We caught the bus to BeiHai and actually got to our destination when we realised we hadn’t booked ourselves onto a trip to the Great Wall for the next day. Our hostel offered various trips out with tour guides as well as the evening performances of Beijing Opera, acrobatics and the story of the Shaolin monks. Mostly we didn’t want to be tour-guided anywhere because both of us find that kind of organised, regimented style of sight-seeing pretty aggravating. However we couldn’t find another way to get to the Great Wall without a feat of logistics. All trips and performances had to be booked half a day before, but we had forgotten about the Great Wall trip until we got off the bus at BeiHai. So we went back through rush hour Beijing traffic. When we got back to the hostel we also remembered that we wanted to change traveller’s cheques, so we popped into a nearby branch of Bank of China to quickly change them. Wrong, very wrong. Two and a half HOURS later, our cheques were changed. When we left the bank most customers were in a state of great agitation. When you go to a bank in China, you take a numbered ticket, like in a supermarket deli. There are also different categories of enquiries so the numbers aren’t necessarily called in order. This adds great excitement and suspense to the whole process. How fun it is two hours in to wonder whether your number will be next. My number was the first in its category as well. One or two people tried to push in despite not having the right numbered ticket. The bank staff really didn’t have to do much to deal with them, as the rest of the customers took matters into their own hands when someone tried this. We honestly thought there might be a riot by the time we left.
We managed to get to Tiananmen just in time to meet up with everyone. (Everyone being Lauren, Becca, Steph, and Catriona. We also thought Catherine might turn up. Catherine being one of the four of us going to Urumqi, and also completely AWOL. We had no means of getting in touch with her via phone or internet or any other method, and we didn’t know when she’d be arriving in Xinjiang so we thought it might be quite useful for her to turn up! (She didn’t, because we’d actually changed the meeting time to a later hour and she didn’t know this, whoops.)) Cue lots of tourists requesting photos taken with the six of us. We then walked south to the Temple of Heaven (an ancient Buddhist temple. The emperor used to walk from the Forbidden City to the temple to pray for a good harvest for the coming year). We managed to get lost at some point and asked for directions from some guards who were astonished at the fact we spoke Chinese. The Chinese have three reactions to a Westerner speaking Chinese. One is astonishment. You say thanks and they practically fall over with complimenting you. The other is complete indifference. This one is fair enough I guess; we wouldn’t be surprised if a foreigner spoke English to us in England but after the first class of reactions it feels like a bit of an anticlimax! The third is easily the worst, and that is when they look you up and down and then tell you that your Chinese is useless. The Chinese, generally as a whole, lack that lovely thing called tact. Or manners.
The Temple was fairly interesting and we took some photos of us in China poses. China poses are the various ingenious ways that the Chinese pose in their photos. We’ve decided that the British way of taking photos is pretty boring (stand in front of something of interest and smile winningly) so from Beijing onwards our photos are littered with China poses. The most common is the V with two fingers, à la Japanese, but there are many more as you’ll soon see in my photos.
We had to rush back to the hostel for the acrobatics at 6pm, but it was nice to see everyone even just for that short time. The acrobatics were mind-blowing. It was actually a performance called Stars of The Future, and I have bought a DVD copy of some of their acts. Anyone that wants to have their heart in their mouth can watch it when I get back home. Yes, if you want to sit scared out of your wits for a few hours, then go to the acrobatics and watch little children throw themselves around and contort themselves into impossible shapes. The blurb claims that the performance is ‘reminiscent of a happy, carefree childhood’ but, as far as I’m concerned, for children to be able to do that the last thing on the planet they’ve had is a carefree childhood. The intermission halfway through was entirely necessary for us to relax from the tension. We also had to control our laughter at Miss Claps-Inappropriately, a Spanish woman in front of us who really didn’t have a clue about clapping etiquette. You don’t realise how much of an etiquette there is to applauding until someone sits in front of you consistently breaking with it. When we got back to the hostel they asked what we thought of it and when we said it scared us as we were fully expecting a child to fall to its death they laughed (a lot) and said ‘ah, it was just kids playing around’. The Chinese scare me.
On Wednesday we were off to the Great Wall. This involved leaving at stupid o’clock (7am) and we realised that our tour guide was a psycho when she turned up at ten to and told me off for not being ready yet.
First stop was the Ming Tombs. There are in fact several tombs, but we only visited one. Buried somewhere in a hill in the grounds is a particular emperor, but Chinese tradition and respect says that nobody will locate it because the dead should rest entirely in peace. The tombs that it’s possible to see are actually just monuments – basically big tomb stones saying that the emperor is around here someplace. It was quite informative to have a guide but I was a bit annoyed that when I asked if I could stop and buy batteries for my camera I was tutted at and then deserted to find my way back to the group on my own. What a lovely lady. She marched us around at top speed and only stopped at her own personally designated photo stops. After a while the British contingent in the group stopped trying to keep up and took our own photos and looked at what we wanted to see. When you leave the tombs you have to tap your shoulders and step through on a certain foot whilst saying 我回来了 (I came back) so that you don’t bring the dead back through with you and so you have left the realm of the dead for good. I stepped through first out of the group and so the tour guide heard my Chinese. She complimented my Chinese pronunciation and I told her we were studying Chinese, about to go to Urumqi (which she thought was a stupid place to go, both to study Chinese and just in general, as do most Chinese as it happens). From that moment on, she liked me and Liam a lot more and we became her favourites in the group, which was quite worth it, because suddenly we were allowed to stop when we wanted to take photos and so on.
After the Ming Tombs we went on to a jade factory. This factory was guaranteed by the government to work with only genuine jade, as it was originally part of Deng Xiaoping’s revolutionary policy of Chinese openness to the west. Obviously they wanted the products that they were showing the first westerners through to be genuine. We were taught how to spot genuine jade – it won’t break when it’s dropped and it scratches glass. Jade is next to diamond in hardness. Jade has veins of colour in it and over time this veins change the colour of the jade; effectively it matures. Not all jade is jade-green as it happens. There is white jade and yellowish jade and bottle-green jade and then every shade in between. Some of the jade carvings were absolutely spectacular. As well as the jade, there was other skilful craftsmanship on show at the factory. I liked the style of painting they demonstrated – the painting surface is carved out, and then the painter takes a very watery drop of paint and puts it to the surface and it fills in the whole section that has been carved out. It’s more intricate than it sounds! But talking of intricate, the most impressive painting we saw there was ‘inside’ painting. The artist paints the inside of a glass globe through a very small hole in the glass, which is then sealed. It’s really beautiful when finished. Jade is actually pretty cheap considering that it is a precious stone, but we didn’t have too much money, being poor students, and more importantly, we had to get our suitcases to Urumqi without paying extra baggage charge for weight. Eventually we settled on some stamps with our Chinese names carved on them, and a pair of jade chopsticks each with a chopstick rest. Most countries which traditionally use chopsticks believe that leaving your chopsticks standing in your food signifies death and means that you want your eating companions to die. Though like most traditions this is not really a big thing any more, still most people won’t leave their chopsticks in their food, and on proper occasions it isn’t really appropriate to leave your chopsticks on the tablecloth; hence the need for rests. There were four options: a turtle, a dragon, a fish and a dragon-turtle. Fish signifies wealth. Turtles are longevity and dragons mean power and success. Liam chose a fish and I chose a dragon-turtle (turtle’s body, dragon’s head) which means long-lasting success. The Chinese, particularly businessmen, put various items in their cars, homes and offices in order to bring in success, wealth etc and let out any bad spirits. Various animals mean different things, as do figurines of ancient gods and so on. It’s really a study in itself, tied in with feng shui and history and tradition and superstition; very interesting. The Chinese cabbage is also to be found in practically every businessman’s office. They position the large end of the cabbage to the outside and it is said to funnel money into the room. I think I might get one when I’m next in Beijing so I can add to my student loan : )
Next we went to the Great Wall at Badaling. The Great Wall is in fact circular, which I hadn’t imagined. The idea was to keep one ethnic group in and everyone else out, but I forget who exactly now. It wasn’t finished. Bits of it are of course in ruins. In fact the Chinese authorities originally considered the wall a great embarrassment because of its state of non-completion, but when outsiders began to show an interest in it, it became symbolic of China. Take as example this from La Geografía China, Sinolingua translated from its original Chinese: La Gran Muralla, una de las siete maravillas del mundo, es la obra de defensa militar de mayor magnitud y que más tiempo requirió para su construcción en el mundo, y constituye la cristalización del sudor, sangre y la sabiduría de los chinos, y el símbolo de la firmeza y la laboriosidad de la nación china. (The Great Wall, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the largest work of military defence in the world and the one which took the longest time to build, represents the realisation of the sweat, blood and know-how of the Chinese, and is the symbol of the strength and hard-working nature of the Chinese nation. (My translation, and without a dictionary, so I apologise for any mistakes)). So that is what the Wall means to the Chinese. But everybody knows of the Great Wall, so I don’t really need to build it up any more. When it first came into sight I had possibly my strongest China moment to date. I was looking at the GREAT WALL.
When I was on it I was actually less impressed, largely because it runs up and down mountains, my trainers had no grip and the walkways are basically smooth. Some people went up and down on their bottom, which makes sense really. It was like the Summer Palace again! Our delightful tour guide allowed us a couple of hours to climb the Wall. When you first go through the entrance, you’re met with several enclosures for black bears. Black bears roam the countryside around the wall, but they’re actually quite solitary creatures and rarely, if ever, attack humans unless provoked. Funny-looking things too. The enclosures allowed the bears a lot of room and had climbing entertainment for them too. Tourists could pay for a plate of monumentally over-priced fruit to feed them. They could catch fruit from practically any angle in their mouths! With hindsight I realise that these bears, though there are many to a single enclosure, are probably amongst the best-treated animals in China. (More on that when I tell you about the hideous zoo we stumbled upon.)
We went up the Wall on what is basically a go-kart on a track. Fun fun fun. Then we trekked as high as we could on our particular segment of wall, with two Aussies (to whom we will always be thankful, as they taught us the diverse values of the words feral and vulgar. Thanks guys.) who may or may not have been a gay couple.
Though the views from the Wall are in my opinion pretty spectacular, there’s really very little to see other than more mountains and trees and green. I thought it was pretty amazing but not everybody would I guess. Really there’s little to say about the Great Wall! I think you have to see it to truly recognise its splendour. On the way back down we got back into our go-karts and had fun pretending we were on a rollercoaster, which we might as well have been as we were hurtling down the side of a mountain in a child’s toy.
The next stop on our jam-packed tour was a silk factory. Again all the silk was guaranteed. Genuine silk is very tough and durable. The threads can’t be broken under duress and it will never bobble. It is unlike any other material as it is made in cocoons and the way it is matted together means that it is extremely strong and stretchy but smooth. We got to see the various stages of silk production which was interesting. The cocoons can’t be broken into – the silk is so strong that they can’t even be cut into. You have to boil the cocoons before you can take the thread. They showed us how they make silk duvets (basically they take one single cocoon and stretch it by four corners, and then they take another and put it on top and so on, and the threads catch with each other and make a duvet. I tried out stretching it, it’s pretty hard to do it so that there are no lumps and it is all stretched evenly. I was worried I’d break the thread but it really is impossible! I quite wanted to buy some products but remembered my suitcase. Perhaps on the way back to Britain. Coming from warehouse source – and being in China – the silk is cheap but extremely good quality. We also learnt that silkworm faeces smell of tea (it’s true, I smelt them!) and in size terms are a bit like those little balls of polystyrene in bean bags so the Chinese put them into their pillows, particularly stress-reliever pillows.
Our tour had ended. We hadn’t booked anything for that night, not knowing what time we’d be back, but our tour guide said there were a few tickets left to see the show Chunyi: The Legend of Kung Fu. This is the history of the Shaolin monks, who practise kung fu as part of their intense Zen Buddhist lifestyle, in particular a monk called Chun Yi (Pure One). I still don’t know why he’s particularly special – I think he turned up to the monastery later than most children and then climbed all the way to spiritual enlightenment, and then became Master of the Monastery. We got in just in time and watched the show (again I’ve bought it on DVD). It was actually really moving and I had to choke back my tears a few times! And the kung fu was amazing, not least the little pre-teen Buddhist monks flipping themselves over on their head. I recommend.
We rounded off the day with a trip to Quan Ju De Peking Duck Restaurant. Even typing just those words, my mouth has filled with saliva. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs. I have never, and believe never will again, eaten anything that good. Peking duck is the Holy Grail of food consumption. I will not rest until I’ve eaten it at least once more. Oh, and I will never again be putting ‘Peking duck’ from England’s Chinatowns anywhere near my tastebuds ever again. We ate in a giant restaurant, which we calculated could hold literally thousands of people. Our room alone had over 400, and there were other rooms on our floor and eight floors in total. A staff member comes and slices your duck up for you by your table, and then they give you garlic, chilli, cucumber, spring onions, ketchup (yeah, it doesn’t go) and hoisin sauce and hot pancakes. You wrap up whatever combination you desire. We ordered just half a duck, as earlier our tour guide told us three people would be satisfied by one half. Liar. We could’ve had half EACH. Hell, we could’ve had a whole one each, it tasted so good. To begin with both Liam and I were picking out the tender pieces of duck breast which was delicious in itself but almost simultaneously we bit into a piece of crispy skin and our lives changed irreversibly. For the better. The crunch, the hot greasy goo, the flavour. Oh wow. Added to the skin and the meat, there was a mystery piece of duck. We think it could have been its tongue. Either way it was the most tender piece of meat I’ve ever put in my mouth. They also gave us half of the duck’s head. We weren’t really sure what the craic was with that, but I can now say I’ve eaten duck’s beak, cheek and brain. Oh and I also ate its eye.
All in all, just today looking back Liam and I have judged this day to be possibly the best in our lives. We stood on one of the Great Wonders of the World, we ate Peking duck, we saw silk and jade and Shaolin monks breaking metal bars with their foreheads. Truly worth it. Best day ever.
By this point, we were pretty much in love with Beijing, and we’ll always remember it as being one of our favourite places in the world. But the next day, Thursday 30th August, after a week of being tourists in Beijing, it was time to fly off to Urumqi and begin our new life.
Photos:
(L-R) Steph, moi, Lauren, Becca and Liam at the Temple of Heaven China-posing our hearts out.
(L-R) Catriona, Becca, Lauren and Liam on the steps of the Temple of Heaven
The acrobatic warm-up
Casually spinning umbrellas with the toes whilst lying on someone else's feet. As one does.
The Ming Tombs
The amazing jade ship. The picture really doesn't do it justice. It was carved out of one single block of jade. It's worth hundreds of thousands (of pounds. Millions of RMB!)
The style of painting I described
'Inside' painting.
Black bears!
The Great Wall, stretching away as far as the eye can see.
I attempt (and fail) to make part of a silk duvet.
Liam, whilst smiling, isn't actually truly demonstrating the extent of his happiness as he holds a duck pancake.
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