Beijing

Beijing

I have to give Beijing a lot of credit and respect for officially wearing me out each and every day I was there. By 6 pm I would collapse back at the hostel and try to think back to all I had done that day, which made me even more tired. I walked, I climbed, I got rained on, I got sunburnt, and I almost got hit by cars, bikes, scooters, buses, you name it, while trying to cross the street. And that was when the light was green.

My first day in Beijing I did the two biggies: Tiananmen Square (from now on referred to as T-Square, since I always have trouble spelling it) and the Forbidden City. T-Square was…big. That’s really the best way to describe it. It takes about ten minutes to walk from one side to another, which is exactly what I did. I took the obligatory picture with Mr. Mao, and even got asked to have a picture taken with this lovely lady here to the left, as I was taking a break to look at my map. 

The Forbidden City was incredibly impressive, and enhanced by my pre-China viewing of "The Last Emperor." Those Chinese emperors sure knew how to live in style. From the Hall of … to the Hall of …, I just walked around, took pictured, dodged zillions of tourists (just like me, of course) and found peace in my favorite part of the Forbidden City, the Imperial Gardens. The mistresses knew how to live in style too. Back there I was best able to think back about 500 years and imagine how pleasant it must have been to be royalty…aside from the backstabbing and affairs and such, of course. 

My favorite day of the whole time in Beijing was the Great Wall Day. Upon recommendation by my friend, I booked a tour through my hostel, as much as I like to do things on my own. Our hostel took us past the very busy section of the Wall to a more remote, farther back part of the Wall – part of which had been destroyed by the Mongols just a few centuries earlier. We were blessed with extremely good weather – the best I’d seen in over a month. After a quick orientation and some information from our guide, we were let loose to roam free for a good three hours to take pictures, wander, and enjoy the wall with only about twenty other people. And last, as was my intention ever since I moved to Asia, I was able to replicate my mom’s Great Wall picture from 28 years ago! I even whipped out the raincoat for effect, even though it definitely wasn't cold nor raining. The sheer greatness and impressiveness of the Wall, which was built over the span of two thousand years from modern day XiAn to past Beijing, was incredible to observe firsthand. 

My last day had a profound impact on me and my perception not only of China, but of the part of the world I was in and where I was headed to. After wandering through the Temple of Heaven complex, (where the emperor used to go pray to the heavens for a good harvest every fall) I made my way back to T-Square for better pictures, and to go to the National China Museum.

Of course, I’m a museum nerd, so it’s only natural that I wanted to head there, but I was also curious to see this particular museum, as it was put up by the National Government of China – which is still communist. They controlled what you read, saw, and learned. As Americans, most of us have grown up with the perception: communism = bad. Yet, as I looked around these cities, with their Gucci and Prada stores, I kept thinking ‘all our perceptions of communism don’t seem to be playing out in this country, right here and now.’ The horrors of the Great Leap Forward failure and the years of famine during Mao’s early leadership seemed to be only memories of the past as I looked around modern China.

But then I went to the museum. The bottom floor was the ‘Ancient China’ exhibit, which was a beautiful display of Chinese bronzes, pottery, ceramics, etc., that ran the course of history from pre-civilization to the proclamation of the Republic in 1911. From there, I went upstairs, and after gawking at the revolutionary Mao portraits (quite reminiscent of the French Revolutionary portraits I remember studying in high school) displayed gallantly in a red exhibit room, I made my way to the side wing, entitled the “Road to Rejuvenation.”

This was what I had come to see. In honor of the 100 years of the Republic, (made official in 1912) the display covered everything from the start of the party, led by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, all the way to the current president Hu Jintao. I was most fascinated by the English translations on the display panels. For example, “the founding of the CPC was an earth-shattering event that brought new vitality to the Chinese revolution,” or how about “socialism is the only way to save China.”

This was verbatim ‘revolutionary’ propaganda that I had read about in history books, phrases desiged to evoke emotions and instill patriotism in all loyal civilians, and I was seeing it for my very eyes. I almost got swept up in it, but my mind wouldn’t let me forget the horrors of the Great Famine and the purges, in which millions of innocent Chinese civilians died. Had it been worth it, in a country so big as China? Were the people happy they were living in communism, with limited freedoms such as YouTube and Facebook? Or were they happy, because they didn’t know anything differently? These questions and dozens more were spinning through my head as I left the museum, hurting my brain. 

T-Square as seen from the museum

Once again, Beijing earned my deepest respect for not only wearing out my feet, but wearing out my thinking cap as well. All of my studying had paid off to paint a pretty good picture of Chinese history in my mind, solidified by my museum visit.  I hope that I can take that knowledge, especially as I head to Southeast Asia to see more countries affected by communism, and use it to help answer some of my endless questions about its place in the modern world. But first, I had a little more of China to see.