On which note, I really must run to catch my train. And as for me – I haven’t been there either, but will be travelling in Qinghai and Xinjiang over the next fortnight. Here, his assistant takes an order from a customer (using a QQ like instant messaging system):Īnd continues to tackle with a customer complaint:įingers crossed that Ben will find that long sought-after combination of time and money, and make it to Guilin. Now, the heaps of clothes are as higher*:Īnd there are three new computers in a row along one wall: The first time (which I wrote about here), the room – not far from Beida – was filled with plastic-wrapped clothes, and a single grotty computer in the back. I saw the progress for myself after our tongue-numbing meal, when I went back to his office for the second time. Not bad, considering that – according to Ben’s estimate – 70% of Taobao shops flop. He has hired two assistants (in addition to his sister who also works for him), and just placed a big order with a new factory in Guangzhou, where he gets his clothes cheap. His business is growing: “actually … it’s not doing too badly”, he puts it with an abashed modesty which can only mean his shop doing very well. Guilin, for him, is still just a song and a photo search on Baidu (a Google knock-off). Two years after opening his clothes store on the Chinese eBay, Taobao, Ben still works from sunrise to sunset. Now, running his own online business in Beijing, it’s line two which is the rub: “I think the money might be enough, but now I have no time”. At first, during university in Shanxi, the problem was line one. I want to go to Guilin, I want to go to Guilin, but when I have the money I have no time.īen hasn’t been to Guilin. I want to go to Guilin, I want to go to Guilin, but when I have the time I have no money. He was reminded of the tune when talking (over instant messaging) with a customer who had just been there. It’s called ‘I want to go to Guilin’ (a famously beautiful southern province of China – think the scenery in The Painted Veil). Over a plate of spicy, crisp Sichuanese potato slices, Ben was telling me about a favourite song of his. Now think of the act of blogging as me leaving the address space blank, and instead glueing the postcard to the back of every computer connected to the internet in the world, should the user have the curiosity to look for it. It’s a beautiful corner of the world, where the sun sets at 10pm (I should be two or three timezones before Beijing) and the old town feels more like my imagination of Persia than my experience of China. But don’t think too much of it: for most of the population, life goes on just as it did before and will after. The nerviness this kind of police presence creates reminds me strongly of Tongren, the Tibetan town with it’s own history of unrest, where I’ve just come from. That truck is part of China’s crackdown in advance of the one year anniversary of Xinjiang’s July 5th riots. On the back I scribble in a spidery, cramped scrawl: Not bad for the mail to arrive only a few days later, right? The stamp mark in dated Kashgar, 25th June. (The characters on the truck – more likely PAP than PLA? – read “The happiness of the ethnic people is our desire”.) Here’s the front of my postcard, a quick snap I took surreptitiously out the window of my cab. Only a postcard, and not a letter, as I’m a bit pressed for time.
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