Being in Beijing: The Thrills of Tianenman Square and the Forbidden City

Sunday, August 13, 2018

Being in Beijing: The Thrills of Tianenman Square and the Forbidden City

When we awoke at 8.00 am (after setting our phone alarms), we showered and made the discovery that our hotel was set up beautifully in a traditional ‘hutong’—Beijing-style housing built around a common garden-courtyard with rooms on four sides of it. The garden was beautiful and filled with greenery, statuary, fountains, etc. Our room was called The Chairman’s Room and was filled with objects related to the reign and life of Chairman Mao Tse Dong who led the Chinese Revolution and is considered the Father of Modern China. There were books including his famous Red Book which contained the basic tenets of his philosophy derived under inspiration from Lenin and Marx. There were dozens of ceramic figurines that had Maoist connections as well as mugs, plates, etc. that bore his image. A superb-strange place overall and filled with clutter.  In fact, there was barely room for us to lay down our things.  The entire collection had been amassed by a retired American diplomat named Laurence Brahm who made it his life’s work to collect items associated with the Cultural Revolution. The Red Capital Residence Hotel belongs to him—and he has found the perfect space in which to exhibit all his wares. In the Reception area, there are sofas and chairs that were once used during important business meetings and discussions in the bygone 1960s’ era. The bathroom was equally bizarre with the craziest decor—again Maoist elements mixed with Victorian decorative panels and stained glass. There was a stone floor for showering with rubber bathroom slippers adding a traditional Chinese touch. I had found this place through Lonely Planet and it turned out to be one of the quirkiest places in which I have ever lived, 

Breakfast that followed soon was grand. There was yoghurt, fruit, hard boiled eggs (eggs in every form are a Chinese fixture for breakfast, as I discovered very quickly), toast, etc. Frank Wang looked after us so well. After eating our fill, we got directions from him on how to get to the subway station—which was at least 20 minutes away (very inconvenient). However, once we got there, we figured out the system really quickly since the stations were also marked in English. Everything is mechanized and we soon discovered that China spent 4 trillion dollars on infrastructure during the Beijing Olympics of 2008 in order to attract foreign investment.  It seems to be a move that has paid off handsomely. They are vast, spotlessly clean, clearly marked and very inexpensive—certainly better than anything we can find in New York. On our way to the subway station, we also discovered that the entire street was taken over by hutongs—a whole long row of them—in which local Beijing natives still live. The main road was rather busy and filled with shops but all signage is only in Chinese.   

First things first: there are two main things to be seen while in Beijing—the famous Forbidden City and the Park of the Heavenly Temple which contains the Temple itself that has become iconic. There is also the Great Wall of China which lies outside the city limits. We devoted today to the former, the Imperial City or the Forbidden City—so-called because until the Revolution, when China was still ruled by a monarchy, only members of the royal family could enter the gates. Everyone else could be executed for venturing into this territory. 

We had tried to sign up for a conducted tour to the Great Wall en route to the subway station—but we had drawn a blank. We decided instead to try to get there on our own using public transport. By the time we entered the subway train, we discovered that all of China was on the move. We had arrived in the country at the very time when the schools are closed (July and August) and Chinese families value their family time enormously. They spend all their free time with their kids and loyally patronize all the local places of interest. Thus, while in most other countries, local people rarely venture into their tourist sites, in China, the bulk of the crowd is local. We also made the discovery that July and August are two of the hottest, most humid, months in China. Everywhere we went, we were subjected to merciless, unmitigated heat which, combined with the humidity, made for thousands of hot, moist bodies! Not a very appealing image, to be sure.

In the notorious Tiananmen Square:

By the time we spilled out of the (thankfully air-conditioned) subway car and joined thousands of Chinese as they moved en masse towards the Forbidden City, we knew to simply go with the flow. All roads seems to lead to the huge empty space in front of the main entrance of the Forbidden City—the infamous Tiananmen Square. Thousands of people were already there when we arrived. It was fun to actually find ourselves in the space we had seen for years on TV. It is one of the largest squares I have seen and surrounded on three sides by official buildings including the National Museum of China, Chairman Mao’s Mausoleum, a flag pole and platform on which official flag-hoisting occurs, and a couple of propagandist sculptural works that marked the People’ Revolution. We did not have the time to enter the interior of each of these buildings as we wanted to spend more time in the Forbidden City. But we did roam at will around it, stopped frequently to take pictures and then resting to simply people-watch. The heat made us feel very enervated and we tended to flop down whenever we found a shady place to sit.

Next stop was the Forbidden City. To cross the huge and busy road that separates Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City, you need to use the underground passageway. We simply followed the crowd and found ourselves on the other side where we were promptly stopped by a tour tout pushing the sale of a conducted tour to the Great Wall. I seized upon the opportunity to see what she could offer as preliminary inquiries online at our hotel, made by Frank, had indicated that the Wall at two popular locations (Badaling and Muthialyu which were closest to Beijing) were both closed and would remain closed tomorrow. When the tout called Linda offered us a coach tour to Jinshanling, we grabbed the opportunity although it was more than two hours away and involved the most challenging climb up the Great Wall.  The tour cost us about 400 yuan each and would provide transport to and from the location with pick up from our hotel, entry fees to the Wall a luncheon and the services of an English speaking guide. We thought it was a steal. It would have been a shame to have come so close to the Wall and not had an occasion to both see and climb it. We paid her an advance of 100 yuan and were told that by 10.00 pm, someone would call our hotel to give us pick up information. We left feeling very pleased with ourselves for having found someone who could offer us a tour to the Great Wall—which, we realized later, was really far away from Beijing and not an easy item to plan and execute on our own.

Inside the Forbidden City:

We also realized that tickets to enter the various ‘Halls’ that comprise the Forbidden City are available online in advance. They do go quickly—which makes them highly coveted. But for those who have not obtained tickets online, you can strand in a line at 8.15 am each day to be given tickets for entry that same day. As we were going to the Great Wall the next day and had only that one day to cover Beijing, we did not have the luxury of obtaining tickets to enter each Hall and view the interiors. 

However, we followed the crowds as they poured into the Main Gates of the vast complex which is almost like a miniature city in itself. The huge portrait of Chairman Mao that we see in all TV coverage of Chinese politics was clearly visible as we entered while crossing a humpback bridge over a dry moat that would, once upon a time, have been filled with water.  Gigantic marble lions—one male, one female (in keeping with the principles of Ying and Yang) flanked the entrance. Once past the Main Door, we found ourselves in a massive courtyard with the grand four-storey Main building behind us and small rooms on each side of the wings that once housed the royal courtesans. We stopped in a souvenir shop that stood besides the post office to get a magnet and a post card and then we followed the crowds again to the next courtyard where we received a very good idea of the architectural principle on which the complex is based—we saw the same pattern in the temples we visited later on the trip. Each Hall is named  after one of the elements of Buddhism—a religion that China rejected after the Cultural Revolution of the early 1960s. 

Following the crowd again, we arrived at the Temple complex—it is evident that in contemporary times, many Chinese have resumed their belief in Buddhism as well as its practice. We saw hundreds of devotees in the various Buddhist temple complexes we visited during our travels.

Our exit from the Forbidden City was via the vast lake-like moat, where we bought ice-cream (mochi) on a stick—that is flanked on both sides by picturesque weeping willow trees. It made for a much longer walk back to the subway station but, in the process, we passed through a series of hutongs that continue to fascinate visitors. Dating from the 1600s, these structures have been converted into hotels (as was ours) but many continue to service the habitation needs of modern-day Beijingers. We made a swift detour inside one of them—the ones closest to the Forbidden City were once used exclusively by the ministers who governed the royal courts. 

By this time, the heat, the crowds and our lack of sleep had begun to take their toll on us. It did not take either of us much persuasion to return to the hotel where we hoped to get a bit more shut-eye as we felt severely sleep-deprived. Besides, the walk to and from our hotel to the subway station was really long. 

Back in our hotel, we took a nap and our showers and about 7.00 pm, on a recommendation from our receptionist Frank, we set out in search of dinner. He recommended a restaurant just 3 minutes from our hotel. It was called the Crescent Moon Restaurant and it had been listed in Lonely Planet as one of Beijing’s best restaurants. It turned out to be a Chinese Muslim restaurant—a rather rare find. Very young waitresses were dressed in pretty green shalwar khameez outfits and even though none of us had the language skills, we made ourselves understood. We started off with a huge family-size bowl of hot and sour soup that was very good indeed and went on to have a huge platter of shrimp-filled noodles.  The food was great. When we learned, the next day, that the place was famed for its lamb kebabs, we would go there again. 

It was only a two minute walk back to our hotel which was a great relief. We did not spend too much time awake because both of us were more than ready to tumble into bed at the end of a very fulfilling first day in China. We felt very proud of ourselves that we had navigated the subway system and had mixed fully with the local Chinese folk as we joined them in taking in their most significant historical treasures. 

Until tomorrow...