There are things to be seen in Beijing deserving of every bucket list.
Laid out on an immense North/South axis, Tiananmen Square (including Mao’s Mausoleum), the stunning Forbidden City and Jingshan Garden, are of epic proportions. The Forbidden City occupies 72 hectares.
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Jingshan garden is stunning. This is no brute dominance of nature by humanity but its euphonious location within it. The harmonising of symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes, straight and meandering lines, wild within carefully tended boundary, subtlety of colour transitions, and unrivalled overlaying of symbol - achieved in layers of undergrowth, shrub and tree - makes an irresistible case for the primacy of Chinese garden design.
Nearby, Hutongs and Siheyuans are being restored. My lodgings at the Jingshan Garden Hotel are here. It is a delightful, small family run establishment.
A decent coffee can be had in Beijing.
It has its challenges, though. Air quality has improved dramatically but it still stings my eyes. The traffic is terrible. The touts around the old city are aggressive. It is best to respond with humour - slapping my belly saying "Wǒ xūyào zǒulù" (I must walk) satisfied most taxi and rickshaw drivers.
Taxi drivers refuse to use meters and rip you off blind so unless you love the fray of intense bargaining DiDi is a must for getting around.
You also need Alipay and WeChat to participate in the economy.
Thing is, the Great Firewall prevents the use of wifi to download and install these apps. So you need to install a VPN before you get to China or take the hit on your mobile data. An eSim can ease the pain but you'll still need a VPN if you want to buy and install it in China.
Airport level security is in place at every subway station entrance. Officers can be friendly or highly officious. A guard indicated a free lane for the baggage scanner but in the time I picked up all my bags 15 people had joined that queue while mine had reduced to 2 people. So I stayed put, which infuriated the little pissant, and I was forced to join the long queue. Authority and weird face-saving behaviours trump efficiency.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere.
On the other hand, small business owners are delightful. They complain to me about Russians always wanting directions to the nearest whorehouse.
There are no words that capture the grandeur of the Great Wall. It can be accessed via a 90 minute bus ride. I found a company that provided a guide to hike and explore unrestored sections. Hard yakka in the heat and humidity, rewarded with privacy from the mobs of tourists, picking and eating fresh apricots from the trees growing in the forest engulfing the old wall and astounding views.
Chifeng, a couple of hours northeast by bullet train, is at the archeological centre of nationalist political efforts (the “Three Dynasties” and “Origins of Chinese Civilisation” projects) to demonstrate a continuous 5000 year old Chinese civilisation.
The postulation of a 5,300 year old Bronze Age Xia Dynasty reminds me of Schliemann, the romantic German archaeologist, who in the late 1800s and early 1900s treated Homer as history and then went looking for Troy. The Turkish government maintains a wooden horse near Schliemann’s most promising dig!
There are no primary sources or archeological evidence for the existence of the Xia dynasty. It is spoken of in a set of ancient writings, including in the Book of Documents, but these were written 2000 years later. Archeological evidence of civilised life going back 5000 years is plentiful but none of it supports the idea of a unified identity or dynasty.
In its Bronze Age section, the city museum includes a "bronze ore" exhibit. Possibly something has been lost in translation, but there is no such thing as bronze ore. It’s an alloy of copper and zinc.
As the geneses of erroneous convictions go, the romantic is vastly more palatable than the political and nationalistic.
The stunning rock formations and birch forests of Huanggangliang National Park near Reshui, a couple of hours west of Cifeng by bus, are well worth a visit. As is the Inner Mongolian city of Xilinhot.
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