Monday, October 17 - Beijing

The weather was better the next day, the smog had lifted and we were gifted with a “Beijing blue” sky – very famous in China, we were told. It didn’t look that distinctive a hue to me, but according to Mary, it’s always welcome because the alternative is what we had the day before, or much worse. We were up by 6:30 and on the bus and on our way by 8:30, after way too little sleep. It’s hard to see how we can ever hope to get over our jet lag with such a hectic schedule. The day’s big agenda item was a visit to a segment of the Great Wall of China, about 70 kilometers outside Beijing. But before that, they had to sell us stuff. This, I eventually concluded, was the primary purpose of the tour. How much commission, I wonder, does Nexus receive from vendors?

     

The first stop was a jade “factory.” Just inside the entrance, there were some strategically placed glass booths where workers were demonstrating their craft, carving jade – just to prove it really was a factory. But it soon became clear that the main business of this place was not making the stuff, but selling it to tour groups. As at other factories and workshops we would visit, the parking lot was crowded with tour buses.

The workers in the glass booths were carving a curious object called a happy family ball – much valued in China, we were told, and found in almost every home. It consists of hollow latticed globes – like practice golf balls – one inside the other, usually three in total. Happy family balls come in many sizes. They symbolize the generations of a family, the older generations on the outside, protecting the younger on the inside. There are no seams: they’re carved from a solid piece of jade. It wasn’t clear from watching the demonstrators how exactly this is done. All we saw was one person filing at the little openings in the outer globe, and another polishing. The initial carving to create the three globes must take a great deal of skill, and patience. They had Plexiglas shields in front of the pieces they were working on, which they had to reach around. They also wore paper masks over their mouths and noses and cotton gloves. This was all presumably to protect them from the fine jade dust.

Beijing, jade factory: happy family ball

The guide here was a fellow who told us he had studied English at university. His English was very good, almost unaccented and fairly idiomatic – at least on first hearing, and in comparison to Leo’s and Mary’s simplified, more heavily accented English. He did give us a five-or-ten-minute spiel about how they work the jade, the different types of jade (not all green), and so on. But he quickly transitioned into selling, and we were soon led into a display room where sales people, mostly young women, were waiting behind counters to take our orders.

Beijing, jade factory: jade relief carving of dragon

There were some impressive large carved pieces on display, but it was mostly trinkets and tchotchkes. Karen and I were soon bored and walked back out to the entranceway to watch and photograph the glass-encased carvers, and then continued outside into the sun, where our group’s cadre of smokers was holding court.

It was another half hour or so on the bus to the Wall. On the way, Mary talked a little about its 2,000-year-plus history. One of the kings of the seven kingdoms of ancient China managed to conquer the others, founding the first of China’s imperial dynasties, the Qin (221 to 206 BC) – pronounced ‘chin.’ An early order of business for the new emperor was forcing each former kingdom to undertake building a section of the wall through its territory. (Sounds a bit Trumpian.) The story is they used sticky rice for mortar in the early days. Not sure how that would stand up to rain. They built the wall mainly to keep out marauding northerners from the steppes between China and Russia – Manchurians, Mongols and the like. Manchuria, of course, has long been part of China. The Wall today goes through the middle of the modern country.

Great Wall of China, near Beijing

The part we were visiting, and most of what survives, dates from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). It looks newer to me: too clean, not worn down enough. I’m guessing it has been constantly restored, repaired and rebuilt over the years, to the point that there isn’t much of the original left. I’m sure the Chinese government, quite rightly, sees the Wall as a tourism golden goose that must be kept spruce and attractive at all cost. 

Whenever it was built, it is a fantastic thing, one of the great feats of engineering in the pre-modern world. The Wall stretches, or stretched, from Dandong in the east to Lop Lake in the west, along an arc that roughly follows the southern edge of Inner Mongolia. It was 8,850 km (5,500 mi) long. Much of it, as in this place, snakes over mountains, with meters-thick walls and watch towers every quarter kilometer or so. It must have been hell for the peasants who had to build it. Thousands died, Mary told us, their bones often incorporated in the structure.

As we pulled in at the entrance, Mary warned us about the hawkers selling souvenirs, toys and other gew-gahs in the parking lot. Just ignore them, she said. What they were offering was mostly junk, and sometimes over-priced. We would see them most places tourist buses stopped, or tourists gathered. Some of the factories and workshops we visited had sanctioned vendors who were allowed to set up booths right on the property, but more often they were just standing around waiting for the punters. They would follow us and bark the same pitch over and over. Irritating but ultimately harmless.

Great Wall of China, near Beijing

Mary also explained that you’re not considered a real “hero” until you’ve climbed a significant section of the wall. ‘Hero’ didn’t sound right to me. Then I realized from a little slip of the tongue she made that it was a politically-correct, gender-neutral euphemism (from Mary the feminist) for “you’re not a real man” until you climb the wall. In any case, that’s about all you can do here, other than stare at and photograph it. So off we all went, clambering up the uneven steps and sloping ramparts, along with hundreds of other tourists. 

Real heroes climbing the Great Wall of China

Some definitely shouldn’t have been climbing so many or such steep steps, Karen, arguably, among them. Some seemed very infirm. But climb they, and we, did. It was exhausting. I could feel it in my knees and calves, so I’m sure it was hard on Karen. She made it as far as any of us, though.

Pat and Ralph, the spry ones, galloped ahead. We caught up to them at the topmost of the watch towers we could see. It was the end point for most. I’d noticed people down below wearing what looked like Olympic medals on ribbons around their necks, and had even foolishly wondered for a moment if they might be Chinese Olympians on vacation. They were in fact wearing cheap souvenir medals you could buy in the shop here at the top and have engraved with your name – to prove that you were a “real hero.” We didn’t bother.

My heroes on the Great Wall: Ralph, Pat, Karen

Real heroes climbing the Great Wall of China

Mary and Leo, who had declined to join us on the climb, warned that we might feel the wear on our legs even more coming down. They were right. I felt quite wobbly. Pat and Ralph insisted they were fine, and went off to climb the wall in the other, much steeper direction. Karen and I continued down to the parking lot level and explored a modest Buddhist temple there.  

Buddhist temple near entrance to section of Great Wall near Beijing

Coming back down

It seems a little surprising in a country for so long officially atheist that Buddhists can practice openly, especially given the ongoing problems in Buddhist Tibet. But of course China has changed radically since the dark days of the Cultural Revolution. Many religions are now sanctioned – if tightly controlled – by the state, including Christianity. We heard one story about the Vatican getting in a snit because local Communist Party committees were in effect appointing Catholic bishops, something only the pope is supposed to do.

Buddhism, which first came to China almost 2,000 years ago, is one of the most popular of the religions that have made a comeback since the Party abandoned strict official atheism. According to a 2010 estimate from Pew Research, 18.2% of Chinese, or over 240 million people, consider themselves Buddhists. Buddhism had its origins in the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, an upper-class Indian who lived about the time of the Ancient Greeks. After a life of dissolution and despair, the story goes, Gautama cast himself out from society and become an indigent monk. He eventually found “enlightenment” while sitting, meditating under a bhodi tree. His spiritual “path,” which he began to teach, involves a life of meditation and asceticism. What is mostly practiced in his name today, though – as with most of the world’s organized religions – is mythologized, ritualistic, dogmatic.

Perhaps I’m a cynic, but this temple, like others we would see in China, with their glitzy golden Buddha statues and garish paintings and hangings, looked as much tourist attraction as real place of worship. Sure, there were shaven-headed monks hanging about, but they could as easily have been actors in monk costumes for all we knew. (Yes, okay, I am a cynic when it comes to China.)

The next item on the agenda was a visit to a cloisonné factory: shopping stop number two on the day. We understood there was to be a tour of the shop floor, but most workers were away on lunch when we arrived. We again got less than 10 minutes of explanation before the selling began. The explanations and demonstrations were kind of interesting, though.

It’s a very involved multi-step process, starting with cast bronze pots (according to what Mary said, but they looked more like copper to us.) Artists draw the outline of the design on the outside, then weld on wire tracing the outline. The wire is to keep sections of solid colour separate. Made from powdered minerals, the colour is thickly applied. After firing, the pots go through several polishing processes to achieve the smoothness, brilliance and lustre of cloisonné.

According to Mary, cloisonné had its origin in the Ming Dynasty, and a “Ming vase” is, properly speaking, a cloisonné vase. As far as I can tell, this assertion runs completely counter to all understanding of the term in the art and collecting world today, at least in the west, where “Ming” refers to a particular style of ceramic object developed during the Ming period.

Applying colour to cloisonné vase: 'No flash!'

Before we left, we did get to see people on the floor working on most steps in the process. It seemed to me unlikely, though, that everything we saw for sale had been produced at the few stations operating. I wondered if this was just a demonstration workshop and the real mass production was done elsewhere. One woman working at applying colour by hand had a big “No flash” sign at her station. Fair enough. I would never use flash in this kind of setting anyway. But when I went to take a picture in the very low light, the camera’s autofocus system shone its little LED beam on the subject, to provide enough illumination for accurate focusing. Without looking up, she barked, “No flash.” I took the picture anyway.

Lunch this day was at the “factory.” The pretence that this was a real working factory when the parking lot is full of tour buses and they actually have a tourist restaurant on the premises was a little transparent. The meal, Mary had half-jokingly told us, would be “Canadian-style” Chinese food. It wasn’t, and it wasn’t very good either. Not much of it was eaten by our group.

                      

Sacred Path of the Ming Tombs, Quilin

We bussed next to the Sacred Path of the Ming Tombs. This is in the hills outside Beijing near the tombs, which we did not see. We were led on a forced march down the kilometer-long walkway. The path is lined with statues – of what era we never learned – depicting creatures real and mythical, and figures of warriors and government officials. There was little explanation from our guides of what we were seeing, other than that this was the path along which the emperor’s body was taken to burial after lying in state at the Forbidden City. Mary did also explain the identities of some of the mythical creatures – the Qilin, for example, which is plug-ugly but considered an omen of coming prosperity or serenity. It was a tranquil, park-like setting, but there was no time to linger and enjoy it, or even stop and read the plaques. Some of us did dawdle to take pictures, but Mary and Leo charged ahead. Heck, we had another shopping activity to get to. And we were late!

Sacred Path of the Ming Tombs, warrior

Sacred Path of the Ming Tombs, civic official

Sacred Path of the Ming Tombs, entrance gate

It wasn’t billed as a shopping event. It was the Jingshan Chinese Herbal Institute where, according to our itinerary, we would “learn about traditional Chinese medicine, which has existed for thousands of years.” The students here, we were told, take four years of western medicine and about the same of herbal medicine. Pretty rigorous! There was a brief explanation, with diagram, about pressure points in the foot and their relation to various parts of the body. Then we were ushered into a small classroom with packed rows of seats. We were to be given foot massages, and free diagnoses by Institute doctors. Wow. Our lucky day.

Some of us were fortunate enough to be assigned one of the senior professors at the school, a mild-mannered middle-aged fellow with no English. While one student massaged my feet – not very enthusiastically or attentively, I thought, but I wasn’t complaining – the good doctor examined my palm and tongue. Through a translator, one of his students, he asked if I had prostate troubles. When I nodded yes, he explained that western medicine would prescribe a drug to be taken for life (which it has in my case), but that Chinese medicine has remedies that could be taken for a couple of months and would solve the problem once and for all. As it happened, the Institute had a supply of these medicines on hand. Would I like to buy some? And the penny dropped: we were at shopping stop number three.

After some quick calculations in a notebook, he told me the drugs would cost 1,400 CNY, about $350. I told him I would think about it. He pressed. I respectfully demurred. Karen, sitting next to me, was given a similarly lightning-fast diagnosis, equally accurate, and offered a prescription. The medications for her would have cost $800. She was less polite in refusing the offer. Everybody else received similar treatment. We heard later that the doctor told one man, whose friends believe he is an alcoholic, that he had serious liver problems due to alcohol consumption and should cut out drinking. The fellow was quite irate, probably because he was embarrassed. There is no concept of respect for the privacy of personal health information apparently. Everybody could hear his neighbour’s diagnosis.

It was impressive that so many of the diagnoses appeared to be correct. Karen suggested that in my case he simply took an educated guess based on my age rather than anything he could see in my hand or tongue in the 30 seconds his examination took – or from anything the student masseuse might have relayed to him about the state of my pedal pressure points. She felt it was a species of confidence trick in other words. But I wonder.

Just for fun, I Googled “chinese medicine enlarged prostate.” There were quite a few hits, including one from an outfit in Portland OR called the  Institute for Traditional Medicine. The director of this institute, Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., summarizes the approved Chinese herbal remedy for Benign Prostatic Hypertrophy, which had been confirmed, supposedly, in clinical trials. He does not say it works, just that “herbal medicines have been suggested as helpful.”

For a “complete therapeutic regimen,” I should take 320 to 480 mg per day of saw palmetto extract and 100 to 200 mg a day of pygeum extract, for six months. Walmart sells 90 160-mg tablets of Webber Naturals brand Saw Palmetto extract for $14.47. A six-month supply at 320 mg a day would cost $57.88. Amazon has 60 50-mg capsules of Solaray brand Pygeum Africanum Extract for $24.10. A six-month supply, at 100 mg a day, would cost $144.60. Total: $202.48. In fairness, if I went with the maximum dosage recommended by the Portland Institute, it would cost over $350, which is slightly more than Jingshan was pitching. But I’m pretty sure the doctor there was suggesting a much shorter course of treatment. Of course, I have no idea what he was prescribing – he never actually said. It could have been something completely different.

Conclusion: Jingshan is, at best, no bargain. Who knows how effective their remedies were. Some of our group did buy the recommended medications for their conditions, so maybe they could tell us. Worst case? Jingshan is a snake oil emporium.

We had an early dinner at a restaurant not far away – of which very little was eaten as no one was very hungry – and went directly back to the hotel. According to Karen’s journal, we were in bed shortly after 9. It would be an early start next morning as we were on an 8:30 a.m. flight to Shanghai. We did not sleep well, especially Karen.