We extended our stay in Beijing by a day as we’d been enjoying it so much. I had wanted to visit some of the old city gates and Annemarie wanted to visit a park which is situated directly behind the Forbidden City and has excellent views over the city. Our first task of the day was to buy train tickets to Tai’Shan for the next day. The square outside the train station was heaving, it’s incredibly busy, far busier than just about any place we’ve ever been to. The ticket office is always separate to the actual station in China and just getting to the ticket office was a chore. The entrance to the station is strictly controlled and there were huge crowds stood queuing outside. We had to get around these queues. The square which is teeming with people like us, wandering around, along with plenty of people coming and going plus people who are just sat down on the ground. It looks like complete chaos. But that was nothing compared to getting into the ticket office. There’s only one door, guarded by a few police officers armed with big guns. But they weren’t as intimidating as the military guy standing on a raised pedestal looking over the crowd, armed with what looked like a rocket launcher. I guess it fires tear gas. Is this really acceptable? To be fully armed in an area where people are going about their daily lives and buying train tickets? The Chinese government sure is paranoid! Through the doors we had to put our bag (the camera bag) through a scanner and finally we were allowed in to buy train tickets. Buying the tickets was actually very simple compared to getting in and after a bit of queuing we were sorted. With that sorted it was back into the underground to go to the Front Gate. This required another bag scan to enter the underground system (in China all bags have to go through a scanner before entering the metro system). At the Front Gate we took the wrong exit from the underground and came up on the wrong side of the road. We couldn’t go back down without a ticket and we couldn’t cross the road because it was lined with barriers. We eventually found a path under the road to cross, then another to take us towards the gate. This was when I realised that the gate is located at the bottom of Tianamen Square. Security here is oppressive to say the least! In the tunnel everyone had to undergo a pat down, have their bags scanned and have their ID...
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Today we were going to visit the Summer Palace. It’s a vast area of land on the northeast outskirts of Beijing, filled with pavilions, pagodas, temples and a replica of a street in Suzhou. All these buildings circle a huge man-made lake, called Kunming Lake, which is modelled on the West Lake in Hangzhou, right down to the causeway on the west side of the lake. The earth from the lake was used to make a hill next to lake which houses the main temples and buildings. All the buildings in the complex were burnt down by the British in the 1860s. It was this act which forced the Chinese into signing an agreement which gave the British the Kowloon part of Hong Kong and opened a further 5 ports in China, one of which was Shanghai. The metro took an hour to reach the edge of the palace grounds. Guessing that food would be limited or expensive in the park we bought lunch from a convenience shop by the entrance gate. Inside we were shocked to see just how large the lake is. Considering that it’s man-made it is vast! We wandered through a few buildings. Every section of the buildings was painted and decorated in incredible detail. We entered a long corridor which was over a kilometre long and ran most of the width of the northern end of the lake. Each beam was decorated with a different scene. Watch this video on YouTube Then we went up the hill, created by the soil extracted to make the lake, through a large temple complex. The view over the lake was impressive. It actually resembled the West Lake in Hangzhou in everything but size, but they’d made a good effort and it wasn’t much smaller. At the back of the hill are more temples. At the foot of the hill is where Suzhou street can be found. This is an ancient street in Suzhou which was almost perfectly replicated here on Beijing for the amusement of the empress Dowager. We wandered back towards the lake and found a building made of marble, designed to look like a boat. Then we set off on a long walk around the lake. It wasn’t as hot or humid as Hangzhou had been, plus it was much quieter. This made the walk far better than Hangzhou had been. On the other side of the lake is a small island with a long bridge over to it. We attempted to walk around the island but one of the pavilions was closed so a full circuit wasn’t possible. From here we could hardly see...
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We had booked a tour to take us to the Great Wall of China today. This was excellent luck because not only was it a good type of tour, i.e. all it provided was transport and food but it went to the section of the wall that we really wanted to visit. Most people go to Badaling to see the wall. It’s much closer to Beijing and has lots of shops and sellers around it. Apparently it’s heaving with tourists and tour groups and almost impossible to actually walk on the wall. We were going to Jinshaling which is a 3 hour drive from Beijing but is almost deserted because Chinese people can’t be bothered to make the effort to go that far. The tour was a 3 hour drive to the wall, breakfast on the bus, 3 hours on the wall (to wherever we want), then lunch and finally the 3 hour drive back to Beijing. We were picked up at 6:20am by minivan. It took us down the road, then we stopped, turned around and pulled over. We drove a bit more back up the road and then picked up another couple. We were then dropped off at the end of the road where our hostel was. In 10 minutes we were back where we started. Actually we were closer, we’d had to cross the main road to get into the minivan, now it dropped us off on the same side of the road as the hostel. What a waste of time! We stood around for 5 minutes until the big bus came and picked us all up. And we were off… The breakfast was a bacon (in China bacon is a mushy slice of pork) muffin and a coke from McDonald’s. I ate this then dozed for the rest of the journey. It’s a 10 minute walk from the entrance gate to the wall itself. In the heat we climbed the steps as fast as possible and it was pretty tiring. This was nothing compared to what faced us on the wall! The wall is built along a ridge (obviously the best place to put a defensive wall) and it follows the contours of the ridge up and down for as far as the eye can see. These aren’t little contours, they were really steep slopes which the wall managed to follow. We knew we only had 1.5hrs each way so turned left (the wall to the right has been mostly reconstructed) and set off. Every few hundred metres is a tower where soldiers were positioned. Nowadays the soldiers have been replaced by small stalls selling...
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The first destination in Beijing was the Lama Temple. This had been a palace and was converted by an Emperor many centuries ago into a Buddhist temple, the largest Buddhist temple in China outside of Tibet. We wandered through the first few temples but it didn’t feel quiet right. It looks like the usual Buddhist temples we’ve visited around Asia, but it doesn’t look like the Buddhist temples we visited in Tibet. It just looked wrong. In addition it felt wrong, crowds of Chinese people carrying lots of incense sticks. Usually a few sticks are lit then placed in sand to slowly burn, but here there were piles of incense on fire creating huge clouds of smoke. We later found out that the incense was free by the entrance, which is why every idiot had them! It looked nice enough but having seen the real thing in Tibet I didn’t care too much. Plus I’d paid £5 for the audio guide and it didn’t work most of the time. Next was the Temple of Heaven. It’s actually a huge temple complex and the main temple is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. On a raised section of ground is the Circular Mound Altar for sacrifices. Then there’s a smaller temple in between the two, the Imperial Vault of Heaven, which is a smaller version of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. Surrounding all this is an enormous park! We followed the Long Corridor to the Temple of Heaven. The Long Corridor is highly decorated and the paint is the usual vivid greens, reda and blues. There were many people sat playing Majhong. The temple itself is a strange looking temple, very different to any other temples we’ve seen elsewhere. It’s circular and has a vivid blue roof. It must be unique and is certainly distinctive. The blue represents heaven and the green tiles are the earth. The main use of the temple was a ceremony to pray for a good harvest. The Emperor came here twice-yearly and we later found out went to the ‘fasting temple’ where he would spend a few days fasting from his life of debauchery before making his way to offer a sacrifice and then to pray to the Gods. The temple is not the original, having been destroyed by lightning in the early 20th century. Surprisingly, it was not destroyed in the Cultural Revolution for reasons unknown to us. From the temple we walked to a huge walkway that led to the Imperial Vault of Heaven. This building is a smaller version of the other temple. The smaller temple was near the...
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We were up bright and early to go to the International Commerce Centre. Well, actually we got up around 8am and left about 9am, but that’s pretty dammed early for me nowadays. We walked down the street towards the tower, it was already in the mid 20s even at this time of morning but the humidity wasn’t too bad. And it was much clearer than the day before! We arrived at the tower at 9:30am expecting huge crowds. Instead it was deserted. We found out why at the ticket desk, the tower doesn’t open until 10am. Argh! At 10am we bought the tickets and jumped in the lift to the 100th floor, 385m up! It took 1 minute to reach the 100th floor, almost two floors per second, which is bloody fast. No wonder our ears popped quite a few times on the way up. The observation floor was empty and very quiet, a real positive. We spent a long time walking around the whole floor looking down on Hong Kong. The views are amazing from this height! After we’d taken the photos and enjoyed the view we sat down for a coffee. It was a bit pricey and not great coffee, but to sit and relax and look out over Hong Kong and enjoy the view made it worth it. Next on the agenda was to buy lunch and take it to the top of Victoria Peak. We bought sandwiches and yogurt and made our way to the Peak Tram station at the bottom of the hill. There wasn’t much of a queue and it wasn’t long before we were on our way up. The tram isn’t very comfortable, the seats are hard wooden benches and when the tram hits its maximum gradient of about 45% our backs were quite painfully pushed hard into the seat. At the top is a large shopping complex filled with cafes, restaurants, shops, etc. It had a McDonald’s, Burger King, Häagen-Dazs cafe. The usual assortment of brands. We sat outside and ate our sandwiches… Then we went for a walk around the peak. The actual peak is closed to the public because it’s filled with radio antennae. Surrounding the peak are very expensive and exclusive apartments all ringed with high gates, CCTV cameras and security guards. As we walked up the road it was surreal; the apartments looked old and shabby and dirty but the garages contained Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, etc. We followed the road round till we reached Victoria Gardens, which was totally accidental as the humidity was crazy again and we were soaking with sweat. We stumbled upon the gardens...
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