Xiamen (aka Amoy)

Xiamen, as far as I can tell, has only one claim to fame: it's the home of the famous Overseas Chinese patriot Tan Kah Kee. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tan, he is basically the second most famous and revered Overseas Chinese after Sun Yat-Sen. Born in Xiamen, he left to seek his fortune in the plantations of Malaya, and worked his way up from nothing to become the extremely wealthy owner of a great variety of plantations. A great philanthropist, he donated primarily in the field of education, endowing countless schools across Malaya, Singapore and China. Disgusted with the corrupted and incompetence of the Chiang Kai Shek regime, he broke with them and turned to Mao Zedong's Communists, basically bankrolling the Chinese Communist Party with his immense fortune. He was able to see the fruit of his investment as the CCP conquered China, and probably most fortunately, he died in 1961 at the ripe old age of 88, before the Communist revolution started turning really sour in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and before the Cultural Revolution.

We spent the morning looking around at the immense campus that Tan built, contained a number of schools and universities- it may be perhaps described as a mega-campus. It also contains a beautiful park he built, where his mausoleum is located. It's filled with carvings that depicts scenes of education, hard work, Chinese history, and the Chinese revolution that Tan worked so hard to see fulfilled. The carvings are not just decorative, but are meant to be educational, especially for the villagers who lived in the area. Around his mausoleum are intricately carved scenes depicting his life, and I was very happy to see the Singapore River shown in one scene- he spend a lot of time in Singapore and his legacy lives on in many schools and buildings.

Apart from that, the tour through Xiamen was basically highlights of the Xiamen Special Economic Zone. We drove by factories, light industry, assembly plants, the port, and so on. Xiamen, unlike the other Chinese cities I've visited, really has little else to offer but a very modern and prosperous city, with little to distinguish it from the cities in Taiwan just across the Taiwanese Strait. In fact, if the signs had not been in Simplified Chinese, it could very well have been Taiwan. I've never been in a Chinese city that didn't have the weight of history hanging over it, but Xiamen for the most part feels like it's only been here a very short while.