Seeing Tiananmen Square

May 10th, Tuesday

Bike path (!) on the Zhexin Dong Lu: Sha and Rob walking to the bus stop

After a long walk down the Zhixin Road we caught the No.22 bus into the city, the road "like a big China town" (as Chris said) continuing for miles, with shop after little shop behind the bike path: not only for bikes but also for electric scooters, motorbikes, pedestrians, the occasional horse and cart and parked cars. The many people employed as refuse collectors and street sweepers carry the rubbish away on their bikes. Parents and grandparents carry little children on their bikes too, risking their lives at every moment. Not a helmet in sight for the whole time we were in China! People sell fruit, vegetables and underwear from their bike carts. On the road itself the traffic is continuous and noisy with plenty of honking just to say, "I'm here" (as Sally said). On the bus, most people stand, but Sha, solicitous of our welfare, ensures we get on at a terminus so that we have seats. This ride cost ¥1.50; Sha had a paycard that gave her a ride for 40 mao. As we approached the city centre, the people who got onto the bus were in smarter clothes. We had passed the hutongs, narrow alleyways between one storey houses, and seen a row of music shops where George hopes to buy a cheap 'cello bow. Goodness knows what all the other places were selling: sometimes it's a two-in-one establishment, like the laundry cum travel agent's where our train tickets were bought.

Waiting to be served at the duck place

An ornamental gate, Qianmen

Qianmen was the last stop. The street is quasi-historic, reconstructed and pedestrianised just before the Olympic Games, and neatly paved with a couple of old trams on show. We decided en masse not to patronise Starbuck's although there were long queues outside the other eating places. Sha began to look anxious, but eventually we discovered that the famous Quanjude restaurant, specialising in Peking roast duck, had a fast food section with stools available, low stools according to Chris and Rob. Sally and I found them just the right size. The English translations on the menu were intimidating, duck gizzard, fried foot webs, curried duck intestines, oh dear, but then I spotted "noodles with duck" so that was what we ordered, along with spring rolls and Chinese lemonade. I paid the bill by the kitchen where whole dead ducks, smoked and dried, were hanging by their necks, heads and feet dangling.

Representatives of the Chinese navy, plus tourists!

Outside the museum

Sha was keen to take us to the National Museum of China, just reopened after years of renovation; she had loved going there as a child. Chinese military units were lining up to visit the museum as part of their education, and to our amusement, ordinary passers-by were joining in the parade.Entrance is free ("open daily, closed on Mondays") but you have to arrive before 8 a.m. before the allotted number of tickets available runs out. Obviously we had arrived too late.

However, Sha doesn't like to be thwarted: "I'll talk to the officials," she said. At the fourth attempt, a man came out of the building and took her aside, slipping five tickets into her hand. She had done it! How? She'd told him that we were from overseas, had come a very long way just to see this museum, that this would be our only opportunity and, her trump card, that all four of us were seniors. Our bags were scanned at the entrance and we were in.

Inside the museum

The interior was like a great railway station forecourt, so spacious it looked empty. We started upstairs at the collection of precious vases, then of artefacts dating back to the 14th century B.C. with mysterious anthropomorphic zoömorphic images engraved on them (a battle axe with a fierce face was that old) and many a bronze zhong, a bronze, bell-shaped gong from the Zhou dynasty. Then came a gallery of "thousand armed and thousand eyed" bodhisattvas, porcelain coloured ones seated on lions with expressive eyes, and some "in embracing posture" with a female goddess at which a trio of Chinese boys were giggling as schoolboys do, the world over. Giant Song dynasty Buddhas followed in wood and clay and stone.

In the larger halls downstairs the glorious history of the Chinese Revolution was shown, and what preceded it. The Qing forbad international trade: we saw the "rules of precaution against foreigners" in vertical script. We saw horrid paintings of, for example, the Lüshun / Port Arthur massacre, of which I'd never heard, and sculpture groups, e.g. The Chinese People Mired in Misery, a title that sticks in my head. In the 19th century there were Japanese, American, British, German and Russian intrusions into China. One caricature on the wall had Uncle Sam with claws for hands.

The "Red" Boat

Sun Yat-Sen was the leader of the bourgeois revolutionary faction, a contemporary of Lenin, overthrowing the Qing Dynasty and thus "putting an end to more than two thousand years of feudal monarchy." And so to Chairman Mao, very handsome as a young man, and his leadership. The crucial meetings to plan the upheaval took place on an old wooden boat.

At this stage of the exhibition I began to feel exhausted and had to sit down to recuperate. The end of Chinese history in the final gallery featured space travel and the railway to Lhassa.

Being on the edge of Tiananmen Square, we had to walk across it and in order to do that had to have our bags scanned again. No water bottles allowed. Armed sentries stood rigidly to attention and wide screens in the open showed patriotic video clips.

A sentry in Tiananmen Square

Back "home" on the 290 bus, to meet George and his astro-colleagues Xiao Peng, Bill and Bill's wife Elma (American Canadians) for supper at a nearby restaurant. With Xiao Peng there to do the ordering for us we had a better selection of food for this supper, fish, vegetable dishes, dumplings, Peking duck. Again we were allotted a private room for the feast.