Temples and Mosques

Cody who lived with us

The Beijing Riviera

Immobilized by exhaustion I spent a day lounging around the gated community with the gorgeous white husky who lives there. Jacques took off for the Beijing Museum, enormous and filled with bronzes and Chinese artifacts but little labeling in English. His big news of his day alone was that he fell for another scam, briefly mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guidebook. A nice woman--neither young nor attractive--wanted to practice her English with him and got him to go to a tea house where they pushed them into a little room and once again performed the "tea ceremony", which consists of filling tiny cups of tea. This time, though, the bill came to 500 yuan--$50. Jacques is never eager to reach into his pockets, and got them to drop the "snacks" which they hadn't ordered, but they still charged 50 yuan per tiny tea and 100 yuan for "use of the room!"

"Are you going to pay your share?" he asked the woman who reluctantly came up with 100 yuan. Jacques still only laid 200 yuan on the table, and so she said she'd use her credit card. But before leaving she disappeared, no doubt collecting her share of the take. And he came home shakey that he had fallen for it. Any remaining scams we will no doubt attract, as the only foreign devils in sight.

Prayer room of the Niujie Mosque

The next day we visited the Niujie Mosque (by default--the taxi driver got lost!) which was indistinguishable from any Chinese temple architectural complex except for the blend of styles in the prayer halls, with their sturdy red columns and layers of (Chinese) rafters and carpeting. The mosque, which had originally been built in 996AD by Arab scholar Nasuruddin, was an immaculate showplace and museum for Islam in China, where rustic ladies in scarves chatted and laughed and greeted me with broad smiles after their prayers in the women's hall. It is the oldest and largest mosque in the Beijing area, the complex covering 10,000 square meters.

Islam came to China in the mid-7th c through merchants and tribute missionaries from Persia and Araby, via the Silk Road and the sea routes of the Spice Road. They were called "Fanke", foreign guests, who stayed around the capital for business or diplomatic purposes. In the early 13th c Muslim groups entered China along with Mongolian troops and merged with local Fanke, forming the ethnic Hui in China, called the HuiHui people during the Yuan dynasty.

Temple of the Origin of Dharma

We walked to the Temple of the Origin of Dharma, a Buddhist college and sprawling temple complex where slacker monks plodded around like any guys their age. Beggars outside the gate proffered their crippled limbs. Inside, visitors with gigantic incense sticks fed the smoky fragrance at the large bronze antique burners before each temple and prostrated themselves. We are not permitted to photograph the "deities", but most Buddhas are a bright, glaring gold-painted copper without signs of age or character, though there were a few apparently older and more beautiful bronzes or clay Buddhas and Arhats. We dutifully entered each temple among the labyrinth where monks went to and fro and laundry hung.

Roberta had told us that the people who pray at Buddhist temples are not Buddhists, just people desperate for a solution. A number of the monks are rich kids who join a monastery for a few years to reduce their stress levels. She said that a popular video circulating showed a Tibetan monk driving an expensive sports car to luxury stores and emerging with high end shopping bags. But the monks we saw seemed to lead simple lives.

Rubbing for good luck

Then we took a taxi to the White Cloud Temple, a large Taoist complex. Large rough marble stellae above Chinese chimeras are rubbed for good luck. Much of Taoism, at the ground level, seems based on luck and superstition, despite its elaborate geometrical and medicinal systems. A small white marble bridge crosses a dry marble basin where people threw coins, trying to hit a bell. A Chinese lady toting her luggage and another Western woman, faces contorted with their effort, hurled one coin after another.

The pantheon of Taoist gods started with a fierce dark wood demonic looking god who cracked a whip against evil spirits. The other temples had stately, if somewhat kitsch, deities with pasted on black beards, for wealth (literary or military), health and the gods for promotion and passing examinations. A fierce bronze warrior almost 3 meters tall had a well polished belly where he's been rubbed by the many visitors to that temple of studies and scholarship.

My guy is on the right

Then there are the 60-year cycle gods, one for each birth year. I photographed the gods of 1948-1951, colorful martial clay men, but as I turned away I found myself turning back to see the green clothed 1951 (my birth year) god looking straight at me with a twinkle in his eyes. The buildings wound into hidden study halls, Taoist medicine halls, areas under construction, and a pantheon of Chinese astrological animals.

Finally we took a taxi to the Lama Temple, lavish and well-funded, with glazed ceramic pots for trash bins, freshly painted arches, inscriptions in three languages: Chinese, Arabic and Tibetan, and a malfunctioning audioguide. It has its bell tower and drum tower and a succession of main temples and side temples.

The three languages of the Lama Temple

Tibetan art is extravagant and based on the Indian version with its many arms and coupling tantric figures. Buddhas were resplendant, including a 38-meter high gold Buddha (we could only glimpse his ample loins for his head was buried in upper stories), a 500 Arhat mountain (arhats have attained high levels of enlightenment) carved of gorgeous wood, the tantric deities which were mainly clothed, except for those miniatures in the museum. The profusion of deities was endless and mind-boggling and worshippers kept throwing themselves before them with tall incense held at their foreheads.

Then we hurried over to the Confucius temples, but first unfortunately Jacques wanted first to see the Imperial College so we missed a performance. The college was the usual impressive array of buildings on grassy lawns, alongside the also extensive Confucian temples.

As the patron saint of fonctionnaires (bureaucrats), Confucius presided over a suitably dull while grandiose public building, with exquisite golden brocade and banners, and many troughs with marble sheep and pigs, meant for animal sacrifice. Originally named as Guo Zi Jian, The Imperial Confucian Temple, it was here emperors offered sacrifices to Confucius. Its construction, 1302-1306 during the Yuan dynasty, covers an area of 22,000 square meters withs three rows of houses and courtyards. 

Not well advertised (but mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guidebook) it had 8,000 cells of 1.5 square meters each, where scholars had been held in isolation for 3 days before their exams. Many went insane or died. In the 20th c. it was the theatre where the great literary figure Lao She had been beaten before a bonfire of Peking Opera costumes and made to confess his counter-revolutionary crimes, and afterwards drowned himself.

High status bestiary, Confucian Temple

Men were spraying the 700-year old cypresses with a special truck. Outside the walls was the beautiful, refined neighborhood of the Tartar city, where we enjoyed an incredibly cheap and lavish vegetarian buffet. But the traffic and pollution on the way home helped ready us to get out of Beijing, and on to Shanghai.