Chapter 2: A Life In A Day

There was a time when if a peasant raised his eyes to look at the outside wall; of the Forbidden City - the hereditary home of the Chinese Emperors - it was likely to be the last time he raised them to look at anything. Shortly after allowing his gaze to linger on the high stern walls the was an excellent chance that his head would be permanently parting company with his body. There was a good reason that it was called ‘Forbidden’.
Times change. During the, Cultural Revolution, a period of Chinese history that was about as remote from anything cultural as it is possible to be, it survived only because Premiere Zhou Enlai specifically ordered the Army to protect it. It is fortunate, if a little inexplicable, that he did so, because now instead of an army of privileged servants and administrators serving the will of the Emperor there is an army of paying tourists taking their sets of identical photographs. Most of them are Chinese, the modern descendants of those same peasants for whom such tourism would have been terminal.
The city itself is a labyrinthine collection of buildings, courtyards and alleys with fairy tale names. Behind every magnificent marble structure called something like ‘The Hall of Middle Harmony’ there stands a still more impressive edifice with a name along the lines of ‘The Palace of Eternal Spring’. Briefly, during those grim days of the Revolution they were given other names more appropriate to an Engineering Workshop and the signs on the buildings show both but it is the classical names that resonate in the memory. The flights of bone white marble steps that lead to them are flanked by sloping relief carvings of lions and dragons in stunning detail - many of them dozens of metres long.
We were on a tight schedule of sightseeing, planned and executed with military precision. We marched around the Forbidden City grounds, snapping away at every new palace and hall. I visited, the costume museum, the clock museum and the jewellery museum where the baroquely elaborate and ornate collections belonging to previous Emperors were to be found, but barely had time to glance at the exhibits before needing to hurry on.
Next up on the bill was the Summer Palace. The trouble with this whistle-stop approach to tourism was that you find yourself trying to see things like this in an hour and a half which is plainly impossible. Nevertheless it remains an impressive place even when you are racing around it with hardly time to pause for breath. In spite of British attempts to destroy it after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 much remains and has somehow not only survived all the social upheavals but actually thrived and received a great deal of intelligent restoration
We rushed around it as if we were demented, cameras clicking madly as if the act of recording it would somehow defeat time and stretch the experience in our memories. There was, in a peculiarly oriental way, something surreal about the place. I found myself likening it to Portmerion in Wales, an apparently ludicrous comparison, triggered I suspect by the sight of the elaborate and ornate marble boat in the lake, a mirror to the equally odd and non-functional stone boat on Portmerion's quay side. The more I thought about it though the less inappropriate it seemed. Both are collections of buildings whose forms suggest their functions but look as if that is precisely why they have been designed, to suggest a function rather than to achieve it. Both have an almost indescribable charm and prettiness about them. Both are clearly places that have been intentionally constructed to look appealing.
Scarcely had we entered by one gate when we were leaving by another, with nothing to show for the visit except a used roll of film and a vague impression that we had been somewhere special.
Two down three to go in our non-stop day. The next item on the itinerary was a brief, but not brief enough, visit to the Beijing Zoo. I don’t approve of most western zoos. The animal enclosures are usually too small and the animals clearly unhappy. Some research zoos are better and wildlife parks where the animals can wander about more or less at will are better still but fundamentally they are called wild animals because they belong in the wild. No matter how bad a western zoo might be though the Beijing Zoo is worse. One of our party had a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to China and that sums it up perfectly in one pithy sentence.
    “After you have been there you will probably look as distressed as the animals.”
Almost at the entrance is the Panda enclosure. It is a grim concrete building allowing the animals no respite from the heat of the day and they lie there looking as if they are contemplating suicide. No-one could blame them if they were. They may well be China’s national animal but they are not given five star treatment at the Zoo. Even Robert, the guide seemed embarrassed to show them to us, apologising for their inclusion on the itinerary. He also tried a little political humour, as if testing the water before diving in.
“Do they remind you of leaders?” he asked “Fat and slow and lying around doing nothing all day?”
It wasn’t funny but it was the first hint we had had that he was prepared to be a little more human than the smiling automaton who had met us at the airport.

With the Zoo done and dusted in ten minutes it was time to be on our way to the next sight. Every traveller to Beijing has to visit the Great Wall of China. The Wall is 5000 kilometres long and contains more than 150 million cubic metres of Earth and 60 million cubic metres of bricks and stone facing. Hundreds of thousands of workmen took hundreds of years to complete it. It was also the most spectacularly unsuccessful defensive fortification in history, never turning back or in any way deterring one single invader. As a tourist attraction it is rather more useful, doing sterling work in pulling in the crowds. We travelled there by coach, to Badaling, the official tourist section of the wall. It is actually a considerable distance from Beijing and when we reached it, it was time for another ‘lunch in a local restaurant’, identical in all but decor to our previous lunch and dinner. Outside the restaurant we could see, between us and the wall a market. This was our first exposure to the ubiquitous phenomenon of the ‘Hello Market’. If you are a ‘foreign friend’ shopping comes in three varieties in China - Friendship Stores, Local Shops and the Hello Market.
The officially encouraged method is to shop only in the Friendship Stores. Indeed so officially encouraged is this that the visits to them are compulsory. The local guides will escort you into them whether you want to go or not as it is part of their job to do so. The advantage of these stores is that the goods in them are of a good quality and they give receipts. The disadvantage is that they are anything from four to ten times as expensive as the local shops. For the serious shopper, and we certainly had a few of those, the local stores are probably the best bet. They are crowded noisy emporia vaguely reminiscent of the sort of department stores common in England in the thirties. The standards tend to be variable but there are plenty of dirt cheap bargains to be had.
Today's lesson was in how to shop at ‘Hello Markets’, the most fun and the least reliable of the methods on offer. There are times when you wander round China when you realise that every Chinese, whether adult or child, knows two words of English. These are the word 'Hello' and the word for whatever it is that they want to sell you. You are assailed by a constant cacophony of "Hello Pencil" "Hello T-shirt" "Hello Tablecloth" "Hello Postcard" and so on. Even beggars will often begin their importuning with ‘Hello Money’ and an outstretched hand. However if you are prepared to haggle you can buy almost anything for almost nothing. The quality is likely to be extremely low but at these prices who cares. It would take a hard hearted bargainer indeed to haggle for a T-shirt when the starting price is fifty pence.
At the Great Wall we ran the gauntlet of the market with only a few people parting with their money for items of dubious worth and reached the steps to ascend it. At the foot of the steps a tiny wizened old man offered to sell me a stone that I had just seen him pick up for 2 yuan, which at the time was about twenty pence. I managed somehow to resist this tempting bargain. Others were offered antique coins that were about as genuine as plastic dinosaur bones, ‘authentic’ Chinese pottery and all manner of other rubbish. Those few that did succumb were given as many forged and Tibetan notes in their change as genuine Chinese ones.
We started up the steps to the Wall. I had been prepared for the traders at the foot of it but even now there was no respite. All along the steps and along the top of the wall were people selling T-shirts and jewellery and one letting you take photographs of the mangiest most flea-ridden camel in creation. The whole six metre width of the wall was full of people, all winding their way up to the first of the guard towers where, for a fee, they received their certificates, stamped in red ink, to prove that they had been there. Here and there there were soldiers, at least I assumed they were soldiers. In China everyone wears uniforms whether they are soldiers, students or street cleaners. It makes identification very difficult. The soldiers on the wall fell into two categories - men in ancient and elaborate uniforms who were probably actors and mean in modern uniforms with white plimsolls who were probably real soldiers. It was the plimsolls that gave it away.
The final thing on the agenda was the Ming Tombs. The approach to them is along a long thoroughfare flanked with giant statues of warriors and mythical beasts. Each of these is an impressive example of the stonemasons art and the tomb building itself, while more modest than I had expected does look imposing in its countryside setting at the end of this road. This is just as well. At the door to the tombs a notice warns that photography is forbidden. Quite why they feel it necessary to point this out when the inside resembles nothing as much as it resembles an air raid shelter, I don’t know. The tomb we were visiting had the faintly silly name of ‘Dingling’ and was the final resting place of the Emperor Wan Li. Perhaps it was impressive when it was excavated with its jade and silver funerary trappings but all of them have been removed to museums and nowadays it is simply dull. The white walls and empty rooms are one of the most intrinsically uninteresting things I have ever seen. Nothing could have persuaded me to photograph them anyway.
We piled back into our coach and returned to Beijing. On the way the coach took a sudden detour and drove into the car park of a large low building. It was one of the Friendship Stores that are another way to shop. Robert led us inside where it was a cool spacious and elegantly laid out store. The quality of the goods on display could be seen instantly. There were fine silks and delicate carvings, exquisite jewellery and detailed wall hangings. The room was cool and calm and very quiet, almost church like. Beautiful Chinese girls in traditional costumes hovered silently around us waiting patiently for our purchases. They waited in vain. No-one bought a single thing, people rarely do so near the start of a trip especially when the prices are high enough to match western ones, but if any of the staff were in the slightest put out by this lack of purchasing they didn’t show it. They remained impassive as we all filed out again and returned to the bus. Why had gone there at all was a mystery that I wouldn’t solve until Xi-An.

The second day in Beijing was a little less frantic. It was a day to explore at leisure on our own, away from the constricting presence of our minder, for that is what I had decided Robert was in reality, not a tour leader but a guard making sure we behaved like good tourists and did everything asked of us. I wandered down to Tiananmen Square. How many people in England I wondered would, before 1989, had even heard of it. The television pictures of the pro-democracy demonstrations and the brutality with which they had been crushed had changed all that. Everyone had heard of it now.
The maps, newspaper photographs and television pictures all fail to give any idea of the size of Tiananmen Square. It is an enormous concrete expanse bounded by Tiananmen Gate and Qianmen Gate to the North and South and by the Museum of the Revolution and the Great Hall of the People to the East and West. Impressive and imposing they all are too, massive solid buildings in keeping with the scale of the square.
Tiananmen Gate was hung with a gigantic portrait of Mao and almost every Chinese visitor to the square was queuing up to have his photograph taken in front of it. Having your picture taken seems to be a national obsession. It can be a little annoying for the tourist. I pointed my camera across the square at Mao’s Mausoleum and instantly half a dozen smiling waving children popped up in front of me. I pretended to click the shutter and moved on to find an interloper-free location. I tried again but the same thing happened. On the third attempt I gave up and took their photograph with the Mausoleum presenting only the background. Then I put my camera into my backpack, left Brenda, with whom I had been sightseeing, to guard it and joined the queue for the Mausoleum itself . Cameras, bags and even heavy coats were forbidden inside.
Until that moment I had thought that the British were the international queuing champions but within seconds of joining the half a mile long line I knew we would have to settle for the silver medal. No more than fifteen minutes later I had not only reached the Mausoleum but passed through it and exited on the other side. No-one was permitted to stop moving or even to vary the pace of the shuffling that efficiently and rapidly filed us past the room where auspiciously waxen Mao was lying in state. Unsmiling guards made menacing gestures at anyone slowing down and the guns they were carrying encouraged us to avoid stopping for whatever reason.

Back outside I rejoined Brenda. We had discovered in the guide book that the Yonghegong Lama Temple was particularly recommended and so headed off towards it. Outside, as we queued again, a man in a suit sat at a wooden table painting incredibly detailed pictures on the inside of tiny bottles, no larger than those used for the most delicate and expensive perfumes. We watched in fascination as he careful added colours with the tiniest brushes imaginable.
The queue shuffled on past him and I caught sight of a hand lettered sign on the wall. I pointed it out to Brenda and both of us chuckled at its eccentric wording.
    “EVERYWHERE TO BE LOOKING AROUND TICKETS”
Unfortunately the small wizened old man at the ticket window saw our smiles and insisted that I should change it for him. I protested that his sign was charming and interesting and much better than any substitution would be but to no avail. Soon his beautiful calligraphy and charming phrase were replaced by my ugly and clumsy
    “TICKETS FOR ACCESS TO ALL AREAS”
I couldn’t help thinking that I had diminished the world rather than improving it.
Inside the temple though the world was undiminished. It was everything we had been led to expect and more. Unlike those we had seen yesterday it was, as they say, compact and bijou. It was also remarkably beautiful with a perfection of form that was never equalled elsewhere in my whole stay in the country. The woodwork had all the usual curls and scrolls of Chinese architecture but was in addition brightly and gaily painted in sumptuous patterns of red blue and gold. The temple interiors were even more colourful with smiling golden Buddhas, multi-storey statues draped in bright saffron robes and walls covered with murals whose detail expanded the closer you got until you felt that a magnifying glass or microscope would produce yet further elaborations.

Chinese architecture may be gorgeous even to the western eye but sadly the same cannot be said about Chines Opera and the western ear. As entertainment goes its a tough one to match, easy to better but tough to equal. Robert had arranged for us to attend a performance. None of us thought to check what the guide books said on the subject. Had we done so we might have reconsidered for they are uniform in their unflattering descriptions. None of us, especially the opera lovers, were treated to anything that we might have expected.
We took our gallery seats and looked around. It was a fairly conventional theatre even if the stage was completely bare of sets and props. The hall was full, mostly with locals waiting for the performance to begin - and what a performance it was. My headache started less than five minutes into the show and lasted for hours afterwards. The main problem was - and I use the term loosely - the music. It sounded like someone strangling cats in an alley full of dustbins. As for the acting I was put vividly in mind of Max Wall performing Aladdin.
The whole performance was interpreted for us on an electronic screen which had unfortunately been programmed by someone who had decided to miss out all the nouns so that it produced such random and bizarre gibberish as
    “I will defeat my and build a mound of their.”
which raised a few smiles but it was still a harrowing experience.
Afterwards we compared notes in the bar and agreed that it had been a unique experience. Personally I hoped that it would remain unique. I had no desire to witness such a spectacle again.
Having been careless once in our preparatory guide book reading we decided to check what they had to say about Xi-An, our destination for the following day and the base for our trip to see the terracotta army. It was a worried group that retired with the words
“Xi-An Airport does not have radar. In the opinion of some it does not have a runway.”
lodged firmly in their heads.