globe-trotters.ch

June 7th, 2005: Forbidden City

It is late evening as the Airbus A330 of Northwestern Airlines lands in Beijing. Customs and immigration are not interested. We queue for a taxi and head for the 12 million city. We pass numerous illuminated construction sites that are busy for 24 hours a day ahead of the Olympics in three years' time. You can book your room today at an already strongly inflated rate. We also pass some ugly residential areas where chicken live on the balconies of twenty stories blocks of gray. After fifty minutes, we arrive in the center of Beijing.

Our reservation in the Wanfujing Grand Hotel mysteriously disappeared from the hotel's computer system. But after some discussion we still get a nice room with a view of the Forbidden City. Next day, we walk to see the jewel of the Chinese historical heritage.

Covering 74 hectares, Forbidden City is the world's largest palace complex. The city has been first built in the early fifteenth century but unfortunately burnt down several times. The buildings now seen mostly date from the eighteen century. The palace was home to two dynasties, Ming and Qing, and off limits to commoners until after the end of the empire.

We approach the city from the south-west. The first sight is prohibitive: The city floats in a six meter deep moat, hiding behind a ten meter high wall, the length of which disappears in the distance. Secretive and disempowering, the only thing the city shows of itself is the delicately structured tower in the corner of the curtain wall.



We walk alongside the moat until we reach the Meridian Gate. A bubbling current of visitors from around the globe carries us through the gates' thick walls. We enter the Outer Court, or the official part of the imperial city, where the emperor exercised his supreme power over the nation. We cross the Inner Golden River, the water reservoir as well as a decorative feature of the city, through one of the white marble bridges carved with dragon and phoenix motifs. The large courtyard beyond the river is ten thousand square meters of white stone. It is treeless as nothing could appear higher than the Emperor. In the middle of the courtyard, we stop and look back. The dimensions are grand.



To get to the heart of the Outer Court, we have to pass another thick gate, the Gate of Supreme Harmony. The gate is guarded by two lions, symbols of imperial power. The lion on the east side is male. Its right front paw is placed on a globe denoting that imperial power extended world-wide.



The lioness on the west side has its left front paw on a lion cub, denoting a thriving and prosperous imperial family. Inside the Gate of Supreme Harmony stand, one after the other, the three main official halls, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Central Harmony, and the Hall of Preserved Harmony, all situated on three-tier marble terraces. This is where the emperor ascended his throne and granted audience to visiting officials and other important events were celebrated.



The main halls are flanked by smaller halls used for example as the studies of the crown princes libraries, or imperial press.

Finally, we cross to the private quarters of the emperors. Six Eastern Palaces to the right, six Western Palaces to the left. The buildings here are smaller, the structures complicated. It becomes easy to mix the doors. It smells eunuchs conspiracy.



We follow the sun out of the maze and arrive to the imperial gardens. Though small in size, it is exquisitely laid out with towers, pavilions, artificial hills, springs, rocks, old trees, flowers and lawns - a replica of the gardens of southern China. We leave the city through the Gate of Devine Might, which faces Jingshan Park. We walk up the artificial hill in the park to throw a last glance over the Forbidden City of the Middle Kindgdom. The contours of the 9'999 ancient buildings are blurred by the fog.

June 8th, 2005: Beijing City Life

We close the guide books and go for the glimpses of today's Beijing. In front of the Everybright Bank, a young lady pulls out one of the eight hundred mobile phone models available in China and calls a friend for help in chosing one of the five billion pairs of shoes the country makes every year.



From a small private shop through Wall Mart to Silk Road, there is a lot goods to choose from, up to 24 hours a day, and not just shoes. Better still, China has made a sharp progress in quality in virtually every category of consumer products, while maintainting the China price. The shelves are not filled with the cheap goods we know from chinatowns around Europe. These are Lancel-quality bags for 150 yuan (8.28 yuan per dollar before the re-evaluation), brilliantly phonied Swiss watches, price negotiable, diabolical "super error correcting" DVD players, the newest models of Nikon cameras. Copycat magic or not, we are impressed.

The traffic in China is always an event worth watching. In Beijing, what can circulate is strongly limited. We see no old military trucks with imprudent loads nor horses or donkeys here. Only buses, personal cars, motorbikes, and bikes are allowed into the city. The cars are still the chief pollutor in Beijing. But compared to Bankok, the air is that of the Swiss Alps. The goverment tries to bring the smog down further by imposing that all cars change engines to more environmentally friendly solutions by 2007, Olympics is a big date. Despite the limitations, the traffic is still quite colorful. There are 120 firms selling cars in China. We see Santanas and Passats, Toyotas and Hondas complete with horrible glitzy gold trims, but also completely unknown brands. A lot of very young drivers means action on the road. The bike lines are full, consisting of ten dollar bikes to electrobikes. We watch a postman stepping down from his ecological vehicle and lit up a cigarette.



Chain-smoking is probably the second biggest pollutor in Beijing..

Cultural shock China, not everything is like at home. Some Chinese have developped habits that are not necessarily part of good education by Western standards. One of them is staring.



If there is something interesting going on, there will always be a peering crowd. So, get used to it.

China claims a history of 5000 years. The land is exceptional in a lot of other ways. About a fifth of the world's population lives there. It is the world's fastest growing economy. It is the "world's factory". It makes not only T-shorts and toys. The nation is making Boeing parts and exploring space with domestically built rockets. It is active in geneting engineering and developping an MRI machine. It bids billions of dollars to buy oil fields overseas. It influences developed countries' inflation rates, interest rates, wages, profits, oil prices and house prices - or at least they are strongly influenced by what happens in China. The Chinese youth learn all this early enough in Civil Education classes. In front of Forbidden City, we see patriotic parents taking pictures of their proud kids.



We cross the huge Tiananmen Square, surrounded on three sides by the socialist style buildings and statues of model workers. We are adopted by a couple of Chinese students who want to improve their English. We ask where good food is being served. They lead us to the old neigborhoods south of Tiananmen. We enter another world. The hutong lives in rythm of bicycles and street vendors. People sit in front of their old tiny stone houses, shovelling trice into their mouths. A father of a family runs in the streets in his underwear, trying to catch up with a rooster that empowered himself to leave. Steam and smoke rise from the bamboo steamers, Mongol grills, woks, and huge pots of soup of small eateries.



A saying goes that Chinese would eat everything with four legs except of the table. But in this hutong, dwarf dogs walk unnoticed and cats get love and care from their owners.



Reassured, we enter an eatery full of Chinese. We get some curious stares. I try some broken Mandarin learned in Zurich and everyone bursts in laugh. Then we get a welcome green tea and a bowl of delicious Muslim noodles that the cook prepares in front of us from scratch.

We walk in the narrow windy hutong streets digesting food and ambiance of a miniature Chinese countryside. One more step and we re-emerge in one of the shopping areas of Beijing. It feels like changing stages in a theater. This scene is ways richer, faster, consumerist.





Two completely different worlds at a chopstick distance from each other.

We walk some of the Beijing's peaceful parks and gardens.





Some temples are for tourist admiration only, others are again active.



In the big green spaces, people in the age of our parents dance, play badminton, or fly kites.



The more we stay, the more we like the city.

August 3rd, 2005: Beijing Summer Palace

After two months of travelling in south-west China, we come back to Beijing. We stay in a charming old Chinese house, Red Lantern, thanks the French, we really enjoy!

We visit the Summer Palace in the northwestern suburbs of Beijing. The palace was first built in 1750 in the Garden of Clear Ripples to become the summer residence of the Mandchu rulers after the capital was transferred from Nanjing to Beijing. Although the Mandchus were foreign tribes who invaded China from the north, they soon adopted the Chinese culture like other foreign dynasties ruling China before them. The Summer Palace the Mandchus ordered to build turned out to be a clever application of elements of Chinese imperial architecture and art of gardening.

The year 1750 is considered by some historians as the culminating point of China's imperial history. Indeed, at that time, China definitely belonged to the military strongest, richest, and most powerful countries in the world. Although Summer Palace was devastated by the Anglo-French Allied Forces in 1860 and again by Eight-Power Allied Forces in 1900, the splendor of 18th century China can still be felt in the palace's restored buildings and man-made landscapes. The Summer Palace is composed of over three thousand buildings spread over close to three hundred hectars of land and water.

The taxi leaves us at the Eastern Gate. We are grateful to meet much less crowd than in the Forbidden City. Even better, the greenery seems to swallow the excess noise.



We walk through the spacious courtyards and pavilions of the residential area. Summer residence at first, the residential quarters were later considerably enlarged by the Empress Dowager Cixi who made her permanent residence here when China plunged into chaos in the late 19th century. The chaos resulted from the population explosion meeting limited arable land, corruption, and incompetent, inward-looking politics that could not deal with foreign invasions. The Emperess Dowager rarely left the comfort and peace of the palace when she dealt with problems that eventually led to the final decline of imperial China.









Cixi even had a theater built in the Summer Palace to spend her spare time in virtue and harmony.The theatre building, constructed with a cost of 1.6 million taels of silver was the largest stage in China at the time.



Performances could be staged simultaneously on three levels of the three-storied stage. The three levels are connected by trap-doors, which provide convenience for actors to appear and disappear. A winch was installed on the top level, through which performers, settings and props could be lowered and raised. At the bottom of the lower floor, a deep well and five ponds were set to strengthen acoustic resonance and supply water for special effects. In the course of the performance, a grand water scene could easily be produced when necessary on the stage.

What was bad for the empire was good for the arts. The Great Stage is today regarded as "the Craddle of Beijing Opera".

We reach the shore of the Kunming Lake, a large lake that once protected the Summer Palace to the south. Today, this is the bussiest part of the Summer Palace. Tourists criss-cross the lake over bridges of different shapes and decorations or in old boats in search of an imperial feeling.



The lotus flowers surrounding control towers get a lot of attention from eager photographers.



On the other side of the lake mushrooms all that the Emperess Dowager wanted to avoid. The old palace views the new, the busy, the cosmopolitan Beijing.



We cross a part of a 728 meters long corridor decorated with 40 000 paintings of mystical landscapes.



Then we escape the masses and climb the steep slopes of the Longevity Hill.



The hill is dominated by the Tower of Fragrance of the Budha, a 41 meters high octagonal structure with four tiers of eaves, unfortunately closed for restoration.



Behind the tower sits the yellow-and-green Sea of Wisdom Temple, built entirely of brick and stone, without a single beam or rafter.





The temple is inhabited by an impressive statue of Budha.

We walk down the hill through richly painted winding corridors that were built to give the visitor the impression of strolling through a picture.



The Kunming Lake comes into view again. A marble ship ordered by Cixi and paid for with the monies earmarked for the Chinese navy obviously never left the shore to defend the empire against the Japanese.



We climb again to another major cluster of ancient buildings. The most impressive of which is a temple complex partly built in the Tibetan style.





Next stop, "Chinese Venice". The Suzhou Street, running 300 meters along the bank of Rear Lake was first formed as a "buy and sell street" during the Han dynasty at the beginning of the millenium. Built after the market street in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, the street gave the imperial family an illusion of taking part in the daily life of ordinary people which was forbidden to them. When imperial nobles came to visit the street, eunuchs, aiming to please their masters, would act as tradesmen and customers to produce a prosperous scene in the street.



We leave harmony and illusion through a garden of pine and stone.