The Beautiful Parks and Temples of Beijing

Dragon screen from Kublai Khan's era

After doing our duty by Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, did we not deserve a beautiful day? And so we had one!

We began in the inscrutable company of a taxi driver. The back seat seemed to be advertising (in Chinese characters) an escort service. Drivers pulling up alongside each other exchanged their knowing smiles. Alongside the traffic, silent motos that operate by electricity and bicycles on which parents ferry their children and couples ferry their loved ones, there is always someone pedaling a rickshaw laden with sticks and trash piled to ten times the size of the poor worker. All coexists without comment.

Climbing Coal Mountain

On the road into Beijing, which traverses Ring Roads 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1, there is a gorgeous toll booth, decorated like a brightly painted Chinese pagoda. Neon computerized traffic advisories flash Chinese characters. The sides of the roads are planted with magnificent poplars and dancing pines. Tall, clean housing developments have stripes of enormous Chinese characters down their sides. Among the young willows lining the road are bright roses and azaleas flourishing next to the traffic. Closer to the center are smudgy older apartments. Huge screens play advertisements on high rise business buildings. The occasional beautifully painted traditional portal stands alone among the old and the new. We read that the Dog Meat Festival was cancelled under pressure.

Pavilion of Universal Brightness

Our driver asks directions of a guy cleaning his ears with his car keys, as many people do. We are among charming little streets of gray buildings, red banners, bustling life, rickshaws with red velvet tops or just red rag tops. A child falls on his head and his rustic father urges him to laugh: "Ha ha ha!"

We enter Jingshan Park, one of the lavish parks that contain Beijing's historical monuments. It has been an imperial garden during much of its thousand year existence. Here is Coal Mountain, so named after the rubble that composes it, unearthed to dig moats around the Forbidden City. Enormous as everything in Beijing, Jingshan is also a playful refuge, like so many parks. For the first time we see gray heads, and they are dancing an orchestrated routine with balls and fans, while next to them an old white haired man does tai chi.

At Lake Beihei

In 1644, during the last days of the Ming Dynasty, the peasant uprising force led by Li Zecheng broke into Beijing. On the morning of March 19 the last Ming Emperor Chongzhen escaped to Jingshan and hung himself (knowing his days were finished) together with his attendant, a eunuch named Wang Cheng' en, under an old Chinese Scholar-tree at the foot of the Coal Hill. We climb the hill with its five pavillions and tens of thousands of peonies, up to the Pavilion of Universal Brightness, with its Vairocana Buddha, where many prostrate themselves with sticks of incense.

An arhat

After Jingshan Park we visit beautiful Beihei Park around its lake, with its own mountain of temples rising to the White Pagoda. Everywhere amorous couples are absorbed in one another. After visiting the great Buddha of Coal Mountain, we climb the pagoda of Bei Hai lake. Each stage of the climb penetrates a temple with a grand Buddha, often fat cheerful Maitreya, a warlike Skanda, and the monumental clay kings of the north, south, east and west, fierce and bulbous. Petitioners kneel fervently before them, in a stillness despite the crowds. The only pictures we are not allowed to take are of these gorgeous deities. Along the sides of the temples' interiors are bronze arhats, Tibetan but Indian in origin. One of them, Karika, holds a fierce animal to his breast, other are in tantric couplings with their consorts, with multiple arms or heads, others are fierce and warlike, and others contemplative. The courtyards drip with red prayer plaques. A Tibetan lama had requested this temple complex, and on display are green taras and Tibetan figures lining the courtyard temples. Up and up to the white lumpy pagoda, with its temple decorated with 500 ceramic Buddhas.

The Five Dragon Pavilions

Then down rocky craigy paths where an old evidently blind man inches along with his cane and young girls shove past him, along caves that had been dug to mimic the mountains of the Immortals. There are always too many people crowding around for us to see anything. People want pictures taken with us, and tell me I am beautiful. Everyone wears American slogans on their t-shirts (Zoo York, Labyrinth of Mind, etc.).

Then we stroll around Lake Beihai, its pavilions restored from late dynastic royal usage filled with music, singing, pipes and reeds, couples dancing. There are Ming temples of wooden lattice work and monumental ceramic gateways, under weeping willows and over dainty stone bridges. There are thousands of stone cylinders on which crawl engraved dragons.

We are in crowds of young couples and gray heads and families and always the beloved, boisterous, bossy, bouncy babies. One gray head strikes up a conversation in the urinal next to Jacques and welcomes him to Beihei. (Bathrooms are everywhere and quite clean--but they are all squat toilets. Sit down toilets are available for the disabled, but the Chinese women--even the disabled-- won't use them!)

The Nine Dragon Screen

There is an old man writing calligraphy with a huge brush and water on the dusty stone walkway. We respectfully admire it but the young Chinese passing by (who can actually read what it says) stare at him with great hostility. A mother sits her pretty little girl next to me on white decorative rocks, so she can practice English. "How old are you?" I ask her. She replies, " Five. Cindy." And she takes refuge with her mother.

At the Temple of Expecting Bliss girls in Chinese costumes descend on me and start dressing me as an empress, pushing my legs this way, pulling my arms that way, snapping photos, then charging 10 yuan for the pose and 20 for each picture, but we bargain them down considerably. In bright towers are ancient bronze bells, significant symbols of harmony and time. I ring one old bell (with its suspended mallet) three times for safety, another 9 times for luck. In another temple there is a mountain with feminine celestial beings tucked in every rock and cranny.  We encounter Empress Cixi's special gardens where she had retreated among lilies and ponds and climbing green and craggy rocks brought there specially for her rustic palaces. The park is filled with munching, smooching, playing young China.

Cixi's Refuge

Then we exit Beihei to the Tartar city, with its low gray facades and lively street life with rickshaws and laundry hanging and cooks sitting outside drinking with the locals. This had been where the nobility of the Qing dynasty, of Manchus, once lived. We sit down for deep fried daikon and a vegetable noodle dish drenched with savory pork sauce which I leave to Jacques. Then we wander where rickshaws bear down on each other and on unsuspecting pedestrians, and all of China gaily visits the hutongs, or traditional alleyways. Except us. Instead we find a taxi who, surprisingly, agrees to take us back home!

The Forbidden City, Heart of the Ancient Capitol

Just trying to get in the Forbidden City

What we didn't know was that each night the Chinese evening news warned people to keep away from both Tian'men Square and the Forbidden City, for the crowds of patriotic Chinese provincials were overwhelming Beijing. We didn't watch the news, nor could we understand Chinese, and so the next day we headed for the Forbidden City.

It is the center of the ancient capitol, the Emperor's enormous home that could contain two Kremlins or ten Versailles. It is a walled city of palaces, alleyways, monumental steps and temples. It was said that heaven's city contained 10,000 rooms, therefore the Forbidden City contained 9,999 1/2, and that in 1974 as China opened to the world, 8,704 rooms were found.  (None of the interiors were open to us visitors.) The other imperial remnants of Beijing are arranged in Taoist order around this nucleus, mainly on a North/South axis, according to the principles of Feng Shui and the I Ching. It is called forbidden because if a commoner entered the realm, up until the 1911 revolution, he would be executed. The palaces atop their formidable marble stairs are named and intended for ritual purposes in a complex system of meanings, but few emperors followed them, for few had the good of their realms at heart. The precise and arcane labyrinths of rules and protocols permeating the Forbidden City are truly the marks of deeply complex minds with staggering obsessive compulsions.

As for getting there, having encountered the obstacles created by taxi drivers, we decided to try the subway. A half hour walk on dusty roads past walled off construction sites of rubble, the station was an immaculate high-tech realm whose staff in formal uniforms scolded the few Chinese passengers mercilessly. After passing through metal detectors--we had been through many the previous day, and would come to understand that they permeate China--we embarked on a journey of 1 1/2 hours to arrive at a metro station that remained open during the holiday, far from our destination. This enabled us to wander through narrow alleyways and streets of low gray brick buildings that had become art shops, selling work, brushes, antiques. It was a human-sized sliver of this vast, crushing city, peopled with cheerful inhabitants who offered to direct us through the maze. A man walked his large cat on a leash, and as the cat took off after a frightened little dog, he caught my eye and shared my laughter.

We were within 500 meters of Tiananmen Square when we were again crushed by engulfing humanity from the countryside, children held by their mothers over modern trash recycle bins to pee, proud, odd-shaped families photographing each other against the massive monuments. We were not so much walking down the street as being shoved, pulled, pushed, just trying to keep track of each other. We passed the boy soldiers who, as they move from place to place, goosestep in a wiggling fashion, and then arriving at their posts become rigid, heads swiveling slowly. Garbage cans, including recycling bins that are thoroughly ignored, keep much of the litter off the street, but the underground passageways are strewn with garbage. Nearing the Forbidden City the crowds never relent. Perhaps that is why the GPS audioguide that take you through the Forbidden City and other monuments never relent either, but force your pace.

200 ton dragon carving

The Forbidden City dates back to the 15th century, the Ming dynasty's imprint. Its massive distant palaces become more cottage-like as you penetrate the enormous complex, until in the Empress Cixi's quarters they have a banal 19th c Western look. But in general the architecture is uniform and hierarchical, the bestiary on the roof indicating the rank of the buildings that were built for exalted moral functions that few emperors lived up to. They did keep up appearances with their collections of huge numbers of concubines. The Qing Dynasty's Empress Cixi (1835-1908) was a concubine who quickly grasped the play of power within the Forbidden City and turned it to her advantage, eliminating rivals and keeping her offspring on the throne while she ruled literally from behind the yellow curtain. Her brutal self-indulgence cost China political and military advantage (she used the Navy's funds for her lotus gardens) and she was forced off the scene just as China tumbled, but not before she left behind plentiful palaces for her amusement.

Cixi, Concubine turned Empress

The tranquil garden

We were dwarfed by the immensity of the scale, the recitation of dimensions and building materials, the ritualistic names and functions of the huge buildings which we could not enter, and which are probably by now empty. Jacques observed, "We think we are so special, but we are nothing." Exactly. We learn Confucian virtue of humility by visiting China, and wonder at the same time: will humanity be crushed by soulless technology or the onslaught of the infinite Chinese? Little children from the countryside stare at me and burst out laughing, as their fathers try to hush them. Their mothers stare with open hostility. Three young girls, arm in arm, take one look at Jacques and explode with laughter. In the rarefied art shop a book called Who Runs the World? has photographs of Bush and the Statue of Liberty with a machine gun.

I had not eaten all day and the only provisions we would find, time and time again, were snacks in the form of sausages, pickled chickens' feet or meat patties. Finally I found a watery soup and a strawberry drink.

We sought relief in the palace gardens, but they were equally crammed with people and we were hard pressed to find the rock or tree that our GPS guide was talking about. Chinese gardens prize intricate, indirect pathways, rocks contracted and warped by time, water and wind, and ancient trees. One such old juniper in the garden was said to have followed Emperor Qianlong (reigned 1736-1795) on his tours of the lower Yangtze to provide him with shade and shelter, thus considered a heavenly tree which he dubbed the "Marquis of Shade." His son wrote

The ancient juniper casts a cool shade

A heart keeps on mourning.

Great is the beneficence of the late emperor

His Majesty's kindness lass millions of years.

Finally we left the Forbidden City past placid canals that had once serviced the palace kitchens, pushed along by the crowd. I was aching with exhaustion and cold. There were beautiful little carvings being sold by rustic characters along the sidewalk, but all was in Chinese characters. As we were pushed along I tried to buy a roasted corn cob, even as a nearly violent fight erupted between a policeman and the vendor. A woman had stretched out on a pallet along the road, displaying horribly injured feet. She was among the many taking up their work stations along the tourist road.

We walked and walked, along huge, posh avenues with gigantic hotels, a sign beckoning us on for miles toward the subway. But at a mall where officials with red arm bands hailed taxis, we were finally able to get one. It even had a meter. One of the day's happy surprises. And we sailed home to the resident dog who squealed with delight, and the beautifully clear spaces of the expat, polished wood and immaculate sofas.

Closing time

We have ticked off the de riguer Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City, but on the worst possible days to see them!

Arriving in Beijing on the National Holiday

Flying over Mongolia @ 35,857 feet:

Rugged snows beneath us, we wake cramped and cheerful in a wordless timeless stillness. We spent the previous day in the Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with its art museum and casino and massage and oxygen bars and wonderful chairs. Now we are above rocky lands in a white haze. Such orderly faces my fellow Chinese passengers seem to have-- completed, rooted. Below the Great Wall snakes over sheer mountain passes, nearly at the gates of the great metropolis.  Hello, China.

Seating at Schiphol Airport

Shortly after arrival at our home for the next ten days (we are exchanging our Paris apt for a gated expat community where diplomats live), we have a stiff coffee and look for a taxi for Tiananmen Square. The taxi drivers lined up by the huge stone lions guarding the Beijing Riviera are bulky darkish men, intimidating suitors till we climb in. Once we are sharing the same space the driver becomes jokey, gesticulating his exasperations. The immense Beijing sky is still and clear--the State has cleared the pollution for the holiday, by cloud seeding and closing factories. The trees are gorgeous and abundant: willows drooping and others like puffs of green like upturned parasols. Bright landscaping lines the roads and highways, with cheerful hardy flowers. We near Tiananmen Square in standstill traffic. Migratory hordes of people pass us slowly like all of humanity marching over our ruined empire. It is the national holiday, and all of the country has descended patriotically upon Beijing, in particular on Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

The People's Square

We, it turned out, were the novelty, among Mongolians and Tibetans and peoples of the North and the far reaches of Yunnan Province and everywhere in the Middle Kingdom.

We reach Tiananmen Square at a forced crawl through tides of humans, crossing the street under a bridge where young military boys in khaki green beaked hats like the Russians, narrow waists cinched in white belts, laden with black leather covered hardware, standd like mannikins. They are immobile except for rhythmically swiveling their heads, deliberate and slow as machines, to scan the crowd with stern eyes, human x-rays. Later, one such boy standing alone on a box in the Square would become the object of family photo shoots, until tall, bearded Jacques approached him to be in a picture. The boy fiddled with his radio and out of nowhere an older soldier appeared to scold us all off. Then the Chinese crowd noticed Jacques and lined up to have their pictures taken with him.

Jacques and the soldier

At length we leave behind the huge hot concrete of Tiananmen with Chinese from all over the countryside, brown and weathered, bright kerchiefs speaking Russian, men of thin bristled chins and wise tough faces, kids coiffed or scraggly in cheap imitation designer clothes, old people in classical dress. The entire huge continent has been squeezed onto the largest public square in the world.

We hope to find relief in Zongchen gardens, which is also overrun, and the keepers of order are bulky brown men in sunglasses and suits with shaved heads, that finger beads and talk on cell phones. The gardens comprise remnants of rambling elegance with hidden spaces, weathered pavilions, glass windows papered up, where everyone is photographing their family. An exhibit, incomprehensible to us, has paintings of Hu and Mao and Chao En-lai.

Zhongchen Garden

Then, sleep-deprived and disoriented, we collapse by the closed metro as the vast tide of China's population sucks past us. One dandyish man with a bouffant hairdo turns to me and says, "YOU want to kill ME?" Of the many thousands of people we have seen, perhaps 3 have been Caucasian.

We find a side street of great charm, traditional wavy roofs on low buildings, all humanity streaming towards us from the Forbidden City. A pretty young woman notes our confusion and starts a seductive conversation with me. She compares me to a Tang poet, whereas she is a student of classical painting and wants us to see the special work of her school. "Look at the birds I painted, like two lovers, like you too." We don't bite, mainly because Jacques has just read about the "art student" scam, our first classical scam of several outlined in the Lonely Planet guidebook. 

Later another young attractive male "painter" stops us, but all we want is a taxi home. The huge blocks of Beijing are filled with street food and rickshaw drivers, dubious-looking storefronts--no restaurants in sight.  A few gargantuan blocks later neon lights flash from international fashion emporiums. All is commotion and thick traffic. Blocks are now lined with food vendors, frying, grilling, people munching starfish on sticks.  We try some noodles but the sauces are spiced with meat, and I am a lifelong vegetarian.  People stand three thick, eating, slurping, while other people dig through the garbage beneath them.  Vendors call out to us and promise vegetables, but it looks and smells like a circus for carnivores. 

Rickshaw drivers practically push us onto their seats but we get off after a block and refuse to pay. The taxi stands are filled with lounging drivers, the largest and most aggressive of whom, at each stand, approaches Jacques with his price.  These taxis don't use meters, and they demand 200 yuan to take us back home, whereas we paid 70 coming--Jacques can't stomach that. Their English is limited, but when Jacques, an inveterate bargainer, counterproposes, they flick their beefy hands and say "Go."  Finally Jacques offers a gentler looking driver 100 yuan and we get in, holding our breaths till the lions of the Beijing Riviera rear up in the dark.  Then, while Jacques hunts down groceries, I get lost circling alone through the labyrinthine gated complex, where children play in the streets like 1960's America.

We are in a vast world here, where past and future collide incoherently.