Tongling is located on the banks of the Yangtze River, in  Anhui Province, China.  It is a small city with a population, listed in the year 2000, of 286,255 people.  Tongling has been a mining center since the 7th century.  Most famous for it's copper mining, Tongling is also famous for it's reserve for the baiji "dolphin".

For more info see our Tongling Links

The following are wonderful pictures and  beautiful descriptions of the city our children were born in.  Most people adopting from Tongling, do so in Hefei and never see Tongling.  This makes the following pictures and words even more precious. 

If anyone else has traveled to Tongling and would like to send a description, story or pictures... Please send to website@adopttongling.com.      We very much appreciate anything you may want to send us.

We adopted our dear Maia Tong Fan on January 12, 1998. She was 20 months old.   We decided to travel to China 10 days before our travel group so that we could spend a bit more time seeing the country.  We spent a few days in Hong Kong and in Shanghai.  Then we flew to Hefei and checked into the hotel (Golden Anhui) to leave most of our luggage (we did keep all of our paperwork and money with us).  

We then took the funkiest bus we've ever been on (no heat, holes in the floor...) on a slow 4+ hour ride to Tongling. The bus rattled and wobbled side to side and stopped frequently to let people on and off. Even with long-johns, hat, mittens..., I was very cold!  It was a little embarrassing because most of the locals did not even have hats on and did not seem to be chilly at all.  (On our way back to Hefei, our guide, who was mortified that we had taken "that" bus, put us on a very nice, heated (!) minibus, complete with shock absorbers, that took only 3 hours.)  

We are really glad that we traveled so "close to the ground" because we spent the rest of our trip in fancy hotels. The people were extremely friendly, especially when we brought out our picture book with photos from our families, our house, town, and our referral photo of Tong Fan.... with descriptions of the pictures in Chinese. It was like a passport into people's hearts. After that, we were treated as if we were Tongling Ren (Tongling people).  We saw beautiful farmland, some gorgeous mountains, people walking water buffalo and tending fields, booming roadside construction, and the impressive new Tongling bridge over the Chiangjiang  (sp?--Yangtze).   Everywhere we looked, new houses and storefronts were going up.  We spent three days and two nights in Maia's home town.  We met wonderful people, were invited to an artist's apartment, watched and videotaped him painting a rat as a gift for our daughter (who was born in the year of the rat) and another painting of a Tongling statue, bought a couple of huge paintings from him (one of our guides also did some calligraphy for us), went to see the outside of the orphanage in the cold rain, shopped in the local department store (I even won the store lottery that day and was presented with 10 bars of fancy Japanese soap!) and spent a truly memorable afternoon at the Tongling Tea House visiting with our new friends and then sharing an eight course meal (they ordered; we treated them).

 Tongling is the ancient bronze capital of China and they are very proud of it, although the city today looks very modern.  It is a fairly well-off industrial city with chemical, textile, and bronze factories. They are also proud of being a potential site for a captive breeding project for the very endangered Yangtze River Dolphin (Baiji Tun).  As of 1998, they had not been successful in capturing any of the few remaining dolphins for captive breeding.  It doesn't look good for the dolphins in the long run, I'm afraid.  There are very few remaining (estimates of 50-100).

Tongling has a local beer called Baiji beer (quite good)!  They also have some beautiful statues in the town.  We bought some bronze things in Tongling.  Tea is also prized in Tongling and we drank and bought some wonderful green tea there.  Next time we return, we plan to travel to the beautiful Huang Shan (Golden/Yellow Mountains) about 100 km south of the city.

 Although our guide told us that he could get us into the orphanage, we politely and with great difficulty, declined.  We had promised our agency that we would not try to go inside the orphanage. I think it is extremely important to respect the wishes of our Chinese friends and the Chinese authorities. Think of the other families waiting for children.  We do not want to offend anyone and put a wrinkle in the good relations that now exist.  We do have a roll of photos from inside the orphanage and from the playground, of our daughter with her nanny (aiyee) and with other children.  These photos are very special for us and continue to be precious for Maia.  She still has primary memories of her "old house" and aiyee and misses them still sometimes.

Carole Erslev
mother of Maia Tong Fan
born May 2, 1996
adopted January 12, 1998

Joyce Sickel and her husband also traveled to Tongling.  They adopted their daughter, Jasmine (Tong Zai), on May 4, 1999. She was two weeks shy of being one year old.

 We hired a driver, along with two other families in our group, to drive us to TongLing the day after we received our girls.  It was a long drive, but worth it!!!  We were only allowed on the outside of the orphanage, but the director and nannies came out to see us and the babies and let us take their pictures.  Seeing the town, the rural areas outside TongLing and the people gave us a feeling of understanding more of our daughter's heritage.

The day we flew from Hefei to Guanzhou, I looked out the plane window and thought about TongLing.  I felt sad and cried thinking I was taking my daughter away from her homeland, and the sweet people who helped care for her the first year of her life.