To get to the Great Wall, I took the train from Beijing across a bleak landscape of both crumbling industrial decay and energetic construction sites. It's hard not to notice the nation’s prodigious demand for iron and steel. I see half-built towers, their steel beam skeletons rising off the sullen countryside. I see forests of scaffolding, a canopy of cranes. Finally, I arrive at the ancient fortifications. It staggers belief that this stone scar is still standing. For hundreds of years, the Great Wall has slithered through hills, deserts, valleys, rivers. Its empty watchtowers have demarcated the spine of the world herself. A ten-thousand-mile long serpent. The ramparts of the old dynasties: stone, brick, rammed earth stretching as far as the eye can see. Built by the indomitable will of the emperor and the innumerable bones of his labourers. It’s hard to imagine what the land must have been like back when the nomadic raiders of the Eurasian Steppes bashed against its great bulwark and crumbled into dust. It’s even harder to imagine what it must have been like when, time and time again, the horsemen breached the wall. I race up the battlements to a vacant watchtower, then hike over to another, and then another. Tourists are dotted all along the wall, scattered like pebbles across its winding back. There are many visitors, but they are diffuse. There’s no natural congregation point along the Great Wall – you can walk as much or as little of it as you want. The wall doesn’t care. It knows it cannot be conquered on foot. It simply never ends.
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Many, many years back I spent a cold and drab winter in the capital city of Beijing. In between dealing with the chilly weather, unbearable air pollution, and some mild culture shock, I was able to squeeze in some of my classic museum visits. The National Museum of China Located to the east of Tiananmen Square, the National Museum of China is a major repository for artistic and cultural artefacts from across the epic span of Chinese history, with a specific focus on its more recent communist history. If you like jade burial suits, ancient bronze vessels, shining porcelain, socialist propaganda, and stirring paintings of Chairman Mao, this is the place for you. The Capital Museum This is a spacious and classy art museum with a carefully curated collection of Chinese ceramics, bronzeware, calligraphy scrolls, landscape paintings, carved jade, coins and banknotes, sculptures, among other artefacts. Certainly worth your time if you want even more than what the National Museum of China offers. The People's Revolution Military Museum This museum is dedicated to the staggering amounts of military equipment from the history of the People's Liberation Army. If you like guns, tanks, and anything that makes stuff violently explode, this place is worth pencilling into your Beijing itinerary. The China Science and Technology Museum As the name suggests, this museum administers an accessible collection of cultural and scientific exhibits for the general public. It is alright, but definitely not one of the most impressive science-focused museums I've been to. Give it a skip if you ask me.
Photos from the historic capital on Taiwan's western coast...I took the train up from Kaohsiung City for a day trip here. Although it is famous as a culinary destination, I sadly didn't have much of an appetite on my visit and, instead, spent most of it just wandering around its historic attractions. Tainan is dotted with old Dutch colonial sites, as well as Japanese colonial-era buildings. In that sense, the history of Tainan is the history of Taiwan itself. Arguably, this city is to Taiwan what Kyoto is to Japan. It is the oldest city on the island and was once the colonial heart of Dutch Formosa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tungning, and a provincial capital under the Qing dynasty. It is a city of rises and falls, a city of revisions and restorations. Some cultural curiosities in the city include a former 19th-century merchant warehouse known as the Anping Tree House, named after the thick banyan roots and branches which have inundated the old structure. There is also the beautifully blue Tianhou Temple, dedicated to a Chinese sea goddess known as Mazu. She is popular throughout Southeast Asia and various coastal Chinese communities and is supposed to roam the open seas, protecting sailors from the perils of the ocean. A very handy deity for a coastal region of Taiwan to have. The Anping Old Fort is probably the most iconic attraction in Tainan. Also known as Fort Zeelandia, this was a 17th-century fortress of the Dutch East India Company. This ended in 1661-62 when a pirate leader and resistance fighter called Koxinga laid siege to the fortress, defeated and expelled the Dutch from the island and formed his own small, short-lived Kingdom of Tungnin. The Eternal Golden Castle is not particularly golden, not much of a castle, and doesn't feel terribly grand and eternal. It is the remains of a defensive fort that was built by the Qing rulers of the island to resist the Japanese invaders of Taiwan. It quickly declined in military value following the annexation of Taiwan by Japan in 1895. And lastly, I visited the charming Chihkan Tower. This was once the site of a Dutch outpost (known as Fort Provintia) before it was destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt in a Chinese architectural style.
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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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