Journal of a Sabbatical

China Trip 2000

the great wall and the summer palace

Quote of the Day: "Mao beebles? Words of Chairman Mao. In English." -- Aggressive Entrepreneur selling The Little Red Book at the Summer Palace

Today's Reading: The Story of the Stone (a.k.a. Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xuequin

Photos:

Great Wall at Badaling

Another View of Great Wall at Badaling

Cable Car Ticket

Magnetic Card with Great Wall Motif

Haze Descending over Badaling

Summer Palace Ticket

The Marble Boat

Roof of Summer Palace

Ceiling of Long Corridor (with Cats!)

Red-roofed Boats in Haze by the 17-Arch Bridge

This place is a zoo. Totally disorganized. Surprise! We are going to the Great Wall today. After we have opportunity to use the computer to send e-mail and use the fax phone, the only one that can dial direct long distance calls, to try to contact the airlines about my luggage, Zsolt persuades me that he'd hate for me to miss this opportunity to see the Great Wall. Who knows when I'll get another chance?

Two taxis take us the 1 1/2 hour drive to the Badaling section of the Great Wall. I share a cab with Mary and Tomasz. Carol rides with Rosalie and Craig. We pass a canal, which Craig claims is the Grand Canal. Hordes of people with shovels are working on rebuilding or renovating it. Bill Holm in Coming Home Crazy is right. China smells like shit especially along where they seem to be attempting to dredge the canal by hand. Who knows what they're digging up? It certainly employs a lot of people.

People living in tents surrounded by beehives sell honey all along the road. It seems to be a beekeeping district or something. I can't tell if they live in the tents all the time or just when they need to tend the bees.

Along the road we encounter a convoy of People's Liberation Army trucks with huge guns on trailers going slowly through an intersection. We need to turn and the driver doesn't want to wait so he just drives right under the guns! Cab drivers here are daredevils. Lanes mean nothing to them, traffic lights mean nothing, other vehicles mean nothing, and apparently the PLA means nothing to them.

Besieged by trinket sellers, postcard sellers, and water sellers in Badaling before we even get to the Wall ticket office I think we're in for the full tourist experience. Water is 4 Yuan except on top of the wall it's 10 Yuan! And it doesn't even have a pretty picture of the wall on the label. The postcard sellers surround you if you stop moving. Maybe the ancestors should have used postcard sellers to pester the northern invaders so they'd go away and leave China alone. People are everywhere but it's not as densely crowded as I expected.

The wall is big, really big. I took the cable car up, which was kind of scary but had great views. The cable car ticket only gets you the cable car ride. Once you're up there you still have to buy an admission ticket to go on climbing up the wall. The admission ticket is a plastic card with a magnetic stripe on it, complete with instructions in Chinese and English on how to insert the card in the magnetic card reader. However, there is no magnetic card reader. You go through the turnstile, hand the guy your magnetic card and he punches a hole in it just like with the paper ticket for the cable car.

The sun is getting to me so I am thrilled to pay $1 for a Great Wall baseball cap. Having a hat greatly improves my mood. I begin to acquire a whole new wardrobe of Great Wall souvenir apparel. I remark that it's unlikely they sell Great Wall underwear and Tomasz retorts that that would be more appropriate for the Forbidden City. Two T-shirts form my new wardrobe so far - a green one that says "I Climbed the Great Wall" and a white one with a picture of the Badaling section of the wall and a long inscription in Chinese, which I have no idea what it means in English but it looks cool. I can only make out the characters for Great Wall.

It's a bit of a challenge climbing at a 45 degree angle but the wall is worth it. You can't see the end of it. It recedes into the distance along with the mountains it runs along the crest of. The idea that it was started 2000 years ago is mind boggling. The wall is truly a monumental human achievement, although I guess it didn't actually keep out the northern invaders for long.

People shout to hear the echo. That seems to be a big thing to do on the wall.

It gets overcast and hazy again, which seems to be the normal weather state of Beijing, and the receding wall engulfed in haze looks mysterious and ancient as it should. Chairman Mao once claimed you are not a man if you have not visited the Great Wall. It does feel like one of those major things on life's to do list (as they say in those dumb MasterCard commercials.)

Back in the parking lot waiting for Mary and Craig who had climbed up a different, less crowded section of the wall, I amused myself watching 8 guys repair a small wall near the parking lot - 3 of the guys mixing cement by hand. Tomasz and I wonder aloud why they don't have cement mixers. Of course, with a cement mixer one guy could do the whole job rather than 3 to mix the cement and 5 more to spread and tamp it so not using a cement mixer provides employment for more people. Cement mixers do exist in Beijing. We pass a cement mixer factory on the way back.

 

On the way back from the Great Wall, we visit the Summer Palace. This is another one of those must-see places. It started out as a royal garden that was enlarged and added to by Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century. After a period of abandonment, the Dowager Empress Cixi rebuilt it in the late 19th century using money that was supposed to be spent on a navy. Well, she did build a boat - out of marble. The marble boat and the Long Corridor are the major highlights I want to see and it's getting late by the time we get there so I plan a route following the Long Corridor to the marble boat.

It's way hazier than this morning. The Summer Palace is way more crowded than the Great Wall. Hordes of people are walking along the Long Corridor. There are a couple of tour groups composed of Westerners in addition to the dozens of Chinese tour groups in their matching T-shirts and hats. The souvenir sellers are even more aggressive than at the Great Wall and they've got a wider variety of wares: postcards, books, Mao "bibles" (which they pronounce "beebles"), carved dragons, ink brushes, and all manner of things.

The Long Corridor runs along the shore of Lake Kunming. It's about 700 meters long. One of my guidebooks, or the back of the ticket or something, claims it's the "longest Long Corridor" in the world. I wonder idly how it compares to the Infinite Corridor at MIT, not that I know how long that is. Anyway, this Long Corridor is decorated on the ceiling and the sides of the roof with scenes from Chinese folk tales and myths - about 8000 of them. At least one of them features cats.

Lake Kunming is so hazy the boats passing the 17-arch bridge look out of focus. I consider taking a boat back from dock near the marble boat, but the boats actually take you to a different gate quite far from the gate we came in at. It's getting near closing time, not to mention it's either starting to rain or the haze has reached 100% humidity, so I walk back the way I came pursued by trinket sellers.

The trinket sellers even chase us to our cabs, still trying to sell us Mao bibles as the cabs pull away.