China!!! (Part II)

THE CHINA EXPERIENCE: PART TWO

Left to my own devices during the week while my cohorts were gainfully employed, I ventured out into Beijing to see the sites, armed with a stack of guidebooks and a little flipbook with popular destinations written out in Chinese. In spite of my complete inability to say anything other than "Hello" and "Thank you", I muddled through better than I'd expected. (Though I did encounter one deeply entertaining cab driver who was convinced if he spoke Mandarin slowly and loudly enough I would magically begin to understand him. And here I thought that was a singularly American reaction to foreign-language-speakers.)

China is a fascinating place. Every time I visited a new historical site, I found myself tripping over intriguing quirks of the culture. Which, in my opinion, is the best kind of discovery you can make in a new country. I won't go into each and every place I saw, but I'll hit three highlights that were on my not-to-be-missed list of Beijing.

The Temple of Heaven (Tiantan)

The Temple of Heaven is where the Emperor would come to pray for a good year. As the direct descendant of God (and here I thought Divine Right was a Western concept), he was the only one who could petition Him for the health and prosperity of the Empire. And when I say "pray" I mean "kill the fatted calf". Animal sacrifices were performed here as recently as the early 1900s. (Betcha PETA just loves that.)

The Emperor's processional would travel through the streets between the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. Yellow fabric (the Imperial color - which was a crime for anyone but the Imperial family to wear) would be hung at the entrances to the hutongs so none of the commoners laid eyes on him... and vice versa. The Emperor would then hole himself up in the Palace of Abstinence on the Temple's grounds before the sacrifices would take place.

They say the Temple itself was built without using a single nail - a feat of architecture and construction. Numbers are very important in Chinese culture - this is evident everywhere, but especially in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, which has pillars arranged in rings of four, then twelve, then another twelve - to represent the four seasons, twelve months, and twelve traditional hours in a Chinese day.

Though originally built in the Ming Dynasty in the 1400s, the all-wooden temple was struck by lightning in 1889 and burned. It was rebuilt, but the story goes that 32 court advisers were put to death for "carelessness" in allowing the event to occur. I found myself fascinated by the lines drawn between what is in our power and what is out of it. Assigning blame seemed almost an inevitable component in such cases - but is that apparent irrationality evidence of Imperial excess? Or a cultural attitude that lingers? Many of the ex-pats I spoke to seemed to think the latter, which continues to intrigue me.

The Temple is surrounded by a beautiful park. Many of the locals walk there, including several elderly men who stroll the paths with their hands clasped behind their backs, rolling large walnuts against one another in one hand with constant click-click-clicks. (No one ever walks on the grass.) The park was originally shaped like a large rectangle with the top corners rounded off - the square bottom representing the Earth and the rounded top representing the Heavens - but even though all the park maps indicate it still holds that shape, if you walk the perimeter (which I did) you find that large chunks of the bottom edge have been carved out to make room for Beijing development.

You may be noticing that a lot of my anecdotes include phrases like "they say" and "so the story goes". The history of these places is so intermingled with rumor and tall tales, it's hard to get a grasp on what really happened. English speaking guides are rare... and quite fallible. They say history is written by the victors, but inside the boxed-off controlled-information borders of China, history is rewritten by the Chinese government - and the details start to feel like a giant game of telephone. I suppose all histories are just as flexible and subject to the reigning perception of the time, but I've never been as strongly reminded of that as I was in China - where your guide has been told by the news that the US acted alone to invade Libya and any raise in the price of soap is a conspiracy amongst the US companies.

So you take it all with a grain of salt.

Salt, which incidentally became very dear during a sudden Salt Scare following the Japan Quake/Tsunami/Nuclear Scare. Somehow people became convinced that salt taken from sea water (largely for industrial purposes, but whatever) would be radioactive. They bought up all the salt on the grocery store shelves and sent the entire country into a Salt Scare with prices suddenly spiking and a black market springing up overnight - even though no traces of radioactivity have been found in sea water near China. I tend to find that kind of panic patently ridiculous, so the mention of salt still sets me giggling.

The Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan)

Another day took me up to Kunming Lake and the Imperial Summer Palace. Following a taxi ride in which I sincerely wished I knew how to say "Please slow down. I don't want to die" in Mandarin, I wandered the grounds, climbing to the top of Longevity Hill and drinking in yet another glorious example of Imperial wow.

I wandered over to the Seventeen Arch Bridge and watched several groups of Chinese women choreographing and practicing traditional dances. As I watched them, I noticed a sign in front of the gazebo-style pavilion there. It bragged that this pavilion was the largest of its type in the world. Now, this was not a massively huge pavilion. But the statement may be true - depending on how you draw the lines for pavilions of that type. The placard's bragging got me thinking about the Chinese affection for superlatives. Everything is the best, the biggest, the oldest, the longest, the most. No points for second place. The Long Corridor (also at the Summer Palace) is touted as the longest wood corridor ever. But what struck me about the corridor was not its length, but the intricacy and uniqueness of each and every painting - thousands of them. But they weren't highlighted. Perhaps because no objective superlative could be applied to them.

I continued around the man-made lake, enjoying the park and marveling that the court eunuchs must have been in stunningly good shape to carry the Dowager Empress up those steep hills on her sedan chair. It was still too cold for the boats to be out on the lake, and sadly too early in the season to take the barge rides up the canals from the Exhibition Center to arrive at the Summer Palace as Dowager Empress Cixi would have done, but even through the crowds it was easy to imagine the site as it would have been when it was the Imperial playground.

The Summer Palace was a retreat - closer and more frequently occupied than the one out in Chengde. It was also where the Dowager Empress is said to have imprisoned the Emperor for months for the crime of modernization. (Tradition versus progress... and one is a crime? Wowsa.)

Another popular icon of the Summer Palace is the Marble Boat - which is not actually marble, but wood painted to resemble it. The large, decorative structure was supposedly built with funds the Dowager Empress siphoned off from the Navy - a diversion that became a bit of a sore point when Japan decimated China's rather paltry fleet shortly thereafter.

The Lama Temple (Yongegong)

Beijing is set up as a series of five co-centric rings. At the northern edge of the second ring sits the Lama Temple - once a palace for Prince Yong and later converted to a Tibetan Buddhist Temple when its royal resident rose to power and moved down to the Forbidden City. Since I was staying near Sanlitun, between the northeast 2nd and 3rd rings, I walked the distance to the Temple. (And got yelled at for trying to walk in the wrong entrance, but really the sign did seem to point that way...)

The Lama Temple, unlike the Temple of Heaven, is a functioning religious site. Bundles of incense are sold by vendors lining the streets near the entrance and inside the smell of it fills the air as the parishioners kneel and bow, lighting always three pieces of incense and leaving them in the antique incense burners in front of the numerous Buddhas.

Laid out in a single long line, each building is a bit larger than the last, leading all the way back to the final temple which houses a massive 18 meter Buddha, rumored to have been carved out of a single piece of sandalwood. Flanking the central temples are smaller chapels and halls where religious relics are displayed. One such hall - about midway through the complex on the right hand side, if you're visiting - has ten figures on display... and half of them are partially or fully covered by bright yellow cloth. After digging through all four of my guidebooks, I found an explanation. Those five relics were tantric figures, covered to disguise their carnal nature. Some you could see the torso of a figure, but nothing below the waist, while still others, all you could make out was an arm thrust out from behind the cloth. The dichotomy of being so embarrassed by the content that you must cover it, but simultaneously so proud of the relic that you must display it... I'm gonna be honest, it kinda cracked me up. The mix of prudery and pride was fascinating.

And that wasn't the only dichotomy at the Lama Temple that gave me a grin. This is one of my favorite pictures I took in Beijing:



Can you guess why? Let's take a closer look at that bottom corner, shall we?

Yeah. It's a Monk. Texting. Cellphone in one hand, little prayer tassel thing in the other.

Dude. Even in China, technology is changing the way we interact with the world. Even Tibetan Monks. Love it.

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And that's all for installment two. Swing by tomorrow, and I'll tell you about our overnight trip to Xi'an to see the Terracotta Warriors and the seat of the earlier dynasties... and that interesting chap we met on the train...