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!