ENTER THE DRAGON

What did I want to do for my birthday?

As questions go it seemed fairly innocuous. How about going for a Chinese I said? Somehow though this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I pressed my nose against the glass and peered out into the inky darkness. Thirty thousand feet below me central Russia lay slumbering beneath a blanket of stars. I was headed for Beijing and a date with a duck.

Few things in life can prepare you for Beijing; everything about it is, well foreign. For centuries it was the centre of the Chinese universe, the sun around which the empire revolved. Established as a capital by Kublai Khan in 1264, today it still holds sway over the vast landmass that makes up the Peoples Republic of China, its directives as much a mystery to the peoples of its outlying provinces as they are to us. A sprawling mass of glass, concrete and humanity, hiding within it some of the finest examples of the Imperial Age left on earth.

Its streets are huge wide thoroughfares, dead straight and aligned along east-west and north-south lines. Branching off from these vast boulevards are networks of dark alleyways, or ‘hutongs’, which snake and twist away from this central grid, their narrow passageways crammed to overflowing with produce, people and livestock. My hotel was situated in the centre of a network of these alleyways, the streets around it a cacophony of noise, colour and smells. I wandered aimlessly, picking my way past stalls and carts creaking under the weight of people and produce. At my feet bags and buckets thrashed about wildly, their occupants, a bewildering mix of frogs, snakes and fish, all apparently desperate to add to the general melee and confusion. I allowed myself to be swept along on a wave of humanity. Movement in Beijing is a constant flow, a ceaseless river: as a space becomes available it is immediately filled, by a cart, a bicycle, a person. I flowed along with it, a stranger in an even stranger land.

The following morning dawned clear and bright. I intended to spend it exploring the delights of the Imperial Palace and the Forbidden City. When you consider the wanton destruction of so much of the majestic beauty of the Imperial Age by successive hordes of Japanese, Koumintang and Communists troops, it is a miracle that monuments such as the Imperial Palace remain at all. In the 1940s there were 8000 temples in old Peking, by the 1960s these had been reduced to just 150. Small wonder then that a jewel like the Forbidden City gets 10,000 visitors a day.

So named because for 500 years it was off limits to all but a privileged few, the Forbidden City is the largest and best-preserved collection of ancient buildings in China. Once home to two dynasties, the Ming and the Qing, it covers an area of some 720,000 square metres and contains 800 buildings. It is estimated that it takes 10 years to do a full renovation of the Imperial Place, by which time the whole process is ready to begin again. It is opulence on the grandest scale and from the moment I entered through the massive portal of the Wumen Gate and looked out across the massive courtyard towards the Three Great Halls at the heart of the city, I was spellbound.

Crossing the Golden Stream, shaped to represent a tartar bow and spanned by five marble bridges, I wandered into the heart of the city. The Hall of Supreme Harmony is the most important and largest of the Three Great Halls. Raised on a marble terrace and originally built in the 15th century, it was used for ceremonial occasions. The entrance to the great hall is flanked by two huge incense burners and inside the hall is a fabulously decorated Dragon Throne from where the emperor would preside over his prostrate court as they banged their heads on the floor nine times. The western and eastern sides of the city house what were once the living quarters of the Emperor and his entourage. These buildings, containing once the libraries and temples, theatres and gardens of the great city, now house museums of bronzes, ceramics and Ming dynasty art. The exceptions are the Western Palaces, formally the living quarters of the empress and the concubines, which have remained untouched and today display the finery and trappings of a court of immense wealth and power.

The northern end of the Forbidden City is taken up with the Imperial Garden, a quiet haven of 7000 sq. metres, containing walkways and pavilions that are set in a classical landscape. I sat there, bathed in the glow of the late afternoon sun, taking in the decadent splendour of a bygone age and I could possibly be sitting there still were it not for the fact that I wanted to see Tiananmen Square before heading back to the hotel. Tiananmen is the heart of Beijing, a vast concrete desert, bounded on all sides by memorials to the past and present. Chairman Mao lies in state in his marble mausoleum here and every day crowds flock to gaze upon his corpse, or stand before the Monument to the Heroes. Much of the world still identifies Tiananmen with the ill-fated pro democracy riots of 1989 and the harrowing scenes of troops and tanks pitted against unarmed students, but as I stood here now it was difficult to equate the scene before me with those images of two decades ago. All around me families were making the most of the rapidly disappearing summer, children played and laughed and above my head huge kites of dragons and eagles swooped and spun in a colourful dance across the sky. My plan had been to stay and watch the flag lowering ceremony at sunset, before heading back, but the overwhelming mass of humanity flooding into the square made me think again. I left the square to the growing masses and headed back to the hotel.

Early mornings in Beijing are a time for the good citizens of this vibrant metropolis to indulge their passions before beginning the rigours of the day. So the following morning found me creeping out of the hotel and into the waking city just as the sun was beginning to rise. I was headed for Tiantin Park in search of culture, excitement and ballroom dancing! Tiantin means Temple of Heaven and the park itself is widely regarded by many as the perfection of Ming architecture. It was conceived as the meeting point of heaven and earth and for 500 years was the heart of imperial ceremony and symbolism. Once considered sacred ground it would have meant certain death to enter. Nowadays the price is slightly less exacting at just a few yuan.

It was a strangely discordant collection of sights and sounds that greeted me as I entered the park. Even at this hour it was full of people. Old men strolled past, deep in conversation, their hands tightly gripping bamboo cages that echoed to the warbling tones of solitary songbirds. Beside me an old man went through the unhurried trance like forms of Tai Chi, his sword reflecting the morning sun as it cut a gentle curve through the still air. Next to him middle aged couples dipped and spun to the distorted strains of a waltz. Suddenly the air was filled with the screeching wails of Chinese Opera and all around me the park seemed to come alive with movement and noise. Shaken from my reverie I moved off to explore the park.

Set in an area of some 270 hectares, the Temple of Heaven is a bewildering array of colour and symbolism. The four gates that lead into the park are set on the four compass points and the structures within are a numerologists dream. The temple buildings are all circular and set onto square bases, deriving from the ancient Chinese belief that heaven was round and the earth square. The centrepiece of the whole complex is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, a magnificent structure mounted on a three-tiered marble terrace and topped by three blue tiled roofs. It was here that the Emperor came to pray for the coming harvests and seek divine approval for the coming year. What makes this structure even more remarkable is the fact that it is made entirely of wood and stands without the aid of either nails or cement. I spent the morning visiting the buildings that make up the rest of the complex; The Imperial Vault of Heaven, The Round Altar, whose entire geometry revolves around the number nine (considered a divine number amongst the Imperial Chinese) and the Echo Wall, said to be a perfect whispering gallery, although somewhat difficult to prove amidst the general noise and chatter.

From Tiantin I headed across Beijing to the Lama Temple, which, according to my guidebook, was not only the most colourful temple in Beijing, but also the most renowned Tibetan Buddhist temple in China. Originally the former domicile of the Emperor Yong Zheng, it became a temple, as was the custom, upon his improved social status. In 1744 it was converted into a lamasery, becoming the residence for large numbers of monks from Mongolia and Tibet. Miraculously it survived the Cultural Revolution intact and today serves as an active Tibetan Buddhist Centre, although that is a somewhat contentious title, given the current Chinese policy towards Tibet.

Politics aside though and irrespective of any religious authenticity, the Lama Temple cannot be faulted as an aesthetic experience. Everything about it is a visual delight; its gardens, its frescoes, its tapestries and the heavy smell of incense all lend a magical quality to the place. At the heart of the temple is an 18 metre high statue of the Maitreya Buddha in his Tibetan form. Sculpted from a single piece of sandalwood and clothed in yellow satin, it is a truly inspiring sight. My personal favourites though were the Nandikesvaras, the copulating figures that had earned the lamasery its reputation as China’s most illustrious sex manual, one used to educate the sons of the emperor himself.

All this culture was making me hungry and I did, after all, have a birthday appointment to keep. The Chinese love to eat and can certainly boast one of the finest cuisines in the world. Beijing duck is probably the capital’s most famous culinary offering. The unfortunate duck is first force fed a diet of grain and soybean paste to fatten it up. Then it is lacquered with molasses, pumped with air, filled with boiling water, dried and finally roasted over a fruitwood fire. At some stage during this process one would also hope that it is killed. The whole process may appear a touch barbaric, especially if you are a duck, but the end result, I can assure you, is delicious. I feasted on duck soup, tender strips of duck with plum sauce and crepes, fortune cookies and Chinese beer, although I am pretty sure that the last two were not directly attributable to the duck.

And so ended my first couple of days. I still had the spectacles of the Summer Palace and the Great Wall to see, but as for the delights of Beijing itself, well it had certainly not disappointed. On the surface it is a city like many others, drab and dirty, a seething mass of humanity. But within its vast boulevards and crammed hutongs it hides a breathtaking array of beauty, reminders of an age of opulence and splendour at odds with its communist doctrines. It is a living paradox and with the onset of a new Imperial age for China and its headlong rush into the 21st century let us hope that these reminders of its previous golden age are not forgotten.

© Trevor Gibbs 2009