Guiyang: 2004-09-07
Today was the day of the rules seminar that tried to make a start with uniform go rules for the world. I thought it would not last all day, but I was wrong, it went on until 5:00 pm. It could even have gone on much longer, but everybody was exhausted by that time. I am not going to say much about it. I could only do justice to what everybody said by giving all my notes here; that would be way too long. But there was an in principle agreement that uniform rules would be benificial to the games and that there should be a follow up meeting to discuss things further.
Lunch during the seminar. Left to right Mrs Nam, Mr Kim and Mr Ing. Mrs Nam is a 1 dan professional and a professor at the Myongji University in Korea. Mr Kim Su-chang is a 9 dan professional and the Korean rules expert. Mr. Ing is the president of the Ing Foundation in Taiwan that sponsors the tournament.
After the seminar we visited the building of one of the potential future sponsors: Guizhou Televion. Guizhou is the province where Guiyang is the capital of. Mr Li Xinmin, the director, gave us a tour. It is a partly unfinished building of 22 floors. It is huge. We saw the theaters and facilities. One of the plans is to have the next tournament in the theater and to broadcast the games life.
Hosted on the ground floor is an internet cafe where actually most, if not all the kids are playing computer games. It is a lot bigger than in the picture, but even then I didn't see anybody playing go there. Only one game of Chinese Chess.
In the control room an impressive array of modern technology. We learned that there is only one channel in China that broadcasts Go. It is a pay tv channel.
The directors office is on the 22nd floor. Interestingly the elevator only went to the 20th floor, you have to walk up two more steps to get there. The office has a balcony with a beautiful view over the centre of Guiyang.
Guiyang centre (1) -- yes Mao is still there. Note the building cranes. It is estimated that 60% of these kind of cranes are now in China.
Guiyang centre (2)
After the tour we had our dinner in the employees' restaurant of the broadcasting corporation. It wasn't self service, but much more relaxed than yesterday. And I finally understood why the dinners are short: because they take more time to lunch.