Seeing the sights in Beijing: Sunday and Monday

Sunday:

Tiananmen Square is massive. We saw it on the day after a night of snow, and the air was even more opaque than usual, so even the weather added to the feeling of grimness. There is nothing “pretty” or human-scale anywhere in sight. The only thing I can think the place is useful for is to have space for massed armies, or maybe massed populace listening to speeches, or ... what happened in 1989. There are no trees, no benches. Maybe there is some greenery when it’s not winter, but there was none the day we visited. A lot of my impressions of China are going to be colored (no pun intended) by the fact that I’m here at a time when everything is brown. The mountainous country on the Great Wall trek was brown, and Jamie says that in the summer it is overwhelmingly green. So maybe there is a softening touch around Tiananmen Square in the summer time too.

Jamie and I were surprised, when we talked about it later, at how differently we think about Tiananmen Square. I don’t remember ever having heard much about it before the events of 1989, and they are still what I most associate it with. From that point of view, I’m glad I went there in some vague way of honoring what people did there, but it’s not a place that would draw me back the way places I visited in the UK would. Jamie doesn’t have the same strong association with the events of 1989, but we did agree that the major message of the whole complex -- the Square and the Forbidden City -- is of overwhelming “state” power.

In the Forbidden City, we didn’t have time to explore every little side branch. But the spaces in the central sequences are massive: again, armies? Until the garden at the very back, there is no greenery, nothing soft, nothing of human scale. There’s a beauty in the ornate roofs and ceilings -- all that intricate woodwork and color. And I do wonder if, as in a medieval fort/castle let’s say, there was actually a lot of everyday bustle in those huge spaces when the place was actually in use: market stalls, blacksmith shops, stuff like that.

The place was crowded, but not as much as it would have been in different weather or in a different season. The vast majority of the visitors were Chinese -- it’s vacation season here, 40 days around Spring Festival.

Monday:

We went to two temples and a shopping center.

The Temple of the Lamas, or Yonghegong, is, depending on which source you believe, the largest Buddhist temple in Beijing, or in all of China. After a long gap, it has been functioning as a monastery again since 1980. It felt more crowded than the Forbidden City, again with mostly Chinese people. There are monks tending the various indoor spaces, and most of the visitors were buying incense sticks, lighting them, and doing a series of bows to the temples and Buddha statues in all the buildings (there were many). We came into one of the courtyards between buildings and found a bunch of couples with baby buggies. They were all non-Chinese, maybe a group that had come here to adopt.

This place was beautiful -- my favorite “sight” after the Great wall. Sad to say, it was forbidden to take pictures inside the buildings. There were huge statues of various Buddhas and boddhisattvas, there were ancient boxes of manuscripts, places to bow and offer incense, and many other interesting things.

About half a mile away from Yonghegong is Kongmaio, the Confucius Temple. It’s similar in being a large complex of buildings (some connected, some not) and courtyards, but it’s smaller than Yonghegong. There is a small museum devoted to the life and thought of Confucius, and there’s a section where there are tall standing stones inscribed with the names of scholars (Jin Shi) who passed certain important exams in long-ago empires.

We had taken the subway to Tiananmen Square on Sunday, but on Monday I proposed that given the low cost of everything here, we should start taking cabs to save my achy knees. After leaving the Confucius Temple we caught a cab to the Workers Stadium (one of the venues of the 2008 Olympics), then walked to a knock-off mall called Ya Show. This was the first (and it turned out to be the only) place where I saw any number of non-Chinese people. In the food court I heard a number of languages -- none of them English. In the food court was also where I decided to start taking pictures of “Chinglish.”

Pictures here, here, and here.