Zhu Pin learned that there were 400 million Chinese, perhaps 450 million.The most recent official figure was 600 million, and then 650 million.No one really knows the exact numbers, but China has about a quarter of the world's population.

Many years ago, Zhu Pin's father immigrated to the United States, and Zhu Pin was born and lived in San Francisco.However, his father was unwilling to let him grow up in an environment without Chinese characters, Chinese literature, Chinese culture and history.When Zhu Pin was 14, his father insisted that the child should be sent back to the motherland to go to school. "Zhu Pin can't just speak Chinese," he said. "He has to go to Beijing to study." He also thought that Zhu Pin was rapidly losing his Chinese cultural characteristics.Like most Chinese, he has a strong sense of national pride in his homeland, and he understands that a person steeped in Chinese language and literature always has more A different vision.

And so it was decided.Zhu Pin took a three-week boat trip across the Pacific Ocean to Guangzhou, and during the three days on the train, Zhu Pin hungrily admired the colorful land of China through the car window. Because of a stopover, Zhu Pin spent a week from Guangzhou to Beijing.Zhu Pin had planned to take a boat along the coast to visit Shanghai and Tianjin.However, he chose to travel by train, partly because of saving time, but more mainly because of his inner desire. "Now that I have just returned to China, I should see the real China with my own eyes, and see a land of China that has hardly been influenced by the West." He really wanted to visit Shanghai, but he thought Shanghai was a melting pot, more like the one he was familiar with. San Francisco, he'll be back to visit it when he's done with college.

Traveling by train from Guangzhou to Hankou on the Yangtze River was quick and easy, and he had to cross the river by ferry before planning his trip.The initial trip was north through Guangdong Province, where my hometown is.He feels at home here because everyone speaks his own dialect - Cantonese.A series of rolling mountains separates Guangdong province from central China.These mountains stretched from east to west, and extended north when they approached the sea, and the southeast coast of China was populated by foreign merchants and various dialects, because the coastal area was separated from the rest of China.

As the train traveled through the mountains and into the mountains of Hunan, Zhu Pin realized something had changed.Everything has changed: the climate, the language, the national costumes and the plants - all kinds of fruit trees, all kinds of flowers and the seasons when they bloom.Guangdong has a subtropical climate, with palm trees, pomelo (a type of grapefruit), and Zhu Pin's favorite lychee.Hunan is the hometown of rice in China.The train rumbled through the high mountains, and he saw tall bamboo forests, green hillsides, lush vegetation, waterfalls and torrents.There are trapezoidal rice fields everywhere.The air is fresh and cool, but as soon as the train enters the plains, the heat hits, and the footsteps of summer have arrived.

At this time, the most impressive thing is the numerous rivers and ditches, here is the largest lake in China - the Dongting Lake Basin.The railway circles Dongting Lake and takes several hours by train.Zhu Pin felt that Dongting Lake was more of an ocean than a lake, because there was no land beyond the distant horizon.The lake was just south of the Yangtze River, and the train had passed Dongting Lake, but he still saw countless small water surfaces.Here the land is fertile and flat, and the main stream of the great river is meandering, ready to change its course and the face of the land in times of flood.The great Yangtze River divides China in two, naturally dividing China into South and North.It has the same source as the Yellow River, another great river in the north, up to the Turks of China and northern Tibet.The Yangtze River flows through vast swathes of China before merging into the China Sea near Shanghai.

Zhu Pin arrived in the Yangtze River after more than 30 hours of travel.Since there was no bridge, he had to unload his luggage when he reached the terminal and ferry him across the river.After crossing the river, Hankou stands in front of you, the industrial center of central China.Another important northwest-flowing river joins this great river.Actually it is a city of three cities (Hankou, Hanyang and Wuchang), the city is divided into three by the confluence of two rivers.Here the river is deep and the water is urgent.The traffic on the river was extremely heavy, and those little steam engines were hidden in the masts of the sailboats, and those masts were like roses in the forest.There are many modern buildings on the riverside, two or three stories high, and some foreign companies with English billboards have sprung up here.

Since Zhu Pin had left the high mountains of Guangdong, he found that people spoke Mandarin, and Mandarin was spoken everywhere in China—from Manchuria to the southwestern border—except on the southeastern coast.Zhu Pin's Cantonese didn't make him feel particularly alienated, although he had some difficulty communicating with the porters at the pier.The people of the two central provinces, Hunan and Hubei (meaning south of the lake, north of the lake), are notoriously competitive, and they love spicy food.In the hotel room, a spicy and pungent smell hit his nostrils, and he found that the chili was frying in the kitchen.It is unimaginable not to let Hunan people eat chili sauce.

From the hotel window, he had plenty of time to survey the river.He knew that this big river flows east along the Jiujiang River to Shanghai, and upstream there is the famous Three Gorges of the Yangtze River in Xibai.He was told that it was an adventurous journey to take a tugboat through these canyons.The soaring cliffs are hundreds of feet high and are only unobstructed by the midday sun.Rough rapids are dangerous and only skilled sailors can navigate them.A mountain range breaks off the vast Sichuan plateau, and to the west rises the still larger Tibetan plateau. Because it was traveling by train, Zhu Pin went to Henan.Now he is in northern China.Here is the Yellow River Basin, the cradle of Chinese civilization.It was also the place where Confucius worked, lived and traveled.In the 6th century BC, the territory of ancient China was in the Yellow River Basin.So Confucius never saw the Yangtze River.

Zhu Pin noticed that northerners in China are physically stronger than southerners.People in the north seem to be poorer. There are no brick houses in the south, and most of the houses he sees are adobe houses.There are no southern buffaloes, but mules, donkeys, and horses to carry the heavy loads; instead of rice in paddy fields, there is wheat in the soil; instead of sweet corn, there is corn.The vast majority of farmers eat steamed buns (looked like tortillas) instead of rice.He saw dusty and exposed loess mountains everywhere, not at all like the purple soil that is everywhere in the south.The whole of Northwest China is located in this loess area. The loess is white, hard and fine, and the loess can build strong cave dwellings.

In Zhengzhou, Henan, he saw ancient works that were considered part of the Grand Canal.In the 11th and 12th centuries, the capital of China was built here.In ancient times, a tributary of the Grand Canal was built to bring water from the rich coastal provinces to feed crops.The Grand Canal is a great water and land transportation system that stretches from Hangzhou, a little south of Shanghai, to Beijing. Now that this long-distance trip is coming to an end, there is a lot of dust all the way during the trip. It is said that the dust all the way is because there are sandstorms blowing from the Mongolian desert on the plains near Beijing.Dust is fine enough to penetrate the tiniest crack in a closed window. Soon Zhu Pin saw Beijing.The summer days were long, and when he saw the ancient city walls, night had already enveloped the land.In an instant, the train roared past, and the black shadows of the long city walls left giant shadows from time to time.Below the city wall is a moat about thirty feet wide, and rows of willow trees stand gracefully on the embankment, and the willow trees are bending over when the train passes by. When Zhu Pin walked out of Qianmen Station, it was completely dark.Qianmen is the real south gate of the city.The walls collapsed to make way for modern traffic, but the magnificent gatehouse, about eight feet high, remains intact.Zhu Pin walked out of the station with his luggage. He was suddenly surrounded by the dazzling light of the city and the ringing of cars, rickshaws and bicycles.The gatehouse at the front door was a little blurred in the light of the square.Fifty feet high, the base of the gatehouse was of great gray brick, with balustrades and vermilion wooden attics, with a curling roof, and rose another thirty feet above the base.At this time, the city of Beijing disappeared into the night. Zhu Pin was tired and hungry, but he was extremely excited.He went to China's cultural center - Beijing, a political center with a history of more than 600 years.Beijing, with its golden-roofed palaces, was twice conquered by foreign invaders: first by Genghis Khan, then by the Manchus.But Beijing laughs at the invaders, because they are always assimilated; Beijing also laughs at the changing warlords and rulers, because their behavior is comic.Because Beijing is Beijing after all, a unique city with Chinese architectural style and diverse Chinese culture.Mongolian camels and Tibetan lamas walk on the streets of Beijing, but Beijing’s various customs and festivals, Beijing’s temples and palaces, Beijing’s lantern fairs and fairs, Beijing’s schools and hospitals are the heart of China, and the famous Xishan defend Beijing. Since Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China in 1911, China has entered a period of civil wars and dizzying changes of warlords, each of whom ruled the country from the city.But by 1927, the Kuomintang launched the Northern Expedition, and China's nationalist parties reunited the country from Guangzhou.Various warlords were defeated and gradually weakened.The Kuomintang army, led by the leader of the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek, eroded the power of the warlords bit by bit. Chiang Kai-shek made Nanjing the capital of the Nationalist government.The word Nanjing means "capital of the South" and the word Beijing means "capital of the North", so Chiang Kai-shek's government ordered that Beijing be changed to Peiping, which means "Peace in the North". However, ancient Beijing has many familiar names.Back in the days of Kublai Khan, Beijing was called Kaiping in Chinese.Marco Polo used the local name Shangdu, which means "great capital", and its meaning in Mongolian is Kanbalu, or Kambalu. When the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Beiping became the capital of China again, and its name was changed to Beijing.