I arrived in Beijing from Los Angeles or Thursday evening and depart tomorrow morning for Nanjing. My stay here was far too brief to take in anything but vague and general impression of the city.

My flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco Wednesday morning was delayed due to the weather in San Francisco by two hours. Thus, I arrived at SFO with just enough time to sprint to the international terminal and get on board my connecting flight to Beijing. The flight itself was fairly uneventful. I was seated next to some quiet (or at least sleepy) twenty-something women. The movies were Spanglish, which is a good movie that I did not watch because I had seen a couple months before, and National Treasure, a bad Indiana Jones ripoff that I did watch.

When I got into to PEK, I took a bus to the subway, and the subway to my hotel, the Novotel Xinqiao, which sits conveniently on Chongwenmen station, about a kilometer and a half southeast of the Forbidden City. My first impression of Beijing was how developed and modern a city it seemed. According to the Rough Guide, the "three big buys" for Beijing households in the 1970's were a bicycle, a watch, and a radio; in the 1980's, they were a washing machine, a TV, and a refrigerator. To judge by the ads I've seen, they are now a mobile phone, a digital camera, and an MP3 player.

As Lonely Planet reminds me, though, 80% of China's wealth is concentrated among its urban 20%. The Chinese Embassy reports that the per capita annual income among peasants rose in 2004 to about 3,000 yuan (about $250 if you ignore the under-valuation of the yuan), which implies the per capita income among city-dwellers is about 48,000 yuan (about $4,000). For reference, I'll probably have spent about 2,500 yuan on housing, food, and various other expenses over the course of my three-day stay in the city.

Friday morning, I walked up Qianmen Dajie toward Tiananmen Square and then attempted to get into the Forbidden City. This should have been a simple matter, but I did not discover the underground walkways that cross the largest streets, like Tiananmen, until I had walked east of the City. After crossing under Tiananmen, I walked through a large, well-landscaped park, in which I passed a number of people practicing tai chi barehand and sword forms. I had thought that this was the Park of People's Culture, directly to the southeast of the Forbidden City, but somehow I ended up detouring through a hutong to the east gate of the City, which, Rough Guide to the contrary, is closed to the public.

The hutongs are the old neighborhoods of narrow alleyways that fill the intersticies between Beijing's grid of broad, pedestrian-unfriendly boulevards. (A note on traffic customs in Beijing: Pedestrians have lower priority than bicycles. Bicycles have lower priority than cars. Cars do not yield to bicycles or pedestrians, even when turning right on red; rather they honk and may slow down slightly to allow the pedestrians to dart out of the way. The sole purpose of crosswalks in Beijing is to concentrate the flow of the pedestrians, for the only safe way to cross a street here is in a large pack. Beijing drivers make east coast drivers look like pedestrian-philes.) The hutongs, though a bit rundown, are often fully of vibrant shops, as well as foot and bicycle traffic. The contrast between the two Beijings -- the new one of the automobile and the old one of the hutong -- is quite unlike the class and race divide I observed in South Africa, where third-world shanty towns exist alongside first-world suburbs. The way the hutong and modern Beijing intermesh is rather reminiscent of something out of Harry Potter, a world of traditional magic (sometimes literally -- hutongs are a good place to buy traditional remedies) nestled against the one of mobile phones. In many places, hutongs are being plowed down to make way for cars and better plumbing, a somewhat ambivalent comment on the relationship between the modern world and tradition.

As I drew near to the Forbidden City, street sellers were drawn to me, an obvious foreigner, like moths toward the Moon. To my shame, I was convinced to buy a couple of picture guidebooks, to the Forbidden City and to the Great Wall, for 100 yuan. I have since gotten better at dismissing these people, and nowhere are they as aggressive as outside the tourist trap of the Forbidden City.

When I was the City, I encountered a group of a few dozen elementary school students dressed in blue and yellow uniforms, all quite cute. One asked me, in fairly good English, if I could take a picture with him. I assumed that he wanted me to take a picture of him, but no: he wanted to have his picture taken with the foreigner.

The City itself was impressive from the inside, but perhaps the more impressive view came afterwards, when I climbed up the hill in Jingshan Park and was able to look out over the City form above. At this point, the batteries in my camera died -- perhaps a good thing, since it made me question why I had been taking so many pictures of objects already extremely well photographed. (I had, after all, already bought a picture book of the Forbidden City).

I then walked along a street of restaurants and clothing shops to the Drum and Bell Towers, and from there through the hutongs (they are much more pleasant to walk along than the major streets) to the Yangzhe Lamasary and the Confucian Temple. I spent some time examining the rather extravagant lamasary and the rather less extravagant temple and then had lunch across the street from the temple, at a good vegetarian restaurant with a 50 yuan buffet.

At this point, I was fairly tired, in part likely due to jet lag -- it was nearing midnight in California -- and in part because I had walked at least ten miles in the morning. I therefore took the subway back to the hotel and rested a bit, then headed out to Wangfujing Dajie to get a look at modern Beijing. Wangfujing Dajie is a north/south street east of the Forbidden City, about one kilometer of which has been largely pedestrianized. It is one of the largest outdoor shopping malls I've seen and could easily have come from the US or Europe.

This morning, I walked to Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven, about a kilometer south of the hotel. Tiantan sits in the center of a giant park, at least a square kilometer in area. When I arrived at the park a bit after 8 am, there were already many groups of people there; some were playing raquet ball or hackey sack; many others were practicing tai chi. Most of the tai chi practitioners appeared to be Yang stylists doing bare-hands or sword forms, often with music to provide a tempo. A number also did some forms involving paper fans, which I would have hesitated to identify as tai chi except that sometimes the same group did all three types of forms, and I saw at least one person practicing a sword form with a fan.

I settled under a tree near one of these groups and practiced my own forms for forty-five minutes or so. By the time I was done, many more people ahd arrived at the park for Saturday morning recreation. A number engaged in quasi-spontaneous music groups, which consisted of a director and a core group but drew in many additional singers from the passers-by.

After my visit to the park, I stopped by the Natural History Museum, which was quite recently renovated. Its exhibits, though unintelligible to me aside from their English subtitles, looked well-done and more up-to-date than the Smithsonian's.

In the afternoon, I went to Bauyun Gong, a Taoist temple and headquarters of the national Taoist association. The temple housed about a dozen shrines to various deities or groups of deities. Strangely lacking, so far as I could see, from among these deities was Lao-tsu, but I guess I don't really get the concept of religious Taoism -- it seems to be just a rather general polytheistic religion with a rather unclear relationship to philosophical taoism. There were a fair number of devotees there who came to make offerings of incense and kowtow before the gods.

After the trip to the temple, I wandered around the city a bit. I visited Niu JIe, the fairly uninteresting heart of the Muslim quarter. I had hoped to see the mosque there, but it was undergoing rather severe reconstruction.

Tomorrow I move to Chaohu City, and the Triassic Biotic Recovery conference starts there on Monday. After three days there comes a five day field trip to Guizhou province to look at the Great Bank of Guizhou, a large carbonate platform deposited in the late Permian and early Triassic. At that point, perhaps, I'll get to see how most Chinese live.

I arrived at Nanjing airport around noon on Sunday, where I was met by a driver, a volunteer English student from Chaohu, and Dave Bottjer from USC. I was the second symposium attendee to arrive at the airport; conveniently, Bottjer was the first, which meant there was somebody at the airport who would recognize me.

Chaohu City is about two to three hours by car from Nanjing. While I had thought Chinese driving was scary as a pedestrian in Beijing, it was even scarier as a passenger. The cars generally lack functional seat belts. The brakes, while probably perfectly functional, are seldom used; the horn is used in their stead, in combination with a techique for passing slower cars that involves pushing them to side of their lane or crossing double-yellow lines. Bottjer, jet lagged from the twelve hour trip from Los Angeles, feel asleep in the car. I joined him in sleep to avoid a nervous breakdown.

Chaohu sits upon a big lake, from which it gets its name. It is much less developed than Beijing; its downtown, while large, urban, and full of new construction, has a run-down feel common in many Mexican cities. The International Symposium on Triassic Chronostratigraphy and Biotic Recovery was the first international conference held here, and it's a big deal for the city, which, as the mayor told us on Monday, is a small city, the center of a metropolitan region of only 4.5 million people.

The conference took place at the Tang Shan Hotel, the newest Western-friendly hotel in the city, several miles from downtown. The hotel room, which costs 150 yuan a night ($18), was comparable to budget hotel rooms in the US. The tap water was not drinkable, but the hotel conveniently provided water coolers in the rooms. While my room did not have Internet access, the rooms in the hotel's newer building do. Phone cards from Beijing did not work in Chaohu, but several street vendors down the street sold 50 yuan phone cards (20 minutes to the US) for 30 yuan.

The food was abundant and quite good. We had buffets for every meal; whereas my breakfasts in Beijing consisted of a couple of pastries from the corner bakery, I probably ate as much for one breakfast at the Tang Shan as I did for all my breakfasts in Beijing. (Plus, they had red bean paste buns at breakfast, which I failed to locate in the Beijing bakery.) I managed to find plenty of food while avoiding red meat; many local specialties are based on fish from Chaohu Lake.

The symposium began on Monday with a ceremony featuring the mayor and dignitaries from a couple of relevant state bureaucracies, as well as the conference organizers. James Ogg, secretary-general of the International Commission of Stratigraphy, was accorded a level of respect he must have found rather bemusing; I suppose local offices view secretary-general of the ICS as something akin to secretary-general of the Communist Party. The local media were present in abundance. As I had happened to sit in the front row, I think my picture was taken more times than it ever had been before. (Two photos of me made it on to the front page of the May 24 Chaohu Daily!)

I managed on Monday to go on a couple short walks in the area of the hotel before the English-speaking volunteers noticed. As I left for a walk, one ran after me and insisted I return to the hotel compound. It was dangerous, he said, to go on a walk by yourself. For one thing, it was a big city; for another, if you go too far in the direction I was heading, you might encounter wild animals. I managed to abide by the restriction for about 24 hours before I started going on solo walks again. I've lived in urban areas all my life, I wasn't terribly concerned about tigers prowling between the local police station and the local high school, and I can't abide restrictions on my freedom of movement or freedom of solitude.

Tuesday morning, we had a field trip to examine the local candidate for the Induan-Olenekian substage boundary Global Standard Stratotype and Point. (The Induan and Olenekian are the first two stages of the Triassic.) We took four buses to the locality, and our precession turned into something of a parade for the town. Police officers stopped traffic along our route, and many locals lined up to watch. We attracted similar attention at the boundary section itself.

Today the conference is wrapping up. Early tomorrow morning, we drive to Nanjing. From Nanjing, we'll flying to Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province and pickpocket capital of China, then head to Luodian to begin our field trip through the Great Bank of Guizhou. Guizhou is one of the least developed provinces of Han China. If, as I would guess, average income in Chaohu is a quarter of that in Beijing, that in Guizhou is probably a quarter that in Chaohu; I may yet get to see how most Chinese live.

On Wednesday, we flew from Nanjing to Guiyang, and from there drove to the town of Laodian, in southern Guizhou province. While the standard of living in Guiyang appeared similar to what it had been in Chaohu, the scene in the countryside was far different.

Guizhou is a fertile province, and nearly every square meter with a slope gentle enough to allow it has been terraced and farmed. There is no, or almost no, wild land here -- just vast areas of rice paddies and corn fields tended by peasant farmers with the assistance of water buffaloes. It is clear when camping is not possible in Han China: you cannot camp without being in someone's field. Horse-drawn carts are common. Outside the population centers, houses are made of wood or stone, just as they were made in past centuries. The peasants follow their ancient tradition of ancestor worship; one allowed us to peer inside her household shrine. The scene is little changed from the feudal era, save that electrification is nearly universal, and that satellite dishes and mobile phones are starting to spread.

Foreigners are still a novelty everywhere in this province. When we drove through towns, we became the center of attention; when we got out of our buses, locales -- most enthusiastically the children -- crowded around us.

The drive to Laodian took us all of Saturday afternoon. We stayed in Laodian at the Shenquan Hotel, a brand new luxury hotel out of place in its current setting. The "China 2008" hangers in the closets may give a hint as to its rationale. The hotel has an Olympic-size swimming pool, and though the digital phone system doesn't allow outside calls, perhaps it will by 2008.

When we arrived, a banner welcoming the "Symposium on Triassic Chronostratigraphy and Btotic Recoverty" (sic) was hung over the hotel entrance. The mayor and vice-mayor of Laodian, which has a population of 300,000, hosted a banquet for us. (I did not find the food as much to my liking as at Chaohu -- too many pork dishes and too much mystery meat.)

On Friday, we examined three Permo-Triassic boundary section on the platform of the Great Bank of Guizhou (GBG), and on Saturday, we hiked up a basinal section. The structure of the GBG is incredible -- the Bank has been folded seventy degrees on one side of a long syncline, so that from an aerial perspective it is as if a cross-section of the Bank had been placed flat on the Earth.

At the boundary sections themselves, fossiliferous Permian limestone is replaced microbialitic carbonate with a mottled texture; a bit farther upsection, stromatolites are visible. I collected a few oriented samples, though the extreme humidity of the province sapped my energy. I also discovered that Paul Montgomery had drilled both a platform and a basinal section for paleomagnetics, but had not had time to analyze the platform section since moving to Chevron-Texaco. The magnetostratigraphy from the basinal section was summarized in our guidebook, but remains unpublished.

Tomorrow, after some fieldwork in the morning, we drive back to Guiyang. I fly tomorrow night to Shanghai, and the next day return home.

I'm now back in Los Angeles, after a 40 hour journey from Laodian by way of Guiyang and Shanghai. I did not see much of Shanghai -- just the freeway and the two airports -- but the fleeting impression it left upon me was of a highly developed city. When I got into the airport, I almost immediately received three text messages on my phone: one welcoming me to Shangahi, one with a weather forecast, and one wishing me a good trip and inviting me to call Shanghai Mobile at 1860 if I needed anything.

A maglev train runs between the two airports and downtown, although I did not take it; I instead took a taxi to from the domestic airport to the Ramada at Pudong International Airport. The driver charged me 250yuan ($30), which would have been a decent price in the US, and therefore was probably rather high for Shanghai; but it was past midnight, so I did not care.

The Ramada was a top-of-the-line Western-style hotel. After a week of greasy, meat-rich food from Anhui and Guizhou, the breakfast buffet came as something of a relief: a Western/Chinese hybrid, with multi-grain conchee, smoked trout, yogurt, fresh fruits, and freshfruit juices. I don't think I'll be eating Chinese food for a while longer.

Shanghai Pudong Airport is well-designed, with the gates housed beneath domal skylights. BIzarrely, the same government-run International Shop, with teas, jewelry, and other items typically found in duty-free shops, is present in almost identical form every five gates or so. One of the bookstores was selling a copy of Newsweek, notable for its cover story: "Life of the Party: With a glitzy new cadre school and a 'rejuvenation' campaign, the Chinese Communist Party is scrambling to remain relevant in a fast-changing society" -- not exactly the sort of magazine I'd expect to find on sale in a government-run airport in China, particularly when juxtaposed upon a headline from the day's Shanghai Times, which someone seated in front of me on the plane was reading. It read, "[Chinese president] Hu pledges to build harmonious socialist society."

My trip through China has left me with two strong impressions. First, there a lot of Chinese. It's something everybody knows intellectually, but to understand it at a viscereal level you need to get out of urban China and get into the middle of nowhere, say rural Guizhou. There, you realize there is no middle of nowhere -- the country is full.

Returning to Shanghai emphasized my second impression, which I had first had in Beijing. Even though most Chinese may been living a lifestyle not radically different (at least before the introduction of electricity, television, and motorcycles in the last decade) from that of Chinese a century ago, even though the populations of Beijing, Shanghai, and other develped cities may be only a small (but rapidly growing) fraction of the population, that's still a lot of people. When my Lonely Planet guide was written, about 250 million Chinese lived in cities; according to today's International Herald Tribune, that number is expected to reach 400 million within a decade or so. That means there will soon be a population in China the size of the US population with a lifestyle comparable to that of the US population.

Moreover, the urban Chinese appear to take education more seriously than we in the US do at the moment. That's why a large fraction of graduate students in the US are of Chinese origins; that's why museums in Beijing and Nanjing have spiffy new displays on the origin and evolution of life, while the Smithsonian is letting the Discovery Institute pay $16,000 to screen a film promoting Intelligent Design at the Natural History Museum.

These facts are not without geopolitical implications. We should not be surprised if, in the next few decades, a multipolar world returns. The US ought to be doing the best it can to promote the development of Chinese civil society and cooperative international institutions while we still have some power to do so.