In 2002 I went to China for a couple of weeks to visit my friend Fi. This article is a lightly-edited version of some emails I sent to friends while there, accompanied here and there by photos.
(Message sent Friday 22 November 2002)
Hi all. Just a quick note to let you know what I've been up to in China. I guess it'll come as no surprise to hear that the highlight so far has been the Great Wall. Fi and I and a bunch of other westerners spent four hours or so hiking along it from Jinshanling to Simatai on my second day. Along this stretch some parts have been repaired as recently as 20 years ago, but other parts are hundreds, maybe thousands of years old.
I was astounded by how rough and bleak the terrain was - row upon row of jagged ridges fading off into the distance. It almost made you wonder why they bothered with the Wall - if the Mongolians could march an army over such terrain, how much would a little wall slow them down? It also meant that the hike along the wall was much more strenuous than I expected - sometimes the slope reached 70 degrees. The day was fine and clear, although very cold, with patches of snow in the shadows. It was a great day and I had a blast. There are lots of other sections of the Wall you can walk along, and so I expect to see more of the Wall before I leave.
I bought a book off a hawker, and on the first page is a certificate naming me as a "Plucky Hero" for having walked the Wall!
On the trip out to the Wall we started noticing little road-side stalls once we were clear of Beijing. The fare was the same in each: a selection of (we think) hares, pheasants, and fish. The hares and pheasants were hung in the traditional way, but for some reason the fish were always hung by the dorsal fin, so there would be these racks like grotesque mobiles, each horizontal fish spinning gently in the wind.
It has to be said that Beijing is not a pleasant place to live. It is big and ugly and dull and grey and difficult to get around. The immense bigness of everything is stupefying. Roads six or eight lanes wide, buildings that take up entire blocks, squares and parks that you could fit half of New Zealand in. Even on "fine" days the crud in the air is so thick that until 10am or later you can look straight at the sun without discomfort. The traffic is bad, but not as bad as I expected. At the intersections cars and buses and bicycles and people mix and weave in a chaotic but fairly good-natured muddle. Traffic lights are seen as helpful suggestions only, and during peak times men wave red flags and blow whistles to try and impose some order.
One thing came as a big surprise - the friendliness. I realise now that before I came I was expecting a constant air of repression and depression that I associate with communism, that I would have to be fearful of the Police, that people would be downcast and afraid. But it's not so.
I've been really impressed by how well Fi has adapted to this huge and daunting place. It's very cool listening to her talk in Chinese to Taxi drivers and other locals.
In the evenings (and, so I'm told, the mornings) the people gather in the parks to play cards, fly kites, do tai chi, ballroom dance, walk backwards, play twangy instruments, sing twangy songs and do other gentle activities. By far my favourite of these activities is a neat game that's a combination of dancing and tennis. The two player-dancers have a racket in each hand. The rackets are the size of a tennis racket but have solid paddles. The players pass the ball back and forwards between them, but it's not just a matter of whacking the ball back to your partner. The rule seems to be: no abrupt changes in direction for the ball. You control the ball as it comes in to you, guiding it along a gentle curve and sending it back to your partner with a balletic spin. The two players constantly move around each other, spinning and bobbing and moving their arms around in flowing arcs while the ball traces a graceful pattern in the air between and around them. It's mesmerising, so much so that it comes as a shock when someone misses the ball and it thunks to the ground.
There is a fair amount of English use around, although of course mostly in the touristy areas. Most of the English is bad English, but there is also lots of quaint English. My favourite example so far is a sign on one of the walls surrounding the Forbidden City - it read, "Writing on this wall is a breach of civility."
The most interesting exchange with a hawker so far went like this:
He: Sex?
Me: What?
He: Do you want sex?
Me: What?
He: Do you want sex?
Me: No thanks.
He: DVD?
Random interesting event: when I was at the Summer Palace, a man was writing long lines of Chinese characters on a patch of concrete, using a long-handled brush and water for paint. By the time he had started on the fifth line the first had entirely disappeared...
Well, there's lots more to report, but that will do for now. Tonight Fi and I and two other Kiwis are off on an overnight train trip to Xi'an to see the Terracotta Army.
(Message sent Thursday 28 November 2002.)
On Friday evening Fi and I and two other Kiwis (Donna and Ester) set out for Xi'an by train. We travelled in the class known as "hard-sleeper", which involves little cubicles, open to the corridor, each holding six bunks. I wasn't expecting a very nice experience, but the quarters, while cramped, were fairly clean and the ride fairly smooth. We all managed to sleep well in our little bunks (indeed, Ester declared that it was the best sleep she'd had for a long time!), and in the end the 14 hour trip went by in a flash.
As we pulled into Xi'an at about 7am Saturday morning Ester pointed out in puzzlement that it should have been lighter outside than it was. The mystery was solved when we pushed our way past the beggars and the hawkers out of the train station into what passes for air in Xi'an. It was the worst air that I've ever had the misfortune to breathe. The extent of the pollution was astounding - look any small distance down the street and the buildings quickly fade into the fug. We found out when we returned to Beijing that the reason Xi'an air is so bad is that everybody uses coal - in Beijing it's been mostly replaced by gas. We only had to put up with it for two days - I really pity the poor sods who live their whole lives in that shit. Later that day we climbed the Bell Tower, and we could even see the crud in the air when we wandered into the museum on the top floor. From the Bell Tower we looked across through the ghastly air to a huge shopping complex. It was shaped like a stack of vast, faceless cylinders, like a pyramid of cans in a supermarket. Across the front of this building was a huge flat screen, 10 or maybe 20 meters across, playing non-stop adverts. It was a nightmare vision of the future - something straight out of Bladerunner.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. After getting clear of the railway station and fighting our way through the insane traffic we checked into our hotel. This hotel is structured in the way many Chinese hotels are - plush, opulent foyer and reception fronting grotty, dirty, damp little rooms. The toilet was sanitised for our protection by the sole expedient of putting a piece of paper across it saying "sanitised for your protection." As Fi said, "To the Chinese, facade is everything." Still, the room served us well - it was cheap and conveniently located.
After dumping our stuff in the room we ventured back out into the soup to try and get someone to take us to the Terracotta Army. We had no lack of offers, and with Fi as our chief negotiator we were soon bumping our way out to the site in a mini-van. On the way out our guide turned around and said to me, "When I first saw you I thought that you were the boss, and these three your companion-clerks." Now I'm not sure what a "companion-clerk" is, but I suspect that having three would be no bad thing. It was certainly better that the guy on the train on the way home who asked me if the three women were my daughters!
The Terracotta Army is wonderful. I had no idea how big the main pit was - 210m by 60m, covered over by an aeroplane hangar of a roof. The most impressive bits of the army only take up a small fraction of the pit, but they are really neat to see - hundreds of life-size terracotta soldiers, with lots of variety in features and expressions and clothes and stances.
On the site was a thing called "circle-vision", which was very cool. It was a huge round room with ten large screens on the walls above the heads of the audience. Between each pair of screens was a projector displaying images on one of the screens on the other side of the room. As the film progressed you could wander around the room or just turn your head and watch different aspects of what was going on. The system really came into its own in the battle scenes - you had fighting and chaos going on all around you, quite literally.
We returned to Xi'an and visited the Bell Tower as mentioned above. We listened politely to the performance the bell-ringers put on until we couldn't stand the clangy cacophony any longer, and fled to McDonalds for coffee. Restored, we headed off to visit a Chinese mosque, but we didn't make it. On the way we ventured into a lovely market, and spent a happy hour pottering about buying trinkets. Fi has turned into a real haggle-demon. She loves the banter and the bluffing and the to-and-fro. She doesn't like performing to an audience though, so when I couldn't get something cheap enough I went for a wander while Fi wrestled this big ugly guy down to a very reasonable price on my behalf.
Eventually we returned to our hotel room to discuss what we were going to do the next day. There are several standard tourist destinations within Xi'an, but Fi had done them before and said that they weren't much to look at. I had heard that there were "pyramids" nearby (including one claimed to be the biggest in the world - a claim I have now heard about three different pyramids!). I wanted to go out to some of the tombs north-west of Xi'an to see if any of these were the pyramids I was after. I was a little hesitant to drag the others along in case it turned out to be a drag, but they all decided it was worth a try, so Fi rang the same guy who had taken us to the Terracotta Army and arranged a trip for the next day.
Thankfully the air was much nicer on the second day. Our guide picked us up and soon we were off towards the tombs. Now the guidebooks have only very sparse information on the tombs, and I wasn't sure what we were actually going to see, or whether you could actually go inside them or anything. As we neared the place, the guide asked me if we wanted to go to the "Underground Palace" or the mountain. I said both, since they both sounded promising. Shortly we arrived at the "Underground Palace." There was a little confusion over tickets - it seemed they either cost 20 or 21 RMB. Not knowing what the difference was and not wanting to miss out on anything I bought the 21 RMB ticket only to find that the only difference was that the 21 RMB ticket was also a handy postcard with enough postage to get, say, clear across Xi'an! Anyway, into the Underground Palace we went. Oh boy. Where to begin? The palace turned out to be a long dimly-lit corridor with large chambers off to each side, and was underground only in the sense of having no windows. In each of the side chambers was enacted some scene from the life of (we presume) Empress Wu (who ruled around 650 AD), using unconvincing manikins.
When we got to the middle of the palace we encountered a room with a statue of the Buddha in it. But this was no ordinary Buddha. When our guide went down on his knees on the prayer mat, a necklace of red lights around the Buddha lit up, a loud speaker started blaring out some Chinese chant, and a nearby manikin started hitting a pot with a stick. This manikin's head also moved from side to side, but it hadn't been adjusted properly and it graunched around far too far for a normal human head, and seemed like something out of The Exorcist. We stood around stupefied as our guide went through his (apparently quite serious) prayers while all this dreadful stuff was going on around him. His devotions completed, the guide stood up, and the necklace lights went off, the chanting stopped, and the manikin stopped banging the pot and gave his neck a rest.
Further along the corridor we reached the burial chamber itself. The sarcophagus was about the size of a double bed, and inside were two manikin figures lying covered in beads. We're not sure who they were supposed to represent, since Wu out-lived her Emperor husband by decades. Around the sarcophagus was a little wooden track with a boat on it, clearly designed to go round and round on the track, but it didn't work for some reason. Also the lights in this room were completely off, the only light coming from the exit door, so were weren't at all sure what was going on.
We stumbled back out into the sunlight, a little dazed and not at all sure what we had just seen. I was afraid of getting lynched by my companion-clerks, since it was possible that we had just driven two hours out of Xi'an to see this horror. Fi thinks it was a Disneyified reproduction of Empress Wu's tomb, but where the actual tomb was/is I couldn't say.
Fortunately there was more to see, and the next stop was at the tomb of "Nasty Prince Yi De." We called him this because it said so on the sign outside the entrance. In fact the "nasty" epithet was just a case of unfortunate hyphenation: the actual word was "Dynasty", with the "Dy-" on the line above. This is doubly unfortunate for poor old Nasty Prince Yi De, since it seems that he was flogged to death at age 19 for daring to suggest that maybe official corruption wasn't such a good idea after all.
The tomb consisted of a long descending corridor and a huge stone sarcophagus underneath an earth mound which may or may not have been one of the pyramids I was after. The paintings on the corridor walls were badly faded, but you could still make out the scenes of courtly life from 1400 years ago without difficulty. It was no-where near as interesting as tombs in Egypt say, but fascinating none-the-less.
Next stop was the tomb of an Emperor called Qian. This must have been a grand affair in its day, but there's not much to see now. A processional way leads up between two artificial hills (called "Nipple Peak East" and "Nipple Peak West" - I kid you not). Acting as an honour guard along the way are statues of horses and ostriches. Next comes a series of large stone stern-faced guardians with swords. I really liked these guys - they've been guarding the tomb for hundreds of years with only a crack or two and a patina of lichen to give away their age.
Next comes the 61 headless foreign dignitaries. I don't know what the deal with these guys is. Each life-sized statue seems unique, and I suspect they represent 61 actual people, but all of them have had their heads smashed off. I have no idea if this was done as part of the funereal rites or much later.
It seems you can't go into the tomb itself - whether this is because it has never been excavated or it is too dangerous or just hasn't been found yet I don't know.
At one stage we got surrounded by a persistent bunch of children trying to sell us things that nobody wanted. Fi had fun talking to them, at one stage frightening one by telling her (in Chinese) that there was a tiger behind her!
On the way back into Xi'an the guide asked us if we would mind if we picked up his two young children on the way back into town. We said that was fine, so we stopped in one of the satellite communities. Our guide ushered us into a bridal shop of all things and left us there to wait while he went off to fetch his kids. Our guide's brother was getting married, and he and his wife-to-be and their entourage were just one group of several bridal parties getting dressed up and having their photos taken at the time. (In China the "wedding photos" are taken several weeks before the actual event). So we sat there, four Kiwis in our boots and polar fleeces, dusty and disheveled from the day, while all this finery swirled around us. All in all it was a perfectly surreal end to a splendidly bizarre day.
Well that will have to do for now - Fi and I are off to see the acrobats now.
(Message sent Tuesday 10 December 2002)
Hi all. I've been back from China for nearly a week now, but I thought I'd send one last message since my other emails didn't cover much of what I got up to.
My second-favourite site, after the Great Wall, was the Summer Palace. I visited twice, once by myself and once with Fi and Ester. It is a park based around a vast lake, and was built to give the emperors a cool, shady place to hang out during the hot summer months. The thing is, the lake is artificial. It would seem that one day some Emperor woke up and said, "I'll have a lake right about .... there." Apparently 100,000 labourers were employed in digging this big hole. The spoil was dumped in a big pile at the north of the complex, and this is known as Longevity Hill. One can't help wondering how many labourers died building Longevity Hill. Various pavilions and gates and open corridors and winding paths were built on the property for the emperors to gad about in.
My favourite features are a boat that never goes anywhere made out of marble, a lovely graceful seventeen-arch bridge, and a causeway that runs the length of the lake with six or seven bridges, each of different design, along its length. At the south end of the causeway we stopped to watch people go for a swim in the near-freezing water. To the Chinese drinking cold or even room-temperature water is bad for your health, but plunging your whole body into freezing water is good for you. Go figure.
Speaking of freezing, the whole lake was frozen over, although only just. There was a magical moment the second time I visited, perhaps the best single moment of the whole trip. Ester and Fi and I had just arrived at the Palace, and we went to the lake to see the ice. As we arrived at the shore something had set up a slight swell in the water, and so the ice on top of the water was being forced into waves, which in turn meant that the ice was breaking. The cool thing was the sound - it was a soft, twittering tinkling kind of sound, "like a thousand birds singing" I think Fi said.
The Old Summer Palace, quite close to the Summer Palace, is a very strange place. Once again it is a large park, this time with lots of connected lakes rather than one large one, but early in the 1900s a couple of invading armies did a good job of smashing all the buildings to bits. The Chinese never bothered to rebuild, so nearly all the original buildings are either piles of rubble or just foundations. The ruins of the "European Palaces" are fun to wander around, with large chunks of marble from once-splendid buildings heaped about the place.
In the middle of one of the ruins is a very odd upside-down stepped pyramid with grass growing on top. Quite what purpose it served I have no idea.
At some stage some bright spark decided to use the land for a really bad Disneyland kind of thing. So in one place there is this sad collection of rusty broken-down fairground rides. Being winter the whole place was closed, so it seemed like a ghost town. In one corner, just past the bumper cars, a MiG jet fighter sat forlornly, its tires flat. In the middle of the complex was a tilted-over statue of Snow White, her colours faded, the pool around her empty apart from the leaves. And all this where once emperors wiled away the hours. It was all very peculiar. But peculiarer was to come.
Further into the park I came across a sad isolated attempt at a side-show. There were two gongs hanging behind holes in a piece of wood. I think you were supposed to throw things at the gongs. The place was open for business, but there were no punters. Opposite this was a rickety Indiana Jones bridge going out to an island in the middle of one of the lakes. The bridge had been made by putting a whole lot of oil drums in the water, lashing them together side-by-side, and covering the surface with a corduroy of sticks. I crossed with some degree of trepidation, to find a small island covered with wooden totems. Most of them looked African, but some were definitely Polynesian, with one part of the island looking a little like a marae.
The totems had been plonked down higgledy-piggledy all over the island interspersed by straggly trees. Some totems had fallen over, and most were split and faded from the sun. Carved lumps of marble - presumably from the buildings that originally stood there - had also been scattered tastefully about the place.
Around the perimeter of the island they had constructed things that I think were supposed to be reproductions of African tribal huts, but which were in fact just crap shacks.
As happened quite often in China, I found myself wandering about in a slight daze going "HUH?!" There were no explanations in English, and the guidebooks didn't mention the place, so I have no idea what was going on.
Just before I left China Fi and I went to see some Beijing Opera. We were a little worried about what we were getting ourselves into, as many people said that the performances went on for five or six hours, but fortunately the show we caught only lasted an hour.
The show actually consisted of two unrelated pieces. The first involved a once-mighty king, recently vanquished on the battlefield, drowning his sorrows in his tent. His consort gives him a a pep-talk, and convinces him to take on the world once again. Then she kills herself, so as not to be a burden on him.
After this piece a woman came on stage and said something like, "The next piece is more interesting." It was called something like "Lord Zu Fights Everyone Else." It involved the hero fighting a horde of yellow-pyjamaed foes, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes in a mass brawl. The fighting was stylised and frequently involved somersaults and tumbling and other cool stuff.
The singing consisted of high-pitched slowly modulating sounds, while the orchestral accompaniment consisted mostly of cymbal clashes.
One thing I particularly liked was that the audience sat at tables, and we were served tea and nibbles. Also we were encouraged to clap and shout whenever we wanted to, but as the audience consisted of only around ten Westerners, not much of this happened. But it was much better than the Western don't-dare-move-a-muscle audience protocol.
So it was a good experience, but I can't see myself getting a subscription ticket.
