Well, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve last written in this. I thought I’d give it another shot, play a little catchup. Here’s my trip to Beijing last year.
Beijing was cold. I’ve spoken to many other people about this, and whenever the question “How was Beijing?” was asked, the immediate response is “Beijing was cold.” This is unfortunate, because all of the things we wanted to see happen to be outside. It put something of a damper on our exploration. Still, the cold did come with some advantages- there were no crowds anywhere. All the places that the guidebook said should be packed elbow to elbow (the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace) simply weren’t.
We stayed in the Redwall Hotel, which was a perfectly serviceable tourist hotel just a few minute’s walk from the Forbidden City. So, this is where we went on the first day.
The Forbidden City was the imperial palace for the Ming and Qing Dynasties. For five hundred years, entry into the forbidden city would have cost you your life. Now it’s only about six dollars.
Inside is a mazelike tangle of corridors and huge pavilions. Some of these halls have been converted into small museum galleries, displaying everything from ancient clocks to precious gems to two hundred year old medical prescriptions. The biggest building in the Forbidden City is the Hall of Supreme Harmony (not to be confused the the Hall of Middle Harmony or the Hall of Preserving Harmony), which is found in the middle of the complex.
Also within the Forbidden City were a number of small parks, with rock gardens, gazebos, and beautiful flowers and trees. Or, there would have been beautiful flowers and trees, if we hadn’t gone in January.
Overall, the Forbidden City was a very cool place to see, but it actually got kind of same-y after a while. After you’ve seen one Chinese hall, you’ve seen them all- and I’ve seen a lot of them. So, we went out to Tienanmen Square, where you can see the famous portrait of Mao hanging over the entrance to the Forbidden City.
Tienanmen Square is the largest public square in the world. And it’s big. Would be bigger, but they put Chairman Mao’s tomb in the middle of it.
You can see his mummified body inside there. People line up to lay a flower on it.
The next day, we saw some of Beijing’s hutongs, which are a confusing labyrinth of extremely narrow passageways leading to people’s homes. We also saw the drum and bell towers, which are a couple of towers once used to sound out the time of day.
The following day we went to the Great Wall.
Normally, this section of the Great Wall is packed with tourists. I’m told it’s absolutely hellish on the weekend. In January, however, we practically had the wall to ourselves.
There’s really not much to say about visiting the Great Wall. The thing about the Wall is that there’s nothing surprising or unexpected about it- everyone has seen a million pictures of it, and that’s exactly what it is. It’s impressive, of course, but if you go there, don’t let its legendary status build your expectations too high. Anyway, we got there on a fine sunny day, and spent a very pleasant afternoon hiking along the Great Wall of China.
We went to a small Great Wall museum afterward. Now, I’ve been to a fair number of museums in China; and one of the things that makes Chinese museum crawling so special is hunting down the propaganda. If you have even a smattering of Eastern history knowledge, it’s pretty easy. For instance: the Great Wall has been called the “Monument to a Million Workers”, because it’s estimated that that’s how many people died making it. Disease and starvation killed rural laborers by the thousands, and it’s a common (though unsubstantiated) belief that many workers were buried inside the wall itself. Now, here is the Great Wall museum’s exhibit on this chapter in Great Wall history.
No, I’m not cropping anything out. That’s the whole exhibit.
The next day, we went to the Summer Palace. Several times larger than the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace was the royal getaway home during the hot Beijing summer months. Now, of course, it was frigid, and the beautiful lake it was built around was frozen solid.
The summer palace was probably my favorite place in Beijing. Though I’m sure it would have been much better when everything was green, you could still get a sense of the incredible beauty of the place. There was the enormous Buddhist Temple of the Sea of Wisdom, which could be seen from anywhere in the Palace, and could be reached by the Long Corridor, a covered corridor painted with hundreds of small portraits. In the center of the palace is Kunming Lake, which is crisscrossed by scenic causeways and the famous Seventeen Arch Bridge, a marble bridge lined with 544 carved lions.
Normally, a ferry runs across the lake allowing you to quickly cross from one side of the palace to the other. Of course, the ferries don’t run when the lake is frozen, so we walked across it instead.
After the Summer Palace, our time in Beijing was pretty much over. It was time to get to the airport and head to our next stop: Kunming, the capitol of beautiful Yunnan Province.
