Yet more photos of Zhizhang Bridge!
Category: China
I am American. I moved from Singapore to China in 2022.
Notable vehicles (Q1 2025)
Ever since arriving in Hangzhou in December 2022, I’ve been noticing stuff about cars here, and I’ve been meaning to share my observations.
Therefore, here are some facts about the automotive landscape in China (especially Hangzhou):
In addition to imported vehicles and vehicles produced in cooperation with foreign automakers, China has a lot of domestically produced car brands. I’d heard of them because I edited news articles for China Knowledge, an English-language news portal offering business, financial, and real-estate news about China. But to see all the different designs in person is dizzying. Never knew there could be so many different shapes of taillights. (LEDs have changed the world.)
There are “cars” on the road that are tiny, some with only three wheels. These glorified golf carts are mysteriously ubiquitous despite not being road legal. (Apparently, they have recently been officially banned in Beijing.)
Some courier vehicles have no driver. These may start to replace the much more numerous three-wheeled courier vehicles that do have drivers. (But who unloads them, I want to know??? Seems like you’ve still got a last-mile problem.)
There are many consumer model vehicles with AI self-driving features. “Already today, a quarter of all newly registered vehicles in the Chinese market are equipped with a Level 2 driving system for highway scenarios.”
There are often mechanical shelves for cars in underground parking garages to increase capacity. (They are super annoying to park in because you have to back in, and you have to do it very precisely, because there’s only about 6 inches of space on either side of the car. Miss and you damage your tire or rim—happened to Siqi twice.)
There are no vanity license plates, but sometimes the license plate kinda spells something by accident. My brain constantly wants the alphanumeric inscriptions to be real words; they’re usually not. Electric and hybrid cars have green/white license plates, whereas petrol cars have blue license plates. There are a lot of EVs in Hangzhou, maybe 20%-30%. (Here’s a 2022 report with some statistics.)
The highway infrastructure continually amazes me. It’s new, it’s massive, and from what I’ve seen, there’s no graffiti.
Intrigued? See below for 25 photos of vehicles and vehicle infrastructure.
Fluorite from Wuyi
Item description / significance
This is a group of seven fluorite display objects, each on a wooden stand:
- A mostly green polished sphere with a purple stripe (stand can rotate)
- A smooth translucent purple lizard carving
- A rough purple and green lizard carving with white crystals
- A bright green translucent “kryptonite” natural crystal formation
- A sparkly purple natural crystal formation
- A polished slice of purple and green fluorite with white “feathers”
- A purple three-legged “wealth toad” carving
Bought where
in Wuyi, Zhejiang Province, China, in a shop inside a residential complex
Age and origin
basically new, from Wuyi
What I like about them
There are so many kinds of fluorite… each of these pieces has unique characteristics in terms of color, texture, shape, size, and interaction with light, thus they attracted me for different reasons. The polished flat slice is the thing that struck me first, and seemed unique in the shop; the pure bright green crystal caught Siqi’s attention; the sphere has a purely symmetrical shape and smooth texture that minimizes distraction from the stone’s colors; I wanted a piece that showcases chaotic sparkly square crystals; and I wanted at least one animal carving.
Other notes
I bought two lizards even though I usually don’t buy two similar items. The logic is, if I buy two similar things, then I will probably wind up liking one more than the other, and the less-liked one will cause regret by seeming redundant. I decided that the lizards were both spectacular enough, each in its own way, and that I’d regret leaving either of them behind.
See below for more on how we found the shop where I got all this stuff, and photos of the items. In particular, the crystal on the far left really is bright green, though it doesn’t look green at all in the photo above!
“English” on signs in Wuyi and Jinhua
Below are five funny English text samples I saw on a brief road trip with my husband Siqi and his parents to Wuyi, Zhejiang Province (a city with a population of 460,000). On our way back to Hangzhou, we passed through Jinhua, Zhejiang Province (a city with a metro area population of 1,258,000).
Notable vehicles in Wuyi and Jinhua
See below for photos of 8 vehicles that caught my attention.
Wuyi Old Town
We visited the “old town” retail street in Wuyi for lunch and dinner. See below for photos.
Wuyi Fluorite Museum
There’s a trip.com page about this place, and a couple of stilted English-language news articles that mention it, and that’s all.
Hello, Wuyi Hot Spring Fluorite Museum!
See below for info on 4 Guinness World Records related to fluorite, and photos of the minerals on display.
Continue reading Wuyi Fluorite Museum
Trip to Wuyi, Zhejiang Province
I live in China. I’ve had the thought that while I’m here, I should look into buying minerals that are mined locally, since presumably such treasures can be had for a fraction of the price they sell for after being exported.
I had the impression that China is known globally as a source of fluorite. I did an online search, and went to a geological museum in Hangzhou, and learned that the county of Wuyi (population 462,462), which belongs to the city of Jinhua, has fluorite mines and a fluorite museum. Therefore, during the Chinese New Year Holiday, I went with my cooperative husband and in-laws to Wuyi in search of beautiful stones. I assumed, since Wuyi has fluorite mines and a fluorite museum, that it also had shops selling fluorite products. If it does, we couldn’t find them! Nevertheless, our road trip shopping quest was successful.
The trip is documented in this post and five others:
- We visited the museum, which had some really beautiful stuff in it.
- Subsequently, I bought a veritable trunkload of hunks of fluorite.
- We walked around in Wuyi’s “old town” shopping/eating area.
- I spotted some interesting vehicles during the trip.
- I took photos of some interesting “English” signs during the trip.
We stayed two nights (February 1 and February 2) in the Vienna International Hotel in Wuyi. There are… 26 miscellaneous photos from the trip below.
“English” on signs (January 2025)
I understand almost no written Chinese. But my eyes and brain still pay attention to text in my environment in China. The result is that English text jumps out at me wherever there is any. English text appears even in places where there are few if any people who might be expected to read it. And since there are few if any people who do read it, getting it exactly correct is not a priority; thus it doesn’t tend to turn out exactly correct, though usually it’s clear what was meant, just from the context.
The fun is spotting surprises.
Surprises include signs that give instructions that I usually don’t see on signs; signs that are so badly translated that the meaning is totally lost; signs from The Department Of Signs That Say The Opposite Of What They Mean; signs that display lorem ipsum or other placeholder text; strange ways of writing familiar ideas; spellings that reveal how people write or pronounce English words when they don’t really know which letters and sounds should be there; and grammar, capitalization, and punctuation mistakes that highlight how difficult English is from the perspective of someone whose language follows different principles altogether.
(As you can see, much fun is also in the analysis!)
Meanwhile, English words on clothing can be surprising because they aren’t necessarily expected to mean anything at all! In the English-speaking world, my impression is, the people who create or wear clothing decorated with Asian writing are mainly anime/manga geeks who’d be likely to know what it says—although, to be fair, there are amusing corners of the internet dedicated to photos of mirrored, error-ridden, insulting, or nonsensical Asian-language tattoos, which you’d think people would be more careful with than clothing! But in Asia, many people wear stuff with English words on it, and even if they can read it, maybe they don’t always bother to: the English is just decoration.
Below are three samples of weird English: two safety stickers (those are almost always good for a laugh) and a garment featuring decorative (rather than correct) English.
Places visited in 2024
Siqi and I visited 2 European countries and approximately 9 cities in China in 2024. I took thousands of photos on my phone! The road trip that Siqi and I went on with my parents was particularly special. See below for an illustrated summary of where we went when.
