Utkarsh Rai

This summer I took my family to China and at the airport in Beijing we realized that over there, all Indians are called Hindus.As also the fact thatmost Chinese arefascinated by Indianwomen likemy wife and daughter because cultural revolution discouraged women from having long hair,wearing jewellery and makeup.

We spoke simple English to our guide, who was a mine of information about the Middle Kingdom. She took us sightseeing and on passing trees from which cottonlike flowers fell, she proudly told us that this would soon be a thing of the past because the government had decided to replace these ‘female’ trees with male ones to avoid inconvenience to tourists. We were in the land where anything is possible.

The Great wall, like any tourist spot in India, was very crowded. The Forbidden City, right in the middle of Beijing, was spread over a vast area. But it paled in comparison with the grandeur of our palaces. The pace of sightseeing was hindered by numerous requests from locals for photo shoots with my wife and daughter, unusual women as far as the Chinese are concerned.

At Xian, the Terracotta army complex is a must-see but the big surprise was the Wild Goose Pagoda. It is associated with Hiuen Tsang, who famously travelled to India in the seventh century. The museum has a collection of articles he carried back from India. Every Chinese seemed to know one of their most famous stories, ‘Journey to the West’, and the “West” in this case means India. Stone tablets bearing Sanskrit verses, along with their Chinese translations, can be seen in the Stone Steles Museum. Clearly, they were intelligently copying back then as well.

It should not be surprising but the biggest link between India and China may be the attitude to daughters. The guide, who was planning her wedding, said the financial burden had shifted to prospective Chinese grooms because of the poor sex ratio.

First Published in Times of India