A Prayer for Peace

Note to readers: I was able to see the site and post the following from our current hotel in Chongqing. But your comments are definitely being blocked. Keep ‘em coming and I’ll read them when I get back.

 

Dongyue

Beijing, Oct. 18

Something comes over me in Buddhist and Daoist temples. I find that they make me reverent and unaccountably prayerful. It first happened in Vietnam and Cambodia almost two years ago—a feeling deep within me that I was surrounded by spirit and that I could be a part of that spirit. This has never happened to me in a Christian church—one reason that I have not been a Christian since my youth. In recent years, as a Unitarian Universalist, I have strengthened my relationship to my fellow humans and to the Earth. But once again this morning, at the 800-year-old Dongyue Temple, I felt the pull. There is no other way to describe it—the pull.

I’m a tourist, not a pilgrim, and sometimes there’s a lot of static from the guides and the crowds. I haven’t felt the pull in every religious site we’ve visited, but at the Beijing Lamasery and again today, the signal was clearly there. I receive it for just seconds at a time, and then I go back to being a visitor, an outsider with a camera. I encounter this feeling as one might encounter a stranger on the street, with a glance and an nod. Still, I wonder what it might be like to embrace the stranger, to wrap myself in such a spirit for an hour or a day or a lifetime. It’s a powerful thing, and I’m not sure I can handle it; but when it comes, there is momentary peace.

I also have a strong urge to participate. At the Lamasery, I wanted to buy incense and follow the ritual: palms together, bow three times. Instead, I merely touched my palms in the style of a Cambodian greeting, lifting them to my forehead to acknowledge the Buddha. “Hello, Buddha,” I say to myself. “It’s Jeff.”

At Dongyue, I took the further step of buying a talisman. Daoists come here to pray for various benefits in their lives—health, longevity, many children (tough with the one-child policy), happiness, harmony, and peace. Each of these blessings requires a different talisman, and I chose one for peace. After a false start at one of the several statue-filled chapels, the temple guide directed me to the correct altar, where I stood quietly, trying to feel the pull amid the noise around me. The group was being hustled to the bus. People were pouring in and out of the temple behind me. By concentrating hard, I got centered; I felt the pull for a few seconds and hung my talisman on the rail before the altar. I knew I was asking for a lot—not peace within myself, but world peace, universal peace. “The peace which passeth all understanding,” as Christians say.

What a fool I am. Moments later, we were on the bus to the airport. All through this trip, I’ve been yanked away from things I want to spend some time with—one of the downsides of group travel. But I shouldn’t complain; I am so grateful to be here. If I were a Buddhist, these desires would mean nothing. Every time I feel the pull, I know it a little better. I must make time to explore it, I think … but now we’re off to the Yangzi River and another adventure.

In my next post, I’ll give you some overall impressions of Beijing, including a look at the subway system, the railway station, and Mao’s mausoleum. None of these were on the tour, but sometimes you just have to get off the bus. Meanwhile, here are some photos of Dongyue.

The Dongyue Daoist Temple was built in the 13th Century. Since the economic reforms of the early 1980s, the Chinese have relaxed restrictions on religious practice, and the temple has once again become a center for worship and community activity. But one of our guides made a clear distinction between “real” religions and “cults like Falun Gong,” which are “very bad.” Religion is OK as long as it does not stray across the line into politics.

The temple takes its name from the Dongyue Gate across the street. It is one of the few remaining gates of the old walled Inner City.

Inside is an island of peace, with beautiful courtyards and old trees.

Confucian gods guard the way to the important altars. Each altar and god is representative of an aspiration or hope such as happiness, longevity, health, and harmony.

Another of the guards is a little more fierce.

At each altar, worshipers and supplicants have left bright red talisman that our guide said would be here “forever.” I have to doubt that. This place is 800 years old, and I didn’t seen any of these bright red, tassled talisman that were of that vintage.

Here are more talisman, hung on a railing along one of the exterior paths.

I chose this talisman—for peace. I signed the back with my own symbolic signature: Yin-yang, Sun-Moon, Male-Female, Love, Infinity.

Great Wall

Great Wall
North Of Beijing, Oct. 17

Before we got to the Great Wall of China, Jack warned us about the vendors. We were to climb a distance from the bus park to the gondola that would take us to the top of the mountain, and he said the vendor gauntlet along this path was particularly intense.

The vendor gauntlet is particularly intense at the Great Wall, but every hawker seems to be selling the same three ugly T-shirts that proclaim, “I Climbed the Great Wall.”

There are street vendors almost everywhere that tourists go in China, hawking hats, postcards, T-shirts, and a bizarre panoply of cheaply made souvenirs from Mao hats and medals to Amish-style quilts. If you make the slightest eye contact with the seller or cast a sidelong glance at the goods, they’re all over you—and will follow you for many paces, reciting their goods and prices, which always get lower as you walk away. “Postcard, one dollar,” a hawker will start, waving a pack of 8-10 postcards. As you pass by, the postcards will be thrust in your face and the price repeated, often with an adjective or question such as, “Very nice postcard, one dollar. You buy?” Avert your eyes and walk on, and the price instantly drops: “Hey sir, very nice, two for dollar.”

Except in the government-run “official” tourist stores (selling mostly Olympics goods) and higher-end shops, you can bargain for just about anything in China. My new Mao Zedong watch started at 20 USD and got knocked down to 5. I could have driven it even lower by feigning my departure, but there comes a point where the whole thing becomes embarrassing. The watch is a piece of junk as far as timepieces go, but the chairman waves his right arm once a second, as if exhorting the cadres, and the second hand has a bright little red star that circles Mao once a minute. The downside is that you have to wind it every four hours, but who’s counting?

I have bargained for postcards, seven-packs of Tsingtao (5 USD), fried dough, Diet Coke, and dried fish. American dollars are useful, but many vendors prefer Chinese yuan because of the proliferation of counterfeit foreign money, most of it printed right here in China. The exchange rate is about 7 yuan to the dollar, so it helps to be able divide by seven. I just think, “Seventy is $10” and extrapolate up or down from there. One night in Beijing, seven of us left the usual tourist streets and had dinner at a place that segregated us into a private dining room, served us a great meal with beer all around, and presented us with a bill for 176 yuan. Do the math.

Getting to the Great Wall from the bus was easy. None of the vendors expect you to buy on the way up. But they tout their wares as you trudge up the steep slope to the cable car, saying, “Remember me.” Rest assured that if you have paid the slightest attention to anything, they remember you.

The gondola ride was swift and exciting, and in about three minute, we were just a short climb from the wall. It was about 10:30, and the morning haze was just starting to burn off, promising a fine day. One Swarthmore traveler described the Great Wall as “preposterous,” and it was. How did this thing get here? It seemed almost like one of those conceptual art pieces by Christo, except this is permanent—and 2,000 miles long.

The gondola ride was swift and steep. We caught our first glimpse of the wall from the gondola, high on the ridge above.

We had about 90 minutes to explore. I got as far as the third blockhouse west of our entrance point. There were a lot of visitors on the wall that morning, but it wasn’t too crowded. It was such a privilege to be there that we were all pinching ourselves and exclaiming with awe. I still cannot believe that I was there, but I took these pictures, except the one that proves it.

At an elevation of about 2,000 feet, the trees were just beginning to turn. Quite pretty foliage—and oh, there’s this big wall that seems to have no beginning or end.

A magazine cover if I ever saw one.

Or maybe this one? The word “Swarthmore” will fit nicely in the upper right, don’t you think?

I made it to the second blockhouse shown in this photo before time ran out and I had to turn around. It was such a fine day that I could have tramped the wall for hours.

Pinch me. I’m standing on the Great Wall of China.

I think this guy with the flag was hired to make everyone’s pictures more colorful.

There is a blockhouse about every quarter mile.

The gauntlet again, this time on the way down.

On the way down from the gondola, I tried turning the tables on the vendors. I had brought some Swarthmore College postcards to give to people I met, so I tucked two in the cargo pocket in my shorts. When a postcard vendor approached me, I looked at what she was selling, then reached in my pocket. “American postcard,” I said, showing her one of Parrish Hall and another of the Scott Amphitheater. “Two for a dollar.” She looked puzzled until she realized what I was doing. Then she smiled and went on trying to sell her cards to me as if nothing had happened. It was a perverse game, so I stopped after the first try, but I managed to get down the hill with only one purchase in my hand—a Diet Coke. One dollar.

Forbidden

Forbidden City
Beijing, Oct. 16

The Forbidden City is no longer forbidden. Throngs of tourists crowd through the south gate to see where the emperor of China ruled from the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) until the fall of the monarchy in 1911. Walking north through its many plazas and buildings takes about 90 minutes. Often, I thought of what it must have been like for an official from the provinces to enter this place a few centuries ago, passing through gate after gate, like opening a box just to find another box, and another and another. When he finally saw the Hall of Preserving Harmony, that official must have been trembling with awe at the power of the emperor. Now it is known as the Palace Museum, and even during the Cultural Revolution, when many things ancient and imperial were destroyed or damaged, the top leadership of the Party managed to preserve its treasures. As with the Summer Palace, it’s better to look at the pictures, so here are a few.

At Tian’an Gate, thousands of tourists and Chinese citizens queue to cross a narrow bridge over the Forbidden City moat and enter the walled compound.

Once inside the palace wall, one first encounters the massive Meridian Gate. The Chinese called their civilization the Middle Kingdom, and the north-south line running through the Forbidden city gates—and right under the throne of the emperor—was their prime meridian.

Each courtyard in the palace is more grand and forbidding (no pun intended). Each is also more beautiful. These rooflines are part of the Hall of Supreme Harmony.

The giant courtyard of the Hall of Supreme Harmony.

Funny story: While traveling with a group of 35 men and women, occasional group bathroom stops are required. About halfway through our 2-hour walk through the Palace Museum, we found some public facilities. The men’s line was (as is often the case) shorter than the women’s—in this case, a lot shorter. Some women gave up when it appeared that it might take up to a half hour to reach stalls that, like most public bathrooms in China, featured squat-over-the-porcelain-hole-in-the-floor toilets. Fired by the desire for equality of treatment in loo lines in this worker’s paradise, Joan, Carol, Hannah, Marilyn, and Emel—with some assistance by Emel’s husband Sameer (far left)—caused several other men to zip up a little more quickly than usual by crashing the men’s room. They still had to squat in the private stalls on the male side, but the entire group was grateful to be on its way after we took this commemorative group picture.

An interior moat must be crossed to gain access to the next plaza.

Approaching the Hall of Preserving Harmony, one has to climb past these marble galleries. The emperor’s throne room is in this hall. North of the Hall of Preserving Harmony lie the royal residences.

The emperor’s throne, where he sat just four times each year, presumably preserving harmony. The monarchy fell in 1911, but many artifacts were preserved.

Huge bronze urns throughout the palace complex provided water for fighting fires.

A beautiful garden was part of the imperial residences.

Tiananmen

Tiananmen
Beijing, Oct. 16

Publisher’s note: Here’s the full post. Enjoy!

-Michael

Tacked to a wall, my map of greater Beijing looks like an archery target, with numbered “ring roads” marching in roughly concentric order away from the city center. The first ring is the perimeter of the ancient imperial compound, the Forbidden City. Inside this high wall, the dynasties unfolded and China’s history was made. And here, on Oct. 1, 1949, standing atop the front gate of the Forbidden City facing Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong proclaimed the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). In the square in June 1988, the Red Army put a bloody stop to the China’s burgeoning democracy movement.

Each of the five stars on the Chinese flag represent 100 million people. The country’s population was a half billion in 1949.

The second ring follows the rectangular contour of the old inner-city wall, which was removed in the 1950s to make room for Beijing’s first subway line and a military-ready road above it. And so on out about 30 km to the latest complete ring, the sixth—a modern expressway that, like an irrigation canal, sprouts not crops but apartments and office buildings.

Our guide, Jack, joked with some pride that the crane is the new national bird—the construction crane. A seventh ring road is being built even farther from the city center and, as Beijing grows (the current population is about 22 million), there will likely be more circles on the map.

One way that China finances the building of new roads is to hand the job over to entrepreneurs who build highways with private capital and then get the right to collect the tolls for 20 to 30 years before handing control back to the government. (This reminded one Swarthmore traveler that Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has proposed handing the Pa. Turnpike over to private operators.) Currently, there are five such toll expressways forming the spokes of the ring roads, each heading in a different direction away from central Beijing.

Tiananmen Square is so big that it has two subway stops—T. East and T. West. Here, in June 1989, the Red Army put a bloody stop to the China’s burgeoning democracy movement—an event that Jack avoided talking about, except to say that it was a “necessary step” in achieving the current level of economic freedom enjoyed in China. But, as I reported from Vietnam two years ago, the Chinese seem to have struck a bargain that trades political democracy for their newfound prosperity.

Tiananmen is truly enormous—the largest urban public square in the world, able to accommodate more than a million people. It wasn’t always this big, but the PRC gradually expanded the square as it built a new seat of government around it. In 1949, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that the “Red Chinese,” as we used to call them, would adopt the old imperial city as its capital, but Mao’s men were drawn to Beijing not only by its symbolism but by its ready supply of government buildings and experienced bureaucrats. Their revolutionary movement had begun in the South, but China had been ruled from the North for since the Yuan Dynasty.

The Manchus began construction of the city in 1271 in precise NSEW manner, according to their habit on the steppes. Their traditional quadrangle houses—which later found expression in the hutong—were entered from the south and fortified on the north. Thus, the southern gate to the heavily guarded imperial city was known as Tian’an or “front gate” because it served as the compound’s front door.

Chinese tourists outnumber Westerners in Tiananmen Square. All of us lined up for pictures with the Tian’an gate in the background.

Imperial China called itself the Middle Kingdom. Their ancient civilization and culture were thought to be the center of the known (and probably the unknown) world, and, for practical purposes, this seemed to be true for a long time. A few years ago, I visited Greenwich, England. Like every tourist who visits the Royal Observatory there, I straddled the prime meridian, with one foot in each hemisphere. It is easy to imaging the Kangxi emperor (1662-1722) on his throne, seated astride his own prime meridian. This is how China thought of itself then—and how it may soon think of itself again.

Directly of Tian’an on the Chinese zero meridian are two other gates, the Daqing and the Zhengyang, the latter of which was one of nine gates that controlled access to the walled Inner City, where the Manchu rulers’ privileged “banners” or family groups lived. The Outer City, to the South of Zhenyang, was also walled and gated, though not as well fortified as the Inner City or, especially, the Forbidden City at the very center, which had a moat in addition to a high wall. The Outer City was where commoners lives and conducted the city’s commerce. It was also the location of the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor went each year to kowtow to Heaven on behalf of the nation.

The entrance to the Forbidden City through the Tian’an Gate has tight security. There are police and army everywhere in Beijing, but especially around government buildings.

We arrived at Tiananmen by bus at around 9 a.m. The October sun was slanting from the southeast, casting sharp shadows away from the massive Monument of the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. To the north, a giant portrait of a rosy-cheeked Chairman Mao hangs over the arched entrance to the Forbidden City—now known as the Palace Museum. To the South, the chairman’s huge mausoleum looms, with hundreds of curious and faithful visitors in a line that disappears around the corner. To the east is the National Museum. Opposite it, festooned with red flags and guarded by Red Army sentries stands the Great Hall of the People.

The Monument to the Peoples Heroes stands at the center of the square.

While we were in Beijing, the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was taking place at the Great Hall, which has an auditorium that seats 10,000 people. More than 2,000 delegates from all over China were in town for the congress, which takes place every five years. To read the China Daily, an English language paper that was outside our hotel room each morning, one would think that this congress was actually running the country. Its primary job, however, was to discuss and approve various five-year plans that had already been worked out by the Party leadership. Jack told us that there are about a dozen political parties in China, and that may be true, but there is only one Party with a capital “p.”

A Peoples Liberation Army sentry stands guard across the street from the Great Hall of the People. The street in front of the building was closed because of the 17th Party Congress, in session during our visit.

On the perimeter of Tiananmen were some delightful topiary sculptures that had been erected for the anniversary of Mao’s announcement, which is China’s National Day. In fact, every day here seems like a national day, so pervasive is the advertising for the upcoming Olympics. The games are an enormous point of pride for the Chinese, and they are touted on posters and billboards everywhere, and on many consumer products.

All of China is preparing for the Olympics, but Beijing is particularly excited. This topiary Great Wall was near a topiary Parthenon at the edge of Tiananmen.

Reminders of the 2008 Beijing Olympics are everywhere. This poster was in the No. 5 subway, the city’s newest line, which opened just a week before our arrival. More later on our adventures in the subway system.

We walked around the square for a while, had a group picture taken (and were sold commemorative books in which the picture would be inserted), then headed for the Forbidden City, which will be the subject of my next post.

The Great Firewall of China

On the Yangzi, Fri., Oct. 19

I set up this site in the States during the weeks before our departure. As you will notice from the URL, it is hosted by a free blogging service called WordPress.com, which provides you with the ability to view these posts and me with the ability to go to a dashboard where I can create the post, design it, add the pictures, etc. It all looked like it was going to be easy—until I got to China.

Our hotel in Beijing had free high-speed Internet in every room. (It was a really snazzy place.) I could get to the Swarthmore Web site in seconds and to Google to check my g-mail account. I could surf easily almost everywhere else, but when I went to post “Over the Top,” I could neither access my WordPress control panel nor see this site. Lots of other sites, including Typepad, another blogger’s service, seemed to be open. But WordPress, apparently, is not always visible in China.

During the five days we spent in Beijing, I managed to reach the site just three times for short periods, most recently to post “Yiheyuan.” But usually, the little spinner just spins until the computer gives up and says “not available.” Everything after “Flying the Polar Route” has been sent by e-mail to my son in New York and posted from there.

According to some research he did, “China is in general pretty nuts about blocking blog sites.” He thinks that my brief windows into WordPress are “funky hiccups in what is otherwise known as the Great Firewall of China.”

We are so used to the free flow of information on the Internet that it never occurred to me to check on this. I wonder whether they will open things up during the Olympics? A lot of Westerners who visit here for the games next August will want to blog about their trips. Will that be permitted by the authorities?

For now, I’ll use the workaround. Because we are now on a boat on the Yangzi River, Internet access is not just a potential political problem, but a technical one as well. There are four computers on board—all in the bar. They are connected through a wireless telephone link essentially a dial-up connection with a maximum speed of 256kb/sec and intermittent availability at that.

I’ve e-mailed this text to my son as an attachment. I probably won’t be able to post pictures for a few days, but I’ll try to catch up on the writing and add some images when we get to Chongqing. Just now, we exited the series of locks that lifted us over the great Three Gorges Dam—but that’s a story for another post. Stay tuned—and be thankful that you can go wherever you want on the Net.

Yiheyuan

Beijing, Monday, Oct. 15

After our morning in the hutong, a visit to Yiheyuan, the imperial summer palace, presented quite a contrast. The wealth and power of the Qing dynastic rulers—and their ultimate corruption and downfall—are embodied in the famous marble boat built by the Dowager Empress Cixi with money that had been set aside by her counselors to strengthen the Chinese Navy and resist foreign influence.

The marble boat went nowhere, as did Qing efforts to resist the Europeans and Japanese. The palace—actually a complex of buildings and parks along a large lake—lies in the northwest quadrant of present-day Beijing. First built in the late 18th century by the Qianlong emperor, the palace became a convenient pressure point for European generals who, perhaps in order to prove that they could easily do the same to the Forbidden City, twice destroyed Yiheyuan.

It was here that the Guangxu emperor lived under house arrest for the last 10 years of his life. In 1898, he tried to institute reforms and move toward a constitutional monarchy, but the reactionary Dowager and her supporters put a stop to that.

After Guangxu’s death, Cixi’s 3-year-old nephew became the last emperor. Today, Yiheyuan is a major tourist attraction and a beautiful park (with an admission fee) for the citizens of Beijing. In the end, its history is less important than its beauty. We visited on the most perfect of October days, so I’ll keep this posting short and let the pictures speak for themselves.

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Hutong

Beijing, Monday, Oct. 15

 

Yesterday, on our first morning in Beijing, my roommate, Sohail Bengali ’79, and I awoke early—about 4:00 a.m. Our jet-lagged bodies didn’t know that the sun wasn’t going to come up in East China for another two and a-half hours, but we did the only thing we could do under the circumstances: We got up.

Sohail is an investment banker in San Francisco, working for a firm that raises capital for large infrastructure projects. When we arrived in Beijing, he checked to see if his Blackberry would work here. Too bad for him—it did.

Sohail Bengali on the bus. Hey, Sohail, look out the window, you’re in China.

At 6 a.m., with the eastern horizon glowing orange, we hit the streets for a walk. Before leaving the hotel, we confirmed its location on a map with the friendly woman at the front desk. Pointing to her right, she suggested that we walk west, toward the commercial district, where we would find “many shops.” As we left the hotel, I pointed the opposite direction. “Let’s see if we can find some hutong,” I suggested, and the agreeable Sohail agreed.

Our feet quickly took us out of the five-star hotel district. (Our hotel, opened earlier this year, has Beijing’s Rolls Royce dealer attached to its lobby. Next door are the Lamborghini and Maserati showrooms.) The streets were almost deserted so early on a Sunday, but soon the city began to stir. Street sweepers with coarse stick brooms corralled the previous day’s litter into neat piles, which were then picked up by men and women pedaling tricycle “trash trucks” that hold little more than a cubic meter. It seemed that every couple of blocks, there was another sweeper and another pedaling picker-upper, with the result that the streets in Beijing—even the poorer hutong that we found within blocks of the hotel—are remarkably clean.

Peeking into a quadrangle house, one sees additional structures filling the former courtyard.

A tricycle Dumpster pedaled by a picker-upper, in the hutong east of our hotel.

Hutong literally means “small street” or “alley,” but in a larger sense it describes the traditional residential pattern of this city—one that is rapidly being supplanted by high-rise apartments and suburban housing communities. Along these alleys, which snake atop the overall NSEW grid of city streets, are the “quadrangle” or courtyard houses that are typical of old North China.

This traditional house has a satellite dish on its tile roof.

Each consists of a rectangular or square walled compound with rooms around its perimeter and a courtyard at its center. Until “New China” (how Chinese refer to the establishment of Communist rule in 1949), these dwellings typically housed one extended family—with two or three generations living together. The abolition of private property and the need to house many more people in Beijing led to the demise of this system; in most cases, families were allowed to remain in their former homes, but they were forced to share the already crowded space with other, unrelated, families. Many courtyards were filled with additional shacks and sheds as the space crunch increased.

Inside the courtyard, it’s crowded with laundry and plants.

We walked these and other streets for more than an hour. I bought some fried dough from a vendor who was cooking on the sidewalk with a vat of hot oil over a propane burner. Sohail stopped at a fruit market and got a bunch of those tasty small Asian bananas. As we walked and munched, the city gradually came to life. Bicyclists jingled us out of their way on the hutong, and cars and trucks began to crowd the larger streets.

Back at the hotel, we joined members of the Swarthmore group at breakfast. The lavish buffet had dozens of dishes, juices, and fruits. Remembering the delights of breakfast in Vietnam, I had a bowl of noodle soup with a dollop of hot chiles.

Today (Monday), we visited the hutong as a group. The bus took us to a different district, however, where the hutong are being saved. With the rapid development of Beijing in the post-Mao era (what you might call the New New China), many hutong have been torn down, I suspect that the ones near our hotel will fall soon to the developer’s hammer, but in the Northern Lake district, an effort is being made to keep the wreckers at bay and preserve at least some of the traditional quadrangle houses.

Through Jack, whose command of English is excellent, local resident Mr. Zhang tells us that about 20 people from at least three families live in the 14 rooms of the hutong house. The old central courtyard contains a shed-roofed brick structure, but there is also room for a tree or two along the narrow pathways that divide the living spaces. Laundry hangs among the vines of bean plants outside Zhang’s small studio, where brushes and paints are set neatly on an artist’s table. Framed paintings, presumably Zhang’s, show a man of significant talent—a nice mix of traditional Chinese and Western aesthetics.

Mr. Zhang’s brushes are neatly laid out in his small studio.

Mr. Zhang briefly tells his life story before taking questions. His father made a “pretty good living” as an herbal medicine practitioner—a traditional Chinese doctor. From age 9 to 19, he studied traditional calligraphy, then went to art college, graduating in 1966. Before 1990, he was a government artist, creating work that was sold to tourists and others in government shops. Then he left his job to open a gallery in Beijing, where he sells his work. Now, he says, his life is getting better because of the capitalistic economy. Zhang is apparently quite successful. The small house has air conditioning, a washing machine, a brand-new Sony TV, electric heat, and many other comforts. He has the incentive to renovate the house since regaining ownership, and its five small rooms have new tile floors.

Mr. Zhang mixes Chinese and Western styles in his beautiful watercolors.

Outside, it appears that the entire district is undergoing renovation. You might even call it gentrification. Underground electrical service is replacing a tangle of overhead wires, and the trenched streets are being repaved with stone. There’s construction everywhere, and bright shops selling not only tourist goods but a variety of consumer items for the Chinese.

The narrow hutong are festooned with overhead wires, but underground power is being installed in this neighborhood.

This is clearly becoming a desirable neighborhood, although Mrs. Bai, when she gets a chance to talk with us, says her daughter still doesn’t want to live here. No privacy, she says with a knowing smile.

Zhang was a young artist, trained in both Chinese and Western styles, when the Cultural Revolution engulfed the country in 1967 and 1968. I asked him what had happened to him. Instead of being “sent down” to the rural areas as many intellectuals were, he said he was “lucky to be assigned to the compass factory,” where he could no longer create “romantic” paintings, but rather made political propaganda for the factory work unit.

 

 

 

Mr. Zhang and Mrs. Bai. After high school, she was assigned a job in a compass factory. He met her there when he was “sent down” to the factory during the Cultural Revolution.

Next came the rickshaw rides. The travel brochure calls them pedicabs, but nonetheless, we were about to be conveyed by human power, like colonial concessionaires. Sohail, whose parents emigrated from India to the United States after World War II, didn’t like it a bit, but we got in and had our picture taken in the colorful two-seater. Our convoy of about 20 rickshaws headed down the hutong highway at a fast clip, dodging the four-door Hyundais that serve as Beijing’s modern taxi fleet. We felt silly and a little sheepish as we bumped along to lunch.

Sohail and I enjoy our rickshaw ride, sort of. A fleet of pedicabs conveyed us through the narrow streets.

Lunch was in another hutong, supposedly an authentic home-cooked meal. We made crepes filled with various ingredients put before us—including slices of corned beef and ham that might have come from an American deli. Corned beef with hoisin sauce was a new experience for most of us. Beer was served as well, as it seems to be at every Chinese meal. It’s a weak brew, about 3.5 percent alcohol, but is light-tasting and refreshing.

The woman of the house, Mrs Heyun, prepared the food while her granddaughter helped another woman serve. The granddaughter, who later told me her name is Gobi, spoke good English. After lunch, she told us a little about herself and her family, which, from the religious paintings above the day bed, was obviously Christian. Gobi is a recent graduate of Peking University (yes, it’s still “Peking” where the university is concerned, and that’s a long story) who works as a primary school teacher during the morning.

In the afternoons, she helps her grandmother, with whom she lives, with these lunches and tourist visits, which bring in some extra income. Gobi’s parents have moved across town to an apartment, for this is a very small place, with room enough for Gobi and her grandmother to sleep in the same room where we are eating. I imagine what it was like when all four (or five, for there was no mention of her grandfather) of them lived here. This quadrangle house is still owned by the government, and the family pays a small rent.

As we left, I took a photo of Gobi with Carol Nackenoff. Taking out my notebook, I asked the young Chinese woman—whose stylish glasses are typical of her generation—how to spell her name. She told me, and then took the notebook from me and wrote it down in both Roman letters and Chinese characters. “Send me a copy of the photo,” she said cheerfully, penning her hotmail address below the Chinese characters.

Gobi Heyun and Professor Carol Nackenoff.

As we climbed back into our rickshaw, Sohail observed that we had just met the future of China. With one foot in the hutong and another in the modern world, with her university education and her excellent English, Gobi is going places. And with so many young people like her, the future of China is everywhere. Take “Angel,” our “local guide” for the hutong tour. We have lots of guides—Jack, who works for the tour operator; Howard Smith, the tour operator himself; Shi’yan, our “national” (government) guide; and various local guides such as Angel, whose lively presentations of traditional Chinese culture were almost overshadowed by her lively presentation of herself.

Our local guide in the hutong district called herself “Angel.” She had style.

The rickshaw arrives at a stand near the parking area for tour buses. There are hundreds of the pedicabs line up for the tourist trade. I ask Sohail if he thinks we should tip the driver. Tipping is not usual in China, and Howard has told us that he has “taken care of” the required gratuities. But how can I assuage that dim sense of imperialist guilt that is attached to all Westerners as they travel in the Third World? I reach in my pocket for a couple of U.S. dollars. “No,” says Sohail. “Let’s not upset the system.”

The Seat of All Power

Beijing, Sunday, Oct. 14

 

Our first day in Beijing began in a hotel conference room with self-introductions by the 35 travelers (during which we heard various definitions of “retirement,” the best of which was, “during the week I do absolutely nothing, and on weekends I rest”) followed by a brief talk by Haili Kong, our faculty leader.

Haili teaches Chinese language, literature, and film and has been at Swarthmore since 1994. His recent book on the history of Beijing, co-authored with Lillian Li of the History Department and Alison Dray-Novey of the College of Notre Dame in Maryland, is a sweeping tale of a city whose earliest habitation has been said to date back 500,000 years to the Peking Man, an early homo-sapiens whose remains were found near here in the 1920s.

Haili gave a brief overview, concentrating mostly on Beijing as imperial capital of China, which it has been (with occasional exceptions) since the Mongol conquest of the 13th century. From then until 1911, three great dynasties ruled China: the Yuan (1279-1368), the Ming (1368-1644), and the Qing (1644-1912). The Republican Revolution of 1911 overthrew the Qing and the century that followed has doubtless been the most difficult and momentous in Chinese history.

But today, we are going to concentrate on three historical sites that have been preserved from Old China—and I mean old. After the introduction and lecture, we boarded a bus with our guide “Jack” (Liu) and the tour operator, an American named Howard Smith. Jack speaks excellent English, and Howard has organized educational tours of China for more than 25 years.

The novelist Yu Hua (left), author of To Live, answers questions during a meeting with Swarthmore alumni in China. The translator is “Jack,” the group’s Beijing guide.  

First stop: the Lama Temple, or Yonghegong. This former palace of the Qing prince was converted to a Buddhist temple in the 1740s in order to connect the capital with the important lamas in Tibet. Even the current Dalai Lama had stayed here while visiting Beijing before the Chinese military takeover of Tibet in 1959 and his subsequent exile.

Yonghegong remains an active religious site today. Redolent of incense and crowded with young Buddhist worshippers, its series of archways and buildings take you along a progressive journey with progressively larger and more impressive statues of the Buddha. It ends spectacularly at the Hall of Infinite Happiness, which was built around an 18-meter high Buddha carved from the trunk of a single cypress tree.

Photography was not allowed inside the five halls of the Buddha, but despite the jostling crowds of tourists and incense-bearing worshippers who prayed both outside and inside each temple, there was a remarkable sense of peace and calm inside them. I am not a Buddhist in any formal way—I know little of the religion and philosophy and almost nothing of its practices—but when I have encountered Buddhist temples or shrines, I find myself strongly drawn to them, centered, and overcome by their spiritual power. I find myself spontaneously meditating and magnetically attracted, wanting not just to look at the statues but to know them. These are more than works of art, I am sure.

Yonghegong is one of Beijing’s most popular tourist attractions too. As you can see from the following photos, the exteriors of the buildings are colorfully carved and painted. A walk along the main axis of the Lamasery is a spiritual path to peace: the Gate of Luminous Peace, the Gate of Harmony and Peace, the Hall of Harmony and Peace, the Hall of Eternal Blessings, the Hall of the Wheel of the Dharma, the Hall of Infinite Happiness, the Hall of Infinite Light.

I find myself wondering, where else is there to go?

Buddhists burn incense outside one of the Lamasery’s five temples. Many of the worshippers are young people.

One of the gates at the Lamasery. You could not photograph inside the temples, so I bought a book.

The Hall of Infinite Happiness.

Our second stop took us to the Confucius Temple. Confucius, Jack explained, was not a religious figure like Gautama Buddha; he was more of a moral and political philosopher. Thomas Wilson of Hamilton College’s Department of History and Asian Studies explains:

“Confucianism” is a tradition that traces its beginnings to an educated elite called shi of late antiquity that advised royal and regional feudal authorities during the Zhou dynasty (1134 to 250 BCE) on governing, which emphasized the importance of virtuous rule through benevolence and proper conduct called ritual (li). The most prominent figure of this educated elite was a man named Kong Qiu (551 to 479 BCE), usually referred to as Master Kong (Kong-fu zi or Kongzi). In the West, Kongzi is called Confucius, a name given him by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century.

The imperial court’s adoption of the ideas of these philosophers led to a kind of canonization of Kongzi and to one of the most important foundations of civil government in the Chinese empire—the examination system.

Inside the Confucius Temple complex, which has been at its current location since 1520, one encounters a series of buildings not unlike those of the Lamasery. Inside them are statues of Kongzi surrounded by various offerings, often of food, left by supplicants. But the striking difference is the spiritual atmosphere. Here, the energy is moral and intellectual; Confucius is the guide, not the god. Here, it’s about getting your act together to be an actor in the world.

The principal building is the Hall of Great Completion. In the main courtyard, protected from the elements by little roofs, are dozens (maybe hundreds) of stele that carry the names of all who passed the civil service examinations over hundreds of years. Theoretically, these merit-based exams drew the best talent from all classes of men (yes, all men) from throughout the empire, populating the local, provincial, and national government with leaders schooled in the great traditions of Chinese culture. The highest examinations were, of course, administered in the imperial capital itself, and one can imagine the candidates visiting this temple of its predecessors, leaving offerings of fruit and grain at the foot of Kongzi, praying to pass the test.

The Confucius Temple once served as the Beijing Police Academy. Its buildings were preserved, but many artifacts were lost during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards burned books in this courtyard.

This cypress is said to date to the time of the construction of the Confucius Temple almost 700 years ago.

Beautiful shadows at the Confucius Temple, where we heard a demonstration of traditional Chinese musical instruments.

After lunch at a nearby restaurant, where dishes kept arriving hot on the lazy susan of our table of eight travelers, we bussed to the Temple of Heaven. The UNESCO World Heritage site describes it succinctly:

The Temple of Heaven, founded in the first half of the 15th century, is a dignified complex of fine cult buildings set in gardens and surrounded by historic pine woods. In its overall layout and that of its individual buildings, it symbolizes the relationship between earth and heaven—the human world and God’s world—which stands at the heart of Chinese cosmogony and also the special role played by the emperors within that relationship.

Even without its spectacular temple-like ceremonial buildings, this is a beautiful urban park, and the many Chinese we found there were using it for family outings, picnics, and outdoor fun. (I should mention that this was a beautiful Sunday in October, crisp and clear, the kind of day that reminds me of autumn in Vermont.) The tourist, however, is struck by the majesty of the buildings, where the emperor prostrated himself to the god of heaven on behalf of his people, hoping to assure bountiful harvests and protection from natural disasters.

Lunch included tiny Chinese cabbages cooked to perfection. Chopsticks all around.

Climbing the stairs at the Temple of Heaven. From the upper plaza, there’s a great view of the city.

The exterior of the pagoda-like building has been restored by the government in anticipation of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Both new construction and restoration of tourist historic sites are in evidence everywhere as China pepares to show its ancient and modern faces to the world.

Inside the pagoda, one can see the structural elements of the tower, which was built without the use of nails.

In the three sites we visited today, we saw the deeply spiritual Lamasery, which had political overtones because it was built by the royal family as a residence for the crown prince and only later converted to Buddhist use—largely to curry favor with the Tibetans and secure Chinese control of that frontier of the empire. We saw the Confucius temple, which represents the intersection of the spiritual and the secular. Chinese culture and civil government were reinforced by Konzi’s school of thought, which provided continuity and stability but also rigidity. That rigidity was ultimately a factor in the success of Western imperialist powers in China, which could not adapt swiftly enough to meet the Western incursions. And finally, at the Temple of Heaven, we encounter the emperor’s power and vulnerability in one place. Kowtowing to forces and gods beyond his control, he not only gathered all power to himself, he represented that power to the universe. In doing so, he proved that he was just a man—and if things didn’t go well, he might even lose his job or his dynasty.

 

 

Over the Top

 

Aboard United 851, October 12–13, 2007

United 851 leaves about 45 minutes late. It takes a good while to pack 347 passengers and 19 crew (including four pilots) into this enormous Boeing 747. Economy Class has a 3-4-3 configuration, and I drew seat 29B, a “middle” seat. My elbow-mates are a retired math teacher from Chicago and an executive M.B.A. student from the University of Virginia, whose entire class is spending a week at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing. Nice field trip. But I guess you could say that about me, too.

We climb above thick clouds, over Milwaukee, Lake Superior, and straight north across Canada. About a half-hour ago, after a few minutes of turbulence, the clouds broke and we could see the southern edge of the Arctic Ocean, just north of the Canadian landmass, south of the Queen Elizabeth Islands. This is the legendary Northwest Passage. (I know our position, altitude, and speed from the video monitor. We’re flying 565 miles per hour at 30,000 feet.)

Sunlight glints off Arctic Ocean wetlands between the Canadian mainland and the Queen Elizabeth Islands.

The sun is low in the southwest, like a golden searchlight beam reflecting aloft from thousands of puddles, ponds, and weblike watercourses. Away from the sun’s illumination, you see only snow and ice, in dune-like formations—hill and dale of white. But as it passes beneath us and enters the sun’s bright beam, this apparently frozen terrain turns out to be the part of the same watery wonderland.

As I write this, it’s about 5:45 p.m. CDT. We’ve been in the air a little more than four hours, which leaves about nine to go. I keep expecting that the sun will set pretty soon. But it’s risen in Beijing, where it’s already tomorrow morning.

7:00 p.m. CDT

As the sun plays tag with the southern horizon (remember, when you are at the North Pole, every direction is south), the clouds part occasionally so that we can glimpse the polar ice cap.

The sun never quite sets. It stays in the South, hovering at the horizon as we drive further north, but it never quite dips behind the clouds, shining obliquely into the port-side windows of the 747. About halfway into the 13-hour flight it starts to rise again.

Well above the Arctic Circle, crevasses in the Arctic Ocean ice are seen from 30,000 feet. Note the jet engine contrail.

Approaching the northernmost point of the flight, we see the sun almost dip below the southern horizon. Clouds obscure the ice below.

I’ve been trying to work out the geometry of this. As an amateur astronomer I like to visualize the geometries of the solar system and the earth-moon system as the months and seasons progress. Where are Mars, Jupiter, and Venus on their own tracks around the sun? When will the moon rise tomorrow night? But this flight presents another sort of geometry altogether.

Think of a satellite in polar orbit, that is, one that orbits “north-south” as the earth rotates beneath it. This plane is a lot slower than a satellite, but the proper motion is the same. The tip-off is the fact that the sun never changed position as we went over the “top” of the planet. In fact, our star conveniently stayed behind the portside wing of the aircraft, so it never really bothered my elbow-mates and me—and we could leave the shade open when others forward and aft of us could not. This went on for hours.

Once we reached our most northerly latitude—a few degrees from the pole—and started back “down” the other side, the rotation of the earth plus the speed of the 747 pretty much kept the sun in place. Only its altitude (what astronomers would call its “declination”) changed, until finally it rose above the shadowing wing and climbed into the daytime once again.

We’re nine hours into the flight, and the rugged majesty of far-eastern Siberia is gliding beneath us. The snow-covered Verkhoyanskiy Mountains are close by the Arctic Ocean, followed by the equally forbidding Aldan Plain.

The Verkhoyanskiy Mountains in far-eastern Siberia.

We followed the Angara River for about a half-hour as we flew south over the Aldan Plain. Here we saw the first signs of human habitation since crossing the pole.

These barren mountains northwest of Beijing also show signs of human activity. This was not true for the vast desert of Mongolia farther to the north.

It’s a little after midnight back in Delaware, where I started my day at 5:30 a.m. We’ll be landing in Beijing in a few minutes, where it will be about 3 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 13. I haven’t slept much on the plane (I never do), so I think my strategy will be to get to the hotel, get a shower, eat an early dinner, and get to sleep by about 9.

By then, the sun will surely have set.

Flying the Polar Route

Philadelphia International Airport, Oct. 12, 0815 EDT

I love to fly, and I especially like to know about the route we are taking and the things we will pass over. Before we left for China, I did a little research about the polar route taken by United Airlines (and others) from the eastern U.S. to Asia. I’m eating breakfast while waiting for our flight to Chicago, which leaves in about an hour. After a 90-minute layover at O’Hare, we’re off to China. Look at the route that we will take from Chicago to Beijing. The yellow circle is 82 degrees north latitude.

Have you ever been this far north? Early 20th-century explorers of the North—Peary, Byrd, Amundsen—could scarcely have imagined that more than 2.000 commercial airline flights a year would routinely cross their hard-won frozen sea above the Arctic Circle.

Peary

Byrd

Amundsen

According to an article in The New York Times (10-11-2000): “Routine transpolar flight became possible only after the end of the Cold War, when the United States and Russia stopped being so concerned about watching for strategic bombers, and with the development of planes like the Boeing 747-400 and the Airbus A-340, with ranges of about 9,000 nautical miles.”

 Here’s a 747. Pretty.

For the airlines, the benefit of transpolar flight is measured in fuel dollars and efficiency. For passengers, in hours. Time equals money in today’s world—for everyone.

In the same Times article, we learn that “navigating over the pole includes odd problems. Compasses are useless, and the geo-stationary satellites that planes in oceanic flight use to relay their position to the ground also become useless, because they hang over the Equator and are not visible from the pole. But the Global Positioning System works, and so does inertial navigation.” Hooray for the GPS, which we also use in our cars and boats. It’s always good to know where you are—especially if you want to decide where you’re going.And then there’s the radiation problem. When you fly near the pole, there’s a lot more radiation—not all of it good—from the sun and other cosmic sources. This has nothing to do with the ozone hole; the fact is, the earth’s magnetic field doesn’t protect us as well at higher latitudes. Plus, the atmosphere is thinner near the poles.

An article in the International Herald Tribune (5-24-01) informed travelers that “airlines flying the North Pole route said they do not inform passengers of the increased cosmic radiation risks. But they said they take precautionary measures, such as monitoring for solar storms.” Airline flight directors report that, when solar activity is high, flights have been rerouted away from the pole or sent to lower altitudes—both of which increase fuel costs (some planes have had to make a gas stop in Alaska) and cause passengers to be late. Pregnant women have been advised to avoid flights over the pole and there’s some concern for frequent business flyers.

The flight crews who make transpolar trips get a lot more radiation than the frequent flyers. One good argument for banning smoking in bars and restaurants is that the people who work in those places are exposed to more second-hand smoke than casual patrons encounter. (The same argument was also made when smoking was prohibited on airplanes more than 20 years ago.) So now the airlines rotate flight crews so that the total annual exposure is lessened.

Curiously, in the media, radiation risk is measured in chest x-rays. A flight over the pole is the equivalent of about 2 chest x-rays, depending on who’s doing the measuring. But isn’t that like measuring the distance to the moon in football fields? How many touchdowns does it take to get to the Sea of Tranquility? Of course, getting to China should be a lot easier than getting to the moon.

We’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll let you know…