Beijing and the Great Wall

The longer I stayed in Beijing, the more I thought of Hudde Ledbetter's immortal words about Washington, D.C.:  "It's a bourgeois town."  And for that very reason, a bit of a disappointment.  It is to Shanghai what Madrid is to Barcelona: a busy capital city dominated at its center by government buildings and operations, but a bit of a bore compared to the vibrant commercial city on the coast.  The only really exciting architecture is the Olympic stadium.

Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City seem echoing soulless places compared to the elegance of the Humble Administrator’s Garden or the stunning tribute to the Tang dynasty in Xi’an.  Nevertheless, there is something so elegant about traditional Chinese architecture 

Forbidden City

and I found myself drawn to the few artifacts still in evidence, such as the turtle below.

Turtle, Forbidden City

 

Summer Palace

                                                                                                                                                                                 

More interesting is the Summer Palace, with its beautiful lake, lush gardens and lovely buildings.

Summer Palace

Summer Palace

Entrance to a home in the Hutong

We were able to visit the Hutongs that still exist near the Forbidden City and had lunch in a home there.

Hutong Street Sign

Even though this family is considered quite well-to-do, occupying an entire courtyard with two rooms, a kitchen and a newly built upper story bedroom for the family’s only child, toilet and bathing facilities remain communal and the structures are for the most part in decay.  It was fun to take a rickshaw ride through the tiny neighborhood.  Beijing is trying to preserve what remains of the hutongs, built originally by the Mongols (as was the Forbidden City), but the real estate is so valuable it is hard to believe they will succeed.

For entertainment, there was a Kung Fu performance, the story of Chung Li, the abbot of a Buddhist monastery who was a high practitioner of the art and a troop of Chinese acrobats, all waiting to be discovered by Cirque de Soleil.

Section of the Great Wall

Great Wall

Of course, no visit to Beijing would be complete without a trip to the Great Wall, which has been built and rebuilt over the centuries to guard what was then China’s frontier.  The landscape is forbidding and so is climbing even a small section of the wall, since much of it is straight up, a staircase rather than a road.  We were there on a misty day, which softened somewhat the barren foothills and the mountains looming in the distance.

And everywhere there was shopping.  We kept asking ourselves who bought all this stuff, especially the luxury items.  With rare exceptions there were no Chinese people in Western ads, which I found shocking given the size of the market they represent.  We saw few Chinese with Western shopping bags.  Perhaps that is because everyone is saving for a car.   As an anti-pollution measure, car ownership is rationed both in Shanghai and in Beijing, but how they accomplish the objective is instructive.   Only so many license plates are issued per year.  In Shanghai, you can pay as much for the license as for the car.  In Beijing, there is no charge for the license, but one may have to wait years to win the lottery for the limited number of new license plates and then can drive only every other day.

Translating not just from one language to another but also from one culture to another produced some pretty funny moments.  For example, our hotel in Beijing had a Liquid Bar and a Solid Restaurant (who knows what the Chinese characters really meant).   In Suzhou, two bars across the street from each other were named the Old Feeling Bar and the New Feeling Bar (we drank our dinner that evening at the latter!).

This was a wonderful trip.  I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to visit China, to try to understand the country and the culture a bit better.  I am grateful to have seen this land when the air has been almost entirely free of pollution.  The food, which in no way resembles food served in Chinese restaurants in the U.S., has been superb (fresh and delicious, especially a wonderful new discovery – lotus root) and I’ve become a devoted fan of Chinese beer (there being little wine and less Scotch in most restaurants).   Nevertheless, I am grateful to have returned home.  After all, one can enjoy a traffic jam anywhere!

Xi'an

Terra Cotta Figures, Shaanxi Museum

Xi’an was without question the highlight of the tour.  Although we saw the terra cotta warriors in the midst of an enormous mob of Chinese people visiting this most important site on the grave cleaning holiday, they are indescribable.  But we’ve all seen enough pictures of them that perhaps I won’t bother to say more.  No photo I could manage to get was as good as the professional ones we've all seen, but here is one anyway. 

What I hadn’t expected to find in Xi’an was a vibrant Muslim quarter.  Its main street was packed with Chinese of every variety on Sunday evening.  The sidewalks were crowded with vendors, 

Muslim Quarter on Sunday evening, Xi'an

many selling food, such as barbecue on a stick or goats’ feet, a local delicacy.  As a result, 

Goats' feet for sale

pedestrians occupied the narrow street from curb to curb, jostling and shouting to each other, over the blare of music from the shops and the cries of vendors hawking their wares.  I have rarely encountered such a thrilling travel moment.

The old city of Xi’an is still surrounded by a complete wall, as it was at the time of the Tang dynasty, the greatest leader of which, Emperor Qin (pronounced Chin) Shi Huang, created the terra cotta warriors and gave his name to China.  

Main gate to walled city, Xi'zn

It was in Xi’an that I finally put together what I believe is the narrative of modern China – the story the government encourages the people to believe about themselves.  We, of course, have our own narrative of who we are as a people – exceptional, superior, right-thinking, self-sacrificing, and so on.   In modern China, though Mao is still a revered figure, the narrative of his rule is a version of “mistakes were made.”  In building a great new society, many experiments were tried -- so the narrative goes -- not all succeeded, yet the great work of building modern China moves on.  There are no more peans to the Long March and only rueful acknowledgement of the Cultural Revolution.

Since Deng Xiaoping began opening China, there has been a renewed emphasis on China’s imperial history and the great dynasties when China was united as a single nation, peaceful and prosperous.   Xi’an at night is a propaganda hymn to this vision of China. 

The wall and its pagodas and gates are all illuminated, which makes them even more impressive than they are in daylight, and a magnificent and beautifully lit boulevard has been created leading to the main gate.  It is full of heroic figures from the Tang dynasty.  One is reminded of the Depression-era hymns to workers and the common man in the murals and paintings of artists like Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton. 

Emperor Qin, Main Boulevard, Xi'an

Wise Counselors

These are magnificent works of art in their own right, but build the narrative of a heroic leader surrounded by wise counselors and worthy generals while the women (and nation) support their leaders.

Concubines and Courtiers

The government has poured billions into this historical and cultural narrative -- and it is truly breathtaking.

Guilin and Yangshuo

Our flight to Guilin was seriously delayed by fog, but we made it eventually.  Guilin developed as a significant trading town due to construction of the Ling Canal, which links the Pearl to the Yangtze River.  But it is best known for the unique beauty of the limestone mountains that dominate its surroundings.  The Lin River winds among them, creating a stunning landscape – one that has been captured over and over again in traditional Chinese painting.

Lin River

Pagodas in Guilin

Although our hotel was next to a lake with two beautiful pagodas in it, we left immediately to take a boat tour of the most beautiful passage of the Lin River.   Everywhere we turned, there was another vista that demanded a photo that couldn’t begin to express the majestic mountains through which we were passing. The river was busy with traffic – tour boats to be sure, but also local people in flat-bottomed boats a lot like the punts you see in Cambridge, England traveling about on their daily business.

Lin River

 The boat dropped us off in Yanghsuo, a thriving market town that also hosts a special light show created by the same director who did the show in Hangzhou.  It dramatizes the customs and native dress of the tribal people who live in the Guilin area – minorities such as the Miao, Zhang and Dong.  (In fact, the Guilin area is a semi-autonomous region within China because of its significant population of minorities.)  It was another stunning evening.  

Karen, Effie, Tomina & Jo

The next day we walked for about 1½ hours through some farming villages.  It was an important time in China, the grave cleaning holiday, when people return to their ancestral homes to tend to the graves of their loved ones and leave offerings to assure their happiness in the afterlife.   In the first village we visited, there had been a recent death, and so the community was preparing for the funeral feast.  A pig had been butchered and men were washing the parts slightly downriver from where the women were washing linens and preparing vegetables. 

Washing in Lin River

My first impression was of the kind of abject poverty we see in photos of southern blacks during the Depression.  Most houses were shacks and there were virtually no public amenities, such as paved roads or running water.  Nevertheless, the construction of a few new houses and the presence of some well-maintained schools suggests that money is beginning to flow to these communities.  The new economy is based on tourism (the Impressions show alone employs hundreds in the evenings) and the cash seems welcome.  Fishing and rice cultivation in this extremely hot and humid environment are no longer enough to sustain the traditional peoples who live here.  Even so, I had the feeling that I was watching a vanishing way of life, one that has survived for 4,000 years.

One of the traditions of this region is fishing with trained cormorants.  A string tied around their throats prevents them from eating the larger fish that they catch, leaving the smaller fish to nourish them and the ones they can't swallow to nourish their masters.  It takes a couple of years to train such a bird and one that is trained can fetch several thousand dollars equivalent in Chinese yuan.  This, too, is a dying way of life – mostly now for tourists to watch.

River Landing, Zhudou Village

In spite of its lack of amenities, this is a hard place to leave.  It is so incredibly beautiful.

Shanghai Reprise

Tea pot shaped like a pomegranate

On Monday, March 30, our official tour began in Shanghai.  Meg and I both enjoyed the opportunity to get a new take on this wonderful city.   We began at the Shanghai Museum, which permitted us to see the exhibits we had missed on our earlier visit.  I particularly fell in love with the ceramics, especially the tea pots, and found the exhibits of traditional dress fascinating, especially the effort to depict the dress of the minorities in this country.

Wall with Dragon Motif, Yu Garden, Shangahi

From there, we visited the Yu Garden in the heart of old Shanghai (the China Town of this Chinese city).   The same concepts that we saw in the Humble Administrator's Garden were realized here as well, but the creator of this garden was not humble.  The gables and walls are decorated in a far more ostentatious manner, befitting the higher rank of the creator of this villa and garden.

Roof Detail, Yu Garden, Shanghai

 

There was, of course, a Starbucks in the middle of the bustling commercial area adjacent to the park – looking distinctly out of place.  In the afternoon, we returned to Xintiandi to visit a beautiful example of urban redevelopment – a group of the lane houses common in the twenties and thirties redone as an open air shopping arcade with a beautiful fountain in the middle.  There we found a small museum showing how a Chinese family lived in such a house during the 1920s. 

Fountain in redeveloped shopping area, Xintiandi

But Shanghai is not only about its rich past.  Our night cruise on the river to see, illuminated in all their glory,  the commercial establishments along the Bund and in Pudong made manifest a modern city reveling in its success.  And that was only reinforced by rides on the world’s fastest elevator and the Maglev train to the airport, which achieves a speed of 431 kilometers per hour (268 mph).

Pudong lit at night

Shanghai is really a study in contrasts.   It is growing so fast that it can barely keep up with its new population, now about 23 million.  Building enough housing, roads, subway lines and other infrastructure is a race against time.  And so is finding solutions to its environmental problems.  Chinese people are very open about the pollution and how seldom they see blue skies (though we were very fortunate in that respect).  And Shanghai is very much at risk from changes in sea levels as it sits in a vast river delta.  Indeed, we heard that one of the new office towers in the Pudong has begun to sink.

As we leave Shanghai, we are becoming friends with many of the members of our tour.  Meg and I are the only Americans.  The tour operator is from England and all of our traveling companions are from England, Australia or New Zealand -- which make us the ones with the funny accents.  This is a group of experienced travelers, ranging in age from 14 to ... us (OMG, how did that happen?).  They show up on time, don't complain, and enjoy the delicious if sometimes unusual food we are served, so we are glad for their company.  Our next stops in Guilin and Xi’an will give us the chance to experience a more traditional China.