Forbidden (City) Pleasures

We saved the best for the last couple of days of our foreign travels, or at least some of the best. It was not planned that way. We had originally planned to spend a month in China, but when we made some changes to our itinerary, we were unable to get a flight from Bali to China when we wanted, and we ended up with 27 days in Bali, and only 12 in China . Not that it was a hardship spending a month in Bali, but China is so much bigger, with so much to see, that a month there cannot do it justice. It is like visiting the USA for 12 days; what do you see, or perhaps it is better to say, what do you decide not to see? We ended up opting for Guilin, in the SE of China, where the beautiful karst mountains are located, Xian, home of the Terracotta warriors, and Beijing, home of the Forbidden City, Tianamen Square, and the Great Wall. We loved what we saw, but we could not congratulate ourselves on making good decisions, as we could not have gone wrong. There are so many great places to see in China.

I was initially a bit wary of visiting Beijing, but I knew that we had to. One could not visit China without seeing the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. The reason for my wariness was my concern about its air quality. China is famous for its bad air, so much so that some writers speak of visiting its larger cities and never seeing the upper floors of its skyscrapers. After visiting, and suffering through the horrid air quality in Egypt, India, and Kathmandu, which are not as well known for air pollution, I wondered what the cities of China had in store for us. As it turned out, it was not a problem at all. Sure, if you looked off into the distance, you could see the air, though it did not appear to be worse than a lot of American cities. I did not find that, unlike in the Nile Valley, nearly all of India, and Kathmandu, that my airways burned when I ran, or that I developed a cough productive of black sputum. I don’t know if that was due to the time of the year we visited, recent weather conditions, or efforts the government has made at cleaning up the air. Whatever the reason, I was pleased.

Tianamen Square and the Forbidden are next door neighbors and are usually combined in a visit, though certainly the Forbidden City is big enough to spend a couple days visiting all by itself, and many people do. We would have preferred a couple of days, but because of our condensed schedule, we opted for the one-day combination. The schedule was even more condensed as Bjorn had to take his big math final that day, and we did not get going until about 12:30.

The Forbidden City

The Forbidden City

For more than 500 years, the Forbidden City was off-limits to all but the emperor, his cohorts, and those doing business with him. It appears that the Chinese are now making up for lost time; we visited along with what seemed to be half the population of Beijing. It is an area filled with temples, administrative buildings, living quarters, and immaculately cared-for beautiful gardens. A country that had such a large and impressive palace grounds had to be a rich and powerful. To emissaries visiting the place it had to be awe-inspiring, and intimidating. Even now, though, only about a fourth of the place is open to visitors. I am not sure what is in the areas we did not visit, but the area we did see was so vast, and impressive, I could not imagine what else would have been needed.

Tianamen Square

Tianamen Square is best remembered as where the tanks rolled in to crush the demonstrations for greater social freedoms back in the early 90’s. As I walked through the square, I tried to imagine where the demonstrators would have stood, and where the tanks would have been, but it did not look like the right place to me. The square is vast, and It certainly does take some time to get from one end to the other, but it does not look like an empty place. Perhaps it is because there are lots of people strolling through the area, with several buildings there, including Mao’s Tomb, in addition to several gigantic Jumbotron screens. I would not have necessarily known by just from being there that it was the world’s largest public square. There are also lots of police strolling through. A response to the events of those previous demonstrations, or to recent events in the Middle East? Margit was here back in 1987, and thinks they may have added a street, or possibly several, to the square, breaking up the space, in addition to adding the Jumbotron screens. It is a topic I would like to research a bit when I get a chance. Are there changes, and if so, were they done to prevent more large-scale demonstrations?

After our tour of the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square, we walked a bit of Xiamen Street. This street extends from one end of Tianamen Square, and is an old commercial street that has undergone recent governement-sponsored renovations, to the tune of about $2,000,000 US. It is a beautiful street, and it is fun to wander down, but it appears a bit sanitized, and I am curious how much is new construction and how much is renovation. It appeared that much of what we saw was new, as all of the buidling materials were identical, and the architecture the same. That brings me to the topic of the development in China, but that is a subject for another blogpost.

Mitch
5/17/2011