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June 12th 2008 by Tina
Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City

Posted under China

As our plane descended toward Beijing, the first things we noticed about the city were smog, a wide flat landscape and smog. “According to the World Bank, China has 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, and by some counts Beijing is the world’s most polluted city.” (Lonely Planet China, May 2007)

By the time we made it through Immigration and collected our bags, it was eight p.m. and we were happy to find a sign with our name on it at the airport exit. It is always a little disorienting to enter a city for the first time in the dark. As I stared curiously out the window during the hour-long drive to the hostel, my brain struggled to make sense of the wide, busy highways. It didn’t look like the China I had envisioned. Not until our minibus pulled into a narrow side street alight with red Chinese lanterns and cluttered with bicycles would my brain accept that this was actually Beijing. The hostel exceeded our highest expectations with cozy down comforters, a quaint garden courtyard, and a Western toilet (although it was the kind that you can’t put any paper into, which is still pretty disgusting).

There is so much to see in Beijing and we started early the next morning with a walk to Tiananmen Square – an easy fifteen-minute stroll from our hostel. The streets were wide with generous sidewalks and bike lanes. China’s dense population is evident on any given street – there are people everywhere! Underground pedestrian walkways circumvent the eight-lane street crossings and uniformed crossing guards assist with the narrower street-level crossings. Efficiently moving this many people through the city on a given day seems like a daunting challenge to which the Chinese have responded with excellent public transportation systems. City buses and the metro are clean, cheap, efficient and filled to capacity – standing room only and just barely – with bodies. And still the streets are crowded with auto traffic. Among the crowds in Beijing are noticeably few Anglo faces; even around the most visited sites, the tourists are largely Asian.

At mid-morning, Tiananmen Square was already flocked with tourists, though the sheer size of the world’s largest public square left us plenty of room to wander. The square was conceived to represent the enormity of Communism and encompasses an area equal to about sixty official size soccer fields. Today, the square bustles with tourists and locals alike, pondering the historical significance and enjoying the wide open spaces in the middle of the city. The most famous landmark and the symbolic center of the Chinese universe is an imposing red wall at the northern end of the Square called the Gate of Heavenly Peace. It is marked with a large portrait of ex-Chairman Mao – a former head of state whose failed communist economic experiment, called the Great Leap Forward, resulted is an estimated thirty million Chinese deaths by starvation but who is somehow still revered by the Chinese.

The Forbidden City lies adjacent to Tiananmen Square. We headed toward the entrance, drawn to the colorful rooftop of the hall towering over the Meridian Gate. We rented an audio guide with a built-in GPS system and walked inside. The Imperial Palace, now know as the Forbidden City because it was off-limits for 500 years, was constructed during the Ming dynasty in the 15th century and served as a secluded palace home to two dynasties of Chinese emperors: the Ming and the Qing. The compound was designed such that the emperors rarely had to leave its decadent, insulated confines. With a 2.6 million square foot area of halls, galleries, gardens and courtyards, it is not difficult to imagine living an entire life inside the foreboding city walls. The emperors held court, gave public speeches, received felicitations on special occasions, hosted foreign dignitaries, studied, amassed a great many treasures and lived their daily lives within the city walls. The main areas of the city were its various great halls, built in perfect alignment through the center of the compound. Each hall had a specific function and was richly decorated in blue, green, red and gold. The design of the halls and their opulent adornments were intended to acknowledge the divine right of the emperor to rule the people.

Around the perimeter of the compound were smaller galleries now used as individual museums, housing palace treasures, historical artifacts, royal jewelry and a splendid collection of beautiful antique clocks. The Chinese used sun dials and hour glasses to keep the time before British traders first brought clocks to China through the port at Guangzhou. The Hall of Clocks displayed an impressive collection of British, French, and Dutch clocks gifted to the emperors as well as Chinese clocks later commissioned in the royal workshop. This dimly lit gallery with red walls and illuminated glass display cases was our favorite gallery inside the Forbidden City.

After four hours in the hot summer sun, we had covered a good portion of the enormous compound. The architectural style, beautiful colors and intricate designs of the halls were all striking but it was the expansiveness of the city itself that left us completely awestruck. We had to ask ourselves how a small contingent can get away with living in such rich luxury, built on the blood, sweat and tears of the masses. The idea of divine right is so foreign to our democratic minds. We are reminded how malleable are the minds of the masses, especially in nations where the free flow of information is largely censored at the hand of a small contingent. Without education and freedom of information, the view from inside the box can be painted in thick, rosy gloss. Still, the American government is no poster child of transparency. Governments apparently cannot pursue their “necessary” clandestine operations without their secrets. It is an interesting world that we live in. I cannot help but think that every society will be corrupted by man’s greed for power but that the volatility of disgruntled masses, however oppressed, will eventually shift the weight of power and restore the balance, only to have the cycle begin again.

We had worked up quite an appetite and decided to walk to a narrow side street in the nearby Wangfujing district, nicknamed “Snack Street”. In reality it was more like an alleyway ornamented with a large colorful archway at the entrance. It was lined with food stalls and a few small restaurants. One vendor displayed skewers of scorpions, seahorses, snakes, starfish, and a variety of insects which could be fried upon request. I found it quite disturbing, especially the seahorses, which are so rare and beautiful. We passed on the exotic fare and were instead lured into one of the restaurants where there was no menu whatsoever and no one spoke English. We managed to order some dumplings and noodles (although we actually got noodle soup instead). We have found the food in China to be oily and mediocre so far but, after a long, hot day of walking in the Forbidden City, we were happy just to sit.

We made a few last stops on the way back to our place, including the Beijing 2008 Olympic Flagship Store to stock up on official Olympics gear. The selection of Olympics merchandise was dizzying with everything from pens and stuffed animals to lavish Chinese vases with prices in the thousands of dollars (but priced in Yuan, of course). We scored a few t-shirts, then popped underground to the metro station and found our way back to the hostel with the ease of seasoned travelers. Our first day in Beijing was brilliant. We are fascinated by the Chinese culture and look forward to digging deeper into the psyche of this emerging economic powerhouse.

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