Like Dalian, Dandong is located in the Liaoning Province in the Northeast and it's about a 4 hour bus ride away from Dalian. As far as Chinese standards go, Dandong is a small city- there are only about 800,000 people that live in the urban area. The main reason people visit Dandong is to see North Korea. Dandong is the largest border city with North Korea, and with just a small river in between the two countries, it is very easy to see it. Now I admit I'm just going to copy and past a few factual things from wikipedia for some more background...
Maps and artifacts suggest that the area has been settled since the Zhou Dynasty. The area became known as Andong (安東), county in 1876. Andong, which stands for pacifying the east, was so named to reflect the power projection that China had over Korea at the time. It was occupied by Japan after the start of the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894. During the Manchukuo era it was the capital of Andong Province, one of the fourteen provinces established by Manchukuo. Then, in 1907, it was opened as a treaty port. It adopted its present name on January 20, 1965, which means “red east,” to avoid connotation of its previous name, which was considered imperialistic by some. Recently, the city has been gaining influence in this region of China because of its market with North Korea and the government’s future plans to develop the city into a special “Border Economic Cooperation Zone” for export and import, in order to expand the country’s ability to conduct trade.
Pretty interesting stuff :) Upon arriving in Dandong, Bell and I immediately felt that the people and atmosphere here were very different than Dalian. Dalian is a fairly international city and many tourists flock to the beaches here in the summer so the Dalianese are a little more used to seeing foreign faces. On the other hand, in Dandong, the foreign population is very small and they have way fewer tourists. When Bell and I got off the bus we were bombarded by people saying hello and trying to get a good look at us. They were so aggressive. I'll get a cheeky hello every now and then in Dalian and some people do stare but this was like everything all at once! It makes me wonder how we would be received in an even smaller city here. Tons of people wanted to take pictures of and with us too- I swear like 200 random Chinese people must have pictures of Bell and I on their cameras, especially when we had our Chinese outfits on (see left). I only got about 2 pictures on my camera in my outfit because I was so overwhelmed from being in photographed with other people's cameras and having to pose with them!I'll write more in the next post about seeing North Korea, but here is a picture that shows the striking difference between Dandong on the right and Sinuiju, North Korea on the left.
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