Beijing: An Ancient City in a Renewed Land, China

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

China, the "world's oldest surviving civilization," at 3.6 million square miles approximates the size of the United States but, with 1.3 billion people has five times our population. Every fifth person on Earth speaks Chinese. They're speaking it now to Americans who’re bending to photograph the sedan chair bearers at Beijing's Bell Tower, a structure built in 1272. Suddenly they’re bundled into chairs and trundled around each by four grinning porters. In former days such chairs, reserved for the emperor, required 36 porters. "Why do I rate only four?" asks one visitor and gets the Ritz Tours' guide's answer, "Tourist class!"

Actually going with Ritz Tours is a first class way to see this country. The company, the largest tour operator taking Americans to China, has been doing it for more than 20 years and has snapped up the best guides all fluent in English. Sometimes you wish they weren't so fluent. "Why are the people smiling at us?" we ask. "Foreigners are still new," the guide replies. "They call you 'big noses'."

It seems to visitors those button nosed people enjoy Americans. They believe, "The Chinese invent everything, the Japanese copy everything and the Americans buy everything!" Such national pride ignores China's attitude to intellectual property rights and shop signs in Shanghai saying "DVDs copied while you wait" but this is a country on the move and, cliché though it is, the US needs it as a friend not enemy.

It's said China's distant past is best seen in Xian with it terra cotta soldiers and its future in Shanghai with its spectacular architecture, but for the feel for China's last 800 years and its very soul the visitor has to head for its capital, Beijing.

Beijing is China as we know it. Here are the vast reaches of the Forbidden City, breathtaking despite the ugly Soviet-style buildings of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Here in Beijing is the Temple of Heaven where emperors prayed to their gods for Good Harvest in what is now recognized by UNESCO as the "largest architectural group for worship in the world". Here's the Summer Palace put up so a feudal emperor could pay tribute to his mother (but not to his peasants): 10,000 laborers digging a field into a huge lake, while others built a stationary 117 foot-long Marble Boat and, in 15 years, -- at a cost of one seventh the country's annual revenue -- created 3,000 marble buildings so the emperor could escape the heat of summer. Here are the Ming Tombs where 13 emperors lie buried in a valley chosen by feng shui. Two of the tombs have been opened and porcelain dragon jars, jade bowls and gold wine vessels compete in the museum as attractions with the crown of the 13th emperor studied with 150 gems. The Ming Dynasty, the one best known to Westerners because of its art, lasted almost 300 years until it ended with a peasant uprising in 1644.

And here is the 3,750-mile long Great Wall, begun in 221 BC when the Emperor Qin Shihuang unified the warring states into China and linked the small defensive walls built against the barbarians and themselves. Historians write that the emperor used nearly a million people, 1/5 of China's work force, to create a wall wide enough for "six horsemen riding abreast. Those who perished had their bones crushed and used for mortar, earning the wall the grim sobriquet, 'the longest cemetery in the world'." The bones of Confucius himself are part of the Great Wall

This China of the past has gone. In its place is a vibrant country that's turning in many ways to the Western world; it's a land where children learn English in elementary school; the language has replaced Russian. So stop a young person when you want directions. An elderly taxi driver recently picked up a tourist who wanted taken to the airport. Using body language, the tourist flapped his arms like wings. He missed his plane unfortunately: the cab took him to a market for caged birds.