The ride from the cruise ship terminal to central Beijing is almost three hours, and prior to that we all had to go through a somewhat disorganized feeling immigration process at 6:30 in the morning. This after the Murder Mystery the night before for at least three of us. Needless to say there were a lot of sleepy people on the that bus this morning. Despite the aid of several shots of caffeine, it was difficult to keep my eyes open. Even though I was interested in what the guide was trying to tell us about population stations and historical facts, I couldn’t focus my energy enough to decipher the information through his accent. I wasn’t the only one. Eventually the poor guy got the message, thanked us for our wavering attention and fell silent; letting us slide in our headphones and fall asleep for the rest of the outgoing trip.
You must have all not gotten much sleep last night
As it turned out, most of us were glad of the cat nap. We had a long day of walking ahead of us.
One thing I constantly forget about in China is the insane level of pollution. I know that I am extremely lucky to live in one of the cleanest areas in the world; the thing is, while my mind is always (or at least always tries to be) willing to experience new things, my sinuses are dead set against smog. The second I got off the bus at the Temple of Heaven my eyes started to sting and water and by the time we made it to lunch my throat had started to feel like it was made of sandpaper.
Sadly, I sometimes agree with my body’s rejection of China. While I find ancient china fascinating, intriguing and enthralling to learn about, I’m far from a fan of the modern day country. There are reasons for this of course, but this is neither the time or the place to air them, not where there are much better and more interesting things to talk about.
The Temple of Heaven rears blue and gold against the constant curtain of the ever-present grey haze of smog over Beijing. Many make the mistake of assuming that this is a Buddhist temple, but it isn’t, it’s Taoist. Once the Emperor knelt here to pray to his divine father for rain and good harvest. Today it’s a Mecca for tourism, the roars of its golden dragons silenced by time. I wonder if the ancestors still watch this place.
We spent only forty-five minutes in the shadow of the Temple. Not nearly enough to truly connect to the spirit of the place. Tour days are always a bit of a whirlwind, and we had a lot to cover in a short period of time.
Lunch, as it turned out, was not at all what we anticipated. We were told that we were getting a packed lunch, and since packed lunches in china are not always what many of us would considered ‘appropriate’ (crew office’s term, not mine), the ship’s HRM had actually arranged for each of us to have a lunch to take with us on the bus. As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Lunch was a proper restaurant, with a giant lazy susan in the middle of the table so you could spin the dishes you wanted towards you. In the spirit of ‘some things never change’, the first platter to empty was the sweet and sour chicken and the last to go was the fried rice.
We barely had time to let our lunch settle before our tour guide scurried us back to the bus (sometimes I think they cram too much into these tours! It feels like you spend a lot of your day running), so that we could journey to what could rightfully be called the most famous square in China.
Tiananmen Square, dominated by the massive portrait of Chairman Mao (which has just recently undergone its annual repainting), looms as large in life as it does in the pages of National Geographic. The remains of Mao himself lie in state, preserved in a crystal coffin, in the mausoleum at the opposite end of the square from the actual Tiananmen building. Thousands every day throng to pay their respects to the founder of the People’s Republic even now. We, however, are not among them as the visiting hours for the day were over (the shrine is only open for a few hours every morning). Besides, our visit to the square was little more than a whistle stop, and that leaves little time for much more than taking a few symbolic ‘yes I was here, I saw it, I stood on historic ground’ pictures before the bus once again rumbles on.
Leaving Tiananmen Square behind us we weaved out way through traffic to our final destination.
I’m ashamed to say that the only time I had ever seen or heard of the Forbidden City before I started travelling was playing Sid Myer’s Civilization as a kid (it reduced corruption in your civilization by adding a second capital…er…yeah), so I was going in on this one somewhat blind as to what to expect. For once I had no history books memorized, and not a single art history class to back me up. I hadn’t even though to look it up in my National geographic database before I left the ship (d’oh!).All I had was a picture from a postcard I’d seen somewhere, and the knowledge of the purpose the building had once served. I didn’t know what to expect.
The Forbidden City is huge. Actually it’s something beyond huge, it’s massive. Without a guide it would be frighteningly easy to get lost in the sprawling maze of red buildings and golden roofs. While the complex feels oddly barren and empty under the constantly led-grey modern sky, it’s actually quite easy to imagine what this place must have looked like when it actually was the residence of the Emperor. When everything was lush and luxurious and full of royal splendor; and only one male over the age of 16 lived within the walls. That would have been the emperor himself. Today there is nothing left of that but the structures of the buildings themselves, while a few of the Imperial gardens have been upkept and preserved for tourists, I’m sure at one point the vast courtyards contained more than just empty cobblestones for the gold dragons of the roof to stare at. I’m sure those dragons have seen much, but they do not see fit to speak now.
The setting sun seemed to bleed gold over the roof of the Imperial Palace by the time we made our weary way back to the bus.
The timing of our return trip meant that we had to battle with the monster that is Beijing’s rush hour traffic. Trust me, this makes any commute anywhere else (except perhaps India, because traffic in India is simply sucidial any time of day), look tame. For one thing schools in Beijing let out at 5pm, so everyone is picking up their children, for another everyone is heading home from work. In a city this densely over populated, rush ‘hour’ is actually much more than several hours long. Making our way through the streets of the city it is easy to see why Beijing still enforces a single child policy (though our guide told us that many families today are choosing to have no children at all). While there isn’t much in the way of pedestrian crowds that we could see from the bus, the vehicle traffic was bumper to bumper. There of course lies the main cause of the city’s smog problem, their fuel doesn’t burn as cleanly as ours, and even though the government knows that’s the problem they are somehow unable to fix it.
Anyway, as the streets crawled past us on the way home, I realized what it is that unsettles me so much about China: there’s no such thing as a blue sky here. I can’t imagine living in a place, raising my children in a place, where the sky was always a sickly shade of grey. Where someone can go their whole life never knowing the joy of spring blue and sunshine.
Honestly, as I made my way through the tourist thronged streets of the Forbidden City, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like when the concubines looked out their windows at a sky that their descendents may never see the like of…