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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This post consists of my scattered recollections of Busan, Seoul's dirtier, more decentralised port city cousin. While it has a few solid spots of enjoyment and while I did snag some decent photos, the sullen truth is that I was in a darkly depressed mood during the terminal leg of my South Korean holiday. A blackened, joylessness coursed through me. I was devitalised and disconcerted, in part, because I was still recuperating from a bad cold I'd picked up in Seoul. But the sickness also prised open cages around my heart. It forced me to brood on the fact things were not well at that point in my life, despite my opportunity to travel. I recall glumly strolling the Busan Christmas Tree Festival, a crowded annual winter event with vividly festive lights, live music, and street performances, feeling awkward and miserable. I was in a fugue state, casting the occasional glances at the scenery, but mostly inside myself, navel-gazing rather than sightseeing. Surrounded, yet apart. One idea that especially bothered me was how I'd arranged this trip to coincide with Christmas Day and (despite consciously, if unmindfully, committing to it) was nevertheless emotionally unprepared to be alone on the 25th. I ended up spending Christmas Day itself at Busan's famed Spa Land Centum City, an ultra-modern Korean bathhouse located within what is supposedly the largest department store in the world, Shinsegae Centum City. I appreciated the novelty. For a while. It kept my most festering feelings at bay, but there was too much heaviness in my being to completely wash the gloom away. I felt like a failure. My career, a promising position at a prestigious economics consultancy, had fallen apart. My personal life was muted and loveless. There was no passion in my flesh. I was burnt out. I was lost. Unhappy. I was on a knife's edge concerning solitude and loneliness. I craved solitude, but if the stars weren't carefully aligned in my skull, that lovely, tender solitude would skip and tumble into its evil double: a ditch of despairing loneliness, self-loathing, and misanthropy. I was not pleased to be alive and no amount of rumination could push me out of this equilibrium. Balance... where was my sacred and wretched balance? Haedong Yonggungsa Temple... Yes... The photos vaguely remind me. Either before or after Christmas (I can't recall, my memory formation wasn't great during my Busanian hours and minutes), I came to this popular seaside temple. Unfortunately, I was just going through the touristic motions. Pushing through without pause. Pushing through with pulse. So, obviously, I didn't feel impressed at the time and only these photos so many years later have faintly stirred something in me. It's a Buddhist site dating back to the Goryeo Dynasty of the 14th century, with a name that means Korean Dragon Palace Temple. According to legend, a sea god appeared in the dreams of an acclaimed religious teacher during a brutal famine and told him that if he built this temple, all their hardships would dissolve away, like salt in the ocean. It was then destroyed by a fire and cast into ruin during the Japanese invasions of Korea in the late 16th century and was finally rebuilt in the 1930s. But did I know all this from my visit? Certainly not. As I said, I was simply going through the obligatory guidebook motions. I am writing this now as an exercise in research and recollection. An exercise in picking up the pottery shards and fusing them back together into a workable, lucid thing. That's the perniciousness of depression: it destroys the autobiographical. In its dejections, it painfully accelerates the soul's entropy. The self-narrative becomes infused with a hazy wrongness. I find writing posts like these an effective approach to tidying up difficult episodes in my life. Not in a therapeutic way that wholesomely salvages them ex-post, but in a clinical, almost-archival sense. I go through these images in hopes of geolocating myself in distant, foggy moments. Back into the realm of essential human experience. Into noise and taste, scent and texture. It is probably a soft and futile hope. I look at my photos from in and around the Jagalchi fish market and can (almost) hark back my visceral disgust at seeing tanks of squirming 'penis fish', a species of marine worm consumed in some parts of East Asia. When I look at pictures of food I've ordered, I can (almost) conjure the loveliness of dwaji gukbap, a sought-after Busan specialty composed of bone broth, pork, miso, soy sauce, rice wine, and many side dishes. For as long as I could remember, I've struggled to figure out what goals and values I was supposed to cultivate... I felt like I was asleep for much of my life, and that, around the time of my Korea trip, I was slowly stirring into consciousness again and examining everything in orbit - my career, my hobbies, my personality - and reacting with a grinding despondency. But this post isn't about how I resolved this struggle. There's nearly nothing here. Just pixels and colour values. Anyway, here's a photo of Haeundae Beach on a crisp winter's day, an urban beach in Busan that's considered one of South Korea's most famous strands... Last on the list of attractions featured in this post is Busan's Gamcheon Culture Village. It presents itself as a slummy, labyrinthian Korean favela that's been squeezed through a deranged pastel children's book filter. Its origins were indeed one of hilly poverty. The village was built by the city administration during the 1920s and 30s as a way to relocate poor working families into an area secluded from the port, yet proximate enough to provide labour. What tourists see these days is the result of a 2009 effort by artists, students, and locals to regenerate the town with the power of gaudy paint cans. And that's kind of what it's all about, isn't it? Trying to cobble something together, even when its origins are suspect. Trying to dredge up something impoverished from the inner world and present it to the outer one. I will never set foot in Busan again after my psychological trials there, but these sentences you are reading right now are something I've finally made of it.
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.
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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