Hangzhou field trip

One part of the course called Asian Business Research was a 3-day field trip to Hangzhou city, located about 200km southwest from Shanghai. Compared to Shanghai the city felt quite small but there are still over 4 million inhabitants. We made this trip over a week ago but I’ll write something about it now..

So we started the journey on Wednesday morning at 8am and drove for about 2 hours to the biggest university in Hangzhou called the Hangzhou Normal University where we had a small tour around the campus with the Vice-President of the uni and some local students and after that a nice lunch with them. After the school visit we visited China National Tea Museum. After a short, guided tour we had the opportunity to walk around the tea plantations. Unfortunately the weather was a bit rainy so we didn’t stay there for a long time. During the evening we had quite a lot of free time that we spent at the hotel which was really nice.

On Thursday morning we headed directly to the Xiling Society of Seal Arts that was kind of a museum/workshop of various seal-related learning’s and arts. In the afternoon we made a company visit at Chiatai Qingchunbao Group, a very large pharmaceutical enterprise that produces both traditional Chinese medicines and Western medicines. Having worked a few years back for a pharmaceutical company in Finland the visit was quite interesting. In the evening we went to a Song Dynasty theme park. It was like a small town arranged in the original Song Dynasty style and the evening ended with an acrobatic dance show called ‘The Legend of Romance’.

On Friday morning we visited one of the largest telecom and network companies, Eastcom. The company’s vice-president gave us an 1-hour long presentation about the company and its products. After the presentation we walked around the plant so that we got and idea how the production processes run and we also saw many finished products. In the afternoon we had a cruise on the very long Beijing-Hangzhou Canal. The cruise’s start and end point was a rising luxury resident area. After the cruise it was time to head back to Shanghai..