Word: tourists
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...poesy, blood, sweat, glory and incongruity as the riven country that greeted Marco Polo. The temples and tombs, palaces and pagodas and gardens, majestic mountains and mighty rivers, art and artifacts as old as civilization: they are all there, glittering, tangible and not quite believable. Off the usual tourist track are the ramshackle tenements, mud-walled village cottages and the grinding labor of the peasant, equally hard for the Westerner to comprehend. They will all become picture postcards of the mind, but on first encounter they are closer to hallucination than reality...
...tourist is prepared for the pyramids or the Parthenon. But the Great Wall of China? More than 2,480 mortised miles of esplanade, built over the bodies of 300,000 serfs and some of the world's ruggedest mountain terrain, to no ultimate military purpose. On a windswept turret of the wall completed in 214 B.C., in a 500-year-old pavilion of the Forbidden City or Soochow's leaning Tiger Hill Pagoda (it has a 3¾° tilt), the visitor is not so much awed as numbed. Who were-and are - the people who could construct...
...hands of all ages are out to greet them, all smiling and hand-clapping (it beats weeding). The F.F.s, after Ni haos! and handshakes, are waved toward basins of cool water and stacks of fresh towels. Then they troop in for the Brief Introduction, the ritualistic prelude to any tourist attraction...
Some of the most attractive handicraft objects are to be found at small stores off the tourist track: lacquered woven bamboo handbags, hand-painted nesting boxes in all shapes, ceramic poudriers that could be used as cigarette boxes, silken parasols, cloisonne bangles. Many of these eyecatching, easily stowed artifacts are sold in the U.S. for ten times the going price in China...
BANKS. They execute most of the orders for companies and also trade on their own account. An American tourist exchanges $100 for marks at a bank in Frankfurt; the bank can hold the dollars or sell them for other currencies, as it chooses. More important, a French cooperative, for example, deposits in Credit Lyonnais $1 million received from U.S. importers for Bordeaux wine; the bank can sell those dollars for other currencies if it wishes. Banks have a cold-blooded view of the potentialities. Says Jean Bourg, head of the currency department at Credit Lyonnais: "We take advantage of small...