A Photo Journey of Our March Trip (III)
18 days and 6 places - Part Three: Tianjin and Shanghai
This March, my husband and I celebrated our birthdays with a trip to China, visiting places that had long been on our wish-to-visit list.
In 18 days, we traveled to six different cities/towns. There is so much I want to write, but I am not quite ready to dig deep into my thoughts. So, I want to start telling the stories about the journey through the lens of my phone camera.
This is the third and last installment of the series. You can read Part I here and Part II here.
天津 Tianjin
Tianjin is one of the four direct-administered municipalities in China, along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing. It sits on the shore of the Bohai Sea, just 75 miles southeast of Beijing. The name 天津 literally means “Heavenly Ford”, or the “Port of the Emperor”.
In 2005, my husband and our then-10-year-old son visited China for the first time. From Beijing, we hired a taxi to visit my husband’s relatives in Tianjin. The two-hour car ride was mostly filled with silence—the scenes of poverty outside the car were a muffled shock to us. We saw one crumbling farmhouse after another along the country road; not many people were seen working the fields; there were no big farming machines like those we were used to seeing in the corn fields of Nebraska. No highways, and no tall buildings.
Twenty years later in 2025, my husband and I took the high-speed train from Hangshan, and arrived at one of the three train stations in Tianjin. (If we were to take the same Beijing - Tianjin trip today by high-speed train, the trip would be less than 30 min.) On the car ride from the train station to our hotel, my husband was once again silent. This time, he was overwhelmed by the high-rises and (what you could call over-) development of modern residential and commercial areas.
We came to visit my sister and her husband, and the Tianjin Juilliard School—the sister institution of the famous Juilliard School in New York City. The school partners with Tianjin Municipal Government and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (USA), offering Pre-College and graduate studies, in addition to a long list of continuing and public education programs. It is the first performing arts institution in China to offer U.S.-accredited Master of Music degrees.
The state-of-the-art campus was designed by the same architecture firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that did the 2009 expansion of Juilliard’s iconic New York campus. It comprises separate and yet interwoven spaces for performance, research, and interactive exhibitions, in addition to classrooms, private teaching studios, practice rooms, and communal spaces.
The school welcomed its first class of Pre-College students in 2019, followed by its inaugural class of graduate students in 2020. The programs continued sending their graduates all over the world, despite the pandemic. Its current graduate program has 100 students from 14 different countries and regions.
Extra:
The hotel general manager—a “Shanghainese American” who married a “Taiwanese American”—found out about my birthday, and, that I was also a “Shanghainese American” who married a “Taiwanese American”, sent me this wonderful chocolate grand piano birthday cake and his hand-drawn card. How sweet of him!
上海 Shanghai
To a city gal with Shanghainese running in my veins, no trip to China is complete without visiting my hometown Shanghai. There was no exception this time. Shanghai bookended our trip.
There is a “tongue-in-cheek” joke among the Shanghainese: to us there are only two types of Chinese in China—those from Shanghai, and those from elsewhere in China. The humor has a hint of arrogance but is nonetheless a reflection of the “Shanghainese pride”.
The Shanghai that I grew up in—the so-called “French Concession”, the classy part of Shanghai:
The (too-popular) symbols of modern Shanghai - the colonial-style Bund and the financial district across the Huangpu River:
The types of food I miss the most - street food and sophisticated dining - savory mooncakes with pork and Peking duck slicing in action:
Traveling by train, the high-tech way:
Dialogues with Turner: Evoking the Sublime, an exhibit made possible by the latest collaboration between the British art institution Tate and the Shanghai Museum of Art Pudong (MAP). What a valuable opportunity to be introduced to the extraordinary artistic world of Joseph Mallord William Turner, one of the greatest British Romantic painters of the 19th century, in Shanghai.
Extra:
The summary of my Shanghai stay - Instagram Reel style.
This marks the end of the 3-part photo journey of my March 2025 China trip. I hope you get a taste of my travel experience through the camera lens.
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The trip is so nice! Sightseeing, visiting family members, revisiting the hometown/the house you grow up, and not mentioning all the food you ate there! Life is good! 👍
YI, I went to college with Charles Renfro who led the design on your school. He lived next door to me fir a year.