Tiananmen, Forbidden City, Great Wall at Badaling

7-10-10

11:37 PM

Today I went out on our first tour with the group, planned by the PKU-JRI staff. We went to first Tiananmen Square, then the Forbidden City, and lastly the Great Wall at Badaling, which was coincidentally also in ascending order of awesomeness. Tiananmen was miserable; it was pouring rain and nothing was visible except for empty stone and large portraits of Mao. There was a line of about three hours to view the embalmed body of Mao Zedong; we did not wait in it as we had scheduled other places to go. It is not a good sign when the most interesting aspect of a tourist attraction is a dictator’s corpse.

The history, which I read about before going, was interesting. Google China and Google HK/USA/etc. show dramatically different results when you Google Image Tiananmen; outside of China you see the iconic tank and protestor image; inside China you see… stone walls and portraits of Mao. Apparently Tiananmen was significant in the past as well; supposedly the ancients believed Tiananmen was along the central meridian of China and therefore along the center of the world. Photographs here were generally boring and of a wall of rain.

Forbidden City: gorgeous; difficult to picture in full Imperial glory, crowded. I’ve included a photograph but really I felt like my mind constructed something very similar from photographs. I felt that Anchee Min’s Empress Orchid captured it better for me, paradoxically, than seeing the ruins. Is that wrong? I kind of doubted that the restoration was historically accurate, from what I saw, which made it difficult for me to imagine what it might have been like.

Great Wall: by now it had stopped raining and I had started thoroughly enjoying myself. We hiked up and along it after taking ‘toboggans’ up to the top (a kind of modified amusement park ride-type wagon). About a million Chinese people asked Drew, Katherine, and Cunning if they could take pictures with them; apparently Badalang is more popular with Chinese than with foreigners. I will have to filch photographs from Katherine of this, as my camera was full. It was foggy and absolutely lovely. It was difficult to see far though; I would like to visit again when my family arrives.

We also went to a jade factory and a silk factory; they were both kind of touristy junk.