CHANGCHUN has a historical notoriety deriving fi’mn its role as Hsinking, capital of Manchukuo, the Japanese-controlled state from 1932 to 1945 that had Xuantong, better known as Puyi, as its emperor. Now a huge, sprawling industrial city based on coal, petroleum and iron, it’s also renowned for its many colleges, its movie studio and the Number One Automobile Factory, producer of the ubiquitous Liberation Truck and Red Flag automo- bile, resend reintroduced, though this time without a wooden interior and aimed not at cadres but at China’s new car-crazy middle class. A stroll south from the train station down the main artery, Renmin Dajie, to B. enmin Guangchang (People’s Square) and then west toWenhua Guangchang (Culture Square) is a good, but long, introduction to the city. Culture Square is the second-largest in the world (after Tian’anmen), and was to be the site of a Japanese palace. Today it’s a large patch of grass with statues of a muscular naked man, standing with his arms raised in liberation, and a reclining naked woman marking its centre.

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