Old Shanghai and its Temples

The Apple Store at Hong Kong Plaza

"Chinatown"

The oldest history of Shanghai, dating from the Ming Dynasty, is buried in "Chinatown", which begins at the edge of the vast luxury stores that put Fifth Avenue, even the Champs Elysées, to shame. I became quite familiar with Hong Kong Plaza, which lights up at night in mutating blues and greens and purples like the Olympic site (perhaps financed by the same Hong Kong zillionaire), because it contained another Apple Store--my oasis, my home away from home. To the strains of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkle I would join hundreds of non-customers using the Apple computers. Once I found myself sitting next to an Italian from Perugia, working in Shanghai for several years. "What are you doing here?" he blurted out. "Don't you know these people are crazy? Just try to get a roll of toilet paper, just try!" ("Expat fever," said Jacques.) But the security guards manage an English word, "Welcome" and even when I set off an alarm by unplugging a computer, the staff was all smiles and apologies. Steve Jobs, his body barely cold, was watching over us.

From the very high end shopping, with exquisite ladies' rooms where uniformed young ladies tried to instruct me how to use a sit-down toilet, the old Avenue Joffre from the French Concession, now Huaihai Road, begins to feature lavish Chinese-style modern malls with vast jewelry stores selling gold and diamonds guarded by enormous jade dragons and gold Buddhas--next door to shiny Kentucky Fried Chicken or MacDonalds.

We left the street to enter a labyrinth of alleyways selling jade carvings and seals made to order along with an infinite variety of tourist trinkets, and found Hu Xing Ting Pavilion and its pond surrounding the oldest tea house in Shanghai, that radiates zigzag bridges thronging with tourists of the East and West. Large muscular goldfish flocked in hordes to the surface while Chinese men from the countryside stared at them fixedly, unable to stop obsessing about their proximity. Turtles struggled up an embankment to get some sun.

Hu Xing Ting Tea House...

In the tea house, serene and unassuming, Chinese customers cracked sunflower seeds all over the exquisite little tables and a young man in a soiled silk shirt took our order and immediate payment. We drank jasmine and chrysanthemum teas and the boy brought us rice cakes and tiny tofu pillows and quails' eggs for Jacques, while we watched the tourists below on the murky lively pond with beautifully feathered geese.

....Shanghai's oldest tea house

Then we entered the Yuyuan Garden, a tiny intricate folly of rocks and streams and Ming (and later Qing) pavillions for reverie, nonetheless logjammed with tourists. Yuyuan Garden had been built during the reign of Ming Emperor Jiajing (1559) as the private garden of Pan Yunduan, an administration commisioner of Sichuan Province. Chinese gardens are noted for their coy labyrinths, fantastically grotesque rocks and ancient trees, which we loved despite the fact that every nook was occupied by a tourist. We wandered and bargained for a pair for jade earrings in a hall of young girls who told me I was beautiful and that Jacques loved me so much. Then we wound our way out, toward the Temple of the City God.

Yuyuan Garden

Shanghai City God Temple is an important Taoist temple built during the Ming Dynasty Yongle period. (Emperor Yongle, 1360-1424, had built the Forbidden City.) Only ten of its original halls still exist. It is dedicated to God Cheng Huang Qiu Yubo (1297-1373) who had been "during his lifetime a Mongol Yuan Dynasty Jinshi, Ming Dynasty Imperial Academy bachelor"--his wife is also prayed to--and was designated a god after he died, "in charge of urban security, people's lives and wealth, health and safety."

The City God

It was a fabulous Toaist menagerie of thunder and war gods, and always the gods of wealth. I actually prostrated myself before the god of literature, a giant colorful blue-robed laquered gentlemen with a gleam in his eye, unlike the sad-faced one in Beijing, and the god of wealth, jovial and conspiratorial. Chic young people who looked like supermodels held long bunches of burning incense above their heads and bowed from standing, down to the ground. Chinese snapped photos (a taboo we had been told) of the gods and then prayed. A woman had just purchased a porcelain god of wealth and set it up before each god she prayed to. There were the 60-year cycle gods, too - but labeled only in Chinese characters. I winked at the one I thought was the god of 1951 (my birth year), in plain green robes.

Prostrating before the God of Literature

Then we emerged from the smokey circles and onto "old" streets selling enormous amounts of everything - in a 10yuan (1 dollar) store almost every temple accessory or revered symbol could be found. Poorer streets were hanging with laundry in front of shallow dwellings, dirty and poor inside, while outside were stands of food, produce, used Chinaware, and a woman washing her hair in the street.

In a Buddhist convent, a few unhappy-looking nuns wore gray robes and shaved heads, while a small crowd of cheerful neighbors hung out, drinking glasses of tea. Along the street women folded gold papers for the temple in the shape of crowns.

Taoist priest ceremony

City God worshippers

Further on was the sparkling new construction of the Taoist Temple of the White Cloud, where a god of thunder greeted us. Inside the courtyard was the usual casual neighborhood gathering, but inside the temple an orchestra of cymbals and strings and drums played celebratory music. About 20 young priests in gleaming embrowdered robes chanted and circled the temple, looking equally bored and curious about our presence, some whose eyes twinkled and some looking threatened as they proceeded with their ceremony. The sides of the temple had clay mountains of Taoist gods, eyes bulging, melodramatic, some sleeping, some yawning into their big bellies.

Taoist disciples

Afterwards we bought snacks from a young man who had learned French in Gabon, and bargained for a silk tai chi shirt (down to 8 dollars). We walked through Huaihai Park where songbirds hung in cages with enameled posts for their food and water--the saddest part of the day, except for the sight of the fields of demolition, munching away at the old Chinese city.

old Chinatown

The Bund and Nanjing Road

Huangpu Park: No Dogs or Chinese!

The very name, Shanghai, evokes the danger and glamour of the 30's, when the city was run by gangsters and full of opium dens, and rich white people hung out at the lawless crossroads. It evokes beautiful Chinese women in slender silk staring with hatred into the eyes of dangerous criminals, and trains outfitted like a Sultan's harem. For the faintest whiff of those days, visit the Bund, the stretch of monumental architecture at the edge of the Huangpu River and former British Concession. But if you blink, you realize that all you really see is classical Chicago-style architecture with touches of art deco, as in the famous Peace Hotel or the original HSBC (Hong Kong-Shanghai-Beijing-Corporation) with ceiling murals of the great financial centers of the world. Across the Huangpu River is Pudong, a few decades ago a rural village, now a veritable laboratory of skyscrapers,. A few blocks away is Nanjing Road, the neural center of the frantic shopping world that surpasses New York in its highs and in its lows.

On the Huangpu River

Pudong

The taxi ride to the Bund had no trees or flowers as had Beijing's carefully landscaped throughways, but lifted us Jetson-like to the skyscraper world, the dingier tenements, the old and brilliantly new skyscrapers of Mercedes-Benz and Caterpillar and Toyota and Deutsche Bank--the world of commerce. At street level the Bund is weighted with the solidity of 30's brick and stone, Art Nouveau and finance. The walk along the Huangpu River raised us above it all, across from Pudong, a perpetual World's Fair of space-age buildings. An exhibit in the famous Huangpu Park, where dogs and Chinese had been forbidden till the Communist Revolution, is a frieze of heroism - but no translation available. Inside an exhibit had brief and quirky translations of the Bund's "glorious" history - as did the lavish Art Deco Peace Hotel. But I was tired and a little euphoric as the pollution of Beijing cleared out of my lungs and the pieces of meat that had seasoned food that I'd tried started to clear my system. So I sat down in an arm chair in a small gallery of the beautiful Peace Hotel to read about the Jewish refugees of Shanghai. We would later visit the museum that told the story of 30,000 Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews sheltered by Shanghai. Major financiers like the Iraqi Jew Sassoon who built the Peace Hotel, had already been mainstays of Shanghai.

old Nanjing Road

We walked along Nanjing Road, which is more intense than Times Square with huge video screens and international brands and hawkers, and junk shops and huge Apple Store where hundreds of kids played with the computers, and incessant solicitations to buy watches and designer bags and flashing roller blades. We found a meal under glaring red lights that was vegetarian--Dr. Li had written out Chinese characters for me that stated I was a vegetarian. The waitress stood before our table and unblinkingly watched me eat The food is so cheap you can't afford to stay home--about $5 for both our meals. Out in the street young Chinese shouted incessantly trying to pull in customers.

Chinese Nanjing Road

Further along, Nanjing Road is very Chinese, with Shanghai's Number One Department Store, and most impressive Chinese pharmacies. Lavish gilded and lacquered floors provide medical checks in bright gold examination rooms, and sell herbs and roots and traditional Chinese medicine. Since I had been subject to a headache every day of the trip to that point, and my migraine medicine was running out, I inquired about the Chinese version. (Since almost no one speaks English the sales people often have to phone up a friend who does, and serves as translator over the cell phone.) The TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) headache medicine (which cost less than $3) proved miraculous--until I tried to stop taking it! It was apparently habit-forming and in Paris I ended up with even more exquisitely painful withdrawal headaches for five days running!

Cai Tong De Tang (Pharmacy)

Further along Nanjing Road is The People's Square, the busiest metro stop (saying a lot! The impressive metro is packed everywhere--) and the soothing center of Shanghai, People's Park, which has displaced many thousands of residents to become one of those idyllic green spaces that makes central Shanghai liveable. Across the pond men loudly played cards, along the water's edge men fished, and in the pond a small creature like a gigantic tadpole or amphibious rat swam along the surface of the water, a kind of Gollum.

Beard Papa on the Metro

We began to be accosted by young Chinese, mostly visitors, who called after us "Come talk English! You are so cute!" After some exhausting exchanges I took refuge in the leafy glade of People's Park while Jacques went off to explore. But he didn't get far. Group after group of young Chinese implored him to come to the tea festival and speak English. "Father Christmas! You are so funny!" The very mention of tea made him jumpy after his tea scam in Beijing, and the attention of so many pretty young girls left him a bit shakey.

Vending machine on the metro

We got home on the packed metro, where the stops were announced only in Chinese and we had to struggle and strain to find our station. If Shanghai is like Manhattan, the walk from the station is the borderline of Brooklyn and Queens--heavily ethnic, people's laundry lining the sidewalks, heavy traffic of motos and bicycles playing chicken, inscrutable food stores where nothing looks familiar and the only writing is Chinese characters. But on entering the campus we are in a world of soft Shanghai breezes, gently rambling neighbors, and always someone moving in soft concentration through tai chi forms. in the most unlikely places.

On To Shanghai

We had tickets for the high speed train to Shanghai, the class of "soft seats." The Railway Station South was sleek and modern, but when I tried to buy a lock for my bag, it turned out that the high end shops only sold items for conspicuous consumption--brand names like Diesel, or expensive watches, nothing more practical than Chinese candy and water. It was a wasted effort, it turned out: we were the only ones in the car of soft seats, ample leg room, sit down toilets. (There was a higher class than ours, which was full.) Two cars down Asian families had spread out their meals and filled the aisle with trash, and the squat toilets were already in need of service.

A Railway Station

Leaving Beijing, the countryside was sad, flat fields with lone individuals working fields of crops, rarely a tractor. Through the smog the landscape was muddy and dusty, with murky channels of water. At one point we passed through a tunnel to immortal Asia, mountains, beautiful rock cols, in the mysterious smog, a golden god over a temple. These were the rocks and scrubby vegetation of Chinese paintings, in hilly countours, pagodas and lagoons. And then the land was obscured by forests and dusty earth.

Shanghai

Another tunnel took us back to the smog and dust-obscured housing construction, and always some individuals with hoes. Power lines marched across the land, across bulldozers on flat rubble. The air became sooty and a haze settled thickly close to the earth, barely revealing silhouettes of reeds and poplars.

Another tunnel and the land was more variable, crops and landscaping, villages of cement blocks, organized by ribbons of soft dust roads. But where the bulldozer stood was a sense of despair. Now mountains again, rocky banks of rivers, landscaped and terraced. Piles of hay on the fields, groups of farmers and their red wooden carts.

Shanghai

And then we were in Shanghai, reaching a taxi stand three deep, as the taxis methodically peeled off and zoomed away. Everywhere skyscrapers, no remnants of other centuries. We sped into the moist air. Shanghai taxi drivers, we would learn, are always in life-or-death races to the next interminable traffic light. Following the map we'd shown him (he spoke no English) and confused by the byzantine roads of the university campus, the taxi driver was kind enough to call the number we'd been given (the father of one of our home exchange partners). Suddenly there was a loud barrage of thick Chinese, and a short thickish man, slightly gray, jumped into the taxi. The one word we could decipher was "welcome."

Whither?

our stairway

The apartment building was dreary as a Soviet tenement, covered with sooty metal railings. You turned on the corridor light by stomping on the cement stairs. The gray unpainted stairway was stencilled everywhere with 8-11 digit numbers. Metal grates covered the doors, along with red and gold stencils and grime. We reached ours, #501. Inside, despite a delicately molded ceiling and some wood flooring, was an abandoned array of depressing cheap furniture veiled in sooty dust.  But the bed had made in pastel greens and pinks and small soft towels hung everywhere. And Dr. Li was determined, at least, to get the wifi working for us.

Shanghai

For the first time in our experience of home exchanges (20 so far), we'd been had. What had been promised was a bright series of rooms in sweet silken fabrics. Instead, the neglected rooms are dusty and grimey, with little electrical assistance. In awkward, medieval Beijing we had been cocooned in Western comfort. Here we had exchanged our Paris apartment, a number of whose appliances had been left broken, whose cupboards had been cleaned out by the charming Chinese girls, for this. Dr. Li, in heavily accented English, explains that the apartment has been empty for 5 years. Jacques and I are each, in our way, busily trying to understand what's going on. (Jacques will never blame such sweet girls.) This was not what the home exchange site promised ("squeaky clean, internet, phone") but too late, they've removed the listing. Dr. Li insists on making us tea with the singular appliance, a hot plate, showing us how to plug in the water heater, how to mop off the bathroom floor after a shower--the shower is a spigot in the wall, and the mop is filthy. We will be here for 2 1/2 weeks.

our view

Dr. Li grows despondent when he can't connect us to the campus wifi network--even offers to leave us his computer! He then perks up considerably when I ask him where to get water. (Tap water is not potable in China, because of the pipes it runs through.)

Next door is a university campus, with a sweet order to it, all that was missing in the apartment we were to inhabit. As if into a long-forgotten memory of college days, we stroll into a grassy realm of  constant birdsong in moist air and gentle, milling life, from our Soviet-era tenement. And, in fact, as we climb the steps everyday we can glimpse interiors of other apartments that have been made lovely, with Ming furniture and renovated kitchens. 

A neighborhood worker...

Dr. Li rushes us to the gate where we can refill our plastic gallons for 1 yuan (10 cents). Madame Li, fragile and apparently ill, totters delicately behind. He shows us the faculty canteen. The campus is active with young and old, jogging and exercising. A little convenience store sells us some Kleenexes to try to clean up the place.

...smiles for a photo!

In the morning we walk back onto the campus to get a steaming hot Nescafé (only instant coffee for the next 2 1/2 weeks) and find a tai chi group on a basketball court, finishing the form, starting fan and sword. We smile and nod and exercise alongside them, I practicing my own tai chi form, Jacques his calisthenics. 

In fact, that would be our nourishment, the beauty of the morning: older people doing tai qi and qi gong, stretching, music piped on campus or brought by the groups of exercisers. Old men eyeing Jacques competitively, chin-up for chin-up. Middle-aged couples playing ball games before 6am. Eventually I abandon the tennis court and use a leafy park for my solitary form, beneath a weeping willow on marble flagstones, while a child or two, just after dawn, plays on the swing set.

Mao on campus

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.

The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China had been pieced together from the fortifications warlords had built to protect their small kingdoms since at least the 7th c. BC. They had communicated between the mountain peaks by smoke signals of burning wolf dung,  so close to present-day Beijing. When the Qin dynasty united China in 221 BC, the disparate walls were joined together by forced labor and civilian labor, and many many died in the process. When in 1644 the Mongolians easily broke through the crumbling remains of the Ming dynasty's fortifications and founded the Qing dynasty, the Wall was left to ruin. No, it cannot be viewed from outer space, but it is still a gorgeous sight that we had first seen on our aerial descent into Beijing.

From our first days in Beijing we had been plied with the business cards of a "China International Travel Service" and had an easy time reserving a car and guide for the Great Wall for about $40. A van with guide and driver showed up before 8 at our doorstep: Roberta, a smooth and subtle English-speaker, and the driver who seemed to understand English but wouldn't speak it. We drove out of Beijing to a countryside that resembles Morocco, poplars and catalpas glittering along dry waterbeds, richer-looking farming and orchards, vendors along the road.

As we neared the city of Matian Yu, located near the Great Wall, commercial density accumulated at the sides of the road. Country folk convert their homes to inns and restaurants, where tour buses gathered in dense traffic. But Roberta was upbeat--the crowds were so much better, she said, than a few days earlier. Visitors had been flocking to the Wall to avoid the worse crowds at Tian'men and the Forbidden City, but visitors were finally thinning out.

Ascending to the Great Wall

Amidst endless tour buses that somehow avoided colliding in parking lot after parking lot, a ski lift lofts you over vegetable gardens and forests among the folds of small mountains to a platform alongside the gray bricks of the wall. Gray is the color for the common people, yellow and red are Imperial colors, and blue and green are for princes and for temples. The irregular steps that follow the mountainous contours of the Wall can be high boulders or shallow gradations of brick or stone, and they are mobbed with Chinese and foreigners. Mao proclaimed that anyone who visits the Wall is a hero, and all of China wants to become a hero. Giant letters visible from an airplane or the surrounding area proclaim "This Wall Belongs to Mao."

Up on the hilly stones is the rest of the world, too. Nowhere else had we seen so many French, British, Italian - a lama in Tibetan crimson, old and bent Chinese. Tiny children protested the climb and posed, the elderly inched along, and then stood upright to pose against the snaky wall behind them. The criminals who were forced to build the wall had died in their labors, while civilians and military had been taken better care of. The towers, of the early 15th (1404 for example) have rough arches in a kind of convoluted crypt fashion, that provided a bedroom in the center with auxiliary rooms and lookouts on top. 

We pressed on, up and down, steeply, past exhaustion to find we had gone several towers too far from where Roberta had instructed us to turn back. We collapsed at a lift station, a plaza that memorialized the glory of China. And then, to get down the mountains, we slid down "tobaggons", rubber seats with throttles for brakes, on a smooth metal slide.

For lunch we ate tiny salted almonds at the parking lot, whose price Jacques bargained down to a third. (Standard, he says. He's been bargaining almost since he was born in Senegal, and says you can expect the opening price to be three times the real price.)

Picnic in a tower

But there is always a price to pay for an interesting guided tour with a Chinese person who can really help you understand the world around you--the "museums"! They are "factories"--apparently the factory aspect is just a put-on, for they are really outlets for the Chinese government to force fixed prices on tourists. We would learn that Chinese tourists are avid buyers at these "museums." We had visited a cloisonne factory on the way, a rustic chatty affair no doubt set up for show, and purchased a vase in the shop. It was an education in the craftsmanship - cloisonné is enameled copper. Then after our hike on the Wall, we were taken, whether we would or no, to more buying opportunities.

Descending from the Great Wall

Jacques wanted instead to visit the Ming tombs but Roberta said no, the traffic would be prohibitive. Later she told us she had received the news that three tourists had just been run over by a provincial tour bus there, traffic was backed up and Embassy staff was rushing to the scene of the accident.

We drove endlessly through reedy, verdant countryside, past duck ponds where young and old sat with their fishing poles, past fruit stands and bio-tourism. We entered the area of the Olympic village, with wooden Tibetan houses atop shops - Chinatown they called it, with its silk factory where a Taoist god of wealth stood at the entrance.

"This Wall Belongs to Mao"

A frantic 20-something with a difficult accent rushed us through the silk-making process as "workers" stood at their posts on the linoleum rooms of what was actually a kind of silk department store. I was invited to participate, stretching tufts of silk to fill comforters, which was what they wanted us to buy. (And the opportunity would come again and again.) But we bought a silk vest that struck me as particularly beautiful.

"Making a silk comforter"

Then Roberta rushed us to an ATM - for the final stop, the scam we had read about. (It had grown too late for the "tea museum.") In the uninspiring neon-lit bowels of an Olympic building we sat on couches and were brought scalding basins of tea to soak our feet, while being lectured on a kind of Tibetan tea-bag medicine by an unflinching pretty young girl, who brought in the "doctor." He was a study in inscrutability, with a face that masked all, pale smooth skin with slits for eyes. After a quick glance at our hands he told Jacques that he had prostate problems and I had circulation problems. With young men pummelling our feet, a growing number of "specialists" practiced a hard sell of their 200 yuan miraculous teabags, but Jacques kept smiling and shaking his head no. As we left, Roberta and the driver seemed almost apologetic, or was that my imagination?

The Olympics remembered

Then we walked around the Olympic area, among kites and hawkers and lame singers with beautiful voices and loud sound systems, amid the Olympic memories of glowing neon buildings, purple and blue and green, the most important of which (The Bird's Nest) stands empty and unused. Under the misting sky we breathed fresh air, before descending to Beijing.