Advertisement
Published: August 7th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Temple of Heaven, Beijing
This temple is within a 267 hectare park "The heavens are high, the clouds are pale,
We watch as the wild geese disappear southwards.
If we fail to reach the Great Wall we are not true men.
We who have marched more than 20,000 li."
(Mao Zedong)
Beijing (北 京 = Northern Capital) is the cultural and political capital of the most populous country in
the world. It's also a major tourist attraction because of its Imperial Palaces and the nearby Great Wall.
But Beijing wasn't always the capital of China. In fact it seems a very strange place to choose as a
capital. It's too far North of the historic Chinese heartland. It first served as the capital of a unified
China in 1264 when Kublai Khan's Mongol forces set up the Great Capital (大都) to rule their new
empire. It gave the Mongol Yuan dynasty a capital closer to their homelands.
I spent 9 days in
Beijing - longer than I intended because there is so much to see in the city. I spent a whole day wandering around the Forbidden City, another day in the Summer Palace. It is possible to get around the main tourist sites in 3 or 4 days but I think if you do that everything will become a blur.
The city is huge. It's impossible to say exactly how many people live in the city because of the millions of unregistered migrant workers. About
13 million live in Beijing permanently but there may be another 5 million rural migrants in the city.
The Great Wall
The Great Wall is a obligatory day trip from Beijing. I notice that it recently topped a poll for the 7
Great Wonders of the World. 100 million votes were cast on the Internet and via text-phone according to
New7Wonders, the non-profit organization that conducted the poll.
I found my visit to the Great Wall disappointing - I enjoyed myself much more in the Forbidden Palace and
the Summer Palace. Part of the reason for my disappointment was the weather - the wall was covered
by fog so that I couldn't actually see very far.
The Great Wall of China or the Long Wall of 10,000 Li (a Li is a Chinese measurement it equals about half a km) is a series of fortifications built and re-built between the 5th century BC and the 16th century. The most famous of the Long (Great) Walls was built by the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang between 220-200 BC. The wall that tourists are taken to see is not the Qin dynasty wall. The tourist
Great
Street scene in a 'Hutong', Beijing
Hutongs are old streets laid out according to the principles of feng shui Wall was in fact built over 100 years during the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644); the Qin Dynasty Wall was much further north than the current wall.
The worship of the Great Wall is in fact a modern phenomenon. It was Jesuit missionaries that first
worshipped the Wall. The
Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911) had no use for the wall, it was well within the boundaries of the country and anyway it hadn't stopped them conquering China from Manchuria. It was early 20th century nationalist propaganda that turned the Great Wall into a national symbol. In popular legends the Wall had been demonised - it had another name to ordinary Chinese -
the World's Longest Graveyard.
"If you have a son, don't raise him,
If you have a girl, feed her dried meat
Can't you see, the Long Wall
Is propped up on skeletons."
(Qin era poetry)
Advertisement
Tot: 0.205s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.1463s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb