The rail spur from Hangzhou through Shaoxing ends at NINGBO (Calm Waves), an important economic hub and ocean-going port in the northeast corner of the province. Despite being a port, the city is actually set some 20km inland, at the point where the Yuyao and Yong rivers meet to flow down to the ocean together. All around you'll see flat watery plain and paddy fields, and, along the heavily broken and indented shoreline, the signs of local salt-panning and fishing industries. Ningbo today would hardly be worth a special journey, except that it is a vital staging post for the trip to the nearby island of Putuo Shan . If you're passing through, however, there are one or two features of interest, in the interesting Tianyige Library and in the monasteries in the countryside beyond the city.
Ningbo possesses a short but eventful history. Under the Tang in the seventh century, a complicated system of locks and canals was first installed, to make the shallow tidal rivers here navigable, and at the end of the twelfth century a breakwater was built to protect the port. From that time onwards, trade with Japan and Korea began to develop massively, with silk being shipped out in exchange for gold and, under the Ming, Ningbo became China's most important port. There was early European influence, too. By the sixteenth century the Portuguese were using the harbour, building a warehouse downstream and helping to fight the pirates, while in the eighteenth century the East India Company began pressing to set up shop. Eventually, in 1843, after the Opium War, Ningbo became a treaty port with a British Consulate.
The town was swept briefly into the Taiping Uprising in 1861, but thereafter lost ground to Shanghai very rapidly. Only since 1949 has it begun to expand once more, and the river has been dredged, passenger terminals and cargo docks built, bridges completed and facilities generally expanded to handle the output of the local chemicals, food-processing, and metallurgy industries. However, despite the fact that Ningbo today is considered one of the boom areas of China, it still wears a rather dilapidated, provincial ai
The City
Downtown Ningbo is divided in three by the confluence of its two rivers. Connecting the western part of town, the area of the original walled city, with the northern part, the former foreign concession, is the Xinjiang Bridge . The neighbourhoods flanking each side of the bridge are the best places in town to soak up a bit of atmosphere; take bus #1 from the train station. Just south of the bridge, on its west side, is an interesting dried fish market, while on the northern bank, you'll find fishing boats, sailors and all the trappings of a busy harbour. Also on this side, but east of the bridge, a few of the elaborate porticos and verandahs of the old treaty port still survive, flanked by impromptu waterside fish markets, while directly south of the ferry terminal stands a seventeenth-century Portuguese church , built for proselytizing purposes but which today serves the local Christian community. The inside is nothing special, with stained-glass depictions of the Twelve Stations of the Cross, but one of the caretakers should be more than willing to take you around on a short tour if you're interested (daily 6am-6.30pm; free). Viewed from afar, the church steeple and the surrounding low-rise Mediterranean-style houses would not look out of place in Southern Europe.
The modern town, similar in sights and scale to other Chinese cities, stretches out south of the Xinjiang Bridge. Two blocks south of the bridge, the main commercial street, Zhongshan Lu , cuts across the big Dongmen Kou junction from east to west. The eastern section, across the Jiangsha Bridge , is an upmarket shopping area complete with several American fast-food restaurants, but it's the western stretch that's the heart of the modern city, a broad avenue lined with modern buildings housing Ningbo's big department stores. About 1km west of Dongmen Kou, Zhenming Lu, a street full of half-timbered houses and arched trees leads north past the Drum Tower to Zhongshan Park , a small open space which teems with martial arts enthusiasts in the early mornings. Half a kilometre west of Dongmen Kou, it's worth taking a walk down Kaiming Jie, which runs south off Zhongshan Lu. This street is crowded with little shops and stalls, and has some of the better places to eat local seafood. About 1km down here, near the junction with Jiefang Lu, you'll find the fourteenth-century Tianfeng Pagoda , which you can climb for views.
The oldest part of town is an area to the southwest around Yue Hu (Moon Lake); take bus #20 from just south of the Xinjiang Bridge, or it's twenty minutes' walk north of the train station. Little more than a large version of a village pond, the lake has an enclosed area for swimming and the usual crowd of people doing their washing on the stone steps. Much of the area's charm has recently been razed, with the construction of a sprawling new park on the western shores, but Ningbo's best tourist attraction, the Tianyige Library (daily 8am-4.30pm; ¥12), survives in the middle. Built in 1516 and said to be the oldest surviving library building in China, it was founded by Ming official Fan Qin, whose collection went back to the eleventh century and included woodblock and handwritten copies of the Confucian classics, rare local histories and lists of the candidates successful in imperial examinations. Nowadays you can visit the library's garden and outhouses, some of which contain small displays of old books and tablets. It's quite a charming place and the gold-plated, wood-panelled buildings, their bamboo groves, pool and rockery still preserve an atmosphere of seclusion, contemplation and study.
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