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May 10th 2009
Published: May 10th 2009
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Unjust Deaths Department. Quote: 'Unjust Death' means the kind of death caused by homicide, suicide and unexpected accidents. Taoism holds that the victim of premature death out of their anger over their loneliness would intrude into homes and residences. This department is especially in charge of the souls of those unjust death cases before they work up merits.
I’m a bit rushed today so hopefully I don’t miss any of the bits. I’d already written the first part, about Dongyue temple, so that should be OK. I’m leaving for Almaty tomorrow (Monday), so not sure how often I’ll have Internet access after this. I uploaded more photos but Travelblog is still buggy, and I don't have time to do it again ... there were a about two shots of Tiananmen square that've gone missing, and about four of the Great Wall, but I guess there's enough of those to keep you happy.





Now most religions are weird. Christianity, with its story about a talking donkey, and the virgin birth, is weird; Judaism, with its belief in a talking donkey and its dietary laws, is weird; Islam with its belief in a talking donkey, genies, and one or two other things that I can’t mention without offending Victoria’s draconian anti-religious-vilification laws, is weird; Buddhism with its talking donkeys and myriad of gods is weird; Hinduism with its (as far as I know) complete absence of talking donkeys, is weird. But if this temple I popped into on the way back from the embassies is anything to
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Sanlitun "Village", an up-market shopping centre just around the corner from the one I mentioned in the text and about four times as expensive.
go by, Taoism is one seriously weird religion!

As we probably all know, “Tao” (“the way”), has become two things. Tao Philosophy has very little relation to Tao Religion. Tao religion is probably the best example of the adage that any philosophy eventually degenerates into a religion. It’s China’s main home-grown religion. Of course, the Cultural “Revolution” tried to wipe out all religions, but today China officially allows freedom of religion, but to be a member of the Party you need to be an atheist. While I don’t on the face of it have an objection to banning people who believe in talking donkeys from doing things that require rational thought, like running a country, it does have the problematic side-effect that most minority groups aren’t represented in China.

Anyway, without any real explanation of the broader understanding that underpins it, the Dongyue temple in Beijing contains a central courtyard with the normal temple-ish things, surrounded by 75 rooms each with a depiction of one of the “departments” of heaven, in plaster statues. As well as these there are three or four larger rooms containing some rather massive statues (probably four metres tall) of some of the special
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see description for previous photo
gods, which look quite scary. However photography isn’t allowed in those rooms, so I forgot about them. The whole thing made a good half-day distraction after standing in queues at the embassies one day. The courtyard is quite nice, containing various stone tablets, apparently some date back to the 13th century. Most are just standing up in the open, but one appears to be special and is protected by a big Perspex case, although on one side you can still see the black marks where someone has apparently inked it up to try to get a tracing. The weird thing is the courtyard is full of some old trees, I don’t remember what sort, and any imperfections in their trunks (it looks like a lot of them had been split in half or were just starting to die back) had been filled in with some kind of yellow fibrous stuff, and painted over with brown paint. The renovated bits looked good, better than the real bits, except where the paint has peeled off. I don’t know if renovating trees is common practice but I don’t think I’ve seen it before.

As well as the renovated trees and the ancient
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there's an awful lot of construction happening in Chinese cities.
stone tablets, there was a big incense pot where some people were actually lighting incense and praying. There was a priest guy in a funny hat. Also one of the interpretive plaques did say that this place is a centre for Taoist learning, and that they’re re-establishing ceremonies there (although how much these are religious and how much they’re cultural seemed hard to define). So in spite of the sometimes dismissive plaques under some of the “departments”, some people still take them seriously. I list here the different departments for your enjoyment. You can imagine you’re a young god, just starting out in the heavenly bureaucracy, hoping for a fun job where you can get a quick promotion. I think some departments would sound more fun than others:

* Death and life department
* Department for Giving Alms to Taoist Priests
* Scripture-reading Department
* Final-indictment Department
* Execution Department
* Department for Increasing Good Fortune and Longevity
* Evidence Department for Issuing a Warrant
* The Department of Petty Officials
* Flying Birds Department
* Deep-rooted Disease Department
* Department of River Gods
* Department for promotion of 15 Kinds of Decent Life Style
* Department for Wandering
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looking out through the temple gate out to a remnant of the old Beijing city wall (I think)
Ghosts
* Department of Wind Gods
* Department of Suppressing Schemes
* Department of Controlling Bullying and Cheating
* Department of City and Township Gods
* Department of Mountain Gods
* Department of Controlling Evil Spirits
* Door God Department
* Department of Reclaiming Life
* Department of Opposing Obscene Acts
* Department of Halting Destruction of Living Beings
* Department of Rewarding Good Conduct
* Department of Upholding Loyalty & Filial Piety
* Department for Individual Destiny
* Mammal Birth Department
* Water Birth Department
* Aquatic Animals Department
* Department for Reducing Longevity
* Jaundice Department
* Department of Accumulating Justifiable Wealth
* Timely Retribution Department
* Escorting Department
* Inspection Department
* Department of Judging Intention
* Department of Pity and Sympathy
* Department of Zhenguan Earth Gods
* Department of Instant Rewards and Retribution
* Department in Charge of Suffering and Distress
* Supervision and Examination Department
* Department for Raising Descendants
* Department for Upholding Integrity
* Department for Resurrection
* Toxicant Department
* Urging Department
* Longevity Department
* Insect Birth Department
* Egg Birth Department
* Department for Bestowing Happiness
* Department of Betrayal
* Punishment Department
* Department for Distribution of Medication
* Department for Preservation of Wilderness
* Interrogation and Examination Department
* Unjust Death Department
* Department for Demons and Monsters
* Department of Earth Gods
* Department of controlling Theft and Robbery
* Monk and Taoist Priest Department
* Abortion Department
* Measurement Department
* Department of Rain Gods
* Department for Implementing 15 Kinds of Violent Death
* Department of the Hell
* Animal Department
* Department of Forest Ghosts and Spirits
* Plague-performing Department
* Department for Examining False Accusation
* Department of Official Morality
* Department for Three-month Long Meditation
* Department for Determining Individual Destiny
* The Department for Recording Merits
* Department of Signing Documents
* Signature Department


How they got all that from “the Dao that can be named is not the true Dao” I have no idea.

The temple complex also contains a small museum with labels mainly in Chinese, but some old photographs showing the temple as a massive site of community gatherings for markets and annual festivals and such-like, in the 1920s.




I didn’t get to go to X’ian (to see the Terracotta warriors). I was running short on time, and the idea of
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another renovated tree. It's not clear in the photo, but when they painted it, they dribbled brown paint all over the ancient stone tablet beneath the tree.
doing a 13-hour train trip each way, as a day trip, wasn’t too appealing to me. I was going to do it anyway, but they told me that the train was fully booked.




I did however get to see the Great Wall of China. I did a day tour in which we walked about eight kilometres of its length, in a section (I forget the name) where it’s still well-preserved. It was very hilly and got quite hot, walking on a hard rock surface the whole way, sometimes stopping to climb up towers. At each of the 36 (I think, I forgot now) towers we walked through, there’d be some local there selling “water, coke, cold beer”. I’m not sure who buys the “cold” beer in the middle of a walk through hot weather, but they obviously seem to think there’s a market for it. One local lady trying to sell me souvenirs walked with me for a bit playing tour guide, trying to tell me that on the one side of the wall is China, and on the other side of the wall is Mongolia. I expressed surprise, and she said “inner Mongolia”. But even when I look that up on the map, it doesn’t seem true. Inner Mongolia (which of course borders outer Mongolia) doesn’t come that close to Beijing. She seemed quite proud of the fact that she was Mongolian, though. I still didn’t buy the stupid T-shirt though.

The next day was a Monday and I was supposed to go and pick up my passport from the Syrian embassy. It’s a long story which I don’t have the energy to outline now, but basically after wasting about four half-days of my time, they decided that they couldn’t be arsed giving me a visa there and then, and I should apply for one at the border. Wikitravel says that visa on arrival at land borders is only available for people from a country which has no Syrian embassy, so that should be interesting. I’m quite annoyed at their incompetence.

So I left Beijing with no more visas than I arrived with.

While waiting for the embassy, before I found out that they were a pack of clowns, I went to the big, cheap-ish, shopping centre which caters for tourists, to try to get some clothes. I won’t be allowed to wear
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Department of petty officials. I kid you not. I don't know if the two gentlemen at the front are petty officials or demons. Perhaps both?
shorts or short-sleeved shirts on the Archaeology dig in Jordan, and I only had one long-sleeved shirt. This took about four hours and I still had no more trousers than I had before. Every little stall says “Come in, we have your size” then wastes an hour or so running back and forth from some little store-room on the other side of the building with clothes labelled with completely wrong sizes, and then those only labelled with “XXL” and “XL” which are of course completely meaningless. The worst thing is they seemed to blame me for them not having any clothes that fitted. I’m seriously worried that I’m going to have no more clothes to wear.

This gave me just enough time to see Tiananmen Square and the “Forbidden City”. Tiananmen (“heavenly peace”) square also contains the mausoleum containing the mummified remains of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, but I arrived too late and the “Maosoleum” was already shut. The square is very large, but rather featureless, hemmed in by the National Museum and some parliament building. It lies immediately south of the Forbidden City. Touts hang out there trying to sell tours, perpetrate scams, practise their English, and
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one of the supplicants (they never made it quite clear what was the role of the non-gods in the dioramas - sometimes they seem to be human and sometimes they seem to be angels) at the Department of Deep-Rooted Diseases
sell icecream or shrink-wrapped chicken feet with chilie (which you can also buy in supermarkets).

I have to admit I raced through the Forbidden City a bit too rapidly. I saw a lot of pagodas, some very massive, a lot of rock carvings, etc. But the little booklet they were selling for the equivalent of $AUS 1 (I think), or the plaques, didn’t really make it clear what the greater purpose of the site was. Also there were so many tourists that at some places you really had to jostle to see anything, giving not-so-great photos.

So there’s a heap of famous attractions I didn’t get to see in Beijing. I heard good things about the Factory 798 art precinct which apparently is quite edgy and worth seeing (“It will change how you think about free speech in China that’s for sure”), the Summer Palace, the Pandas at the zoo, Kung Foo, the Beijing Operah, the museum, Mao's Mausoleum, or a bunch of other things I forget at the moment. Still, I never really intended to spend much time in Beijing, so I saw more than I originally intended.

Given my experience with the food, I was
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Wandering ghosts who happened to wander into the Department of Wandering Ghosts
wary of trying the local food again. So I didn’t wander down the backstreets and find the stalls which someone told me about the day I left, when I didn’t have a chance to look for them. Apparently these sold all sorts of food such as bugs, starfish, ram testicles, etc. Instead I had Peking Duck. People were saying that since I was in Beijing I had to try Peking Duck (for those who’re confused, “Peking” is the old way of writing the name of the place we now call “Beijing”, it’s not the old name per se, just the old way of writing it). The backpackers recommended two places, a cheap place and an expensive place. We opted for the expensive place, Quanjude, which is the original Peking Duck place, dating back to the 1840s. I don’t know if that actual restaurant itself is the original one, as they’re part of a chain.

The guy I ended up going with there was a chef, so it’s not just my uncultured opinion, but we sort of agreed that it wasn’t that great. He just kept saying “we serve a fair bit of duck and I reckon we cook it
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An evil spirit at the Department for Controlling Evil Spirits
better than this” and suchlike. They bring the duck out and cut it up in front of you, which I guess is to make you feel like you got a lot of meat, whereas if they just brought it out to you on a little plate in slices, you’d complain that it wasn’t enough. I don’t know what they do with the rest of it, they did bring out a little soup at the end, but still, there was a lot more meat left on that bird. I guess people like the fat, but I didn’t find it that tasty, and there seemed to be too much of it, drowning out the taste of the flesh.

The funniest part was a guy came out to show us how to eat it, as if we couldn’t work it out for ourselves. It’s served with sauces and some thin little pancake things, and the trick is to pick up the duck slices with your chopstick, dunk them in the sauce, and roll it up in your pancake. The guy who came out to show us messed up the first pancake, so he threw it out. He then tried again, with the
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yeehaw! Donkeys! (Department of Reclaiming Life - this is the department you go to if you want retribution after being hounded to death. It's not where you go if you want to come back to life, for that you'd need the Unjust Deaths Department, or the Department of Resurrections)
aid of a fork, and managed to get it working, but of course we didn’t have forks, so his demonstration was a bit pointless.

Probably the most frustrating thing is that we walked past the lakeside to get to the restaurant, which even on a Monday night was a very lively, happening, place, with locals and tourists and expats alike. The restaurant is basically on the waterfront, but for some reason there’s no windows, and so you miss out on all the benefits of being in that great location. Anyway, that was Peking Duck. I’m not sure if we got them on a bad day or something.

The other thing I did is go to the Tiandi Theatre acrobatics show. These were mainly circus acts, and I thought they were quite impressive, I think everyone else did too. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take photos (one two people tried it surreptitiously but got growled at by the ushers) so I don’t remember much of the detail. As well as all sorts of acrobatics, there were also juggling acts, one act in which twelve girls got onto the one bicycle, contortionists, some cool stuff with diabolos, a guy doing
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Not sure why these dudes were destroying chickens, dogs, pigs and rabbits in the foyer of the Department of Halting Destruction of Living Beings. Not a smart move, guys.
tricks on a slack wire, etc.

So I think that was all I saw in Beijing since the last blog. After that I took the train to Urumqi, where I am now, about to leave. I thought it would be a 44-hour train journey but it turned out to be only about 40 hours. It was fairly good, but I’ll write about that in the next blog.




Thanks to Dad for pointing out in the last blog I said that I would have to go from the far East of Kazakhstan into Azerbaijan. Of course I meant the far West. I’ll be arriving in through the East, which of course isn’t “far” in the sense that that’s where most of the people live. I was getting the countries confused, thinking from Azerbaijan’s point of view. It's not that I don't know my East from my West. Really.




Of course the answer to the question I posed last week is that the Chinese policy of relaxing their “one-child” policy for Han Chinese in allowing rural parents who have a girl to try again, will make no difference to the number of boys and girls,
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I'm still not sure if the one monster is doing to the other monster what it looks like, in the Department of Instant Rewards and Retributions.
at least in theory. Instinctively some people might think that there would be more girls, because there would then be some two-girl families and no two-boy families (assuming that everyone practises it properly, which I understand doesn’t actually happen in real life), but if you draw out a graph of the possibilities you see it doesn’t work like that. The simplest way of thinking about it is to remember that births are more or less independent events (ie the sex of a baby isn’t affected by the sex of its older siblings, and for every birth there’s an almost equal chance of it being male or female. This works even whether or not you're allowed to keep having babies until you get a boy, or if you're only allowed a maximum of two.

If anyone disagrees let me know. I think it's still true if you take account of the fact that boys are a tiny bit more likely than girls.

The only way I could think that it would be different in practise is that it would reduce female sex-selected abortions, in that a family who values boys over girls, if they know that they’re going to
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These gentlement are from the Urging Department. It's their job to urge us to do good. They're professional urgers.
get a girl, might be less likely to chose an abortion if they know they can “try again” to get a boy. I’m not sure if people think like that, but that’s the only way that I can see that it would make a difference to the ratio of boys to girls.



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some poor bugger at the Punishment Department getting his very long tongue cut out by a tattooed monster in a leather miniskirt.
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Beijing - Dongyue taoist temple

a couple of other guys who've felt the wrath of the Punishment Department
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Beijing - Dongyue taoist temple

Department for Demons and Monsters
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Beijing - Dongyue taoist temple

Department of Rain Gods
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Great Wall of China

conditions of going on the cable-car include "Don't release the latch and throw irresponsibly. People with heart conditions, hypertension, mental illness, infectious disease, strong drink, please do not take..."


11th May 2009

Quanjude and girls...
For what it's worth there's a Quanjude restaurant at the top of Queen Street which, according to their signs, are "genuine Peeking duck specialists".. probably part of the same chain. I think the policy re boys/girls is still flawed (better than the previous one of course) since let's assume there is a 50% chance of a boy or a girl and let's assume there is no stacking of numbers through abortion etc. Those families who have a boy first stop breeding. If they have a girl first then they (let's assume) have another child which statistically would make the next child a boy (I'm ignoring the independence of the events, but relying on the 50% chance thing). What you wind up with in general is that every 2 families produce 3 children... 2 boys and 1 girl. Leaving twice as many boys as girls... Not sure if your graph says anything different, but that's my take on it after limited consideration.... Travel safe and have fun.... Mark
11th May 2009

re: Quanjude and girls...
Mark D: your logic is obviously flawed because we know that all axe murderers don't understand probability (I'm ignoring here the fact that you're not an axe murderer). ie you can't ignore the independence of events, that's fundamental to the problem! There might be some biological basis for doing so, in which case you have to say that. I don't think such an effect would be significant. The intuitive answer would be that it would give more girls, which is what the government was of course hoping for. But in theory it's simple. Some people are allowed one child, they have a roughly 50% chance of a boy and a roughly 50% chance of a girl. Some people are allowed to try again, they again have a roughly 50% chance of a boy and a 50% chance of a girl. Yes I think Quanjude in melbourne is probably the same chain, I know they had a branch in LA, which I think closed down, I didn't know they had one in Queen st though, is it good?

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