A Visit to Tianjin

BF and I visited Tianjin on Saturday. We were lucky enough to have one of our co-workers (QL who grew up in Tianjin) as a great host and guide.




Picture of QL and TF with Driver Shen.
The city is less than 100km from Beijing. This is another one of those cities that I bet most of you have never heard of yet it is the third largest city in China behind Beijing and Shanghai. The PRC governs China at the following levels: Provinces, Autonomous Regions (like Tibet), Municipalities, and Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). Tianjin is one of four self-governed municipalities along with Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing. Like all the Chinese cities that I have been too there is a lot of building and construction.

We have been here nearly a year and I did not realize how large Tianjin was so it caused me to do some population research. Here are some interesting gacts that I found. First lets look at population by agglomerations (include a central city and neighboring communities linked to it (e.g.) by continuous built-up areas or commute). Th. Brinkhoff: The Principal Agglomerations of the World, http://www.citypopulation.de, 2007-04-21

Chinese cities with world rank and populations size (NY is #4 at 21.8 million and Tokyo is #1):
Shanghai #9 - 17.3 Million
Guangzhou #16 - 14.5
Beijing #20 - 12.7
Shenzhen #28 - 9.0
Wuhan #30 - 8.6
Tianjin #36 - 8.0

For city proper population, according to Wikipedia I found the following:
Shanghai at #8 with population of 9.8MM; Beijing at #16 with 7.4MM and Tianjin at #28 with 5.1MM (with Mumbai being the most populated city and NYC at #13).

We visited an antique furniture store that also can reproduce pieces but decided to wait. We we did a little shopping where BF bought some art supplies for her Chinese watercolor painting (more to come on this in an upcoming blog). We had a nice lunch and picked up some Tianjin local snacks. Then we visited QL's high school. That was really nice and impressive campus. Then we drove around the concession area, drove QL over to his parents home where he stayed the night and then we drove back (horrible highway with lots of accidents which is not unusual). It was a nice short visit.