Queshi Island
A couple of weekends ago I went to Queshi. Now, before anyone puts a post on, I know Queshi isn’t an island, it’s only a river. But y’know, it feels like the sea and in fact it nearly is the sea, and people have to cross one of two bridges to get in and out of Shantou, so I often here of Queshi being called an island by English speakers. And it looks like an island and you have to take a ferry to get there if you don’t have a car.
The ferry is 1rmb/person, or 2rmb for a motorbike. They leave about every 20min from the port, it’s called the 码头 (ma3 tou2) or 轮渡 (lun2 du4). It’s on Haibin Road (海滨路), opposite the outdoor pool and diving centre. Every driver knows it.
Anyway Queshi is lovely, once you get past the mad frenzy to get you on a vehicle it’s slow and quiet and pleasant and green. Straight ahead is the old British embassy, now a government building. If you turn left at the embassy you’ll find a school and a navy hospital. The navy hospital has a specialist burns unit which treated my friend when his back was badly burnt and the treatment was excellent. They have this special medicine. Anyway.
Turn right and go up the hill and eventually you’ll get to the best middle school in Shantou, where all the brainy/rich kids go, and also the opportunity to climb up the surrounding hills. You have to pay about 10rmb to get in. The first one has the most stuff, caves, aerial runway, tobaggan run, golden Buddha, pagoda on top. If you don’t like too many people, which I don’t, keep walking up the road and go up some other hills.
I went up one of the other hills with two friends from the hospital late in the afternoon. We found some army ruins - the man having a walk at the top said it was army, he didn’t know whose. Then he walked down with us through the winding winding paths, there are caves there too. It’s a good thing he came with us otherwise we would’ve got very lost and we didn’t have that much time. The man had a season ticket (whopping 60rmb/yr) and came up here about twice a week to chill out. He was cool. We climbed many steep upwards and downwards paths. It was a nice afternoon.
Oh and an interesting thing: The character ‘que’ in Queshi(？石) is only found in Shantou. It won’t be in any of your dictionaries, so I can’t write it. How about that.
Maggie Ad posted on March 30th, 2006 under: Fun place | Tag: countryside, Haibin Road, Queshi |
礐石(queshi)is really a beautiful place,I love it.
And I think maybe the character “礐” is the font style in the ancient days.
Shantou(Chaoshan area) is a remote area during the feodal times,so the local language contains many ancient prose,which we don’t use today.It is said that the linguists who study with the ancient Chinese characters mainly focus on the local languages of meizhou(梅州)、chaoshan(潮汕) and minnan(闽南，fujian),because they don’t change too much ,while the others change a lot between the modern and the ancient time.
Hey Chaos if you ever read this,how do you spell that word in pinyin?
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QUE, ah,ah,it’s hard to type it .
I think it can be found in the “kangxi(康熙) dictionary” ,maybe.
i tried QUE on 紫光, but it’s nowhere to be found. anyway thank you
To type 礐, don’t use Pinyin, it’s way too hard…
and I can find it in 康熙字典 and 辞海..
Queshi in a hill,not an island.
So I think you should call it Mount. Queshi,like most students in our school.
By the way,may I have your address?Or telephone number? Or QQ?
I hope you can make a friend with me.
My QQ is 834366771