Days 56 - 57: The Great Wall

They call it great for a reason.  T and I were fortunate enough to go on a cool, clear day. It was was perfect for the 30 minute hike up to the wall and for our climb around the stretch we visited. 

The Badaling section of the Great Wall is the closest to Beijing, just an hour and a half drive into the mountains to the north east.  Most of this area of the wall was built up and expanded durning the Ming dynasty--a relatively new stretch compared to other parts, which was first built during the Warring States Period in the 5th century BC.   And generally speaking, given the heavy volume of tourists, one that had been heavily "restored."

Our hotel, The Commune by the Great Wall, was a perfect example of a modern Chinese hotel, run by a western hotel management chain. Originally, the complex had been developed as a luxury housing development.  Few of the houses were sold, the investors where bought out, and the site was expanded and converted into a resort. With over 190 rooms, the hotel boasted modern architecture, good food and strong coffee, as well as edgy paintings of Mao-as-Buddha.  The staff wore kitchy uniforms with a giant Red Star on the lapel. Parts of the hotel were lovely, but mostly it felt empty and cold.  But far and away, it was worth the stay, just for the wall alone.  Ironically, the Commune had its own private section of the Great Wall.  

A path snaked behind a red, cantalevier-style house made of concrete, stone and bamaboo. After twenty or thirty minutes, we reached the top.  The massive wall stood right along a ridge, and snaked from peak to valley to peak.  I wasn't prepared for its scale, severity, or its steepness.  And the stretch before us was empty, overgrown with shrubs and trees.  In some parts the stone had turned to rubble and in 

some, the wall had just fallen away.  Behind us and up the mountain further, the wall was all but gone.  It looked like a rocky scar rising up the face of the ridge.     

It was quiet, cold and the wind was strong.  I found it hard to shake the vertigo.

Day 55 - On Touring Beijing

When you are a tourist in Beijing, sometimes its hard to tell who is on the tour.  Or what is on the tour.  Or even, if you are part of the tour yourself. 

Our second day started off with an morning jaunt through the Temple of Heaven.  The Temple of Heaven is surreal.  Built in the 15th century at the same time as the Forbidden City, it sits close to the center of modern Beijing.  Unlike the Forbidden City, which was just mobbed with sightseers, the temple seemed to be a site of living history; it's purpose was equally dead and alive, ancient and relevant, eerie and celebratory.  

When we arrived, we walked though a hallway that connected us from the East Gate to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests.  The hallway was crammed, so that we had to slowly make our way through the crowd.  And we had to strain to hear our tour guide Sandy explain: "Many people come here in the morning for exercise, to play poker together, to sing.  Since the temple is in the city, many locals will buy a monthly pass, and come here regularly.  It's very good for the old people."  I saw grandmas and grandpas playing something that looked like hackey-sack.  I saw them leaning against the railings in the morning sun, with cards dealt out between them.  And most of all, I saw and heard them perform.

For most of the past two months, I have grown over-accustomed to being the audience. Performers at temples aren't uncommon, especially at very famous sites, as its one of the many ways locals capitalize on the tourist industry, and for tourists to capitalize on local industry.   But this morning, the men weren't playing the ehru for me.  Further on, a sixty-something woman, modestly and carefully dressed, stood in front of a small crowd.  Her hair was pulled back in a bun tied up under her hat.  Her hat shaded her petite face. She sang with her eyes closed, her eyebrows arched.  Her hands moved very steady and slow.  She is an old opera singer, Sandy said.  Other groups were larger, gathered around a few men with old looking instruments, and a man with a microphone.  In these groups, everybody joined in, singing songs they all seemed to know.  Like everyone there, these were songs from their past.  Like everyone, but us.

We came to the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest.  The temple was round with the roof tiles painted blue, both traditional Chinese symbols of heaven.  In Ming and Qing dynasties, the 

emperor would come to the Temple of Heaven to pray for harvests and it was here that his ceremony would start.  He would then progress, being carried in a sedan, down past the Vault 

of Heaven to the Altar of Heaven.  The altar was a series of 

concentric marble rings, rising towards the center, and open to the sky.  From the top of the altar, the emperor would pray for a good harvest, and oversee an animal sacrifice being carried out on a pyre below.

Having left the temple parks, the locals gave way to tourists, and soon T and I found ourselves amidst a sea of red, yellow or green baseball caps, all trailing behind an umbrella, stick or backscratcher tied with a red, yellow or green flag.  Most of them were Chinese tourists.  

Domestic tourism has been on the rise for quite some time.  Hessler writes in his book about the Chinese tourism industry. In the years he was in China leading up to the Three Gorges Dam project, would-be tourists were exhorted -- see them now before its too late!  Too late, meaning before they flooded the gorges to create the largest hydroelectric dam ever built. Since the late 1990s, however, domestic tourism has increase by 250% - last year over 1.6BN Chinese tourists visited China, spending an average of roughly $70 each. 

And so I found myself in front of other people's cameras as often as they were in front of mine.  

It would go like this.  One of them would approach Sandy, and ask her a question.  She would turn to us, and say "They have asked to take a picture with you." At first, we said "Sure!" and both hopped right in.  Then I would practice flexing one of my two Chinese phrases (Ni Hao and/or Xie Xie).  And next thing you know, other girls would want to join in.  Or the guy taking the picture would trade places with his wife and jump in the middle, resting his hands up on our shoulders.  Xie Xie! Xie Xie, Ni Hao.  Id say.  (Thank you thank you hello).

Then we realized we had a good thing going here, and T started staying out of the frame, taking pictures of the craziness himself.  "People think you are glamorous here," Sandy said.  "They will go home and show pictures of you to their friends and say they met Westerners at the Temple of Heaven."  At one point, our guide even started saying Money, Money when people were approaching to enquire, as if we were getting to the point where we'd charge for taking a picture with us.  Apparently this word translates, because we all laughed.  Even the dude with his hand on my shoulder, tag still on his suit jacket, Beijing medal around his neck.  Xie xie!

 

Day 54 - Culture in Beijing

"Shanghai is like New York.  Beijing is Like Washington DC." Our guide said this within the first thirty minutes of our all day tour, which was to include: Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Hutong Area (Old City), and the Lama Buddhist Temple. 

We had gotten in around midnight the night before, and I was excited to have a fully packed agenda; if left to my own devices, I probably would have frittered away the morning.  I notice I have this tendency if cities feel overwhelming.  I get this feeling mostly when a city feels unwalkable-- and especially if it has lots of highways and/or hotels that are located in strip malls or over giant parking garages.

And Beijing feels built for cars.

This is a completely crazy thing to say for lots of reasons.  But mostly because Beijing has existed for most of history without cars.  In fact, the earliest remnants of human habitation stretch back to Homo erectus (the Peking Man) between 230,000 to 250,000 years BC.  Cities were in this area in the first millennium BC, and Beijing first got it's name all the way back when it was established as a capital city during the Ming dynasty, in 1403.

You would never know it today.  In fact, the characterization by our guide is somewhat fair.  In 2009, Beijing is a show city.  It's well organized with a series of concentric ring roads, east-west roads and north-south roads.  The streets are clean.  There are historic preservation projects in old Beijing.  Its most famous sights are well-managed, -signed and -concession-fed.  My favorite symbol of the new, New China, post Deng Xiaoping, are the placards everywhere that say "Help preserve our culture.  Do not touch."

China is deeply fascinating.  And like a total greenhorn, or worse - an ass maybe? - there was something about standing in Tiananmen Square that made me want to jump right in to all the awkward questions.  Chairman Mao - do people respect him still?  Is he still a hero?  Did your parents live through the Liberation?  Was your father "Reeducated"?  How many children do you have? What do you think about Hong Kong?  

I couldn't quite help it.  You see, this was my chance to try my own hand at understanding the Chinese. 

I have been reading a terrific book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangzee, by Peter Hessler. It is the memoir/travelogue of a super intelligent guy, who taught English for 2 years in the 90s in Fuling, China.  Over two years, he works hard to learn Mandarin and make Chinese friends.  And he offers all these bits of insight, which I might have missed on my first several (hundred) trips to China - things like how the Chinese refer to everything before 1911 as "feudal times" or "feudal" society.  Or that there isn't an equivalent word to "farmer":

• People who work the land are nongmin, literally "agricultural people" and in English, this word is usually translated as "peasant"...Farmer fails to convey the negative connotations that are associated with working the land in China.  Roughly 75 percent of population is involved with agriculture, and the divide between these people and the urban Chinese is one of the most striking gaps in the country...Even the word for soil -- tu -- can be applied to people as a derogatory adjective, meaning unrefined and uncouth. 1
  

It was in this light that I revisited an exchange I had with a sales woman, who replied to my interest in traveling outside China's major cities.  "Oh.  But they are not modern."  When she first said that, I originally interpreted her reply as a bit of caution - the same as when a tour guide tells me that the toilet at a particular sight-seeing attraction is "only 3 stars," meaning it lacks a Western-style option.  You are going to have to squat, its not what you expect, bring your own toilet paper and by all means, DO NOT sit on the "seat."  

I think the same thing when our tour guide Sandy, takes us to a nice, tourist-trap lunch on our first day, saying it's "nice and clean."  In countries like Malaysia or Thailand, "clean" meant it came with fork, was not spicy and you could eat uncooked vegetables as a foreigner without getting sick.

But after the past several days here, I realize that the sanctity of the past may not be as relevant here.  For our guide, a "clean" place was infinitely preferable, even if her own customers were asking for local noodle shops.  Even if we said that waiting in line for a 10 Yuan bowl would be great. For the sales woman, "not-modern" was an indictment.  And it was without irony that another young guide  told us that the Old City would have been redeveloped if foreign professors hadn't lobbied Beijing to preserve it as a historical area.

For one, the country spent 10 years eradicating its past as part of the Cultural Revolution from 1966-76.  Secondly, when you have thousands and thousands of years of continuous history, how do you pick which parts are relevant to save? And most significant in my mind, progress is always good when starvation is a recent memory.  Preservation, heritage sites and societies -- these are my fetishes.  I buy heritage breed meats, order handmade crafts on Etsy.com, switch to "Obama bulbs" as my sister calls the energy-efficient ones.  To a Chinese person, I am crazy.  I might be crazy anyway...

In the old city, I climbed an 15 c. bell tower.  I gulped down incense at the Lama Buddhist Temple.  Tiananmen Square was big.  The Forbidden City was lovely.  It was anything but forbidden feeling.  It was overrun with tourists - mostly Chinese tourist.  To see in the "Hall of Supreme Harmony," you had to either throw elbows or have them thrown at you.  

So while Culture did not make it on the list of Xiaoping's Four Modernizations (Agriculture, Industry, Technology and Defence), I am happy to report that I enjoyed every moment taking it in.  So did the Chinese.

Maybe those signs - "Help us preserve our culture" - are signs in more way than one.

Footnote:

1. (Hessler, pg. 228)

Days 51 - 52: Kyoto - Where it All Makes (More) Sense

Despite having some very mixed feelings about my experience in Tokyo, I would come back to his country in a heart-beat. Most of that can be attributed to the two days I spent in Kyoto.  Somehow, being outside the mega city seemed to put this culture in more context.  Some of the oddities - various shades of curious, surreal, formal or efficient - fell in to a bit of perspective.  

Take for example, the fastidiousness of moving through this country.  A sidewalk will crowd at a crosswalk until the Do Not Walk sign turns to green.  This is true even if there is not a single car on the street.  Everyone waits for the sign to turn.  You wait in line to board the subway cars.  You walk up one set of stairs to come, and another set of stairs to go. In Japan it seems that everything has a right way and a right path.  One that has been carefully considered and now one that is carefully observed.  And from my vantage point, it all seemed unnatural.  

But 24 hours later, I find myself standing in the middle of a garden that was first conceived of in the 14th century, as part of what is now called the Golden Pavilion temple.   Clearly marked, the garden was a measured progression of views framing the pavilion itself, from the ponds, to sculpted pines, to the gnarled plums and profuse cherry trees.  In this garden, there stood a 600 year old Bonsai tree in the shape of a boat, sailing west.  It was twisted, trimmed, and yet 

organic looking at the same time.  Graceful and strong.  Earlier that day, I met a man who kept a private garden.  His father had planted it 60 years ago, and as he shared it with us, he explained that now he maintained it as his father had.  All trimming and pruning, of which there seemed to be much, was all done by hand.  It is more graceful, more feminine this way, he said.  Between these two gardens, I gain a bit of appreciation for a culture that had evidently being thinking about how we move through its country for quite some time.  And the way cultivating a specific approach - pruning by hand, or the placement of a rock within a pond - can affect the sensibilities of the traveller.  This is not to say such lovely gardens wouldn't have been as lovely if they were more ragged or wild, or if I had strayed from the path.  I just felt a keen interest in seeing something as someone 600 or even 60 years ago would have wanted it to be seen.

In Kyoto, we made the decision to stay at a ryokan, or a traditional Japanese inn.  As we entered, we left our shoes in the entrance hall, still wet from its welcome ritual of being cleaned with water every evening. Upon entering the inn, we were shown into our room, overlooking a small garden at the center of the house.  Low ceilings, rice paper screens and tatami mats, low slung table and chairs without legs -- these were the only furnishings in the room.  No TV of course, no Internet.  But you could hear a dripping sound - slow and steady - from the garden below.  

We shared a bath with all the guests of the inn.  Traditionally, guests bathe in the late afternoon and evening, more as a way to relax than to get clean.  In fact, the "business" part of the bathing ritual is done outside the bath itself, sitting on a squat bamboo stool, with a shower head perched just over your shoulder.  Here you wash completely, and when you are finished and clean, you climb into a hot bath that was drawn sometime earlier in the day.  The tub is big, rectangular and wooden.  Hotter than a hot tub.  And as you sit down, you feel the none-to-familiar pleasure of being stretched out and immersed, up to your neck almost, in a steaming, stupor-inducing bath.

This is typically before or after a Kaiseki style dinner, prepared by the inn.  Kyoto, as the capital of Japan for almost 1000 years, is famous for this style of dinner, which is said to have originated in the Imperial courts.  Course after course are paraded out: delicate soups topped with radishes sliced so thin they are transparent, cut out in the shape of hearts and blossoms; bamboo shoots, now just in season, steamed so they are crisp to the bite; jellies of cherry blossoms, with steamed rice and red snapper.  And an equal bounty, it seams, of sake.  This is all presided over by our inn keeper, whose family has owned this ryokan for over 200 years.  He is the seventh head chef in that time.

When we return to our adjoining room, the screens are just ajar so you could feel the faintest spring chill.  Our beds were set up on the floor.  This included a thin mattress, a coverlet and a heavy, plump buckwheat grain pillow.  I crawled in.  As I put my head on the pillow, it gave a little sigh. I could smell the warm aroma of malt the buckwheat gave up, and it occurred to me that for a long time, this is what sleepiness smelled like here.   With its ritual welcome, its orchestration of slippers and kimonos, very warm bath and thoughtful cuisine - this experience was an artful, careful expression of the Evening.  How an evening should be considered, and if your lucky, how observed.  

Just now, I knew 250 kilometers away, throngs of goth twenty-somethings heaved on the sidewalks in Shibuya, patiently observing another more modern ritual. Do not walk until it's green.