2011 7月 4号 (Posted 9 July, 2011)
4 July, 2011 Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City and more Shopping
On our first full day in Beijing, we rode early and loaded ourselves onto a bus that we would come to know well as “our” bus for the next two days. We filled it up, but it was comfortable, the A/C worked well and our driver knew how to drive without jerking us around with lots of stopping and starting, swerving and weaving.
We arrived at the heart of Beijing after nearly an hour of driving. The day was quickly becoming warm and sunny and I was regretting that I had left my bright yellow Valpo cap in the room and as I stepped off the bus, a man stepped forward with hats to sell. He had two styles in two colors: ones that said “I Love Beijing” on the fronts and black or green ones that sported the communist red star. After a moment’s hesitation I bought an army green hat with a red star. Even as I was paying for it, I began to wonder if I was being politically incorrect in either Chinese or American culture and likewise wondering if I was displaying bad taste, but I needed the hat, so I went with it.
We walked past the drum tower and arrow tower that marked the southern extreme of the old city. The walls are long gone, but the towers remain. The Qin Dynasty was started by invaders (Mongols) who were in love with Han culture and remade Beijing in the image of the Han’s ideal city, with the important buildings arranged along a central axis with the palace at the center, facing south. Despite all of the devotion to Han ideals and culture from the Mongol rulers, Hans were forbidden from entering the walls of the old city, thus the name. We walked through the merchant are beyond the south drum tower where the Hans could live and make their livings. Today, the area is gentrified and expensive (complete with early 20th century-style trolley) much like the Old Town in Shanghai. It really was quite beautiful.
From there, our guide led us to Tiananmen Square, the Chinese equivalent of our National Mall with the seat of government, Mao’s mausoleum, and the National Museum, but it was also the location of the pro-democracy protests and the subsequent crack-down back in the late 90s. There was, of course, no sign of that, but there were lots of signs celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party and the usual monuments to Chinese glory. There were people everywhere. School groups, tour groups, a group that looked like it might possibly have been elderly communist party members and just families. Everyone (including us) was taking pictures of each other standing in groups and alone with the huge picture of Mao that is mounted on the front gate of the Forbidden City. It was just what we would have done had we been in sight of the Washington Monument or the Capital Building or the Lincoln Memorial. Professor Meng mentioned that the architect for Mao’s tomb was designed by a graduate of Harvard and, he pointed out, looked ever so slightly like the Lincoln Memorial. I had to agree for the most part, but it had decidedly Chinese ornamentation.
From the Square, we moved on to the Forbidden City. There is nothing that is small or intimate about the palace of the last Emperors of the Chinese monarchy. Indeed, when I say “the front gate” I am actually referring to four huge gates in a gatehouse that was easily a quarter of a mile long. We crossed one of the many bridges over the mote and entered one of the middle tunnels, past the red painted doors with the auspicious number of brass studs that were all worn to a polish by millions of people touching them as they passed. The door handles were decorated as lions. Inside the view opened into a huge plaza with a ceremonial building at the far end. We crossed the plaza, entered another set of gates that led through the gate building and entered… a huge plaza with a ceremonial building at the far end followed by a huge plaza with a ceremonial building at the far end. In the side buildings there were galleries with objects from the last royal wedding, jade from the Imperial collection, etc. There were also side streets and enclaves for concubines and princes. Near the north gate, the rigid, rectilinear structure finally gave way to a garden with trees, a round pavilion, rocks and rock gardens that, in contrast with the rest of the Forbidden City, seemed down right cozy and informal. There is a great deal more to see and tell than I have given you here, but it was all a little overwhelming and a hard to describe without sounding boring, which it was not. There are lots of on-line and printed resources that can show and describe it better than I can.
Beyond the north gate we re-crossed the mote and looked up at the artificial hill that was made from the excavation tailings of the same mote, now wooded and lush with several pavilions and pagodas near the summit. From there, we walked to the northeast corner and around into a commercial area where we once again mounted our bus and were taken to a nearby restaurant for lunch.
After lunch, I was excited to hear that our guide would take us to the Temple of Heaven, but mystified when she told us that we would not go in. There had been some discussion about what the tour covered and what we would have to pay extra for and, apparently, going inside the Temple of Heaven was one of the extra things. The grounds were beautiful but it was hot, hot, hot in the sun and I could barely stand the thought that I was this close to seeing the magnificent interior of that auspicious building and that I was fated to just walk around the outside of it. But that is indeed what we did. The bus picked us up at the far side and then we went to the old-style neighborhoods of Beijing, called Hutong(s). (Chinese doesn’t actually pluralize nouns, thus one Hutong, two Hutong, but I am writing in English, so I guess “Hutongs” works.) This was one of the pay extra parts of the tour and only a few of us opted to pay the 12 or so dollars for the tour and the rickshaw ride through the Hutong. The tour was interesting: we learned about how rich and poor lived together in the same part of town and that the only way to tell the difference was the way that the doors were marked with different kinds of stones next to the doorways and the number of beam ends that protruded above each door. We visited a working pottery that was hundreds of years old… with an impressive gift shop… and then we took our bicycle rickshaw ride around the ‘hood. This particular Hutong was set around the northern Drum and Bell towers, marking the northern extreme of the Old City. As we rode through the narrow streets, we heard drums from the tower. The tour itself was a mixed affair. That is to say, my feelings about what I was doing were mixed. On one hand, I was seeing a part of Beijing and Chinese life that most tourists never even glimpse and on the same hand, I was helping these people earn a living. One the other hand, I felt very much the outsider/rich and spoiled tourist gazing upon the peasants with detached interest.
After the rickshaw tour, we entered (by pre-arrangement) the house of a middle-class family whose house was built around the traditional courtyard. We walked through several winding passages to a gated doorway where we entered a small courtyard. In the courtyard, we saw several birds in cages, a turtle in a large bowl, goldfish in a still larger pot and another cage that must have had a lizard or some other reptile in it. The “house” consisted of three buildings that faced onto a courtyard. (The fourth side of the yard was a high wall.) The rooms in the house were airy and had windows facing the courtyard. (I’m fairly sure that the walls away from the courtyard either adjoined another building or faced the street.) Despite the slightly squalid streets outside, this enclave seemed like a pleasant enough place to live until the guide reminded us that there were (traditionally) no toilets in any of these houses and that most people used the common toilets throughout the neighborhood. She made it clear that they were unpleasant, to say the least. We looked around, listened to what our guide had to say, took our leave of the owner and returned to the bus.
At the bus we were in for a surprise: the people who stayed on the bus were able to pay a few quai to enter the ancient drum tower and were there in time to witness the beating of the drums (marking the hour of the day) while we only heard them from a distance in the rickshaws. They said that in addition to the drumming, they went to the top of the tower and could see back along the central axis of the city to the Forbidden City and the other gates of the city. While it was all very interesting on the tour, I just about cried when I found out that I had missed climbing a centuries-old tower with a view over the old city. No one mentioned that as an option. I suddenly realized that our tour guide and our group had very different agendas.
From there, she took us to a silk store with a little demonstration area and a lot of merchandise.
2011 7月 6号
The Great Wall and Still MORE Shopping
I am writing from the Detroit Airport. I didn’t have the right power adapter for my computer in Beijing (we improvised something with available technology in Shanghai due to slightly different outlets) so my computer died mid-Skype with my family with no juice in the spare battery and I my previous go-to people were supposed to be sleeping. I spent my time on the plane watching movies and dozing along with the usual distractions of meals and snacks and trips to the toilets. The Boeing 777 that we were on was quite a bit more advanced than our plane on the out-bound flight. We had in-seat screens with movies, TV (including HBO), music, games and an in-flight map with real-time flight data. It was fun to watch our progress as we traversed western Russia/Siberia/Irkutsk, north of the Bearing Straight, the north coast of Alaska, the Northwest Territories and then south through Saskatchewan & Ontario, went around the tip of L. Superior over Duluth to Wisconsin, across L. Michigan and over Lansing Michigan to Detroit. We all made it through customs without a hitch and Patrick had something cool happen: the Chinese couple in front of him were having trouble answering the questions from the Customs officer (who knew zero Chinese and apparently had no one to call in to interpret) and Patrick was able to relay the most pressing question, “How much cash are you bringing into the US?” It made Patrick’s day.
Yesterday seems like a dream to me, partly because I am so sleepy and wacked out by the jet-lag, partly because it was such an amazing experience. We gathered early in the lobby of the hotel and loaded onto the bus for a trip to the Badaling section of the Great Wall. Our trip there was instructive in and of itself; the driver took us through the poorest, dirtiest sections of any Chinese city that I have seen. There were piles of trash with stray dogs snacking at them, piles of rubble that were once houses next to piles of rubble that were still being used as houses. There were new industrial-park-looking areas, some nice enough looking and some quite seedy-looking even as they were being built. The people that I saw looked like they had hard lives. Eventually, we got onto a highway that took us into the mountains that were much more wilod than any other landscape I had yet seen in China. The occasional pagoda/temple punctuated the mountainsides, but otherwise, it seemed wild. Then we started getting glimpses of the Wall.
A wave of fatigue just washed over me and I would dearly love to find a bed or just a flat surface to lie on for a little while. But instead, the airport provides uncomfortable seats with arm rests to better serve their customers. If my vocabulary or grammar or typing are lacking, you know why.
I’m not sure how exactly, but we arrived to the Wall from the north side. There are great sections of the Wall that have fallen to rubble and we also went through several tunnels, so it might have been easy to have missed. The Wall, as my guide book says, was built as a defensive structure, but not in the way that most people think. Yes, there are battlements facing to the north and the Wall tops the highest part of the mountains, thus giving the Chinese to the south a military advantage to potential Mongol or Manchurian invaders, but the real importance of the wall was to give lines of communication over thousands of miles of terrain to warn of invasions and/or call in reinforcements if the enemy breached the Wall using smoke, flag and (later) cannon signals to send messages over a thousand kilometers in an hour’s time. Then, also, if the need arose they could move armies swiftly along difficult terrain to counter attack. Walking the Wall is exciting and beautiful. The mountains are quite steep and in places each step is knee high or higher. There are relatively few flat spots and much of it would be considered far too dangerous for American liability laws. For the Chinese, the Great Wall is a nearly religious icon. The high point of where we walked was the place where Chairman Mao visited and wrote a famous poem that spoke of grandeur and heroism. On our upward journey, the wall was packed with huge bottlenecks at every stairway and guard tower.
That bring me to the adventure of yesterday: Our guide, in case you have not already picked up on this, had been nickel and diming us or offering us additional options for additional money, depending on how you interpret it. On this leg of the journey, the additional option was to take a cable car to the highest part of the wall for an additional 80元 ($12) per person. In the end, after much discussion, he bulk of the group opted for the cable car but Nick, Patrick and I decided that we wanted to walk. The guide gave us directions and we headed out. It was great. The day was overcast and a little misty which gave the mountains a decidedly mystical and painterly texture and the air-temperature was significantly cooler than we had the day before at the Forbidden City. I loved the climb. There were ever-changing views, hundreds, if not thousands, of people to see and the climb was a pleasant challenge after weeks of walking on the flat. As I mentioned, there were places that the passage narrowed and the crowds slowed to a crawl, so by the time we met up with the group, they were heading down and we still wanted to get higher. As I looked at the map on my ticket and looked around at the lay of the land, I noticed two things: there was another part of the wall that was much less crowded just after the high point of our journey and there appeared to be trails down that would have even fewer people on them that would allow us to make much better time getting back to the bus. For reason we opted to climb to the highpoint and were not as worried about getting down. That was when Nick and I got separated from Patrick. Nick and I tried to ask a couple people about where we were on the ticket map. I was pretty sure that I knew, but I Wanted to be sure before embarking on a different route down. Unfortunately, as I learned from Deborah Fallon, the Chinese don’t spend a lot of time with maps unless their job requires it. In general, they rely on verbal directions to find places and leave maps to the military. The people that we asked pointed in different directions when we asked them to show us where we were on the map. Finally, I just decided to trust my own judgment (which turned out to be correct) and headed down the different way. It was beautiful The crowds thinned to a trickle, the section of the Wall took us to some breath-taking views and the roller-coaster ups and downs added a sense of fun and challenge. The down side was that we did not know where Patrick was and Nick, who is a big guy with a rolling gait, just could not move as fast as me on the ups and downs. With Patrick already off my radar, getting separated from Nick seemed like a bad idea, so suddenly my estimation of our decent time doubled. A few minutes down the road, Nick’s phone rang. It was Professor Meng asking us where we were. The long and short f it was that Nick and I hustled down the mountain as quickly as we could, the bus moved to a position that would allow then to pick us up sooner and we arrived to find that Patrick was not at the bus and the folks on the bus were surprised to find that he was not with us. Despite being soaking wet with sweat, I was feeling pretty good and immediately offered to go back to where the bus had been parked to look for Patrick. The hardest part was convincing Nick to stay put so that I could literally start running, but that is what I did (with Nick’s phone in hand to keep lines of communication open) and about halfway to our former parking place, I found Patrick trying to ask someone if he could use their phone. When I tried to apologize to Professor Meng, he laughed and said that he was happy that we got to see so much of the wall and that I was a hero for finding Patrick. If that what he thinks, I’m good with that.
The remainder of the afternoon was a bit of a downer compared to that. We visited three more shopping opportunities: a jade store, a pearly store and the Silk Market (which was really another general goods market) and the first two of which were opportunities for our guide to get commissions on what we purchased. This was frustrating to us since we had been under the impression that could choose between seeing the the Ming Tombs or the Summer Palace. I would have been thrilled to see either one, but instead, I got to see jade and pearls. The Silk Market was much like the shopping we did in Shanghai with lots of store booths selling designer knock-offs, toys, souvenirs, jade, pearls, (yes and silk) and any number of other desirable items. I decided that I wanted one more kind of tea and found some very good tea for a price I was willing to pay after some haggling. When we first arrived to the market, we headed downstairs looking for the grocery store tea. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, a young woman grabbed by the arm and tried to lead me into her purse stall asking me to “just come in and look.” Her grip was not a gentle one and when I resisted, she reinforced her grip with the other hand. After saying “no thank you, No Thank You, NO THANK YOU!” to her repeated come-ons, I broke her grip easily enough, but was additionally surprised when one of her co-workers called me rude and she called after my retreating back, “You look like a monkey! Go back to the zoo!” It’s hard for me to imagine who she thought would respond positively to her tactics and it is the first time in all of trip to China that I thought anyone was rude. In the streets of Shanghai, I was used to people invading my personal space on the sidewalks and passing close without any word of politeness. It was easy to just go with that cultural norm. No one was intending offense. This experience rattled me and Patrick and Nick brought it up again and again as something they wouldn’t have believed if they hadn’t seen it themselves.
Nick told us an adventure the he and one of the Thea Bowman students, Avery, had the previous day. The group had been turned loose at the famous Beijing Night Market where one can by all sorts of interesting delicacies including roasted scorpions on a stick, snake, and who knows what. Nick and Avery met a Chinese guy who said he wanted to practice his English. (“Oh my gosh!” I said, “I know where this is going!”) So he and Avery go to this bar with the guy and Nick orders a beer and Avery gets a Sprite. (There is no official drinking age in China, so it was perfectly legal for Avery, aged 16, to enter a bar. He’s a good boy, though, and I have no reason to think he abused this situation.) So they talk for a bit and the barkeep brings the bill which was 80 quai and an additional charge for 70 quai and the guy says, “I forgot to tell you, there is a 70元 fee for just sitting down. Nick is a big guy who is easily twice my weight and taller than me by at least 6 inches. He has a calm demeanor that seems common in men his size. I can only imagine what it sounded like when he sized up his host and said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to give you 50 元 and leave. I helped you with your English, right? When then you spot me for the rest.” Whereupon, he laid 50 元on the table and he and Avery walked out as the host and the barkeeper looked on helplessly. Nick has got style when push comes to shove.
I am home now, but I have several more stories to tell. Stay tuned! --Peter
2011 7月 4号
Bejing! I am going to give you the short, short version and then fill it out an the plane home.
Today: Tiananmen Square, Fordidden City, lunch, Silk Market, Old Town residential areas and rickshaw tour, a working pottery with museum and shop, shopping and night market food.
Tomorrow: Great Wall and Summer Palace - or - Ming Tombs.
(or what really happened: Great Wall and more shopping opportunities)
We are leaving for the Wall very early. I need to sleep.