Beijing Day One

The Journey To China

The journey to China was pretty uneventful. We headed down to Heathrow by train, and grabbed some western food at the airport before switching to the Chinese diet when we arrive. The flight is long and sleep is hard (William claims to have stayed up all night, but we both got at least 5 hours of bad broken sleep. Probably just as well though, as we were definitely ready for sleep by the time it got to bedtime on Friday night (2 pm in England 9pm in Beijing)!

William was very impressed by the onboard TV system. Paradise TV he called it! A selection of films on-demand, of which we watched about 3, music, a map showing where we were in the flight, a camera pointing out of the bottom of the plane, and games. On arrival our tour guide for this leg of the trip met us, a Chinese girl called Regina (her English name of course!) We got into a car and headed for the hotel, the 4 Points hotel. The hotel is pretty impressive, has a pool and 3 restaurants, and the rooms are spacious.

After unpacking (i.e. unzipping the suitcases), we explored the hotel, and found the pool and hot tub. After going back to the room for swimwear, we went back down for a dip. William stayed in the hot tub so long he looked like a lobster! We ended up talking to a Chinese gentleman and his 10 year old son via the boy's pretty good English and the half dozen words we had learned before the trip. I eventually managed to entice Will into the pool for a swim and cool down!

Dinner was interesting. I ordered a chicken dish for William, some noodles, an Oyster dish and some Dim Sum. Probably would have been fine in a Chinese restaurant in England, but here each dish would have done us both! I made a valiant effort at it though, and managed half of the Oysters, all the chicken (which William shared) a good helping of noodles and half the Dim Sum, but was then ready to burst! Bed cam very shortly afterward - I only made it half an hour longer than Will at 9:30!

Beijing Day One

On Saturday morning, after a breakfast of cereal, noodles, toast and doughnuts (guess who has had doughnuts every morning for breakfast?) we met Regina in the lobby at 9am. We set off on the first of two very busy days. The itinerary included the Emperor's Summer Palace, and the Forbidden City. The Summer palace was very impressive - built by one of the Emperors for his mother, and later lived in by the Dragon Lady - ward to two of the Emperor's in the Ming Dynasty (note that my facts should be carefully checked before quoting...).

Aside from all of the palace buildings in the traditional Chinese yellow and red colours, and a huge hillside temple, there were loads of large boulders full of holes and features. These are apparently a symbol of wealth in Beijing, as they come from a particular region, and finding large ones is hard. If you have one of these rocks in your garden, it shows you are very wealthy. The number of them in the Summer Palace demonstrates the wealth of the ruling class during this time, and one of them, the size of a bus, is called the Bankruptcy Stone - at least two people ended up bankrupt trying to get it moved. The Dragon Lady's Nephew (again - verify the facts for yourself) spent a vast amount of money moving it to it's current location, as apart from the cost of moving the thing, it was too big to fit through the doors, so he had to pay to get the entranceway taken down and rebuilt!

After walking through the palace buildings, we walked down the long covered walkway (supposedly the longest in the world at 700m) through the gardens to the docks, and took a boat ride over to the other side of the lake. In the harbour was a stone boat, commissioned by one of the Emperors - there's a Chinese saying that an Empire is like a boat - it floats carrying all of it's people, but the people can band together and capsize it. The Emperor decided to build a boat that could not be capsized! Needless to say, his plan failed, and his empire was overthrown by a new Dynasty.

On the far side of the lake, we saw some locals dancing, and playing games, and walked the 15 arch bridge over to a temple on an island in the lake. Here we learned that statues of lions are used as guardians to entryways, and come in pairs, a lion and a lioness. The Lion is on the right as you face them, and has a ball, representing power, under his right paw; the Lioness is on the left, and has a lion cub under her left paw.

After the Summer Palace, we went to a silk factory to see how silk is made, and in particular the duvets that they then proceeded to try and sell to us. The process was interesting though. Once the silkworms have spun their cocoon and become a chrysalis inside, the hard silk cocoon is soaked for a few minutes in water until it has become soft. The cocoon is then pulled apart at one side (they are white oval things around an inch in length) and the chrysalis removed. The cocoon is then stretched over a semi-circular wire hoop about 9 inches in diameter. This is repeated until about 6 cocoons have been stretched over the same hoop. This is then left to dry. To make the duvet, the silk is lifted off of the hoop, and then stretched again to the size of a double duvet, and looking like a huge spiders web. This is repeated until many many layers have been produced.

You are then encouraged to buy anything and everything from the factory shop, and are told many stories about the near magical properties of a silk duvet (I exaggerate of course, and I'm sure that many of the properties are true, but I also suspect that they exaggerated somewhat as well.)

After grabbing some lunch (which was fairly minging I have to say - we only went there because the tour guide was pandering to William and trying to find him pizza, which he didn't like the look of when he saw it - I had a smoked pork dish which looked and sounded good, but had a truly horrible flavour which stuck in my mouth for the rest of the day...) we went to the Hutong area in Central Beijing. This is the old part of Beijing where the older generations live. These are Beijing's equivalent to the English terraced houses and back to backs, or Scottish tenements. They are all low single story buildings, and are built around a courtyard, with small rooms surrounding them. They have a small kitchen, but toilets are shared and of the hole-in-the-floor variety. It was interesting to notice that there are no proper partitions on the holes - just a low barrier. We took a ride on the Rickshaws around the area which was clearly pretty poor, but preferred by the older generation for the sense of community - youngsters prefer life in the high-rises of which there are thousands in Beijing.

We headed next to Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City. As we travelled around Beijing it became clear just how huge the place is. There are 20 million people living here, many of whom have cars. The traffic is much like London, but the roads criss-crossing the city are 3-5 lanes wide. The driving is crazy here lights and rights of way are treated as just suggestions, and pedestrians and cyclists put their lives in danger at every junction. Between the eating of everything that moves and the ubiquitous sound of the car horn, I think that the Chinese and French must have a shared ancestry! The tower blocks are endless, and many show a real contrast in the spread of wealth here between the tiny courtyard dwellings in the Hutong and the extravagance of many of the skyscrapers.

Tianamen Square was enormous, a large needle in the centre, with the Forbidden City at the North, Chairman Mao's tomb at the South, a museum to the East and a Art gallery to the West. Two huge screens, somewhere around 30m wide by 6m high, were about half way between the needle and the entrance to the Forbidden City displaying scenes from around China in a hugely panoramic view.

The Forbidden City itself was pretty impressive. Huge with pavilion after pavilion forming layers of gateways from the outside world at Tianamen Square to the Emperor's inner quarters. Each of the gateways were guarded by the pair of lions, giant cauldrons of water (to protect against the possibility of fire (in the Feng Shui sense rather than any real practical one), and often a dragon and phoenix - the former representing the Emperor and the latter the Empress. At the far end of the complex are gardens, and then back to the car.

We were reminded many times by our guide that British soldiers pillaged the Forbidden City and Summer palace twice - in 1860 and 1900 or thereabouts during the Opium Wars. Apparently the Emperors Guardian at the time - the Dragon Lady - sold off most of China's navy to rebuild the ruined Summer Palace (burned down by the British in the first Opium War), and left China fairly defenseless. Every time another country declared war on China, she apparently just rolled over and let them in! The effect of the soldiers invasion in Bejing is apparent in the Forbidden City, as the first two lions have been stripped of their gold plating, scraped off by soldiers with their bayonets. The subsequent lions still have their plating, as the soldiers never entered the living quarters of the Emperor, family members and officials.

We ended the day with a trip to see the Chinese Acrobats who were phenomenal, and a dinner of Peking Duck before heading back to the Hotel to sleep.