We started the day with a short van ride to the Forbidden City, home of the imperial families from 1368 to 1911. Our leader this day was Lihong, a native of Shanghai who works in the foreign affairs office at the University of Alberta. She did much of the travel planning and flew over to China to help facilitate things in Beijing.
We bought our tickets and went in the back door entrance. All of our many tickets in China were beautiful, with lovely photographs on them. Just inside the back door were the imperial gardens. My impression of classical Chinese gardens is this: lots of very old cedars, with many branches held up by pole-like supports, inlaid pebble mosaic flooring, and large (maybe 20 feet high) rock gardens of craggy, holey limestones, artfully joined together. Nowadays cement is used; in older times it was lime and rice glue. What can’t you do with rice? Some of the trunks of the trees were purposely split to look like legs of humans, or in Chinese ‘ren.’ A wisteria plant had a trunk about 2 feet across.
The palace is said to have 999 rooms. We couldn’t go into any, but we passed through countless gates and courtyards and peered into some rooms. We looked into a honeymoon suite where the written characters above the bed meant double happiness. Lots of other rooms or entire buildings were official kinds, for receiving visitors, doing written work, making pronouncements—that kind of thing. The most important buildings had yellow glazed tile roofs, as this symbolized the earth, the center of the universe and the emperor himself. Other colors were black, the color of water, and red, the color of happiness. Carved wood, silk brocades, marble, in a word, sumptuous. Interestingly, some buildings were in need of renovation, so we could all see how the colors fade, and the enamel chips and falls off. I think they are constantly renovating, and all the city was in various stages of demolition or preparation for the 2008 Olympics.
After emerging from the front door, we checked our parcels and went through metal detectors, and then walked up to the balcony of the building in front of the walled city, overlooking Tiananmen Square. This was the tightest security we had encountered on the entire trip, due we suspect to concern over the possibility of a political protest being staged at such a significant place. It was from here that Mao declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. There was a small museum there and as ever a gift shop. Two of our group bought “Chinese Army” watches that seemed to be of similar quality to the “Rolexes” that we had seen for sale at the Great Wall.
The square didn’t look as enormous as I expected, maybe because Mao’s mausoleum blocks it part way. Bruce took a photo of the Army guards standing at attention—from a respectable distance and with a telephoto lens. They were armed with pistols and next to each were fire extinguishers. It had to be explained to us that these served the purpose of dealing with self-immolation protestations in the square. Fortunately we saw no indications of such people. Just tourists, mostly Asian groups led by flag-wielding guides. People of all ages and descriptions. Of course there was no recognition of the uprising and massacre of thousands in 1989, as it did not officially happen. There were however cheery decorations with Olympic mascots. There were no vendors on the square, no protestors, no beggars.
At the other end of the square was a huge building, one of the nine gates to the city. A short walk past it took us to our lunch. Lihong brought us to the most famous Peking duck restaurant in the country. It’s been in business since 1884 and has served over a million ducks. Yes, they kept count. There were nine of us around a table with the now familiar glass turntable in the center. Under Lihong’s expert guidance we ordered two ducks and a number of complementary side dishes from a huge menu. Those that I can remember are: duck and the wrappers and filling (like mooshoo pork or fajitas), dumplings, duck soup, duck head (split in two) (We passed on that one, except for our Vietnamese-born friend who tried a tentative sample.), spring rolls, snow peas, pork with cilantro and garlic, shrimp (headless and peeled!), and duck- shaped sweet dough. I believe I read that this restaurant serves 90 dishes made of duck. Waste not. We stuck to the basics, however, leaving the exotic body parts to the connoisseurs. As you see in the photo, the duck carvers wear surgical masks. They handed us little cards describing the upbringing of each of our two ducks.
Before
During
After
All this eating doesn’t take too long and doesn’t make you feel all groggy, so after the meal, we were driven to a newish establishment on a major boulevard, a 6-story building of stalls, selling everything imaginable and selling to the tourist. Unlike the market we went to yesterday, this one did not feature fish sellers on the ground floor, or anywhere! Lihong explained that this place demands heavy bargaining. Like starting price at 1200 RMB and buying at 60. I bought two silk scarves. All the vendors call out to you in English “Hello lady. Want to buy a … ?”, and the most aggressive were in the shoe section where I swear they all grabbed at your arms too. “Special price just for you nice lady” “Morning price” “Special discount for first sale of the morning”
At first this made us uncomfortable but we did get used to the game after a few days, and it made us laugh. We didn’t get any pictures inside the market itself, because we didn’t want to stop that long in any one place for fear of being overwhelmed by vendors. But you can get an idea of the atmosphere of the place by reading the sign in the lobby that attempts to place some modest degree of control (mostly ignored) on them. There was also a sign regarding trademark infringement, also mostly ignored nationwide except in a few ‘make an example’ cases that were recently reported in the newspapers.
Dan took the plunge and ordered two custom-made suits for a bit over $100 each. Despite it being late afternoon, the tailors said they could deliver them to our hotel that evening! Since we had plans for the evening, Dan put them off till first thing next morning. Stay tuned for a report.
After a short rest at the hotel and a quick supper of banana bread and juice, hurriedly purchased at the German grocery inside our hotel, we headed off to a show of Chinese acrobats. Lihong arranged the whole excursion for us in about 5 minutes on her cell phone while sitting at our table at the duck restaurant! (Everybody in China has a cell phone, most extremely tiny.) She told us we would see only tourists at the theater and she seemed correct. Never mind, we ate our ice creams on sticks and awaited the show. It was great.
There were probably 20 or 30 people in the entire troupe, all capable of amazing feats of acrobatics. A trio of two-man fuzzy looking dogs (or were they classic mythical beasts?) cavorted onstage. A group of women spun four plates on sticks in each hand while doing acrobatic maneuvers. The same group performed similar maneuvers while spinning a spool on a length of string, flipping the spool high up into the air and catching it or exchanging it with a partner. A man stood on a plank balanced on a small cylinder, on his shoulders was a small platform, and on the platform were balanced a similar cylinder, plank, and man. The guy on top then proceeded to flip bowls from the plank up onto his head, starting with just one bowl at a time, then moving up to two, three, and four simultaneously, finally culminating by flipping a glass up into the nested bowls and flipping a fork up into the glass! I’m sure there were other acts too, but these are the ones that come to mind. I felt my mouth starting to dry out because my jaw was perpetually dropped in amazement!
We didn’t get any good pictures of the show itself, but you can get an idea of the place from this outside video.
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