The Newmans

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Saturday dawned to the sultry sounds of a sick wife. We stayed in the hotel for the morning while Gail rested. At an early lunch time we ventured out… about 50m out… before Gail decided that the best place for her was back in the snuggly comfort of the hotel room bed. The goal for the day was the Summer Palace, the place where the emperors hung out when things to a bit to hot in summer in the Forbidden city, so I explored it on my own.

I tried to get there on a budget and the palace is located in the north east of the city, so my journey took me by taxi to the subway, then around up to the top-left Xizhimen station on the city ring line, then three stations up on the northern loop light rail line to Wudaokou and finally onto a 375 bus. The palace is called Yihe Yuan in Chinese however the bus stop I needed was 3 stops beyond the bus stop of the same name. Fortunately the bus ticket guy stopped me when I tried to exit the bus at the stop of the same name and told me that it was 3 stops further, my rudimentary Mandarin skills coming in handy there! I covered the straight-line distance of about 14km in approximately 1 hour for a paltry 19 Yuan in total.

This bus stop put me on the north entrance which leads up the back side of Longevity hill, with the palace located on the front side. Here there's an area called Suzhou street with small walkways, shops and places to eat. Ascending the hill leads up to the Buddhist Temple of the Sea of Wisdom, covered in these glazed porcelain tiles. Looking north has a good view, or at least it would be on a clear day…

Descending the hill through beautiful gardens brings you out on the Kunming lake foreshore to the side of the main palace. The lake was greatly expanded by various emperors as they each made their mark on the palace and it's now about 1.5km long with a few islands and smaller lakes.

Built, destroyed and re-built was the white marble boat. This was a place where rituals were conducted of releasing animals to promote good things spiritually for the emperor. It also signified the solidity of the Qing dynasty.

Along the foreshore you can look up at the main palace halls, various halls of benevolence and harmony as well as the usual food, museum and such buildings. There's everything from Chinese trinket souvenirs to reproduction Qing dynasty architecture. Also along the foreshore are these highly decorated covered colonnades with some exquisite detailing. It's from here that you can take a ferry to cross the lake if you so desire.

Moving around the side of the lake brought me through to the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity, complete with a courtyard decorated with bronze animals. Further down there was this bronze bull covered in writings from one of the emperor's himself. The bronze bull is said to control the floods and bring good luck to it's visitors.

A very cool landmark is the white marble 150m long seventeen-arch bridge. On the columns of the parapets are 544 unique carved lions. Legend has it that these lions move around at night.

Another dominant feature of the park is a large array of the traditional Chinese gates. At each entryway in and out of the park and also into the palace itself are these huge structures, some restored and others not.  

After exiting from a different gate it was unclear how to get home, so I took a taxi all the way back to the north-west corner of the subway system. It's here that I became stranded in an A-grade Beijing traffic jam. We barely moved for over half an hour. It took me two hours to get back to the hotel and my recovering wife, where I was once again tired and happy from the adventure.  

Our day was far from over in the centre of Beijing. After exiting the Forbidden city we made our way up to the top of the hill in JingShan park, which lies directly behind the city. From here you have almost a 360 degree view of the centre of Beijing.

The top of the hill in JingShan is also a great place to get an elevated view of the Forbidden City except… well… on this day the view wasn't too flash. We could see less than half the length of the city. At least the temple on top of the hill had some lovely under-roof paintings as some compensation. Lower in the park they were keen to keep people off the grass so they had erected this cute little sign that works in any language.

Located within the park is the location where the last emperor of the Ming dynasty hanged himself. After receiving news that the peasant uprising had broken into the city he did a bolt for it out the back door and took his own life rather than be captured and killed by the peasants.

From here we made it out into the old streets of surrounding Beijing. We walked through roads and dwellings that look like they haven't changed for 50 years or so. We stopped in a small local restaurant and had a feast of rice, dumplings, fried beef and garlic broccoli, served with a tepid and somewhat ho-hum tea.

With all the rain and so forth our Swiss companion found soggy socks more than she could bear. We eventually managed to find a store selling women's clothes and she managed to put an end to her sodden socks.

From here we made our way to Beijing's famous silk markets. Like other places in China, this is a multi-story complex full of shops selling all kinds of goods, including silk. There were shops selling tea wares, jade articles, jewellery accessories, wall hangings, customised stamps and a bunch of other trinkets. There was also a steady stream of foreigners all hunting for a bargain.

Nearby there were a few more familiar food places, where we eventually had dinner. It was a big day, a colossal day in fact. I don't know how many kilometres we walked but it was a lot. We saw everything from the biggest to the smallest Beijing had to offer and went to bed utterly exhausted, but loving our time in this culturally-rich city.

After getting the 2 days of work out the way we began our real adventure in Beijing, exploring the city. We teamed up with a colleague and a friend of his for our first day of exploration. Target - Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

We taxi'd and subway'd our way into Tiananmen sq and emerged at the surface into pouring rain. In this mess the only solution was to buy umbrellas and ponchos from the local sellers who emerged from the woodwork. For 5-10 Yuan each it was a small price to pay to stay dry.  

Tiananmen square is a massive open paved area in the centre of the city. In it's centre is the monument to the fallen heroes of China's past. As the Mid Autumn festival approaches in China the square had many temporary structures on it, including a grandstand and some giant trees carved into the shape of famous Chinese landmarks. There were various guards scattered around, all required to remain motionless, which brought some brief amusement. The Chinese flag is ceremonially hoisted and lowered on it's humongous flag pole every day. The square also has Chairman Mao's Mausoleum, which we were unable to enter due to it being closed for renovation. Keeping a dead guy on ice in a crystal casket is one of the crazier things the Chinese have done.

Just across the road lies the Forbidden City, so called because for many years it has been off-limits to commoners. It's a huge complex consisting of about a dozen primary halls, literally hundreds and hundreds of smaller buildings, alleyways, courtyards. This is where the emperors administered their empire. There are supposed to be 9999 buildings in total spread over 720,000 square metres, 960m long and 750m wide. No wonder it's called a city! 

The southern section of the city is called the Outer Court and you enter the outer court by going through the Meridean gate. Here are the halls of Supreme Harmony, Central Harmony and Preserved Harmony, each with a different purpose. All of the main halls are perfectly aligned through the central axis of the city and it is symmetrical left and right of it's centreline. The ground is covered in uneven stones. To prevent someone tunnelling in, the paving is made from 15 cris-crossing layers of paving stones.

The gate of Celestial Purity marks the entrance into the Inner Court where the palaces of Celestial Purity, Celestial and Terrestrial Union and Terrestrial Tranquillity lie. The walls of the gate project proudly and dominantly forward on either side, intimidating all who come before it. The inner court is where the emperor and his close consorts resided. On either side lie sets of 6 buildings where the concubines resided. There are additional halls for things like ancestor worship, eternal and joyful tranquillity, benevolence, etc…they just go on and on.

On the north side of the last great hall is the Imperial Garden. It's full of towers, monuments, rocks, flowers, old trees, sculptures and the like. Just the sort of place for the emperor to nip out to if the Mongols have given him a hard day at the office . Behind the garden is the gate of Divine Might, which exits the palace on the northern side, nearly 1km from the entrance. 

The level of detail in everything is quite extraordinary. Some examples are the multiples of 9 that appear in pillars, rows of rivets, roof trusses, the animals and gargoyles on the corners of the roofs, the yellow porcelain tiles, the ornate ceilings, the interlocking pavers and the stone dragon mouths that encircle the elevated platforms that spurt water when it rains. 

Throughout the palace there are these huge bronze basins that were traditionally full of water. Apart from looking nice, their purpose was to enable them to fight a fire when one started. With lots of wooden structures, high roofs and being located in an area prone to lighting, you can imagine the result. The undersides of all the roofs were heavily decorated and I didn't fancy the job of dangling from the rafters 2 storeys up trying to re-paint them!

Located in many of the buildings are small museums to various aspects of the palace or Chinese culture. There are halls that display Chinese clothing, musical instruments, working tools or historical events. Sadly, most of the original articles from within the Forbidden city are now either in storage or in museums and few remain at the city itself. We didn't stop at too many and it still took us 2 hours to get through the city. It would be possible to come back here day after day and still not see everything.

It's a strange feeling walking through such a mammoth construction, especially when you consider how long ago it was constructed and the means that it was most likely done by. It feels like the buildings, gates, bridges and paving stones go on for ever. It's also constantly under renovation and it seems especially important to make it pretty for the number of expected visitors during the Olympics. It's big, it's imposing, its overwhelming, which I'm sure was precisely the intention. It signified great might and power and is probably the single most important construction linking China with it's past. 

The typhoons and tropical storms of the season have been creating some very bad weather and much tragedy for some people. Notably there seem to be lots of coal miners trapped underground in underground mines. Of course, their bosses knew of the weather warnings. The illegality of coal mines doesn't seem to count for much, with corrupt owners and government officials turning the ignominious blind eye after a bit of greasing of palms and not letting expendable human life stand in the way of making a profit. There are always more people to hire. When this kind of thing happens it's the poor in the provinces who really lose out. So far this year possibly 2000 miners have lost their lives, but that's probably a conservative estimate.

China is the only place in the world that I know of where the gap between the rich and the poor is growing, not shrinking. Sure, many who were poor now have money but those who are rich are grotesquely rich. The rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting out of poverty.

I snapped this Ferrari F430 outside our apartment complex. Parked in front of it was a Mini Cooper S and sometimes a Porsche Cayenne makes an appearance. Less than 50m away there are often beggars at the Metro escalators, just trying to survive. So much for communism distributing wealth evenly. 

Our return journey to Shenzhen was relatively uneventful, except for a bit of flight shuffling. Our change-over in Sydney was always going to be tight and the delay leaving Adelaide meant that we were not going to make it. You have to take a ride on a bus to change terminals in Sydney which adds considerably to the time required to change from domestic to international flights. Fortunately there were two flights going to Hong Kong that day and we were transferred to the second one, leaving about 4 hours after our original flight. 

Regrettably, our re-acclimatisation to China started even before we left the airport with a number of Chinese guys snorting and spitting in the bins by the boarding gate. Furthermore we were seated right at the back of the plane and in the thick of a group of loud and somewhat boisterous men travelling together. I was quite tired all day which made me easily annoyed. These guys seemed to be pushing all my buttons. Several of them came on board with thick Australian wool quilts as hand luggage, in addition to their regular carry-on bags. This quickly filled the overhead bins completely. If the plane had been full we would have been nursing our hand luggage. The guy directly behind me felt the need to get up several times every hour, putting his full weight on my backrest without warning and jerking me backwards each time he did so. One of the other guys stopped to talk to his friend across the aisle from me, his backside about 10 inches away, whereupon he farted right in my face. More than once. Another guy decided to take a walk around the cabin during take-off(?!), only sitting in response to shouts from an air hostess.

Due to the later flight we were on a tight schedule to catch the last KCR train to the Luo Hu border crossing. We took the A43 Airbus to Sheung Shui and, as we were walking to the train station, saw the last train for the night departing. Missing the train, the sudden adjustment to the high humidity and temperature and worsening tiredness were all taking there toll and we were both feeling depressingly flat, so we downed a bottle of water and took the N76 night bus service to the Huang Gang crossing, which is open 24 hours. After crossing the border and dishing out a few 'bu yao's (don't want) to various private car taxi drivers we made our way up and over the Huang Gang foot bridge, past the women selling drugs and joined the enormous taxi queue, where we tried to dodge all the smoke from the 1am smokers. Yep, definitely back in China now!

As we crashed into bed I realised that it had been a 22 1/2 hour long day. No wonder we were dog tired.