Part 2 of our June 2009 trip to China with the Speizmans.
Tuesday, June 9 – Beijing, Forbidden City
With dawn’s early light we rose with jet lag. Barb was delighted find that the Raffles offered a full breakfast buffet, as befitting a fine hotel in Singapore or Hong Kong. After filling ourselves with eggs, bacon, pastries and other delights, Barb produced baggies to hold some little sandwiches for the road. These would prove useful, even if Rick and Faith were a little perturbed.
With breakfast accomplished and a little time before our main activity, we decided to walk a little around Wangfujing in the daytime. The pedestrian street was barely waking up but McDonald’s was already going strong. I loved that it was in the same building as this flagship Chinese Arts and Craft store. When we lived in Hong Kong, the three Chinese Arts and Crafts stores were the only official Communist Chinese retail outlets (an immediately wonderful non-sequitur). They sold all manner of authentically mainland Chinese things from museum-grade jade and ivory carvings to Mao suits and Little Red Books. They were one of Mom’s (and my) favorite stores and a must-see stop for visitors. Compared to regular Hong Kong shops they were dour, understated, fusty stores, though always nicely air conditioned, that didn’t ever go for the garish colors or promotional signs decorating this Beijing outlet. Closer inspection of the photo reveals that it’s not actually a Chinese Arts and Crafts store but an “Arts and Crafts Emporium” in the same font style as the Hong Kong stores. So it’s a Beijing knock-off of a Hong Kong institution. Now I wonder if the McDonald’s was real.
My photo of the Beijing apm entrance doesn’t do justice to the six-floor shopping mall of high-end international brands that sat inside. Wikipedia’s picture is much more impressive. The juxtaposition of this cathedral to international commerce just a couple of blocks from Tiananmen Square was a jarring indication of how much change had come to China in a couple of decades.
Even more culturally jarring to me was this sculpture of a rickshaw driver on the street. Just what did they think they were promoting? Who in the Central Committee thought this was a good idea? I mean, it didn’t stop us from taking a cute picture with Allie…but really? It was time for us to get going when we were nearly soaked by an aggressive street cleaning truck scrubbing the sidewalks to get ready for the day’s business. Something else you never would have seen in Beijing 20 years before. These few minutes on Wangfujing were an early indicator of how disorienting much of this trip would be.
For our first full day in China, we explored the Forbidden City. Rick had arranged for a guide (was his name Henry? It will be for the purposes of this post) to accompany us through our three-day stay in Beijing. Henry met us at the hotel and we walked to Tiananmen for a basic overview and photos. This iconic national symbol of China with its portrait of Mao and red flags fluttering never fails to impress. The gate was first built by the Youngle Emperor as the entrance to the Ming Dynasty’s Imperial City in 1420. I didn’t realize the 1969 renovation of the gate was secretly a complete rebuild authorized by Premier Zhou Enlai. Everyone wanted a picture in front of it.
We went through Tiananmen to the courtyard in front of the Meridian Gate. We loitered for a time while Henry fetched our tickets for the palace. The center arch of this and all the gates was formerly reserved for the emperor but now everyone goes through it, as long as they have a ticket. Go egalitarianism!
We went through the Meridian Gate and were in the first official courtyard of the Forbidden City, before the Gate of Supreme Harmony. Here we began to get a sense of the scale of the entire palace complex. This was just a forecourt.
There were two large bronze lions guarding the gate. Here is some more about them: “The lion statues in front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City are made of bronze, with fine workmanship. They are the largest pair of bronze lions in the Forbidden City and the only pair without golden gilt. Each lion has 45 buns on its head, representing the supreme dignity of the emperor in Chinese context. The ears were pricked up, which means that the emperor should listen more to the opinions of his ministers and the instruction of the god.”
We went through the gate into the courtyard before the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest of the Forbidden City’s buildings. Time for more posing and one of the best vantage points to see the extent of the Forbidden City.
This building houses the Emperor’s elaborate Dragon Throne. We could briefly shuffle around it in a crowded, dark and dusty space. Flash photography was not allowed and the hall was kept too dark to take a good photo, so it was hard to appreciate the interior and even harder to look for The Last Emperor’s cricket. I actually had a better view and photo of the throne back in 1982.
There were several more sculptures and details worth noting. The sundial, or Ri Gui, was very cool. Ingeniously, it tells time for half the year on the top side and uses the bottom side for the other half of the year.
There were several symbolic animal sculptures: “In ancient times, crane and tortoise were the animals that represented longevity…. In front of the Hall of Supreme Harmony, there is a pair of copper tortoise and copper crane. Their mouths are open and the heads are up towards the sky. The crane is in the front, representing the ability of soaring to the sky, and the turtle is in the back, expressing its ability to swim in the deep sea. In important ceremonies, they can also be used as incense burner, to create the effect of cloud and mist like in the heaven.” Allie and Sydney were particularly fond of the Dragon Turtle.
Henry made sure we noted the ridge animals on the roofs of each building, especially those of the Hall of Supreme Harmony: “…there are ridge animals on the sloping ridge of each building in the Forbidden City. There are strict rules on the size, number, and even the order of ridge animals. The number of these ridge animals is either five, seven, or nine, in a singular order. The only exception is the Hall of Supreme Harmony which has 10 ridge animals, because it is the most supreme architecture in the Forbidden City. The 10 ridge beasts contains the dragon, phoenix, lion, horse, haetae, and so on. Each has its own meaning and blessing, but all have auspicious, protective meaning, symbolizing the supremacy of the imperial power and the long run of the emperor.”
The extensively renovated and repainted exterior of the Hall was very impressive and intricately beautiful. We noted the dragon motifs throughout the structure but thankfully did not try to count them all. “The dragon is the most revered animal in China, and ancient Chinese emperors are called as the “son of dragon”, so the most frequently seen animal in the Forbidden City is dragon. For instance, the most supreme building of the whole imperial palace, Hall of Supreme Harmony (Taihedian), has 13,844 dragon patterns and dragon carvings inside and outside. And it is calculated that there are a total of over 50,000 dragons in the whole Forbidden City.”
After the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Henry led us through several halls exhibiting a small portion of the enormous Palace Museum collection. The scrolls, paintings, jade work and other treasures were exquisite but overwhelming and not especially well laid out or explained. Also, no photos, please.
We were mostly worn out as we explored a few areas of the northern portion of the Forbidden City, home to the concubines, eunuchs and other members of the palace retinue. It was a maze of smaller buildings, most closed to tourists, and a few garden areas for the enjoyment of the rarified few.
We were all pretty much exhausted after our day in the Forbidden City. Rick had arranged a sunset boat cruise on Houhai Lake for dinner. This was a district just north and west of the Forbidden City that included one of the last remaining neighborhood of hutongs or traditional courtyard houses in Beijing. The city had been dominated by hutongs when I visited in the 1980s but in the modernization of Beijing and especially the run-up to the 2008 Olympics an astonishing percentage of the old neighborhoods had been razed in favor of highways and high rises. This particular neighborhood was quickly gentrifying into an area of bars, restaurants, homes and offices for foreigners and well-off Chinese, hardly the original set of residents. The displacement and resettlement of so much of the population of a huge city in a couple of decades was something that only an authoritarian regime like China’s could pull off. It had not been done without protest, but it had surely been done. On one hand, many of the hutongs were borderline slums (some well over the borderline) but on the other, they formed the character and history of much of the city. It was a mixed blessing to see them gone, and to see this one turned into a bit of a Disneyland version for tourists. I would liked to have spent more time wandering the area but not at the end of this tiring day.
I don’t remember if we had food on the boat or at a cafe on shore. The erhu player was nice but it was all a little awkward in such a small boat; the tone of an erhu is somewhat of an acquired taste that not all of us had acquired. The boat had seemed a great idea but we were all struggling with jet lag. It had been an ambitious first day.
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