In Beijing

[fivemack]

The Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven are very much as impressive as everything would lead you to believe; hundreds of pavilions (square with yellow roof tiles in the former place, blue-tiled and occasionally circular in the latter) held up on great red columns, with various numbers of auspicious roof-beasts sitting on each of the corners. The Great Wall is also pretty remarkable, though the bit at Badaling is rather more of a Great Staircase than I was expecting.

Yuanmingyuan is full of signs, carefully without English translations, which look as if they're probably saying '150 years of humiliation' - an Anglo-French army sacked Yuanmingyuan rather thoroughly in 1860, an action that I'm afraid I remember most vividly from Flashman; nobody did anything actively unfriendly, but it did feel slightly more disconcerting to be the one white face in that busy park than the usual circumstance of being the one white face in the subway car.

(Beijing underground is extremely underground, you don't get incidental city views on branches which happen to be on viaducts. It has six times as many lines as shown in the 2000 guidebook I have, most of which are longer than any of the ones in the guidebook, and there's at least one new line opening before the end of the year)

Tomorrow I will try to look at some buildings built after the Qing dynasty.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

How busy are the tourist sites? I fear they might be swamped with the Chinese themselves.

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

Yuanmingyuan did seem to be a bit more off the main tourist map than most sites - we went there last year and it was notably less-accesible, less-translated and with fewer non-Chinese tourists than the other places we went. Our experience of Chinese tourists was that they were more interested than hostile, though. On several occasions we were asked if we could pose in Chinese-tourist photographs, which was a bit disconcerting.

If you want suggestions for things to visit, the Lama temple was great (if slightly politically-charged) and the Dongyue Taoist temple is fascinatingly bizarre (it is full of little rooms full of statues depicting, e.g. "the department for implementing 15 kinds of violent death").

[ellarien]

Beijing! Is it a holiday or a business trip?

I got the guided tour of Yuangmingyuan in 2006, and it definitely isn't a story calculated to make Westerners feel good about themselves. There were English signs driving the point home then, at least in the car park -- but as we were boarding the bus afterwards, a crocodile of Chinese schoolchildren was arriving -- and they waved and called out in English, in unison, "Hello! We love you!" Which was slightly surreal.

[angharad (from livejournal.com)]

We went to the Wall at Mutianyu having been warned against the crowds at Badaling and were able to find whole deserted sections which was great, lots and lots of people trying to sell us stuff on our way down (from the end of the tobaggan ride!) though.

You could check out the Summer Palace which is quite mad with the stone boat a particular standout memory. We also ended up going round a hutong at the back of the Forbidden City after flopping in exhaustion and the rickshaw guy kept lowering and lowering the price until we gave in :-) interesting though.

--
Angharadxxx