Saturday, May 2, 2009

Photos of the Week - Xi'an's Westernization

Here are a few pictures I took of Xi'an's development in the Spring of 2007:


Old man collecting bottles and Starbucks. Nice contrast here.


Walmart. Those little stores are, in fact, still there. They haven't been put out of business by big bad Walmart... yet.


A KFC and the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was built in 652AD. The KFC about 2005.

Xi'an is changing really quickly. It's a pretty amazing thing to witness.

5 comments:

SteveInChina said...

Nope, those little shops disappeared about a week ago. The mess that was left behind has been hidden by a nice wall they've built around it. No doubt they'll build a shopping mall on it. Or, even better - another WalMart.

Mark said...

Didn't realize those buildings had been razed. Wouldn't be too surprised to see a KFC or some other kind of western company go in there.

China Business Success said...

Nice pictures!
I saw the one of Starbucks before I read they were taken in Xi'an, and thought I'd recognized it.. been to Xi'an about a year ago, and as a true westerner, I did hit Starbucks.

I love how things get better for lots of Chinese, but I do hope that some good bits of the 'old China' will remain throughout the country though..there is so much history, so many stories to tell and sites to see.. definitely not worth sacrificing it for something like Starbucks;-)

Mark said...

You know what, it looks like those little stores that were torn down might in fact become a Walmart.

Walmart is getting into the convenient store market in China.

Rhodo Zeb said...

You guys hit Xian at the right time. I was there maybe 5 years ago and it was nice, but the only real foreign outposts were over there on Keji Yi lu or whatever, which was a little like the foreigner areas they used to have in Shanghai.

My buddy went there 3 years earlier and said it was a dirty dump. But a few years later, it was pretty cleaned up. Now Walmart is moving in, and I bet some multinationals have facilities around there...