I lived for over a month in Beijing after my second year of uni. Nominally, I was here to do an "internship", to get some "work experience" with a consulting firm. A joke, truly, given my limited grasp of Chinese. In reality, I wanted to escape my little summer pocket of New Zealand, and I leapt at the chance to spend a wintry, smoggy season in the capital of the People’s Republic. The Forbidden City. After the fall of the final Qing dynasty, this restricted and walled palace complex, the largest of its kind in the world, opened its doors to the general public after five centuries. Gone were the eunuchs, the concubines, the courtly intrigue, the rites and rituals, and the illustrious strength of dragon rulers. After the ousting of Puyi and its conversion into a museum in 1925, this "city" became a frozen timepiece for the mighty tourist throngs, both Chinese and foreign, to march through. In the slideshow below: ceramics from across the expansive, nearly unfathomable, current of Chinese history. All those differing hues, dimensions, profiles. Such fantastically masterful pieces. I hungrily snap up photographs as I tour the museum wings of the Forbidden Palace. I glance at some other artefacts too, jewellery pieces, delicate goldwork, ornate sculptures, but no – it's the ceramics that I fall in love with. For me, the Forbidden City did not merely draw my attention to its intricate architectural layout, it seemed to command it with a booming announcement. Its yellow decorated roofs and marble bridges. Its glazed dragon tiles and red-walled pathways. This was a microcosm built by a civilisation that believed they were at the absolute centre of the universe. And it almost certainly was. For a time. Jingshan Park. Jingshan Park spreads its ancient trees over 23 hectares in the imperial heart. Sitting directly north of the Forbidden Palace, it is a venerable redoubt of huddled pines and raw-boned cypress. At that time of year, its flower beds were comatose, its fruit trees naked. The green of the branches was a murmur, an echo of woodlands on brighter days. I climbed to the top of one of its peaks and felt the dry, muted chill of the Beijing winter. From somewhere near the foot of the hill, I heard the ghostly rise of old men singing. I had no idea what they singing about. I have never known what old men speak about in Chinese. Beijing Zoo. I visited what I thought was the most depressing zoo in the world. I peered upon far-flung animals in their small and barren pens, their faces pressed against the dirty bars, biding their time in their chilly and unstimulating concrete worlds. What do they think they are waiting for? What could goodness could they possibly feel in this morose menagerie? But this was many years ago, back when the country was not nearly as sophisticated and wealthy as it is now. And change happens so fast in China. But has change come to these denizens? Are their existences better now? I hope so, I can hope so. The Summer Palace. Yí hé yuán, a royal retinue of halls, pavilions, lakes and gardens. We stood on the glassy face of Kunming Lake. Icy vapours rose over Longevity Hill. The Marble Boat was shackled to the frozen waters. The 17-Arch Bridge was made of pale, frosted moonstone. Like the palaces around it and the fallen social order that built it, the lake was but a memory of living water. Its flow and form were held captive, imprisoned by the endling months. My little cousin pattered on the ice next to me, cocooned in her pink puffer jacket. The lake ice groaned, like a persistent toothache. Blue lightning streaks revealed tension points. Another groan. A crunching sound beneath our feet. We were spooked and the two of us scampered for the safety of solid earth. In my mind, I was already jetting back to warmer climes.
And here sits Cairns, with its access to the world's largest coral reef system and the oldest rainforest on the planet... Striking sun and brooding skies, the muddy foreshore with squawking seabirds... I weather a storm, I amble tipsy an esplanade, I wait for my ride to its wilder nearby... Here glides the waterways where the saltwater crocodiles are... where a perfect apex predator waits, for everything, anything that moves, the flesh of fish, turtle, snake, bird, boar, human... We spot a few resting near the mangroves, where they've seen us before we've seen them... Here rambles the Daintree Rainforest... survivor of continental drift, older than the Amazon, a tropical bowl of biodiversity upon biodiversity... And Cape Tribulation, that remote splendid headland, where Cook ran aground and scribbled the words: "...here begun all our troubles". Green Island, surrounded by the great yet fragile coral reef and all its works... A short but nauseating ferry ride from Cairns... I snorkel among the marine life, I bask on the hot sands, I try to forget about my puking seasickness... But that was 2013 and now it's 2018 and I'm ready to brave the seas once more... I'm on a boat heading out to the Great Barrier Reef for three days and two nights of faraway scuba diving... I hope I'll see extraordinary, even fantastical things in its wondrous ocean.
Midnight on the Charles Bridge. The hawkers, pickpockets, and beggars of Prague have all retired for the night. Only lovers and street cleaners remain. All of us caught under the dead gaze of a menagerie of saints. A soft presence of snowfall is caught in the columns of street lights. The Turkish gentleman at the pizzeria on Karlova Street told me it snowed last winter for only thirty minutes. "It was boring", he said. I stand around on the bridge for a few more minutes, readying myself for something to happen. But nothing does. “Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist. “Just look at you,” said the supervisor, “why can’t you do anything else?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed. If had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.” — A Hunger Artist I once posted a review of Milan Kundera's “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on social media that pissed off a few people. The review simply said this: "As far as I can tell, the whole point of the novel is that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was great since it gave the intelligentsia of Prague lots of time to have sex with each other." I think I still stand by that review. “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is it that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.” — Before the Law Shown above: the infamous window where the defenestration of Prague occurred. It was here in 1618 that two Catholic Imperial governors were tossed out a window by Bohemian Protestants (supposedly landing in a pile of horse manure, which broke their fall), triggering the start of the Thirty Year War, a brutal European conflict that led to the death of a third of the population of the Holy Roman Empire. While they amused themselves in this way, it struck Mr. and Mrs. Samsa almost at the same moment how their daughter, who was getting more animated all the time, had blossomed recently, in spite of all the troubles which had made her cheeks pale, into a beautiful and voluptuous young woman. Growing more silent and almost unconsciously understanding each other in their glances, they thought that the time was now at hand to seek out a good honest man for her. — The Metamorphosis But how? But how what? But how what why? But how what why who? But how what why who when? But how what why who when where? It was the waiter at Charles Bridge with a digital camera at 2 o'clock because there was a turgid, nippy love triangle under a nearby lamppost. Turgid (adj.): 1610s, from Latin turgidus meaning "swollen, inflated, distended", and from turgere "meaning to swell", of forgotten origin. Earliest use in prose appears to date back to 1725. “Giddy up,” he says and claps his hands. The carriage is torn away, like a piece of wood in a current. I still hear how the door of my house is breaking down and splitting apart under the groom’s onslaught, and then my eyes and ears are filled with a roaring sound which overwhelms all my senses at once. But only for a moment. — A Country Doctor "Oi Prague, Czech it out!" said the tired old lark. What all the others had found in the machine, the Officer had not. His lips were pressed firmly together, his eyes were open and looked as they had when he was alive, his gaze was calm and convinced. The tip of a large iron needle had gone through his forehead. — In the Penal Colony Oh dear, and here creaks the Prague Metronome, overlooking the Vltava River and the city herself. This grand pendulum, an artistic piece about the temporality of all things, has very aptly seen better days... And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes. — An Imperial Message (Strč prst skrz krk.) But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.’s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. “Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him. — The Trial
Just some pictures I took while I was resting up for a few days in the lakeside city of Pokhara after my tiring trek around the Annapurna Circuit. I ate pastries and drank hippie fruit juices, I stomped up to see the Peace Pagoda, I went to a short yoga retreat, and I thought and thought and thought about my life. And that's all folks! "I didn't expect it to be so touristy... and strange," admitted a person I was travelling with at the time. "It reminds me of Wanaka", she said, having lived there in New Zealand for a while. I had to calmly agree.
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AuthorMing is an economist, traveller, and creative writer from Melbourne, Australia. He’s a nebulous collection of particles on the lookout for a good corner to sit with a book and a cup of coffee. Archives
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