In England the Daily Telegraph reports The Bund, Shanghai’s much-photographed historic waterfront, is to get a radical face-lift.

The 100-year-old Waibaidu steel bridge across Suzhou Creek is to be removed, renovated and then replaced.

The city’s government has begun a £280 million scheme to divert the motorway that separates the Bund’s neo-classical buildings from the Huangpu river into a tunnel, and demolish the flyover that disfigures the view.

The government wants the work finished by the time Shanghai hosts the 2010 World Expo.

Thirty of the buildings have protected status, while the renovation of the bridge will turn attention to the Astor House Hotel and Shanghai Mansions, Art Deco haunts of the city’s pre-war glitterati.

It is that last sentence that attracts the attention. The Astor House Hotel is one of the city’s neglected treasures and a fair bet will be that it will be restored to it former glory and, sadly, the prices will zoom up to reflect this. A price worth paying for the Astor is part of the history of Shanghai. Consider:

It was the first modern hotel in China’s history, which hosted many celebrities from all over the world.
The hotel lit the first electric lamps in China on July 26, 1882.
In the same year, 1882, came the earliest performances of the circuses from Western countries.
In 1901 the first phone call was made from the Astor.
The first Yellow Pages in the city listed the number of the Astor House Hotel ‘200,’ the first phone used in Shanghai.
On November 5, 1897, a grand dancing party was held in the hotel to celebrate the 60th birthday of the Dowager Empress Cixi.
In December 19, 1990, the first stock exchange in China after 1949 was started at the hotel.

And the guest list is just as remarkable. In 1897, former American President Ulysses S. Grant. In 1920, English philosopher Bertrand Russell. In 1922, Alfred Einstein. 1931 and 1936, Charlie Chaplin.

It was originally called the Richard Hotel, after the American sea captain of the same name who was its first owner.

In 1860, the hotel was sold to Henry Smith, who changed the name to the Astor House Hotel.

1927, an eight-year-old girl named Peggy Hookham came to live at the Astor House with her family. Hookham’s father was the chief engineer for British American Tobacco and while she was here, the little girl continued her ballet lessons, studying with the Russian teacher George Goncharev. She later became Margot Fonteyn.

In 1923, the Astor House Hotel and other Shanghai hotels (including the Palace Hotel) were acquired by Hong Kong Hotels Ltd, making them Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd.

Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels were owned by the Kadoories, a Sephardic Jewish family that grew to become one of Shanghai’s wealthiest. And went on to open other stylish hotels including the Peninsula in Hong Kong.

The Astor Hotel is crying out to be restored to its former glory. It must happen. And before 2010 when the world arrives for Expo 2010.
Source: Pujang Hotel and a lot of research

Well-known female Chinese folk singer, Wan Shanhong sings a song dedicated to Jiuzhaigou at the opening ceremony of the 4th Jiuzhaigou Ice Waterfall Tourism Festival at the foot of iced Pearl Shoals Waterfalls.

Jiuzhaigou in the winter becomes a fairyland of glittering and translucent ice waterfalls, snow-caped mountains and sapphire lakes covered in white.

This festival will last until March 31, 2008. Located in the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Region in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province, Jiuzhaigou is reputed in China as the Heaven on earth and was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992.
Source: China View

The Sino-U.S. memorandum of understanding (MOU) on tourism means that Chinese will be able to travel to the United States in groups on tourist visas. Currently, the United States issues only business visas to Chinese. The travel business expects a surge of travel.

A manager with China International Travel Service (CITS), China’s biggest travel service, said, ‘Everything will be in place only when we know how the MOU will be implemented. Some U.S. travel agencies are coming to us as well.’

Most travel agencies interviewed plan to promote tours linking Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego and Hawaii, at an average cost of RMB25,000 yuan (US$3,351) per person.

Liu Yanwen, manager of U.S. section in China Travel Service (CTS), China’s second largest travel service, said, ‘Although very inviting, the U.S. tour will keep some potential travelers away because of the tight visa interview procedure and the comparatively high expense.’

The European Union does not require visa interviews for tourists in groups. A tour covering 12 European countries costs about RMB16,000 yuan (US$2,162).

And Liu Yanwen said the transport costs in Europe are also lower than those in the United States.

She said, ‘Many Chinese people are curious about America as they are already familiar with it through Hollywood movies. So I am quite optimistic about the U.S. travel market.’

Source: People’s Daily Online

An official said reports of Beijing hotels ramping up prices for next year’s Olympic Games are based on a misunderstanding of Chinese negotiating techniques.

Local media reports in the first half of this year said hotels in the Chinese capital were charging up to 10 times their usual rates for next August.

Penny Xiang, deputy director of Games Services for Beijing Organising Committee (BOCOG) said, ‘It is a game between the hotel owners and the market. The reason is that there were many enquiries at that time, which released a signal that the market demand was extremely high.’

Penny Xiang said the exorbitant rates are mainly a sales strategy of the hotels and reasonable deals were available if buyers kept haggling.

She said, ‘As far as I know there are not many hotels that have actually signed contracts with clients, and those that have signed contracts are actually not at very high price.

‘The Chinese way of dealing with something we’re not sure about is to wait and see, especially when many hotel owners thought they could get a better price next year.’

But city officials and Olympics organizers contributed to the rush for hotel rooms earlier this year by urging visitors to book early in order to guarantee a room.

Penny Xiang said the Organising Committee had already booked 70% or more of the rooms in 122 top-ranked hotels closest to the Olympics venues. Those rooms are reserved for visiting Olympics officials, sponsoring companies and the media.

For all of the remaining hotel rooms Penny Xiang said that she was confident the market would settle down closer to the time the Games begin.

She said, ‘When the demand and supply reach a balance, it will not be possible to keep demanding such high prices.’

Beijing is expecting 500,000 foreign visitors and more than a million domestic tourists in a daily flow of about 280,000 during the Games.
Source: Washington Post

Shanghai is awaiting approval of mainland China’s first Disneyland, and the theme park could be (this is far from definite) built on an island in the Yangtze River

A Shanghai city spokeswoman, who like many Chinese officials refused to give her name, said Shanghai was waiting for approval of the project by the central government. She would not comment further.

Walt Disney, which has set up office in Shanghai, has repeatedly emphasized that for now it is focusing on developing its theme park in Hong Kong, which opened in 2005 and, in truth, is not doing nearly as well as Disney would wish..

Disney Asia-Pacific spokeswoman Alannah Goss said, ‘China is a priority for the entire company. We have a continuing dialogue about a variety of Disney initiatives, including television, motion pictures and consumer products, of which theme parks are only a part.’

Perhaps. Possibly. Maybe.

The state-run magazine Oriental Outlook said in this week’s online edition residents have been moved off farmland in Chuansha, a part of Shanghai’s Pudong district near the city’s main international airport, to make way for a 6-square-kilometer tract along the city’s airport expressway.

The magazine quoted local economic committee official Qian Weizhong as saying, ‘Once we have central government approval and a concrete plan and Shanghai Disneyland can begin construction right away.’

The park would be built after 2010.

But will it make money? Probably not at the prices Disney likes to charge. Hong Kong Disneyland charges between US$37-$45 a ticket. So the people instead go to Ocean Park which is enjoying the highest attendance in its 30-year history. And you do not have to take the ferry to get there.

It’s about to get worse for HK Disneyland because nearly half of all visitors come from the mainland. Open a Disneyland on the mainland and you have lost a lot of visitors.
Source: The China Post

The number of overseas visitors to Beijing reached 3.2 million in the first nine months of this year, up 12.6% from a year earlier.

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics said in a statement that the figure breaks down into 2.8 million foreign tourists, up 14%, and 400,000 tourists from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, up 4.1%.

The United States, Japan, the Republic of Korea remain the three largest sources of overseas tourists to Beijing, with the numbers standing at 444,000, 435,000 and 341,000 respectively, up 19.4%, 22% and 7%.

It is thought that ‘Olympic factors’ have mainly boosted the tourism growth. The amount of publicity that Beijing is getting in the foreign press is unparalleled.

More visitors are expected to come to Beijing next year when the games actually happen.

According to BOCOG, which is running the games, China will host 280,000 athletes, referees, journalists and other workers from more than 200 countries and regions.

The official estimate is that about five million overseas tourists and more than 120 million domestic travelers will visit Beijing in 2008.
Source: China View

China plans to enlarge Kanas Geological Park into a huge national park in the vast northwest Xinjiang region that will eclipse Yellowstone National Park in the United States in size.

We are talking very, very large.

Yellowstone Park is the oldest national park in the world and spans an area of 3,472 square miles (8,987 km²), The Kanas Geological Park, now about 385 square miles, would be expanded to about 10 times that size in the next few years by incorporating nearby tourist regions and grassland. Which would neatly get it past Yellowstone in sheer size.

And in beauty and interest it again rivals Yellowstone. It is 620 miles north of the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi and includes China’s deepest alpine lake, snowcapped mountains and grassland.

More than 900,000 tourists visited the park in the first 10 months this year, a 32% rise over the same period last year. Again, that is challenging Yellowstone which runs about two million visitors a year.

What Kanas has that Yellowstone does not is something akin to the Loch Ness Monster. There is even a video of it, albeit somewhat blurry. Our illustration, previously unpublished, shows the beauty of Lake Kanas with the deep-water monster sunning herself in the spring sunshine.

In a sense this is bad news. Fog Cutter plans to open a Fatburger in Beijing at Solanain April 2008. Fatburger plans to have approximately 25 locations in China by the end of 2010, all company-owned.

Like who needs a new fast food joint called Fatburger? The menace is in the name.

It is a little more complicated than that.

Fatburger is a fast-food restaurant chain that operates in the United States and Canada. Yes, it is a fast food restaurant, the food is cooked and made to order.
Former professional basketball player Magic Johnson was one of the owners of the parent company — not that it makes the food healthy.
Customers are given a number after ordering and the food and milkshakes are delivered to the customers’ table.
Burgers can be ordered fried or flame grilled.
All Fatburger locations have a jukebox which runs perpetually for free. Honest.
Fatburger was featured in the 1995  movie with the splendid title,  Don’t Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood. It is also one of the favorite eating places of Ice Cube and is mentioned in his 1993 single It Was a Good Day.
Whenever you put money into the tip jar, the cashier will yell ‘Fat Tip!’ I am not sure of the Mandarin equivalent.

Fatburger is not high on my list of eating places I must try. But then, I have never been in a Hooters. Nor yet a Kentucky Fried. I am plainly a complete Philistine.
Source: Business Review

To develop tourism in the Three Gorges Dam region China will invest RMB26.9 billion between 2007 and 2020. The funding is aimed at developing tourism in the region to provide jobs for local people.

The forecast is this investment will generate a RMB20 billion return, or 24.7% of the area’s gross domestic product, by 2020.

Li Chunming, vice-governor of China’s Hubei province, is reported as saying that booming tourism will provide jobs and economic growth without posing a threat to the fragile ecological environment.

The money will be used to improve tourist ferry services along the valley, build roads and docks to form a traffic network and improve other tourist facilities around the Three Gorges Dam.

Spanning the Yangtze River, the hydroelectric dam is the largest structure of its kind in the world, more than five times the size of the Hoover Dam.
Source: Opodo

26.9 billion RMB ($3.5 billion) will be invested in China’s Three Gorges Dam from 2007 to 2020 to develop tourism to provide jobs for people relocated for the project.

Tourism will be a pillar sector in the Three Gorges Dam region and should generate24.7% of the area’s GDP by 2020.

The Three Gorges tourism development plan has been issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and has been approved by a group of experts in tourism and city planning.

The fund, financed by government allocations and outside investments, would be used to upgrade the tourist ferries along the valley, build roads and docks forming a traffic network, improve tourist facilities and traffic infrastructure such as accommodation and catering, preserve historic sites and the develop culture-oriented attractions.
Source: People’s Daily Online