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Published: October 25th 2007
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Thurs 4th Oct - in the wee hours, we visited a genuine Mongolian disco! We had been looking for a jazz club, but it was the disco that we had stumbled across, or nothing. As the only 'white' faces, it was not long before our group was being almost dragged onto the dancefloor, and cultural exchange took place through the medium of dance.
We had a pre-7am departure on the train from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing, which we made in good time and soon settled in. We had enjoyed our brief stay in the Mongolia, with its friendly people, interesting language (which sounds like Chinese spoken with a Welsh accent) and the tog-rog, the funny-sounding currency.
Ulaanbaatar was very dusty city, and the scenery from the train window remained dusty for the entire day; all evidence of life was reduced to tiny intermittent villages. By the afternoon, the ground was almost completely sand and the journey seemed like we were speeding across a beach; not surprising
as we were cutting across the Gobi desert.
Customs at Mongolia and China were fairly smooth, around midnight. At the Chinese border, we had to change bogeys due to different size tracks, each carriage was hauled 6ft into the air before being lowered onto new wheels (see photo). We first set foot on Chinese soil at the border post, represented by a large, clean building, neon lights forming big oriental characters on the roof, and a decent-sized shop. We got our first glimpse of the differences we would experience in China, perhaps summed up by the food, such as vacuum-sealed packs of chicken foot and soft-boiled egg.
On waking in the morning, the contrast with dry, flat Mongolia was striking. Barren dunes had given way to fields of crops and huge cliffs which the train cut through. We knew when Beijing was near when construction sites, landscaped public areas and block after block of luxury and ordinary apartments all burst into view.
We emerged from the railway station into a very busy Beijing street, and the sight of 15 westerners carrying all their worldly possessions on their backs still managed to draw stares in this city that is
expecting a deluge of similar folk for the Olympics next year.
Some first impressions:
* Beijing was not really how we imagined a city of about 15 million people. This was partly because there are few high rise buildings in the centre, as if in deference to the low historical buildings there. Tall buildings do exist, but are located further out.
* To us, the Chinese often talk at high volume, especially in restaurants - it always sounds as if they are about to have an argument!
* The beleaguered cyclist is no longer king of the road in the city. The larger roads have a couple of traffic lanes in either direction, used almost exclusively by motorised vehicles, then there is a pavement, and beyond that there is a small cycle lane at the edge where the cyclists can move along in relative safety. However, traffic lights and pedestrian crossings are only loosely adhered to, and the absence of lane discipline plus the amount of obstacles on all pavements (from big trees to repair shops spilling out), means that getting from A to B is a challenge for pedestrian, cyclist and vehicle alike.
* The metro system is
just developing, with only 4 lines at the moment (one of which opened during our stay), but there are plans to treble its capacity. It's new and sparkly with ticket clerks ripping paper tickets, and little use of ticket machines.
* Smog - maybe at certain times of the year, but the air was as clean or cleaner than any other giant capital city.
*Spitting - supposed to be done everywhere by everyone in Beijing, it’s not that bad....!
* Loads of people, when they’re hanging around, instead of standing or sitting, like to squat as if they’re on the loo.
Our hotel provided one of the best rooms we had had so far, but the cable TV only stretches to one English language channel, which is broadcast from inside China and mostly talks about how well China is doing in the areas of business, medicine and agriculture, or has a ‘Learn Chinese’ language programme presented by a cheery American, or documentaries on rural village success stories - none of that capitalist CNN revolutionary broadcasting allowed to pollute the screens! We even saw an interview where Chinese table tennis champions talked of their debt to the motherland for helping
Aerial view, Forbidden City, Beijing
Courtesy anonymous postcard photographer. Tiananmen Gate is in the foreground.them to realise their talent, and how they were proud to be communists. I recorded a video of a TV propaganda advert, which I have attached to this blog.
On the subject of censorship, I typed in “Tiananmen” on google.com but none of the links to ‘student massacre’ worked. However, in the Chinese equivalent (google.cn), it brings up the official website of Tiananmen Square.
We all had a delicious early evening meal at a local restaurant, where the speciality was Peking Duck but there was also chicken and beef. I was expecting that Chinese food would be quite different to Chinese food in England, but it wasn’t really - and very tasty. The main difference is what is actually on the menu’s photographs: sometimes there is a rather sad looking baby turtle splayed out across a plate, and in the tanks at the entrance there are sometimes large live toads as well as fish. Chinese beer is very weak, the Tsing Tao is typically 3.6%. After dinner, we strolled down the main street by our hotel, famous for its restaurants and hundreds of bright lanterns hanging from the trees. It was the Beijing we had imagined, with people
everywhere, walking and sitting at both large and tiny tables on the pavement. Several restaurants had large, tiled fish tanks outside and we watched as a man at one of them caught a couple of large catfish in his net, each about a foot long, and then stunned them by thwacking them loudly against the side of their tank! (Interesting fact: the Chinese for 'How are you?' translates as 'Have you eaten?')
A couple of times we bought bread for breakfast from the supermarket. They had small loaves with either red bean flavour or "beef floss", tasting a bit like curry!
Saturday 6th to Friday 12th October 12 We were in Beijing for the final part of National Week, a celebration that has taken place since 1949 when the Communists first came to power. In Tiananmen Square, there were thousands of people milling around, almost all with a camera, young and old from across the country, posing for pictures with one of the many grand buildings or temporary flower displays in the background. Vendors of little red Chinese flags were doing a roaring trade, which parents made their children wave in patriotic photos. This square, which we have
seen so many times on television, was great to finally be in. It was always a main plaza, but Mao enlarged it when he took power and it now measures a whopping 450,000 sq metres, the largest in the world. ("Classical Beijing planning didn't permit public squares. They were seen largely as dangerous places where crowds could gather and diverted attention and focus away from the Emperor. Tiananmen Square is therefore, one of Beijing's most modern sites and largely Mao's concoction".) In 1976, one million people gathered in the square to pay tribute to the 'Chairman'. As mentioned, it was also the scene of student pro-democracy demonstrations that were beamed around the world, which were ruthlessly put down by tanks to prove that the Reds were not about to consider reform.
On this subject and of current censorship in China, the English war correspondent and poet James Fenton wrote:
Tiananmen
Is broad and clean
And you can't tell
Where the dead have been
And you can't tell
What happened then
And you can't speak
Of Tiananmen.
I had read that one of the jobs of the the large number of police and army personnel that are
present on the Square is to ensure no repeat of the protests, and to that end they were searching all the day-packs and handbags of any Chinese person as they entered the square. Despite all this control, there are still vendors of Mao watches, which feature a photo of him with a large grin while his right hand waves insanely from side to side in keeping with the seconds!
Tiananmen Gate (translated as the “Gate of Heavenly Peace”) is just to the north of Tiananmen Square, originally built in the 15th century but restored several times since. There are 7 small bridges over a small stream which lead to it, and 5 doors in the Gate itself. In imperial times, only the Emperor could use the central gate, and it is this one over which has hung the famous giant portrait of Mao since the Communists came to power. Both emperors and party officials have used Tiananmen Gate to speak to the masses, and one day we paid the entrance fee to climb at and see the sweeping views of the square, in the middle of which is the
Monument to the Peoples Heroes obelisk, the
Great Hall of the People, and Mao’s large mausoleum. We went to visit these last two places: the Great Hall is where the Communist Party ratifies central decisions and was very bland inside, like a series of hotel meeting rooms with a large theatre where the politicians sit. The mausoleum was, I couldn’t help feeling, a rather large and grand waste of space for a corpse. Signs inside ordered us not to speak as we filed past Mao, lying with a flag over his body with his upper body and face peeping out from the top, while soldiers guarding him kept us moving quickly. Was he real? Impossible to judge from the distance that we saw him, although I can say he looked more rubbery whereas Lenin had looked more waxy. I had read a book on Mao over the summer which went into detail about his ascent to power and the tens of millions of Chinese who died, during peacetime, under his rule and I wondered if the thousands of people who reverently walked past him each hour would feel the same way if they had the opportunity to read it too.
Saturday
night began with another feast, this time we were spread across 2 tables and in the middle of each was a large stainless steel bowl, heated by gas from underneath and divided into plain and a spicy soup on each side. Piled up around the bowls were plates of raw chicken, beef and lamb, plus greens, which we dunked in and fished out - freshly cooked - two minutes later. All washed down with local beer and it came to less than 4 pounds each. We headed over to one of Beijing’s night life areas, starting in a bar-club where the Chinese band did amazing covers, including The Beatles, then went somewhere with tables outside before ending up for a few hours in another bar-club where the DJ played the ideal mix of Britpop & dance music to make it an ideal place for our last night on the Vodka Train tour together. Much raucous fun was had, not least by the stool-podium dancers in our midst and by D.I.S.C.O. Mark: don’t miss the chance to see him in action if the chance should arise.
Sunday lunch was a fantastic vegetarian buffet at a new restaurant, Xu Xiang Zhai.
Before we even got upstairs to the restaurant, we were served refreshing little cups of tea in a traditional Chinese way. At lunch. I didn’t recognize most of what I heaped onto my plate but it was all delicious, with unlimited Ice Tea, Chinese
puer tea & coffee (and Milo!) to accompany it. The desserts were small and superb: silky coffee mousse and delicate shortbread.
Round the corner from the restaurant was the
Lama Temple, described as Beijing’s most colourful temple. Originally built in 1694, it is one of the main Tibetan Buddhist temples outside of Tibet. There were five halls decorated with statues of Buddha & larger-than-life cartoon-like religious characters from the Buddhist religion, along with ribbons and frescoes, and outside the halls were large metal chests full of incense sticks that people continuously added to before kneeling down on nearby padded benches. The two highlights were a sandpainting (coloured sand arranged into extremely delicate patterns and shapes, including a couple of small dismembered people!) and a 26m-high Buddha - made from a single block of sandalwood.
In the evening, we went to a show in the
Lao She Teahouse, located just off Tiananmen Square and named
after a Chinese writer persecuted during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The good and the famous have visited this place, as evidenced by photos on the walls, and our evening consisted of snippets of Chinese culture, including a folk music performance, a scene from the Chinese opera
Farewell my concubine, acrobatics, kung fu and our favourites: the conjuror, an amazing hand-shadow routine from behind a large screen, and the odd-named-but-highly-impressive ‘Face-changing of Sichuan Opera’ - got to be seen to be believed!
For the rest of the week, we saw some of Beijing’s other sights:
The Forbidden City was an impenetrable area of Beijing for 500 years, and from where 24 successive emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasties reigned, starting in 1420, although most of the 800 buildings in the 720,000 sq metre area are post-18th century due to frequent fire ravage. With approximately 9,000 rooms, it’s a big place and we were there for quite a few hours, admiring the brightly coloured architecture and being amused by the names of many of the individual buildings (e.g.
The Hall of Central Harmony was constructed in 1627 during the Ming Dynasty, originally being called The Hall of Overwhelming Glory. The inscription over the throne begins, “The way of Heaven is profound…”)
The main attraction of
Beihei Park is its 36m tall
White Dagoba (a dagoba is a “dome-shaped memorial alleged to contain relics of Buddha or a Buddhist saint”) which was built for a Dalai Lama visit in 1651. Standing tall and proud on a hill, it can be seen from some distance, and just next to it is the tiny-but-long-named
Hall of Beneficient Causation, bearing 455 glazed Buddha tiles on the outside. We took a boat across the park’s large lake to its northern shore and saw
Xitian Fanjing with its three huge dark bronze Buddhas, whose only colour is their traditional blue hair! In another of the park’s temples,
Jingxinzhai, there were rockeries, ponds and pretty painted corridors, and not far away the
Wall of Flying Dragons, measuring 26m by 6m tall and built in 1756, featured 9 glazed tile flying dragons. At the other end of the park is a giant jade urn made in 1265, weighing 3.5 tonnes, decorated with carvings of sea monsters and reputedly used for serving wine from in imperial times during the reign of Kublai Khaan! A pagoda behind it is
dedicated to housing a 1.5m Buddha made from flawless white jade. In and around the park, people who had the leisure time were having dance glasses, singing (loudly) in choirs and playing cards or the Chinese domino-type game
Mah Jong.
The grandly-named
Temple of Heaven was originally built in 1420, and was the place where the emperors for the Ming & Qing dynasties used to worship Heaven and pray for good harvests for the year to come. The emperors lived in unimaginable luxury compared to their subjects and this task was one of the few they had to carry out on behalf of the masses. There is a
Hall of Abstinence in the complex, which the emperor was expected to use while he refrained from some of his popular vices, but it appears that certain of them were not up to any self-denial and brought in a cluster of concubines.
The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests itself is a rotund tower, 40m high, and having been restored only last year it is a real splash of oriental colours. There is a mini version further on in the complex, called
The Imperial Vault of Heaven, which is just 20m
tall.
Quianmen Gate at the south of Tiananmen Square gave us views over Mao's mausoleum - see above. There was a good museum on the Gate's upper floors, showing pictures of old Beijing and adding the fact that women came to rub its large rounded nails in a superstitious belief that it would help them to have a male child.
We were keen to see some of Beijing's
hutong on our wanderings around the city. Translated as 'an alleyway', the network of
hutong are homes to "mini-communities with an ancient past", and are described as "one storey ramshackle dwellings & historic courtyard homes, first created when Genghis Khaan reduced the city to rubble hundreds of years ago". Nearly all
hutong run East-West so that the main gate faces south, a requirement of feng shui. Four-sided courtyard homes are less common than much smaller homes that house family after family. There is still a one-child policy in China, so the typical family is 3 plus grandparents. Many houses don't have their own bathroom/toilet, so there are many public conveniences around. We wanted to see the
hutong because they are traditional Beijing residential areas which are reportedly being wiped out
at great speed as the city prepares itself for the Olympics and smartens itself up. The streets are being bulldozed, the inhabitants being moved to apartment blocks out of the centre, and their history lost. The
hutong often had utilitarian names, such as "Date Tree Lane" but during Mao's
Cultural Revolution some changed to fiery names like "Destroy the Capitalist Lane"! There were around 6,000
hutong in the 1950's, now there are around 2,000, home to about a quarter of Beijing's residents. We managed to have a good walk round several of them, seeing that they were generally friendly and pleasant places to live, with plenty of trees, lots of little grocery stores & kebab-type vendors, as well as other business such as hairdressers and carpenters. It naturally seemed a shame to us that these areas are being uprooted, however it wouldn't be hard to believe that the local residents might welcome the change, at least to some extent - the smell outside some WCs wasn't too great and there is not much room for the growing number of cars. We also took a rickshaw ride for an hour in a
hutong area and saw where Mao lived with his
first wife, had a joke with a very cheery elderly woman selling chillies, and visited a grumpy old woman in her well-preserved courtyard home. (Incidentally, I had heard that personal space is largely an unknown concept in China, and this was well-demonstrated in a public
hutong toilet: the holes in the ground for the number two's are just side by side. I guess neighbours get to know each other
really well).
The grossest sights we saw were at the
Wangfujing night food market. This pedestrianised street was mostly innocuous, such as chicken/beef skewers, but several stalls also sold the following (all on a stick, raw and ready to be cooked on your say-so!):
* Cockroaches (4 to a stick)
* Grasshoppers (4)
* Baby scorpions (4, and some were still wriggling!!)
* Starfish (1)
* Sea-horse (1)
* Lizard (1)
Stomach-churning stuff indeed. Round the corner was
Donghuamen night market, quite a bit larger and with the addition of sea urchin and centipede on a stick (1), which cost RMB30 (about GBP2); given that a Big Mac meal is only RMB20, that critter must be a real delicacy! There were more palatable snacks too, I had mince in a
Paula in Beihei Park, Beijing
White Dagoba in the background
bun and Paula got an ear of corn. We left Beijing the next morning for a visit to the Great Wall, 3 hours out of the city.
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Richie
non-member comment
Flying train
Here was I, desperate to see a picture of a train carriage hoisted 6 feet in the air, as you promised... yet Alas! no picture could be found.