Sunday, October 16 - Beijing

We were up, breakfasted and on the bus by 8:30 a.m. The dining room was a zoo: seats at a premium, long line-ups for some dishes, lots of empty pans. They were clearly understaffed. Most of the food, contrary to expectation, was Chinese. At home, we think of Chinese breakfast, or at least brunch, as dim sum, but judging by this breakfast, it ain’t necessarily so. Most of it looked as if it could as easily have been served at dinner. But there was, as promised, at least some western food: eggs (fried only, which I don’t eat), sausages (pale, unappetizing-looking, and in short supply), ham, bread-y things, toast and jam, OJ. It was okay, but not an auspicious start to the culinary side of the tour.

Meeting in the hotel lobby on our first morning in Beijing

The weather was a continuation of the previous day’s: smoggy and muggy, the temperature headed for the high teens, low twenties. The itinerary was absurdly packed: the Summer Palace, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, followed by theatre. If Karen and I were doing this on our own, in our usual way – starting with staying in the centre, not in the outskirts – we might have done Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, and considered it a very full day. They’re adjacent and there really isn’t a lot to see on the square, unless you want to line up for Mao’s corpse. You just need to see the square because it’s iconic. And maybe to people-watch. The Forbidden City easily warrants a full day. The Summer Palace was one thing too many.

That’s where we started, though, after an hour-plus bus ride. The traffic in Beijing – and as we would learn, everywhere in China – was horrendous. The rules of the road are mostly ignored. The bigoted view that Chinese drivers at home are awful gains some credence here. They’re not so much incompetent in China as aggressive. Pedestrians take their lives in their hands when they cross the street, even when they go with the lights, which they don’t always do. More than once, I saw pedestrians stranded in the middle of a road, cars whizzing around them. Our guides would act like school crossing guards whenever we had to get over a busy street on foot.

It’s interesting how many cars on the road here are expensive imports – Volvos and Mercedes in particular. Both, according to Leo, are built in China now. But they’re still absurdly expensive in relation to average annual income – which is about $11,000 at current exchange rates. That figure is according to Trading Economics, a New York-based consulting firm. Other sources say it’s lower. The Mercedes-Benz China website lists the cheapest Merc as starting at the equivalent of over $40,000. Cars, clearly, are an important status symbol here. It’s also clear the disparity between rich and poor is beyond even what it is at home, where it already approaches criminal. You see pitiful beggars everywhere, and hordes of dumpily-dressed worker drones. But also stylishly-dressed trust-fund babies and entrepreneurs in Maseratis.

Donning our Whisper headsets at the entrance to the Summer Palace

Beijing, Summer Palace, entrance to gardens (which we didn't see), just inside main gates

Beijing, Summer Palace, details of garden entrance

The Summer Palace, built in the 18th century for Qing Dynasty emperors (1600s to 1910), was where the royals and their retainers spent the summer months, lounging beside a cooling, man-made lake. It’s patterned on a famous natural lake in Hangzhou (in southeastern China, near Shanghai,) which we would see later in the trip. When the emperor grew tired of making the long schlep to Hangzhou for his summer retreat, he ordered a replica of the lake, and a palace complex, built in Beijing. Like the original, the lake is dotted with islands, and rimmed with parks and gardens, with prospects of pagodas on distant hills. Today, it’s plied by tacky tourist boats, including u-pedals.

Beijing, Summer Palace, the way in

Beijing, Summer Palace, lotus plants in foreground

Beijing, Summer Palace, tourists by the lake

The Summer Palace would be a lovely place to spend time, if it weren’t for the hordes of tourists crawling over it. The canals and waterways are planted with lotus flowers – not in bloom at this time of year, but you could see how gorgeous they would be in July when they do bloom. The views, despite the smog-reduced visibility and louring grey-brown sky, are charming. If you could blank out the crowds and smog, even for a few seconds, it was possible to imagine how serene it might have been for China’s harried god-emperors. You can see them in flowing embroidered gowns trailing their fingers in the water as flunkies rowed them across the lake at sunset. (It takes quite an effort of imagination, though.)

Beijing, Summer Palace, boating on the lake - in the smog

Beijing, Summer Palace, tour boats

The architecture is what we think of – or I do – as classical Chinese: red plaster walls, sway-back copper tiled roofs, decorative painted and carved friezes. We would see a lot more of it at the Forbidden City. We did not see inside any of these buildings. In fact, I suspect we barely scratched the surface of what there is to see at the Summer Palace. It had been allotted about an hour and a half in our agenda, with two periods of “free time” of 20 and 30 minutes. We spent our free time wandering aimlessly. Free time, as we came to understand, meant free of information and direction. We really should have brought a guide book, as at least one other couple did. But then it would have been frustrating to read about everything there was at a place like this, without having the time to see it properly.

Beijing, Summer Palace, calligrapher writing with water in dusty flagstones

Beijing, Summer Palace, Ming Dynasty dress shop

We did amble along the lakeside covered walkway, but not very far as it was clogged with others trying to do the same. It was built to shade the royals from the blazing (pre-smog) summer sun on their daily perambulations. It’s supposed to be the longest anywhere in China, or maybe the world. (This was one of the many factoids we were offered that made me think, “Who cares?” or alternately, “Who says? Prove it.”) The ceilings in the walkway are decorated with figure and floral paintings, now faded and cracked.

Beijing Summer Palace, Leo pointing

Beijing, Summer Palace, selfies

At one point, we could hear a band (with western instruments) playing vaguely Chinese-sounding music somewhere out of sight. As one tune struck up, the security guard we happened to be walking by broke into song and started swaying to the music. We followed the sound to a pretty pavilion on a wooded hill, and found the band playing for couples dancing under the canopy. They looked like an amateur pick-up group, out having fun, playing for free. A middle-aged woman stood just outside the pavilion, singing along loudly. Karaoke, we hear, is huge in China. This turned out to be the band’s last number. When it ended, they began packing up, the party was over. We wandered back down to find our group.

Beijing, Summer Palace, enter the Chinese tour groups

In each city, except Shanghai, we had a local guide as well as Leo. The Beijing guide, Mary, was supposed to have met us at the airport, but her flight back from Russia was delayed five hours so she missed the rendezvous. The foreign-language guides, we later learned, sometimes accompany Chinese tourists to foreign countries, as well as hosting foreigners in China. Presumably that’s what Mary was doing in Russia. But do they not give them any time off between assignments? She caught up with us at the Summer Palace.

Beijing, Summer Palace, Karen writing in her journal (near dance pavilion)

Mary is a bright, confident young woman. She dresses stylishly, much as a young woman her age (early thirties at a guess) might dress at home: skinny turned-up jeans, half boots, cropped top, hair pulled back in a tight pony tail. Her English is not quite as good as Leo’s, although she too was perfectly understandable. She speaks an even more simplified English, and overuses – and sometimes misuses – stock idiomatic phrases like ‘you know’ and ‘actually,’ etc. After listening to her for a couple of days, I realized that her working English vocabulary was quite small.

Each of our guides revealed something of their personalities and life circumstances in the course of their talks, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes quite deliberately. I think some had learned – or been told as part of their training – that westerners are often curious about how people live in China. Some of the guides seemed more than happy to oblige. Mary was in many ways the most guarded of our local guides. But she did drop enough hints for us to realize she was a staunch, even defiant, feminist. You would think, in a country once dominated by an ideology espousing equality for all, including women, that feminism would be a non-issue. But my sense is this is not the case in modern China – hence the slight edge of defiance. There were off-hand comments about women’s roles, and only half-joking assertions of women’s superiority.

She also talked almost obsessively about an historical figure she referred to as The Dragon Lady. I had thought that “dragon lady” was a generic term for a strong, assertive woman, with – in English certainly – negative connotations. But Mary talked about a specific woman, the Empress Dowager Cixi, who effectively ruled China from 1861 until her death in 1908, a couple of years before the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the last of the imperial dynasties. She had been regent when her young son came to the throne, but clung to power long after he reached adulthood. She didn’t sound like a nice person to me. But as Mary explained, in China, the dragon is not the marauding beast of medieval European lore, to be vanquished by a hero, it’s a positive force, symbolizing male power and nobility. It was clear Mary, and perhaps Chinese in general, revere this woman. She was mentioned by most of our guides at one point or another, never, as far as I could tell, disapprovingly.

The Dowager Empress Cixi - The Dragon Lady

I was curious about the term “dragon lady” and the association with Cixi, so Googled it when I got back to the hotel. One of the first hits was the Wikipedia entry on the Empress Dowager. The attachment of the term “dragon lady” appears to originate in, or at least have been solidified by, the publication in 1992 of Sterling Seagrave’s Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. There are other references to her in the (English-language) literature as “the dragon empress” and “the she-dragon of China.” Is this purely an English-language title for her then, which our guides had adopted in deference to western understanding, or is it how she is known in Chinese too? Seagrave claims Cixi was vilified as a despot by her enemies but was actually a good ruler, an assessment with which Mary might agree. As a footnote, another website claims the term “dragon lady” was coined in English by the cartoonist who created the Terry and the Pirates strip.

Beijing, Summer Palace, Leo gathering the group for departure

Before we left the Summer Palace, we had another reminder of what it’s like to travel in a tour group. One of our young fellow travellers, a guy named Jonathan, who works at Children’s Aid and was travelling with his wife and a friend, had wandered off on his own as soon as we got in the place. He hadn’t returned. Leo went off to search for him, looking a little panicky. It’s probably considered bad form for a guide to lose tour group members. We stood around and waited with Mary. Leo and Jonathan turned up soon enough, and off we went. I later heard Jonathan telling someone, “Yeah, when he [Leo] started talking [about the Summer Palace], I thought, this isn’t for me, I’m out of here.” Apparently he just wandered aimlessly – as we all had.

The next stop was supposed to have been a special restaurant for a Peking duck feast. It turned out the restaurant was full, and a long way away in the wrong direction. I was surprised they hadn’t booked tables far ahead, given this was on the itinerary we received weeks ago. But it would be difficult to make a reservation without specifying a time, I suppose, and, given the traffic in Beijing, and other possibilities for delay, who knew when we might arrive? In any case, Leo, to his credit, quickly came up with a reservation at another much closer restaurant.

Apparently it wasn’t quite prepared for an inundation of 34 foreigners. The young wait staff scrambled to set up tables, looking offended at the imposition, rolling their eyes at every request from Leo or Mary or the group. One disgustedly threw utensils on our table. They crashed and skittered across the glass top. Welcome to Beijing.

We sat at tables for eight with a lazy susan in the middle on which the platters were served. They began to come out almost immediately. The food was nothing special: generic Chinese. There were eight or more dishes, including rice, and soup near the end. Each table received two large bottles of beer, which didn’t go very far, and a big bottle of coke or Sprite. Water was also available, and green tea was served. No wine. This was the way we ate everywhere at lunch and dinner. We were rarely in restaurants with tables for small groups or a la carte service. It was basically cafeteria-style food, with a fixed menu. There were always some unidentified dishes that folks turned up their noses at. We wasted a lot. In a country that had in fairly recent history known mass starvation, it seemed criminal. After we were settled at the tables, Leo and Mary disappeared to eat on their own, as the guides would do everywhere we ate.

Beijing, Tiananmen Square, Mary addressing the group (notice the gawkers at left)

After lunch, we headed in the bus to Tiananmen Square. On the way, Mary talked a little about what happened there in June 1989. She knew, but apparently not a lot of detail. She admitted she had no idea how many died. In fairness, probably no one knows. It’s likely that not many died on the square itself. But at least hundreds, and more likely thousands were shot and killed by the PLA around Beijing, and thousands more wounded. Much of it happened the in neighbourhoods around Tiananmen. Mary clearly wasn’t comfortable talking about this, and didn’t want to pursue it with us further. I think the only reason she raised it was to ask us to please not speak of the massacre while we were on the square.

I know from reading a couple of books about China (Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost and Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler) that the reason for this caution is that the square is always crawling with secret service men. They’re on the look-out for potentially embarrassing protesters – and, perhaps, shit-disturbing foreigners bent on infecting Chinese with the truth about the massacre. The government’s greater fear in recent times has been members of the quasi-religious Falun Gong group protesting their persecution. But there have also been cases, especially at the anniversaries of the massacre, of pro-democracy protestors trying to distribute pamphlets. These are always, like the Falun Gong protests, quickly and brutally suppressed.

On this day, the secret service men were certainly visible – all dressed in black suits, with creamy white open-necked shirts, standing with hands clasped behind backs. But we saw no sign of protestors. We did see small groups of PLA soldiers standing around too, but they may have been vacationers, or just there for show rather than intimidation. They appeared to be wearing dress uniforms and were not armed as far as we could tell.

Beijing, Tiananmen Square, secret servicemen and PLA soldier

The country had just come through its annual (October 1) celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. We had noted lots of lovely floral arrangements along the streets as we drove into the centre. On the square itself, there was a gigantic display of artificial flowers, as well as real ones – all left over from the “National Day.” It’s evidently a big deal. Many workers get a full week of paid vacation, Mary told us.

Beijin, Tiananmen Square, left-over National Day decorations

Tiananmen is a huge square, one of the largest in the world (the largest, according to the Chinese)  – 440,500 square meters or 109 acres. It was greatly expanded by Mao in the 1950s. His intention was that it be able to hold as many as 500,000 people. Whether it ever has, I doubt, certainly not in recent times – big crowds are discouraged. There are triumphal gates, large government buildings surrounding it, most modern, but some of historical interest. Much of the current streetscape was created at the time of Mao’s expansion, which bulldozed a lot of old colonial-era residences. It seemed to me a mostly flat and featureless place. There is at the north end the famous portrait of Chairman Mao in the socialist realist style. To my eye, the current portrait – it’s renewed every year – makes him look insipid. The thing is huge, weighing 1.5 tons, and  hangs above the central entrance to the Tiananmen rostrum, formerly the Chengtian Gate, the main entrance to the Imperial City (of which the Forbidden City is part.)

Beijing, Tiananmen Square, coolist kid on the square

Speaking of Mao, no mention was made by our guides – and no questions asked by group members – about the square’s main attraction, Mao Ze Dong’s mausoleum, where his embalmed body is on view. Hundreds line up to see it every day, many leaving floral tributes. It has been rumoured that what they actually see is a wax sculpture over the body. In any case, I suspect our guides had long since learned that westerners were not interested in the least in seeing it, and found it creepy that Chinese are. So they said nothing.

Mao’s name did come up frequently in the more informal parts of our guides’ spiels. They were often openly critical of his policies, especially of the Cultural Revolution. But it’s also clear he is revered. At one point, much later in the trip, Leo said something to the effect that Mao had made many mistakes but was on balance a great leader. I found this disappointing, liking Leo and knowing as I do that Mao was “a very bad man,” as Maarten Troost calls him in Lost on Planet China. The Great Helmsman was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths by starvation or violence of tens of millions of Chinese.

Beijing, Tiananmen Square, secret serviceman with tired PLA soldier

As we walked out on the square, we noticed some Chinese peering at us curiously. One couple came up and asked some of our group to pose with them for pictures, which they did. Mary later explained that many rural and small-town Chinese who come to the capital on vacation have rarely if ever seen foreigners. Their attentions are always friendly, she stressed. One of our group, Michael, said later that some Chinese were staring and pointing in particular at his hairy legs in shorts. We saw no Chinese wearing shorts, though the weather was mild and very close. And no hairy Chinese either.

Beijing, Tiananmen Square, grandma gets a snap of baby with The Great Helmsman

After 30 minutes or so on the square, we walked to the Forbidden City, about 15 minutes away. As we were nearing the entrance, a group of oddly-dressed Chinese overtook us, wending through the crowd, singing. They were wearing costumes draped with silver metal plates that clattered as they walked. Mary explained they were from one of China’s ethnic minorities, visiting from the north – or maybe it was the south – and showing off their national dress. The vast majority of Chinese – 90% plus – are Han people, but there are several ethnic minorities, including some, like these people, who look to us not much different from other Chinese. Mary claimed the metal was real silver, which if true, would mean they were wearing a small fortune.

Beijing, entrance to Forbidden City

The Forbidden City, to me, had something of the feel of Alhambra: a vast complex of buildings, squares and gardens exclusively for the use of a ruler, his family, servants and senior government officials. Mary referred to the latter as “ranking officials,” a fine English phrase she had learned and obviously liked, so used repeatedly. It’s called the Forbidden City because commoners, other than servants, weren’t allowed in. Mary pointed out one gate with a main archway and then smaller arches on either side. The royals, she said, were the only ones allowed to enter through the central arch, lesser mortals had to take the smaller side portals. That’ll show ‘em who’s boss!

Beijing, Forbidden City, crowd scenes

As at the Summer Palace, the architecture has a sameness to it – and is pretty much the same as at the Summer Palace to my eye, though of different vintage. The buildings are grander, perhaps, and more ornate in decoration. If the Summer Palace retained, despite the hordes, some faint sense of the serenity it must have had in its heyday, the Forbidden City has lost all sense of exclusivity and grandeur. It too was crawling with tourists, even more of them than at the Summer Palace – it’s free for Chinese to enter. Many of the buildings were open so you could peer in from outside to view traditional furnishings, temple decorations and so on. But the crowds were so thick it was mostly impossible to get close enough to see.

Beijing, Forbidden City

We also by this time were running out of steam, and had been given way too little time to see the place – not much more than an hour. It would probably take at least 20 minutes just to walk without stopping from entrance to exit. Most of our time was spent wandering aimlessly. I took lots of pictures, but have very little understanding of what I was seeing. Most of what I know of the background and history of the place was gleaned, after the fact, from Wikipedia. We were so tired that whatever Mary told us, which was very little in any case, went in one ear and out the other.

Beijing, Forbidden City

The Cole’s Notes version: the Forbidden City, a World Heritage Site since 1987, was originally built between 1406 and 1420, during the Ming Dynasty. There are 980 buildings spread over 180 acres. They have names like the East Glorious Gate, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Central Harmony, the Hall of Preserving Harmony. (The emperors were big on harmony apparently, although I doubt there was much harmonious in the lives of peasants.) It was really shameful how little we got out of this marvellous place. It would be worth going back and spending a day, when you weren’t desperately jet-lagged, with a good guidebook, or guide.

Beijing, Forbidden City, ancient tree trunk

The next stop was a theatre, at what looked like a theme park, to watch a live show called The Golden Mask Dynasty, an interpretive dance performance dramatizing some legend or other – which of course meant nothing to us. Theatre Beijing, the “official” Beijing theatre guide website, describes it as “a fairy-tale like story of war, royal banquets, and romance.” The development of the production, and the building of the theatre especially to house it, was sponsored by something called the Overseas Chinese Town, OCT, which reportedly invested the equivalent of over $42 million in the project.

Worth it? Not in my humble opinion. I found it silly and over-the-top, if undeniably spectacular. The music was bombastic Chinese-flavoured western schmaltz, the costumes fantastical, the staging overblown, with lots of moving screens and platforms, characters flying on wires, etc. At one point, they had quite plausible waterfalls thundering onstage. At another, characters came out with head dresses topped by live peacocks, which flew away on cue at the end of the dance. Crazy! I had difficulty keeping my eyes open, despite the crashing music and sound effects, and more than a few of our group did nod off.

After the show, we finally got our Peking Duck feast. It’s supposedly a great treat. The restaurant was impressively plush, but the duck didn’t get very good reviews from anybody at our table. I noticed when we left that a lot of it was left on other tables as well. It was too dry for my taste. The idea was to eat it in little crepes, with onion, greens and sauces, but that didn’t improve it a lot. I’m guessing this was not the finest Peking Duck served in the city. It must sometimes be better than this to have gained such a reputation. Luckily, there were other things to eat. Generally, though, the food at lunch and dinner was no better than mid-quality, very undistinguished. We can get better Chinese at home.