The drive from Xiamen Airport to Anhai has changed since we last took it in early 2000. The pot-hole laden pseudo road has been replaced with a bona fide superhighway, complete with tollbooths along the way to help pay for it. A trip on the road from Xiamen to Fuzhou used to take 8 or 9 hours; now, we’re told, it can be accomplished in 2, thanks solely to the improved road conditions. And the generic Chinese cars and trucks have largely been replaced with imported vehicles and more modern-looking Chinese vehicles. And there are oodles more billboards along the road.

In the late 90’s and 2000, I recall, the few billboards along the road were for high-grade items like Hennesey cognac and the latest brand of washing machine. Now they seem devoted almost exclusively to the pillars of the local economy: stone and stoneworks, marble and granite suppliers, as well as some general trading sites like alibaba.com, with text in both Chinese and English.

Fujian Province has always been more outwardly focused than most other provinces, more business-minded too. In fact, the Chinese end of the so-called “Marine Silk Road” ended here in nearby Quanzhou, I believe, though things on that route kind of dried up when the local river silted shut a couple or few hundred years ago. “Let’s hope the Information Superhighway doesn’t clog to a halt,” I imagine the folks who’ve bought billboard space are thinking.

On the way into Anhai, on the outskirts of town, we passed the Anping Hotel, where we had our wedding ceremony in February 1997. It’s common here for folks to spread the legal “paperwork” marriage and the whoop-de-dooper marriage ceremony and banquet fairly far apart, though we were longer than most, over a year in between.

The only changes I noticed in town had to do with a greater number of multi-story private homes–and a couple monumental enclosed gardens that some of the extremely rich have built for themselves here. Otherwise, the streets and alleyways looked mostly the same: filthy and unattractive on the outside, grand and sometimes nearly palatial behind people’s locked gates.

China is “a vast and diverse country,” as the travel brochures tell you, and the town of Anhai certainly has its own unique flavor. But we’ll save that for another entry….