“No zuo no die. It
means if you don’t do stupid things, they won’t come back and bite you in the
ass. (but if you do, they most certainly will ).” - A modern take on Confucius.
Having been to Shanghai and Beijing in October 2005, I was
curious to see what had changed in the intervening decade. At that time, as we
went through the older sections of the cities, I kept hearing that this would
all be gone in a few years, to be replaced by the new and modern.
So was that true?
Yes, but not completely.
Many old homes and shops were gone, replaced by the shiny and
high-end. But, along the way,
people did remember to preserve and honor the past, and so some traces of the
old were still to be found.
Both cities’ skylines are replete with skyscrapers, each
trying to be higher and fancier than the last. The little shop houses, with one block devoted to, say,
shops all selling the same buttons and the next block to selling the same
threads and the next to the same fabrics, are largely gone, replaced by
Versace, Gucci, and other expensive stores. But clusters of the same kind of product could still be
found. I’ve never seen so many
high-end wristwatch stores as in a particular two blocks of Beijing.
People on the street were dressed for business, comfort,
or fashion, though the occasional Mao suit could still be found. And the city parks still boasted people
practicing tai chi in the morning, and groups playing mah jong on public
squares in the afternoon. However,
it was largely elderly people in both activities. I’m told that young people
are no longer interested in such things.
So what did I do in China? In Shanghai, I rode the magnetic levitation train, which
does not touch a track to run, and which reached a speed of 260 mph. The visit also included visits to and
among the high rises—of which there were many—and to some of the public parks.
In Beijing, we left the ship for three very full days,
visiting the Great Wall (of course), the Summer Palace (which is largely
rebuilds of a complex that was destroyed multiple times, but is now a lovely
park where many locals go for a day’s outing), Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden
City, and one of the hutongs—the old neighborhoods that Beijing is being
careful to preserve.
The Great Wall is, well, the Great Wall. One of those things you spend your life
hearing about. I couldn’t climb as
high as I did ten years ago, but it still was breathtaking. But gazing up it, I could not help but
thing of the tens of thousands of lives that were lost building it, only to
find that it actually was never effective in preventing invasions. A lesson to today’s wall advocates,
perhaps?
The Summer Palace was where we saw the greatest crowds—it
was a holiday weekend and the weather was perfect, so it seemed that all of
Beijing had come out for a boat ride on the lake or just to tour the grounds.
The last time I’d been to Tiananmen Square, I had to leave
rapidly as it was the National Holiday and the crowds were denser than anything
I’d seen before or since. It was
the one time in my life I felt that I could be crushed alive by a crowd. This time, the crowds were downright
sparse, and I had the opportunity to walk around and drink in the atmosphere
and history of the place.
Directly across from the square is the Hall of the People,
where the Chinese legislature meets.
We had the privilege the night before of attending a banquet there, and
were treated to a sampling of entertainments. It was quite a treat to dine
where heads of state are entertained and where a major nation’s legislature
convenes.
The Forbidden City also was considerably less crowded than
my last visit, and a great deal more of it had been restored. Alas, the Starbucks that used to be
there is gone—it was expelled before the 2008 Olympics.
I was thrilled to visit a hutong—one of the old
neighborhoods that are being carefully preserved in Beijing—as I’d missed this
on my last visit. Our guide used
to live in this hutong, and so was able to offer a unique perspective on
it. Every manner of vehicle, from
expensive car to rickety bicycle, was parked along the alleyways, and the maze
of street featured homes that were largely modest and comfortable, but some
were sprawling complexes.
Municipal electricity had recently come to the hutongs,
meaning that people can actually run a TV in one room and an oven in
another. And their coal fireplaces
have been replaced by electric heat.
But none of the homes have toilets—everyone in the hutongs uses public
toilets that can be found on many corners. They are squat toilets (i.e., holes in the floor), which are
prevalent throughout most of the Asian countries we’ve seen so far, and kept
quite clean.
Some homes also function as restaurants: you can come to
the house and be served a home-cooked meal. We visited one such house, but because our group was too
large, stuck just to tea. Some of the
residents engage in traditional arts, such as paper-cutting or bottle-painting
(as in painting the insides of the bottles—no small feat). The government has been supporting and
to some extent subsidizing this since 2008. Indeed many of the changes we heard about seem to date back
to 2008. Not coincidently, the
year the summer Olympics were held here.
Our visit to Beijing was another major highlight of the trip.
Next up:
South Korea
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