I had extensive dealings with this university and with the city of Xiangtan.

The university is located way outside of the city of Xiangtan and there are no buses in the evening and even fewer taxis. Xiangtan is an absolutely dreary, dirty, polluted and depressing riverboat town. It is the seat of the steel industry in Hunan Province and if one enjoys soot-filled air that turns the nostrils black, then would suitable. One year the steel mill inadvertently dumped a great many liquid tonnes of of cadmium from its storage tanks for noxious substances into the main river that is source of drinking and bathing water for the city. Needless to say, the water supply was shut down for a long time. There is one McDonald's, one KFC and one department store (BooBooGow or something like that) of note in the city. The weather is absolutely frigid in the winter (as frigid as Harbin however) and absolutely torrid in the summer (as torrid as Guangzhou). None of the buildings have central heat. The locals are a good point, however -- they tend to be very friendly, if not rather rudimentary, and still will give a foreigner the benefit of some doubt. The PSB office that handles the resident permits for foreigners is actually one of the more friendlier ones, if only for the reasons that the local FOA's submit monthly reports about the laowai because of local industry.

The salary at Xiangtan University is on the lower end of all salaries (about RMB 4,500) I think and there are few benefits. Foreign teachers were not expected to pay for water and electricity then but now I understand that this might have changed.

Train service is available to anywhere in the country from Xiangtan Train Schedule but train tickets are always hard to come by and one must resort to a special little agent at the Friendship Hotel if one has any intention of getting a ticket. Needless to say, the mark-up is about 35-50%. Very nice little racket.

There is bus service hourly to Changsha, both from the main station and from a station near the University (less frequencies however) and there is also express service to Guangzhou (quite nice) and to Beijing (quite nice).

Xiantang Mandarin is about as far off the standard mark as possible and if one has any intentions of learning standard Chinese, this is surely not the place. This is one part of the country where every village has its own strong local dialect, unintelligible to the inhabitants of the next village.

As for the FAO at this university, he previously worked for the PSB Foreign Affairs Office (as did many of the FAO's dealing with foreigners in this city) and that should tell one everything.

There are two or three other major institutions of learning in this city and one vocational college -- all are about the same however.

Frankly speaking, I would pass on this place and I should have passed the first time.

Paul Weiss