Nanning aka: 南宁

My family and I lived and worked in Nanning for 12 months in 2002. We taught English at Nanning Foreign Languages School and lived on campus in a teacher apartment. It was a fabulous experience which I’d highly recommend. Before going, we sold virtually all our worldly posessions (kept 8 tea chests at home, took 8 with us). It was refreshing to start with almost nothing and live with just the very basics of life. We had few possessions to weigh us down and we appreciated absolutely everything we had and received.

The people of Nanning are extremely kind and friendly. We travelled everywhere on local buses (1 Yuan per trip) and so we got to spend a lot of time with locals. We also went places with our students, other teachers and the school administrators. Because there are so few foreigners in Nanning (less than 200 when we were there, in a population of 3 million), we were treated like visiting royalty a lot of the time. It really was amazing.

Nanning is just hours from the most beautiful scenery in the world. The Chinese say that Guilin (200 km north) is the most beautiful city in the world. And they say that Yangshuo (half an hour further) is even more beautiful than Guilin. And it’s hard to argue they are wrong. The mountains of Guilin and Yangshuo are picture postcard gorgeous and rise straight up out of the plains into the sky. A lot of the time they are shrouded in mist and they are dotted with small temples.

Nanning itself is a rural commercial centre. Not sophisticated like Shanghai, or bustling like Guangzhou, or even historic like Beijing. It is the creation of the bureaucracy, as the provincial capital was moved here from Guilin by the Communists. Its population is about 3 million.

I was happy eating at one of the hawker stalls when a friend told me that I was actually gnawing on dog meat. Apparently it’s a specialty here.

I had just come from there, having attended the China ASEAN Dance Seminar. It’s quite hard to get around on your own if you don’t know how to speak Mandarin and it’s not a place to go for bargain shopping (though the grocery was fun to visit). But our hosts were very gracious and took us to eat at fantastic places and made sure our stay was very comfortable, also there’s a wealth of culture there, especially in dance. So if you like to look at beautiful parks and buildings and if you love chinese food and if you like to see the best of chinese culture, come to Nanning!

small city but modern.
nice.

I can’t really explain it but something about Nanning felt like home.

If you want a SE Asian experience when you go to China, go here. It’s hot, muggy and friendly. It’s a rather small city but there’s plenty to do and see (history, culture, religion, architecture and nature.