David's Big Adventure in China

I’m in Beijing now but before I go into all the incredible sites here I’ll go back and fill in some details on some previous stops and add some odds and ends. I mentioned that in Suzhou I saw the Grand Canal which runs from Beijing to Hangzhou and is over 1000 miles long! That is more than 20 times the Panama Canal. Quite impressive, and even more so considering that it was dug more than 1400 years ago. Also in Suzhou, the pictures from the garden there include some flowers in the water which are Lotus flowers. While on our way out of Suzhou we went past some big factories and I was surprised to see a nice covered parking lot for employees vehicles in front of one of them. There under the covered parking were several hundred bicycles. While in Xi Tang we had dinner at a local noodle restaurant that I refer to as the slurping restaurant because most of the customers were making a slurping noise while eating their noodles out of the soupy broth. They were all very curious about the foreigner in their restaurant and were asking about me. That dinner cost about $1.15 for 2 of us including a beer for me. If any of you come to China make sure to wear two watches if you go out in public. I have found that if I only wear one watch they think I need another one and try very hard to sell me one. I have been approached at least 100 times about buying a watch. I have found that Moon River and Auld Lang Syne are two of the most popular English songs here but I have no idea why.

Now for my experiences here in Beijing, which has a population of about 14 million people (almost as many as the state of Florida) and has a history of more than 3000 years. There is a lot of construction going on here but it’s difficult to tell how much of it is due to Olympic preparations as there is a lot of construction everywhere in China. We did see the “birdnest” Olympic stadium under construction (see pics). The traffic here is very bad and the public transit does not seem to be quite as good as some other cites although it is very cheap (only 1 yuan or $.13 for a bus and 3 yuan for the subway, minimum of 10 yuan for a taxi with most taxi rides costing less than 20 yuan). Pollution is definitely an issue as there are many days when the sun is shining but you don’t really see it through the pollution. They only have blue skies if there was a good storm the night before. We went to the Summer Palace first which is out on the edge of town. The Summer Palace was first built over 800 years ago. In 1860 the Anglo-French forces invaded Beijing and burned down the palace. In 1888 Empress Cixi (see pic) had it restored at a very high cost. It was again destroyed in 1900 by invading armies from other parts of China. The Empress again had it rebuilt in 1903 at an enormous cost using funds intended for the navy. Many believe that this drain of resources from the military contributed significantly to the downfall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. The palace was built on a large lake and the grounds include the entire area around the lake. We didn’t walk around the entire lake but we must have walked about 8 miles during our 7 to 8 hour visit.

The next day we visited the Forbidden City/Imperial Palace (aka Palace Museum) in the heart of the city. It also is enormous and is literally a city within a city. I’m guessing that in a residential area you would find about 100,000 people living in the same amount of space as the Forbidden City. Construction was finished in 1420 after 14 years of work by 100,000 artisans and 1 million civilians. There is one large marble ramp carving (see pic) that weighs more than 200 tons and took 20,000 people to move it the 43 miles and was accomplished in the winter on an ice road using logs and iron sticks. 24 Emperors from the Ming and Qing Dynasties ruled from here. The luxurious lifestyle enjoyed by the royalty is quite amazing. The Emperors normally had more than 1 wife and enjoyed many concubines. There was a ranking among the Empresses and the concubines with higher rank conferring more power and entitlements. There was particularly powerful Empress named Cixi who started as a concubine. She ruled the country for the better part of 50 years even taking power away from an Emperor when she felt he was unfit. Often she would rule by sitting behind a curtain while a child emperor sat in front of the curtain holding court. She had a taster to taste every dish of food before she ate to ensure that they were not poisoned. As an example of the luxury she enjoyed, there were over 1000 people working to make her silk embroidered socks as she wore a new pair every day and they were destroyed after she wore them. To keep the concubines from “straying” the male servants in the palace were all eunuchs. I read that about half of them did not survive the surgery and that many of them carried around their “dismembered members” to help them get into heaven since they had a religious belief that you couldn’t get into heaven with parts missing. We walked and walked and still didn’t see all the buildings within the Forbidden City. In the afternoon I sat down and leaned back in a chair and promptly went to sleep. Needless to say, my feet and back were dog tired.

The next day we rested a bit and only did some light sightseeing. We visited Tiananmen Square the site of many famous populous protests. The “Mao-soleum” which is where you can view the body of Chairman Mao is also located there along with the Peoples Hall (similar to our Congress). We also attempted to buy our train tickets to Xi’an at the nearby train station. We wanted to buy “soft” seat tickets (sleeper) for the overnight train but apparently scalpers buy up most of the good tickets so we ended up with “hard” seats (no bed, just a seat). For dinner that evening we went to Quanjude restaurant for Peking (roast) duck. They have been serving duck at this restaurant since 1864 and it was delicious. It was the most expensive dinner I’ve had in China costing about $16.50 (125 yuan) per person without any alcohol.

The next day we had a very busy day. We climbed the Great Wall, visited a Ming Tomb, a Lama Temple and did a Hutong tour. We left the hotel at 6:00 a.m. to go join the tour bus to the Great Wall as I wanted to beat the crowds. The closest and most popular section of the wall is at Ba Da Ling about 50 miles from the city. We arrived there at 8:00 and it was already crowded. It’s mind boggling to think about how difficult it was to build it considering that it is on top of a mountain ridge and the tools they had to use when it was built. It is really several walls that were joined together over time. Construction began as early as 400 BC and ended by 1620. It is almost 4000 miles long and it is estimated the amount of bricks and rock used to make it would be enough to build a wall around the world 3 feet thick and 16 feet high. After the Great Wall we went to see one of the Ming tombs which was not too far away. It was built in the 1500’s and was built underground. It’s amazing the riches that they buried and that the tombs were not pillaged later considering it took many workers to build the tombs. They were left undisturbed for hundreds of years. Then we went back to Beijing and visited the Lama Temple which is a large Buddhist temple. After that we went to see a nearby Hutong neighborhood which is the old style of housing in Beijing. A Hutong is a rectangular compound with a wall around the outside with much of the wall being sides of buildings and a courtyard in the middle. We hired a bicycle taxi to take us for a tour of the neighborhood and we went inside one of the Hutongs (see pics) owned by a private family that charges a small fee for a tour and some tea. One of the buildings is for the parents to live in, another building is for the adult children and their family to live in, another building is for cooking, and the 4th building is for guests. Many of these Hutongs have disappeared in recent years and have been replaced by high rise buildings.

Well that’s about it for Beijing, next stop is Xi’an and the terracotta soldiers. I hope I didn’t bore you with too many details.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.