Tianjin Century Clock 天津世纪种

The area around the Tianjin Railway Station is really very pleasant. Based on several experiences when visiting China’s train station, they were never pleasant, I have learned to avoid train station whenever I can. The stations are usually crowded with people with large bags. It is already difficult enough to be carrying your own luggage but having a lot of competition makes it worse. The worst experience was in Chengdu’s train station. It was the first time we’ve been there and it was already dark, with not enough time to try to figure out how to navigate the station, we had to rush through that massive number of people at the station and figure everything as we go. I hoped I would never need to go through that again. Thankfully, the Tianjin Railway Station is very well designed. The plaza is very large, hopefully large enough to handle all those people.

Maybe the local government of Tianjin learned a thing of two about improving the train station area, since it seems that they have done a very good job of keeping the area pleasant. There is a major roundabout to the left of the train station and there is a very striking structure at the middle. There was a clock. Now, this was not the first time I have seen a clock in China, but the clock here was quite attractive. Normally, the Chinese would have put a tower with a clock on top. In the case of Tianjin, they made sure that the clock would also be pleasing to the eye. The Tianjin Century Clock as it is called is all clock and no tower. The large face of the clock is surrounded by bronze sculptures of the twelve signs of the zodiac, quite strange to see in China. The clock has two large arms, other than the one on the clock face with the sun and the moon on each hand. I assume that those two represent the location of the sun and the moon. I didn’t linger long to find out if the sun would also go down during sunset as I have a plane to catch.

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