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.
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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.
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.
The showpiece city of ChinaShanghai, what a metropolis! The largest city in the People's Republic of China and the second-most populous city proper on the planet. Arriving into the city from the smoggy industrial sprawls of the Jiangsu Province was a godsend. Crisp, clean air. Here, the air is dense with something other than the belching of coal-fired plants and light manufactories. It's redolent of international finance, fashion, retail, professional services and real estate: the perfume of global capital flows! When Anthony Bourdain called Shanghai the most materialistic place on earth, he wasn’t kidding. During my short stay, I had the opportunity to visit a private yacht club and peek into its decadent wine cellars. I strolled into a Louis Vuitton showcase at the Exhibition Centre just for kicks. I drank Hennessy XO Cognac (mixed with sweet tea!) at the VIP table of a booming nightclub with my father and his 40+-year-old investor colleagues (don’t ask). This city is a relentless, gilded cynosure. Unlike many other urban centres in the Yangtze River Delta region, where economic growth has supplanted aesthetics with hedgerows of copy-pasted Soviet-style buildings, Shanghai is very pleasing to the eye. Is it as visually attractive as global cities like New York, Paris, and Hong Kong? Not really. But after spending so much time in banal, industrially stamped Chinese cities to the north, seeing the old European banks, consulates, clubs and trading houses of the Shanghai Bund was deeply refreshing. It was a shame that when I visited the Bund, I couldn't see Shanghai's iconic skyline through the mist. Overall, I found Shanghai fairly walkable, which I like in my cities. Also, it's hard to become even remotely lost with so much English everywhere. Likewise, the French Concession is a lovely area to walk around. Hate to admit this, but a colonial history can, at the very least, make a city nicer to look at. Even so, the Chinese way of unleashing cycles of creative (and un-creative) destruction has left its mark. Consider the stunning, glittering Jing'an Temple on West Nanjing Road. On paper, sure, this Buddhist temple has existed since the 12th century. In reality, it was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over the centuries and was, at its nadir, converted into a plastics factory during the Cultural Revolution. The current temple, as grand as it is, is only 35 years old. Such is the case with many "historical" sites in Mainland China. The people are Big City Brusque, as you'd expect. But they're not pathologically rude, like the denizens of Beijing. Shanghaiers also don’t seem to spit on the streets that much (an infamous habit of many PRC pedestrian, I’m afraid to say). The subways (which are, as you'd expect, seamless networks of efficiency) have all the usual public transport PSAs: where to stand, how to let passengers off first, how to be a courteous commuter. Yet no one follows them. They do in Taipei. They do in Tokyo. They do in Singapore. They do in Hong Kong. But China is still China and does things China's way. Shanghai Museum was wonderful. Free too. Strolling around the building, I got a sense of just how different societies can appreciate art and culture in unique ways. Consider, for example, the Chinese calligraphy wing of the museum. While largely devoid of western tourists, there were throngs of Chinese visitors crowding around particular scrolls and taking photos of ancient Chinese poems. Could you transpose such admiration onto the western world? An analogy would be if the English romantic poets were also famed for their breathtaking penmanship and people travelled from far and wide to a museum in London just to gaze upon their original manuscripts.
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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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