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Our last several days in China were a blur. We checked back into our Shanghai hostel for one last night and, on the recommendation of some fellow travelers, we went to see a Chinese Acrobatics show. We arrived early and watched the small theatre fill up as foreigners in enormous tour groups filed in behind their dutiful guides. The show began with a group of high-energy gymnasts bounding across the stage and soaring through narrow hoops, barely dodging one another in precisely choreographed stunts. Another performer was a young girl, who mounted a small elevated platform in handstand position, and did a ten-minute routine supporting her body weight with only one arm. The men and women were equally impressive; the men with their strength and agility, the women with their grace and poise while lifting and maintaining enormous heavy loads. The show was spectacular and we were mesmerized for ninety minutes by the talented performers.
After a rainy business day, we took the overnight train from Shanghai to Beijing. We had a room booked there for just one night because we were unable to change anything about our original flight itinerary and that meant we had to return all the way to Beijing to begin our marathon journey to Nepal.
After four months in Asia, Tina proclaimed that she was officially “templed-out” and had no desire to see anymore temples – Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu or otherwise. This meant that our last day in Beijing I went out sightseeing solo. Despite the rain, I was determined to see two temples that we missed the first time around – The Temple of Heaven and the Yonghe Temple.
The Temple of Heaven is actually a complex of Taoist temples and parks covering nearly three square kilometers. The main Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests pagoda has become somewhat of an icon for Beijing; it’s pictured (along with the “Bird’s Nest” stadium) in nearly every Olympics advertisement that we’ve seen. The large triple-gabled circular pagoda stands atop a tiered platform in the middle of an enormous paved square. The temple complex was constructed in the early 15th Century during the reign of the Yongle Emperor (the same emperor responsible for building the Forbidden City) and was visited by subsequent dynasties praying for good harvests. Like so many of the other temples that we’ve visited, tourists were prohibited from entering any of the sacred buildings so I simply wandered about the grounds snapping pictures of the naturally photogenic Chinese architecture. The similarities to the Forbidden City were obvious – the enormous scale of the complex, the colorful detailed artwork adorning the temples, and the overall architecture design. This was definitely one of my favorite temples.
The Yonghe Temple, or Palace of Peace and Harmony Lama Temple, is most commonly referred to simply as the “Lama Temple”. The Lama Temple is a Tibetan Buddhist temple and monastery, one of the largest of its kind in the world. The expansive grounds contained five main halls separated by courtyards, and numerous other unimpressive buildings. I stumbled upon a religious ceremony at its conclusion and was fascinated by the costumes of the presiding monks. Their orange robes were standard issue, but they each wore large, yellow hats resembling the comb on a rooster’s head – a very entertaining sight indeed. The highlight of my self-guided tour was a 26-meter tall, gold-covered statue of the Maitreya Buddha carved from a single piece of White Sandalwood and housed in one of the pavilions – it was truly impressive. After my brief visit, I left the temple complex unimpressed and boarded the metro to return home to my wife…and ready to leave China.
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