SHIJIAZHUANG, is a major rail junction that you may find yourself passing through ifyou’re heading south to the Yellow River. At the beginning of the last century Shijiazhuang was hardly more than a viIlage, but the building of the rail line made it an inrpor- rant junction town, and by the 1920s it had a population of ten thousand. Having industrialized rapidly, it’s now an unglamorous, sprawling place that keeps adding parks, squares and department stores as flourishes. It’s known as a centre for medicine and, besides being home to China’s largest pharnraceudcal factory, is reputedly a good place to study traditional Chinese medicine. For tourists, the grave of Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune and the city rnusemn are worth a look, but the best sights - Zhengding’s Longxing Si, the Cangyan Shun Si and Zhaozhou Qiao - are ont of town, though accessi- ble by tourist minibuses which leave in the mornings from a park about 100m northeast of the train station. Shijiazhuang is laid out on a grid with long axial roads, which change their names several times along their course, running north-south and east-west. The main street running east west across town, just north of the train station and served by the #5 bus, is one of the most interesting. Five (rather long) blocks *vest of the station, along a section called Zhongshan Ln, y0u’ll find the Martyrs’ Memorial (daily 6am-Spin), an ordered, sober-look- ing park, containing the graves of the only two foreigners to be honoured as heroes of the Revolution. On the *vest side of the park, the grave of Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor, is marked by an ornate sarcophagus, a photo exhibition, and a statue, identical to one standing in Bethune Square, Montreal. Bethune (1890-1939), whose remains were moved here from Canada at the request of the Chinese government in 1953, was a brilliant, idealistic surgeon, who came to China to help the Communists in the fight against the Japanese after working on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He was pres- ent at most of the major battles of the era, and became a close confidant of Mao when the Red Army was holed up in ~an’an after the Long March. Mao was so impressed with Bethune’s devotion to his work that he later exhorted tile Chinese to “learn selflessness fi’om Dr Bethune”. As one of the naost well- known foreigners in China, Bethune is one reason why many Chinese are well disposed towards Canadians. On the east side of the park, identical treatment is given to Dwarkanath Kotnis (1900-42), one of five Indian doctors who came to China in the 1930s. Staying in the country for nearly a decade, he joined the Communist Party just before his death. Both doctors are celebrated in a small museum at the back of the park; items on display include the exer- cise books in which they practised writing in Chinese and the crude surgical implements they had to work with. Among the large number of photographs are pictures of Bethune operating by torchlight and chatting with Mao. East of the station (and confusingly, behind it), the road becomes Zhongshan Dong Lu, the city’s commercial sector, with a few department stores, the largest 0fwhich, the ostentatious five-storey Bei Guo Department Store, at the intersection with Bei Dajie, is the biggest in Hebei. Overstaffed and full of window shoppers, it’s was once the city’s prentier tourist attraction. Now that h0nour falls to People’s Square, one block east, a jumble of plaques, shrub- bery and kites.

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