As we walked up a big hill to see the Great Wall of China, our shopping skills were honed as we were barraged by vendors trying to sell us T-shirts, translations into many languages of Mao’s Little Red Book, chopsticks, postcards and many, many other goods.

When a tourist showed even a slight interest in an item being thrust into his/her face, as evidenced by a glance or even simply a failure to push the item away, the vendor holding it would name a price in yuan, the Chinese unit of currency worth about 15 cents.

If this price evoked no response, the vendor would then thrust a calculator into the tourist’s hands to ask for a counter offer.

Silent bickering with the calculator as intermediary continued until the tourist did one of two things: Buy the product or walk away. Usually the latter resulted in the vendor punching a much lower number in the calculator and following the prospective buyer in hope of an eventual sale.

After being offered a set of five pairs of beautifully carved wood chopsticks for $50 (I still hadn’t exchanged my money to yuans, but the vendors were glad to take U.S. dollars), I felt rather good about getting them as a gift for my husband at around $30. When I saw a student buying an identical set for $20, I set out on a mission to match that price and was thrilled to get the same set for $15!

Not included in the written plans of our daily activities were trips to several government facilities: A cloisonné factory (Beijing), two pearl factories (Beijing and Shanghai), a jade factory (Shanghai), a silk factory (Suzhou), the Silk Embroidery Research Institute (Suzhou), the Tea Research Institute (Hangzhou) and a jewelry factory (Hong Kong).

Most of the tours were enlightening.

We saw the painstaking process of making cloisonné by hand, and we learned how to determine if pearls are real and why some are more valuable than others. We were shown ways to distinguish real from fake jade.

We observed and some of us handled silk worms, which feed on mulberry bushes that farmers must tend around the clock during two or three different two-week periods of the year so that they can keep the leaves absolutely dust-free to produce the finest quality of silk.

We saw artisans using single strands of this high-quality silk to create masterpieces of silk embroidery. Even on close inspection, one on display looked like a color photograph of Princess Diana and another like a good reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

We were served locally grown green tea, a very different type than typically served in the U.S.; it smelled like spinach! We were told of its many health and beauty benefits, and lovely young tour guides promised we would have figures as nice as theirs if we drank it regularly.

Each of the very interesting tours of the government facilities culminated with a tour of an equally expensive gift shop full of high quality merchandise. We were given much more time to shop at these factory stores and government institutions than we were at small, private shopping centers.

Even though the tour guides claimed that these government-run stores have the best quality merchandise, we soon learned that their prices were very much inflated.

The tour guides emphasized that an added incentive given to shop in them is that the merchandise is guaranteed, but that seemed meaningless to a tourist unlikely to be able to return.

We soon figured out that the tour guides wanted us to shop in these stores because of the commission they made on goods bought by gullible tourists.

The initially unexpected stops at government factories are apparently a mandatory part of every tour, as even the weakened American dollar is appreciated as much in the associated gift shops as it is by the various independent vendors we saw.



Victoria Czarnek accompanied two of her children, musicians Laura and Nicholas, on the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra tour of China in June. She lives in Richland with her husband, Robert, and three children, Matthew, Laura and Nicholas, and is a math instructor at UPJ.