One of the highlights of my recent trip to Beijing was getting another chance to visit the Great Wall. This time I visited an older section further out from the city at Mutianyu (about 80km northeast from Beijing), generally regarded as one of the best preserved and most impressive sections of the whole wall. It’s also a good choice for those who want to avoid the hoards of tourists who plague Badaling most of the year.
After an interesting bus trip riding along with a horde of migrant workers I arrived near the base of Mutianyu - there are probably easier ways to get there on organised trips but this seemed more interesting! For the intrepid you’ll want to look for bus no. 916 from Dongzhimen bus station. It’s about a 30 min climb to the wall which was built in the Qi Dynasty (550 - 557) and provides around 4km of rugged walking with watchtowers approximately every kilometer.
Magnificent views are to be had in every direction although the best time of year to visit is probably in the spring/autumn when there is green foliage on the trees which cover the sounding mountains. The day I visited was a bit overcast but pleasant enough to enjoy the fresh breeze and a chance to stretch my legs. One part is particularly steep and potentially dangerous so the old and unfit be warned.
Sadly once you reach the end of the maintained section the wall starts to dramatically crumble away and is overgrown with weeds. Although it’s tempting to continue along the wall into the looming mountains there is a guard to stop intrepid tourists - I saw him wittling a stick with a rather large knife so you’ll probably not want to cross him!
Throughout the world there have been countless instances where irreplaceable pieces of history have been flattened in the name of progress only for future generations to look back and wonder how their forbears could have been so short sighted as to destroy that which was their last connection to the past.
With China developing at an unprecedented rate nowhere is the mantra of “out with the old, in with the new” more visible, especially in Beijing where many of the dynastic treasures lie. Whilst the government may be going to great lengths to preserve and promote the tourist honey pots it’s the less obvious treasures of ‘old’ Beijing which are at risk of disappearing and with them an important part of China’s heritage.
The pictures above and below show the rapidly developing new face of Qianmen, just south of Tiananmen Square, almost entirely demolished under the “conservation” plan and its occupants removed to make way for an idealised version of it’s former self in what can only be described as Olympic vandalism of the most senseless form. Unique local merchants are being replaced with international designer brand names to create a disneyfied version of China (supposedly in the Ming-era style) with about as much character as a meeting of the communist party.
This urban renewal also takes it’s toll on the communities who have lived within the remaining enclaves for generations and are being uprooted to make way for a world which is as foreign as it is Chinese; herein lies the tragic irony, mirrored across this vast land of conflicting extremes. I was particularly dismayed to see some of the fascinating hutongs which I visited last year had been bulldozed and their former inhabitants now banished to the history books (or in all likelihood cheaply built tower blocks on the city outskirts).
Further along from Qianmen lies the Beijing Natural History Museum, famed in The Rough Guide To Beijing for its grotesque display of pickled human corpses. Whilst the appropriately named “Room of baddies” is still shown on the english language guide map the human remains are no more; as with everything in this city of change they too have fallen victim this latest round of cultural cleansing.
Above, a video from the Hard Hat Show documentingrandomwire.com › Edit — WordPress the destruction of a 600 year old temple, yet another casualty in Beijing’s ever-shrinking hutong neighborhoods.
As Beijing says goodbye to the past you can’t but help wonder if it’s vision of the future is just the rebirth of Maoist reform wrapped up in a new veneer but contianing all the same mistakes of the past…
One of the best part of traveling is undoubtedly the food and trying new cuisines. Being such a large country China has a particularly rich array of options to choose from, with almost all regions being represented in Beijing and numerous local varients. On the evening after my day wandering through the north of the city I went for hot pot at Xiabu Xiabu (a popular restaurant chain) in Wangfujing.
Here you choose from a selection of vegetables, meats and seafood to cook in your own individual hot pot containing stock of varying degrees of spiciness. Once cooked you usually dip the food in sesame sauce before eating with a bowl of rice. It’s not the first time I’ve had hot pot, but this was a slightly different varient known as Shabu-shabu (hence the name of the place). Delicious!
China is currently in a headlong rush to reinvent itself for the 2008 Olympics and more importantly as 21st century super power. Nowhere is this more is this evident than in the capital Beijing which is undergoing a transformation like no other city has ever seen before. In this series of posts I’ll be examining the growth from my own perspective as an outsider and from native Beijingers who are forging a new China out of a situation which can only be described as extremely complex.
The first thing which greets any foreign visitor to Beijing is it’s impressive modern airport (recently expanded) which far outdoes anything which London has to offer and judging by recent events anything the UK is capable of. As you head into the heart of the city the scale of Beijing becomes quickly apparent with row after row of high-rise accommodation and multi-lane carriage ways which house and carry around its 17 million inhabitants. On the way you get glimpses of both the old and the new with one overriding theme: construction. No part of the skyline is free from cranes which work day and night building ever upwards and outwards consuming what little remains of “old Beijing” (more on this in Part 2).
For such a large populous Beijing has a woeful transport system which is horribly overcrowded and the volume of road traffic only adds to the dreadful pollution which casts its grim shadow over the city most days. Below ground things aren’t much better. The subway system consisted of only 2 lines in 2007 (compared with 15 in London, a city half the size) but after a cash injection of over $30 billion things are looking up and by the time of the Olympics it will have more than doubled in length with an extra 561 kilometers planned by 2015.
You could never accuse the Chinese of not thinking big but unfortunately the cost of this expansion has been felt in human lives as well Yuan. Beyond accidental deaths (negligent or otherwise) its also worth remembering the thousands of migrant workers who work 7 days a week with few if any rights and get to see their families once or twice a year if they’re lucky. They are the ones truly baring the cost of this mammoth undertaking.
At the other end of the social spectrum I was surprised to see that the iPhone was very much the fashion du jour amongst the rich elite who apparently buy them on the black market having been brought over from the US or Europe; somewhat ironic considering where they are manufactured! They are of course pre-hacked to work on the local networks and in a feat of home-grown ingenuity have software installed to enable Chinese language input. One estimate puts the number in China at a staggering 400,000 (about 1 in 10 sold worldwide)!! The other interesting fact is that they cost more than 4,000 RMB (US$570), about 40% more than in the US and around 50% of an average urban family’s income.
One of the visible improvements since my last visit has been the proliferation of signs in Pinyin (Mandarin written in roman characters), around the main sites at least, which makes getting about a whole lot more easier as a foreigner. Coverage is far from universal but a step in the right direction. Alas it’s a little sad to see that many of the comical chinglish signs have undergone linguistic cleansing and are in sharp decline. On the up side the notion of standing in a queue still hasn’t made it this far east so it’s every man for himself still!
Having walked along the central axis of Beijing for nearly 7 hours I reached what must be one if the most relaxing and tranquil places in the city; the Confucian Temple, devoted to the memory of Confucius and philosophers of Confucianism (nearby the Lama Temple). Away from the hordes of mindless American tourists this is like stepping into another world. All that can be heard is the general murmur of distant chatter and magpies singing in the trees. On a warm spring afternoon I can think of no nicer place to rest ones legs and while away a few hours which is exactly what I’m doing while typing this on my iPhone.
In an age when the world was still full of mystery (the temple was built in 1302) buildings like this were in some respects living fantasy, enhancing the religious/philosophical underpinnings of their existence. We might see a modern equivalent as the CG films of today which take thousands of man hours to construct fantasy realities which transport us out of their ordinary to the extraordinary. Even though we may consider ourselves to have evolved from this time places like this still hold an other-worldly feeling.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Confucian Temple are the 198 stone tablets found on each side of the first courtyard, containing 51,624 names of Jinshi scholars who passed the highest imperial examinations, who then went on to become civil servants.
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