Tsinghua, the Silk Market, and Wangfujing

Yesterday was a pretty eventful day leaving me worn out by 9pm.

The morning involved meetings with China’s National Natural Science Foundation (where unnatural is the “social sciences”, hmmf) and a representation from Tsinghua (sounds like Ching Hwa) University which has been a traditionally engineering based university.

Our meetings have all followed the same pattern, a nice power point presentation explaining the founding, mission, organizational structure of the agency followed by a Q&A session. The latter meeting was particularly interesting as the presenter discussed the difficulty that their professors have with understanding intellectual property rights in China. This is interesting because Tsinghua is one of the oldest universities in Beijing and their university is one of the largest producers of patent applications in China. I hope to discuss IPR in China more with the presenter sometime next week.

After the talk, we toured Tsinghua’s campus which is quite beautiful and large, with 15 dining facilities and a pond surrounded by weeping willows.

Next, a group of 12 of us decided to go to the Silk Market near Embassy Row (Jiangguomen Dajie). I was floored to discover that what had once been an alley of stalls with vendors hawking their wares had been all moved into a large shopping complex. Now Chinese and tourists alike could do their haggling over skirts, Chinese arts and crafts, and “Prada” wallets in the comfort of AC.

I was excited that my haggling skills have much improved and I was able to score to skirts, a Mao shoulder bag, and a dressy top for USD$32! We had hall worked up an appetite so 8 of us grabbed a cab over to Wangfujing’s night food market. Wangfujing has developed a lot in the past five years and feels more like Hong Kong or Shanghai than Beijing. There were upscale boutiques, an Outback steakhouse and TCBY, and tons of locals and tourists walking around. The night market was not much changed, perhaps slightly more organized. It was a highlight of the day- stalls and stalls of interesting foods from exotic seafood and animal parts on sticks and dou hua (steamed tofu) to pineapple rice and dumplings. I tried an crispy crepe-esque dish filled with stirfried egg and greens, a “Chinese hamburger”, and eel on a stick. It was delicious although not super cheap by Chinese standards- 20 RMB or USD$2.5. One of my friends tried a pupa and he said it was quite tasty. Maybe next time. . . .or not.