Nanjing Road, Shanghai, March 2024 © Elizabeth Morrell
ACE Tour Director Elizabeth Morrell recently visited the ACE office to talk about her years of travelling to China, and about her thoughts on returning to the country for the first time since 2019. The blog below is transcribed from a video recorded with Elizabeth, which will be released soon.
I've been visiting China since 1976, when I went there as a postgraduate student for a year, and ever since then I've been going back to China regularly. If you ask me what draws me back - well, you can never know enough about China. I don't think anybody ever can.
Being there in 1976 was a time of a great change - Chairman Mao had just died, so there was great political and social change. Old writers who'd been banned for a long time were rehabilitated, and classical music from the west was allowed again. It was just so interesting to be an observer of a society changing at such a rapid pace. If you see Shanghai now and if you visit, for example, the area called Pudong, in the 70s there were only a few fields and a few old houses and it wasn't anywhere that anybody went. Now you've got all these incredible skyscrapers, and they've actually recently moved the main museum from the centre of Shanghai out to Pudong.
The other thing that keeps drawing me back is curiosity and love of the language and the calligraphy, which I like to practice now, now that I've got a bit more time. And then I've also over the years developed a lot of friendships. Those of us who started working in tourism in the very late '70s, early '80s, we've grown up together, so those friendships go back a long time.
I went to China at the end of March and I visited Shanghai and Beijing, and I have to say I went with a bit of trepidation. But actually it proved to be a very good and refreshing experience, because I met lots of old friends and colleagues and we reconnected. We discussed together the kind of weirdness and craziness of the period of the pandemic and how it made us feel, and how it's clear that, like us, many businesses changed their direction. Many people who used to work in tourism have already found different roles. My former colleagues, many of them have retired, so was all together a really pleasant experience.
I really wanted to see what life was like on the streets. It wasn't about going back and seeing famous old sites, but it was more like, what's the atmosphere like on the streets? For example, I was there at the end of March just before a very famous public holiday, which is called the Qingming Festival, often called the Grave Sweeping Festival. It's when people remember their ancestors, which is a very important part of Chinese cultural life and their psyche. So it's a public holiday and there were lots of places that were quite busy. The streets in Shanghai at night were full of people shopping, taking photos.
I was surprised in a way that there was still quite a lot of high-end foreign names of foreign brands. And there were lots of sort of shops selling all kinds of Shanghai local cakes and sweets and lots of neon lights everywhere. And then people dressed in all sorts - young people dressed in quite crazy hot pants and long red socks, whereas when we went to Suzhou, which is famous for its gardens and canals (it's often called the Venice of the East), we found that a very popular activity was young girls or teenage girls, they would go to rent a traditional Chinese costume with a lovely flowery head dress, and they'd wear lots of makeup and then they would walk along the canals and take photos of each other and generally try to recreate what Suzhou might have been like a few centuries ago.
I think people were happy to see tourists again. Travelling by train is an incredible experience there - in the last 30 years, China has built a network of high speed trains. That means, for example, when I was there I went from Shanghai to Beijing by train. My train left at 10 o'clock and I was in Beijing by 20 past 2:00. Whereas in the past that journey took at least 18 hours in an overnight train! So it means that we can visit or join all these places together very very easily by train, so people have a sense of seeing China at eye level rather than getting on the plane and just turning up in a different part of the country.
To see full details of Elizabeth Morrell's ACE tour to China in 2025, click the button below:
All images © Elizabeth Morrell
