Pinguoyuan, and keep walking!

I went to a wonderful lecture last night, given to Canada-China Friendship Society members in Ottawa by a former diplomat, banker, financial expert and business consultant, Lars Ellström. He told us that on retirement in 2009, he decided to take one last good look at China, a country he'd loved since the age of 10 and where he'd lived in for most of his life, by going for a walk. He said, "I decided to get off at the last station at the western end of Line 1 on the Beijing subway––Pinguoyuan zhan––and start walking west. I had no definite plans as to where I was going." He finished his walk a couple of years later on the borders of Kyrgyzstan, in Kashgar.

I just love that kind of story, and Mr. Ellström told it very well, showing slides for illustration. The first few slides included two famous Chinese proverbs, 百闻不如一见 bǎiwén bùrú yījiàn: Seeing it once is better than hearing about it a hundred times! and 实事求是 shí shì qiú shì: Seek truth from facts. 

Beyond the edge of Beijing, with no particular lodgings in mind, Mr. Ellström wandered into the Xishan (西山, western hills), often following traces of the Great Wall, sleeping where he could, either in ¥10-¥15 guesthouses or under the stars, and so continued into Hebei, Shanxi and inner Mongolia, which was a "centre of contention". Here he came to Ordos where he met migrant workers building a new city that seemed as yet deserted. Since then Ordos has become inhabited. Three Mandarin-speaking sisters that he met told him they were direct descendants of Genghis Khan, of the 30th generation. Aristocratic ladies, he called them.

Most of his encounters, though, were with poor and often illiterate people. He showed us a photo of a kind, welcoming man, head of his household, who had been born in 1960 and who'd had no proper schooling because of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Ellström's conversations with local people (speaking Mandarin with strong regional accents) were over and over again the same: Where do you come from? Ni na'r lai? Where are you going? Ni qu na'r? The people he met often had no concept of Sweden or even of Europe, only vaguely aware that it was somewhere far away to the west. They asked him about his rulers in Sweden. Were they corrupt? Here, they told him with bitterness, in a sort of refrain, all officials are corrupt. "Do Swedish farmers own their own land?" Mr. Ellström did his best to explain and was met with incomprehension. The frustration of the Uyghur peasants, nomads forced to be farmers under bureaucratic control, was expressed by a tearing down of public notices and a strewing of litter, including dead animals, all over the roadsides. Mr. Ellström saw this as a form of civil disobedience, subversion.

Thence into Gansu and along the He Xi Corridor (aka Silk Road ... although that is a western concept) that stretches between the Tibet Autonomous Region on one side and the Gobi desert on the other, to his destination, the province of Xinjiang––the Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the wooden gates in the towns are decorated with beautiful patterns. They had no cemeteries in these faraway places; their dead simply lay under mounds by the roadside, in "auspicious" spots.

He was fascinated by the place names on the way, often having something to do with the Wall or a defeat of The Others. He showed us how the village names were written in large Chinese characters (hanzi) with their original names above, in smaller, Arabic font. He saw many women wearing burqas, as a sign of defiance, he thought, clinging to their Muslim culture. There's a growing sense of defiance among these people, although the minority languages are diminishing in use. The Han Chinese have traditionally seen outsiders such as the Uyghurs as barbarians. Now, their homes have touristic value. He mentioned a place not so far west, where (migrant) construction workers were tearing down ancient, Ming dynasty houses and building replicas of them in their place, so as to create a tourist resort. "Like it or not" (quoting another Chinese phrase) their owners had had to leave. In another location, an unhappy family was being evicted into the desert so that their home and land could be flooded and a new reservoir built.

His conclusions? Modern China is agro-industrial, despotic, expansive, militant. It is a "Realm of Walls" and at the same time, when he thinks of the individuals who welcomed and fed him along the road, "a Realm of Human Warmth." His final conclusion is that it is a Realm of Contradictions!

From the Temple of Heaven to the sky

May 17th, 2015 (written 10 days later)

Just as we'd finished checking out, Howard turned up at the hotel to collect us and put our luggage in his car. For our sakes, he was sacrificing a whole Sunday, instead of spending that day with his wife, in-laws and baby son. We were grateful to him. This was a sultry morning with heavy rain threatening and smog in the air, so it's just as well he was able to drive us to a spot quite close to the attraction we were going to visit: the famous Temple of Heaven, a UNESCO heritage site, southeast of the city centre.

Having squeezed his car into a parking spot on the Xiangchun Hutong, Howard led us with confidence across the busy road to the North Gate of the Temple of Heaven park, generously paying for our entrance tickets himself. He has brought foreign visitors here before. Immediately within the park we noticed groups of people in fours, playing games of Chinese shuttlecock (jiànzi) on the tree lined pathway.

The replica––I've just read on Wikipedia that the original was struck by lightning and burned down in 1889––15th century Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is a huge, triple roofed, circular building with marble terraces around it in concentric circles, steps leading up them on all sides. It's hard to get a photo showing the scale of the site, especially with all those people in the way. The best ploy might be to arrive at 8am, just as the gates open. I was curious to peer inside this building, as Howard said, the equivalent of a cathedral, but it was difficult to catch more than a glimpse of what was beyond the barrier with people pushing in from behind with their cameras. In the interior stood richly patterned pillars, and the domed ceiling was covered with coloured images of dragons (long, 龙) and phoenixes (fenghuang, 凤凰), representing the Yin and Yang. In China, the dragon is a symbol of good fortune, strength and wisdom, not of evil. I think there were stone buffalos in the shadows too; I couldn't be sure.

Wikipedia photo of the Hall of Prayer and outlying halls

A tourist making fun of the Heavenly Stone

South of the Hall of Prayer (the largest structure) is a smaller one, with an echoing wall, The Imperial Vault of Heaven, and lined up with that, further south, is the open air Circular Mound Altar, built in 1530, where they used to worship at the winter solstice, again built in concentric circles with balustrades and flights of marble steps, nine at a time, the nines (as it says on the nearby plaque) "symbolizing the nine layers of Heaven and Emphasizing its extreme importance" (sic). At the centre was the Heavenly Centre Stone, surrounded by nine rings of lesser stones, 18 in the second ring, 81 in the ninth, etc. ... As Howard told us, and as the Wikipedia article explains:

The centre of the altar is a round slate called the Heart of Heaven(天心石) or the Supreme Yang(太阳石), where the Emperor prayed for favourable weather. Thanks to the design of the altar, the sound of the prayer will be reflected by the guardrail, creating significant resonance, which was supposed to help the prayer communicate with the Heaven. 

While we were there, people were irreverently posing for photos on it.

The temple complex is too huge to discover everything in one morning. It includes, for example, the Hall of Divine Music Administration on the western side of the park. What was that? I wondered. We could have explored the paths through this park for hours more. What we did find on the way back to the car was the loveliest méi gùi yuan, rose garden, that I ever saw in China. Such magnificence!

I had to be torn away from there and from the strange birds with their black heads, long tails and blue feathers––which I now think was an azure-winged magpie––and the tiny, tame Chinese marmot in the grass, to be driven to the airport for our flight back to Canada. It only took us about an hour to reach the airport area from the city this time, as the traffic on the main roads was flowing well, that Sunday lunchtime. Howard lives near the airport, he told us, so he knew the way to a restaurant in a modern residential area where he chose a variety of dishes for our substantial lunch at a quiet table. We didn't recognise much of what we were eating, Chris reminds me (though I seem to remember spring rolls, mushrooms, bok choy, flavoured carrots and meats?) but we left well satisfied.

Chris puts his Tilley hat away at the airport

Flight AC32 being prepared for departure

We said goodbye and thanks to Howard at the International Departures drop-off. Then came the long check-in procedures, exit card handover, passport and boarding pass controls, security checks, the wait for our flight to board and the long, long flight itself. We had a good 40 minutes' wait in our seats on the plane, in row 50 again, before ground control gave our pilot push back permission, so our take-off was delayed, and we presumed we wouldn't catch our connecting flight in Toronto. We had intermittent turbulence all the way. I must put it on record that Chris behaved himself remarkably well on this journey, not losing patience once. We each nodded off for about an hour en route; I even had a dream that, near the Arctic waters, the pilot brought the plane down almost to water level so that we were flying among the fishing boats in a harbour, under a bridge and through a hangar, a manoeuvre that knocked off some of the landing gear and fuselage and left cables dangling. We'll never be able to land safely in this state, I thought, as we headed (in my dream, not in reality) towards the mountains of British Columbia ... then something woke me up again, and I went back to watching Gone With The Wind.

It was over 13 hours again before we touched down at Lester Pearson airport, for a long queue in the Immigration Hall (though luckily we were put in a priority line for passengers with connections), then a frantic dash through the baggage collection hall, up and down the steps and the corridors to re-drop our suitcase and be issued twice with new boarding cards: after being told we'd be on a later than planned flight to Ottawa, the original flight turned out to be delayed so we could make the connection after all, but only just. "Paging passengers Christopher Hobbs and Alison Hobbs ...!" During the security checks at Domestic Departures I was of course chosen for the random body search; once released from there we all but ran to our gate. This sort of thing is very stressful for people with erratic pulses. Our last flight of the day in the Canadian sunset was smooth and quick and easy though, and the taxi ride home through peaceful little Ottawa a real pleasure. As we could see in the lamplight, my green garden plants had sprung up beyond recognition during our week away.

Finally we lay down in our own bed. It had been a 28 hour day.

Day 6 in Beijing: on the Jiao Tong campus and up the Jingshan

Written May 15th, 2015

Entrance to Jiao Tong University

Today, Chris was finally able to relax after the completion of his assignment here. The people he's been working with left a box of expensive and beautifully packaged guan yin tea at our hotel--we found it on the bed just now when we came in.

Graduates of Jiao Tong Da Xue

While Chris was conferring with Prof. Liu and his colleagues and students this morning, I had a leisurely start, though I'd been awake since 5:30am, and a fascinating walk around the university by myself, observing the life on campus. I struck lucky because it was graduation day today and many of the students were proudly wearing their robes and taking photos of one another around the pond and in the garden near the Chairman Mao statue. I saw some proud parents in attendance too. The girls wore traditional Maoist tunics of pale blue cotton with black piping round their high collar and wide sleeves, over a demure black, knee-length skirt. Some had their hair in pigtails, which made them seem even more demure, but to my amusement I did notice a few had pleated their tunics with a safety pin at the back to give them more of a waist. The young men were in smart, new, black tunics.

Reading outdoor newspapers on the campus 

The graduates were celebrating, in their robes

Old lady walking through the campus

Chris' place of work,
with soldiers running

The campus doesn't appear to be confined to the students. I saw many young mums with their little ones again as well as some old people strolling around, one gentleman pointing with his stick at the characters on a stone as he mouthed the poem to himself. On the sports field, some young men and women 20 years old or so were jumping over skipping ropes in giggly groups, like 10-year-olds in a British schoolyard. Some other young men, extremely disciplined and dressed in army fatigues, were jogging round the racetrack in unison under the supervision of a sergeant major. As usual in outdoor Beijing, uniformed workers in conical straw hats with a broom and a dustpan on a stick kept coming along to sweep the pavement. I felt I was seeing little vignettes of Chinese life on this campus. It is a lovely place to walk around on a fine May morning, under the avenues of leafy trees and past the fragrant flowers.

Chris orders a coca cola

Chris met me back at the hotel; we lunched at the street round the corner from the Gaoliangqian Xiejie, returning to the comfortable restaurant where we'd dined on our first evening here and were served a bubbling bowl of chicken remains, including all the bones and the feet, with whole garlic and a sort of dumplings, kept hot by a small flame, and another tasty dish of beans and other things in strips. I've no idea what were were eating or what it was called, or what the restaurant was called, but it was a decent meal. Our visa card didn't work in their credit card machine so we had to resort to cash, as is often the case in this country.

No worries about supper because Howard and Henry had offered to treat us. We were to meet them at the junction of Lines 6 and 8 at Nanluoguxiang station (a bit of a mouthful to pronounce), which is so new that it does not appear on my map, but we worked it out from first principles, and realised that, once there, we'd be within walking distance of Jingshan park. Chris wanted to relax on park benches again this afternoon, so that's where we headed after coming up to ground level at Exit B. This area, remarkably popular with non-Chinese tourists, is also not far from the Qianhai and Houhai Lakes and Beihai Park, so I didn't think we'd get too lost.

Western couple on the slopes of Jingshan

The park was at the end of another leafy avenue--I was really grateful for the shade, even though today was cooler and fresher than yesterday. Then, because there was the inevitable big red wall round the park, we had to ask where the entrance was and continue round the corner. This park's name means Mountain with Landscape View, or something like that, and when we went in, it was idyllic, with graceful dark cypresses round the base of the mountain and rocky steps up the shady side. We encountered a non-Chinese couple here who asked us to take a picture of them; I think she was American and he was British. He was preparing to run a marathon tomorrow ... along parts of the Great Wall! Anyhow after chatting to us for a few minutes, they climbed the Jingshan nimbly enough. We sat and rested on the ascent, where it was quiet, and again at the top where it was not quiet; crowds of other people stood pointing at the formidable view of the great city skyscrapers to the north, similar to our views from high places in Tokyo, and on the other side of the roofs and whole extent of the Forbidden City.

This is a very famous view. It strikes me that the similarly extensive, strictly guarded Zhongnanhai compound behind the long red wall on Fuyou street today is not so very different from what this Imperial compound of old China used to be. The earth and rocks from the moat excavation around the Forbidden City, by the way, were used to create Jingshan, this "mountain" on which we stood looking down.

There's a gigantic golden Buddha in a temple at the summit of the Jingshan, to whom people were being encouraged to pray after the purchase of incense sticks and rosary beads. One lady I watched refused to pay for the extras but having stood and muttered with her fingertips together and having dipped her forehead to the cushion at the Buddha's feet, did slip him a 10-yuan note under one of the boxes of offerings. People of many different nationalities were sitting on the wall and benches or chatting in groups, including a large group of people who were Asian, but definitely not Chinese. I'm guessing Burmese, all the ladies in identical long golden, lacy dresses, some of them also wearing Mandarin hats bought from the gift shop. They and their menfolk were in a cheerful mood.

As we climbed back down the mountain we stopped to listen to a musician on a saxophone accompanied by an accordion player, entertaining a group of American and European students with a medley of music of their countries. He had an impressive repertoire, from the Marseilleise to Funiculi-Funicula.

Typically chaotic afternoon traffic near Nanluoguxiang zhan

Supper with Howard and Henry

We took our time wandering through the bottom of the park then walked back to Nanluoguxiang station to wait for Howard and Henry at Exit B. They showed up dead on time at 5pm and we set off walking again: supper was at a Korean restaurant on Qianhai Lake. We ate at an outdoor table under the willow trees, the Beijing men doing the ordering, fortunately. We shared all the dishes. My drink was a surprisingly good, frothy tomato juice and Chris got two bottles of the beer he likes. While we dined, lines of tourists went by in groups following their leader who held up a flag. Howard said he could “feel” that some of them were southern Chinese. After the meal we did a slow circuit of the lake, past the street vendors selling massages, kites and so on, constantly offered rickshaw rides and seeing the sunset over a distant mountain. Before it was quite dark a taxi ride with Howard and Henry took us back to the hotel, past Ping'anli and under the intertwining Xizhimen road bridges.

Sunset and tourists at Houhai Lake

Day 5 in Beijing: Olympic Park and hutongs

Written May 14th, 2015

Pond and tower at the Olympic Green

Chris finished giving his training course today and will spend the morning with one of the profs tomorrow morning. In the afternoon we'll be able to go out together again, not far, as it gets awfully hot in the afternoons, when I come back to the hotel room for a rest and the thermometer says 25º, which feels cool. I didn't fall asleep today, watched some of Gone with the Wind on the DVD-player instead.

This morning I decided to see something modern, the Olympic (Ao Lin Pi Ke) park, which is accessed by three well spread out tube stations; I chose the middle one, Olympic Green. To reach it, I had to take Line 13, the railway on stilts, giving me a view of hutong demolition below, the slums everywhere giving way to tower blocks, to Zhichunlu, two stops to the north, then transferred to Line 10 along a long passageway, then at the fourth station along that line to Line 8, two stops. Line 10 used to be our nearest tube line when we stayed at the "Hornki Great" Hotel four years ago, so as I went through Mudanyuan station I thought of Sha, George, Rob and Sally who had been with us then.

At the Olympic Park, with IBM building

Bird's Nest Stadium with future athlete

Imitation Bird's Nest lamp

Surfacing at Olympic Green is quite a thrill, because you're immediately surrounded by wide, clean spaces and futuristic architecture and art installations. There's also a big pond that I remembered seeing on the way to George's 2011 astronomy conference dinner. It had waterlilies and boats in it. I walked by the side of the pond as far as the entrance to the Olympic plaza which seems to be inspired by Tian'anmen Square, being so vast and rectangular. Ai Weiwei's Bird's Nest Stadium is on one side and the Water Cube and wiggle-topped IBM building on the other. I could have ridden in a little train-bus like the sensible people, but I chose to zigzag the whole length of the plaza on foot, which I estimate to be at least 3 kilometres, so by the time I'd reached the Olympic Sports Centre station at the far end I'd really had enough walking for the day. The heat was already intense and it was not yet noon.

A long walk through the Olympic Sports Centre

Rickshaws waiting for passengers at Shichahai

Too early to return to the hotel, I had time to return to another interesting place on our previous visit to Beijing: the district known as Schichahai near the central hutongs. Sha had taken us to a wonderful teahouse there, but I didn't go inside this time. It had been too precious an experience to repeat by myself.

In the Yandai alleyway

The lakesides were still fun, although rather more tacky than I remember. I walked the Yandai (tobacco pouch) alley again in both directions, jam packed with people, didn't buy anything except postcards, and dodged the rickshaws and bikes coming at me in all directions, with the drivers shouting, “Lady! Rickshaw!” My lunch was another rip-off: 95 yuan. It was quite a good imitation of a Hawaiian pizza, but that price was ridiculous.

What I enjoyed most was veering off the beaten track to see what the hutongs were like behind the scenes. Scruffy in the extreme, but more genuine.

Qianhai Lake

Chris sent me a text message to say he was finishing work mid-afternoon, so I made my way home from Beihai Bei as I'd done the day before yesterday, easy once you know how. None of it feels so strange any more. I checked out some more dining possibilities in the big shopping mall and we ended up at a very good restaurant called Sizzlers this evening, packed with young Chinese trying out the knives and forks, before another stroll round the university campus, where 60,000 people live. We saw a warbler-like bird I didn't recognise, fluttering in the fir trees. The rose beds look lovely. Children were playing round the central pond, among them two little boys with toy spades, doing some gardening.

Day 4 in Beijing: Wangfujing and Zhongshan Park

Written May 13th, 2015

Chris had a productive day today, meeting the “Director State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Controland Safety,” Mr. Tang, for lunch at the campus hotel (Hongguoyuan) with all four of the local QNX men. They had roast duck plus dozens of other dishes, apparently. Chris' training course is going well; they'll probably finish the training half way through tomorrow, but then Chris will spend some extra time with the university people.

Today, my day was going to be shopping, but it's never my favourite pursuit, so I lingered in a park again.

I set off straight after breakfast with good intentions, buying a tube ticket that would allow me to reach Wangfujing station (a ¥4 ticket) on Line 1, change at Xidan. The trains were crowded today, but twice I was politely offered a seat by a young man and accepted gratefully both times. When you arrive at one of these stations you need to pay attention to the map of the exits and choose the right one for your purposes, or you could find yourself the wrong side of an 8-lane highway. The exit I chose this time brought me up to ground level in the middle of a huge department store, so finding my way out took a while. Wangfujing Dajie is the Oxford Street of Beijing, wide and largely pedestrianised with booths selling soft drinks in the middle. It sells clothes ranging from Prada outfits to kitschy straw hats and plastic flip flops. There are two enormous bookshops, both of which have English novels for sale, precious art books, computer manuals and maps of Beijing, and a huge children's books and toys section, but of course most of the shelves are copiously stocked with Chinese literature. In the corners of each floor they sell souvenirs––tea sets, bangles, placemats and such. I browsed through these big stores, wasting time rather, because I didn't find anything that appealed to me. A friend in Ottawa had asked me to try to find a plate-display stand for her, a sort of wooden easel. I found some, but they weren't for sale without the object to be displayed, so the shop assistants wouldn't let me buy one. I am too embarrassed to describe my attempts at making myself understood in Chinese; in the end I gave up. I went into an Emporium too, tried and gave up again, but bought a fan and a silken tissue box cover there. I should perhaps have bought more things made of silk, but being a poor and uninspired shopper, I didn't.

Yi wan kung pao ji

Many things on the Wangfujing Dajie are expensive; many are rip-offs. The fan I'd bought in the Emporium was the twin of the ones I saw in a souvenir shop further down at a fifth of its price. Rip-offs annoy me, so I cheered myself up (?) by going to look at the alleyway selling the unforgettable scorpions on skewers as snacks. Some were still wriggling, I'm afraid. The alleyway was indescribably noisy, scruffy and crowded. I could also have bought some baby octopus legs with spring onions. It was getting extremely hot and smelly--the temperature rose well into the 30s today--and I needed lunch, so I left the shopping area for a side street where there were restaurants and sat down for a fast bowl of Kung Pao Ji with rice, along with crowds of young office workers on their lunchbreak, five of whom shared my window table.

That's enough, I thought, I'll walk back to one of the stations near Tian'anmen Square and then go back to the hotel for a siesta. I found a walk through flowerbeds and trees beside a canal on one side and on the other a row of exclusive looking, sealed-off hutongs, a residential area for VIPs, I think.

Tiananmen Square from the northern side

In order to walk across the north side of the famous Square (more of a rectangle, really) I had to join the queue to have my bags scanned. “Please accept the Security Check for your own and other people's safety.” The young girl in uniform ran a wand over my legs too. Soldiers and police were posted everywhere again. Once through the barrier and past the street vendors frantically trying to sell rainbow umbrella hats and Chinese flags, I could pass the grand entrance to the Forbidden City with its stone lions, flagpoles and Chairman Mao portrait still prominently central. I liked the roses planted in front of the forbidding walls; they softened them.

Inside Zhongshan part

In the mid-day heat haze (smog that can be smelled) I was heading for the Tian'anmen West station, but on the way came across a nice surprise: another garden I hadn't seen yet: Zhongshan Park. This place, named in honour of Sun Yat Sen, is combined botanical garden and place of refuge, with an ancient “altar” to the gods of land and grain in its centre, with a square of five different coloured soils, symbolising all the earth below heaven that the Ming Dynasty Emperor ruled. The building behind it was hundreds of years old, and so were the giant cypress trees. I sat in various corners of this park, including a bench by the moat (tongzi he) that surrounds the Forbidden City, watching the hired boats go by, and at an outdoor table by a drinks booth, drinking a very sugary drink; because I was so thirsty, anything would do.

Moat round the Forbidden City, seen from Zhongshan Park

A respite from the city in Zhongshan Park

This evening, after the inevitable sleep on the hotel bed, Chris took me for a walk round the Jiaotong university campus to an obviously popular restaurant he'd visited for lunch yesterday, where we ate some more roast duck. We had a glimpse of the life on campus, people doing all kinds of sports on the sports field, indulging in a dance class, or cuddling in the courtyard pavilions. Looking through the upstairs windows of their halls of residence we observed that the students sleep in dormitories, in bunk beds.

Back to Beihai Park, on my own

Mural and ATM at Beihai Bei underground station

Written May 12th, 2015

Chris went to work today, met by 3 young men in the lobby at 8:30am who accompanied him to the large, white Science building on foot. The day was cool, but rapidly warming up. Half an hour later, I set out myself, solo this time, and headed to Xizhimen zhan, the tube station, over the dangerous pedestrian crossings. I tried getting cash from an ATM but my card was rejected, probably because I tapped in the wrong PIN--some keypads are differently configured here. Then I also made the mistake of going through the security check at the entrance to the trains before buying my ticket (Everyone has their bags scanned, and in other places, the ticket machines are beyond this hurdle.). In my rudimentary Chinese, I had to explain to the security guard I'd have to repeat the procedure, but like most people in Beijing he smiled at me, mei guanxi, no problem. I was returning to Beihai Park, because I hadn't seen it all yet and thought it would merit a second visit. This time though, I took a far easier route to get there: Line 4 to Ping'anli, 2 stops, transfer to Line 6, 1 stop, and out at Beihai Bei zhan, which was almost diagonally opposite from the North Gate of the park. On the northern side of the road is the entrance to the “Hutongs” (old alleyways) near Qianhai lake which we'd visited in 2011 with our daughter-in-law-to-be, Sha.

Mudan

For my son George, Beihai Lake is his favourite spot in Beijing, and I can see why. Having seen the western side twice yesterday and ridden on the boat with Chris, no need for repetition; today I walked around the eastern side, which seemed even more attractive. Perhaps because it was sunnier, there were more people around, all of them looking blissfully happy, unless I was much mistaken. Singers, dancers and professional or would-be musicians were everywhere, taking advantage of this shadier side of the lake to keep cool, some of the dancers dressed up in clothes they'd packed for the purpose. The character of the people seems childlike; these were often men and women my age. No doubt they think the exercise is good for them besides. One of the dressed-up older ladies had a false moustache--she seemed to be acting a part in a dramatic scene and her troupe had attracted a large audience of all age. I snapped away with my camera, then joined the flow of pedestrians once more. Sometimes I followed the lakeside path, which was quieter than the main one. I passed many rose beds and a glorious mudanyuan, peony garden, in full bloom. (The mudan is the national flower of China.) Fish ponds are popular too.

Teaching their grandson to fish, in Beihai Park

This park, which has been here in some form or other since the 12th century, is highly landscaped, with rocks positioned vertically on the hillsides, perhaps to represent mountains. These carefully chosen rocks are cemented together and criss-crossed with rocky steps, great fun to explore. Away from the lakeside are hidden grottos with small pavilions where the Imperial family and courtiers used to gather for relaxation––feasts and story telling––very much as described in Dream of the Red Chamber (石头记), "permeated by an atmosphere of exquisite refinement" as the plaque put it, but absolutely out of bounds to commoners in those days. I began to have an inkling of what prompted the communist revolution: it can't have seemed fair to keep such things for the nobility alone. Now all can come and enjoy themselves here, young couples can smooch in the pavilions and older ones can bring their children, buy flasks of bubble mixture for them to play with or, like the grandparents I observed for a while, teach a very small boy to fish in a pond (“dangerous for drowning”).

Communist sculpture in Beihai Park

Bridge to the island

You pass public conveniences at every few 200 metres and a few of them even provide a special “Potty toilet” in case those usual holes in the ground are too intimidating. What you have to remember is that you need to help yourself (adequately) from the toilet paper dispenser before entering.

I crossed the arched, hump-backed stone bridges and near some lotus ponds came to the Jade Islet with its 17th century white pagoda or "Dagoba" at the top of the steep hill, some 160 steps up. There was an extra charge to see it at close quarters so I contented myself by looking at the views from the lookout points, could make out the three unmistakable skyscrapers with their curved tops where Xizhimen is, Beijing's TV tower, and many traditional-looking roofs in the near distance. At close quarters, their eaves are decorated with symbolic rows of dragons and Imperial personages. Back at lake level I walked right round the island, on one side of which is a long, curved outdoor corridor with red pillars, its ceiling painted very thoroughly and beautifully with flowers, birds, landscapes and story pictures. Pity I don't know the stories!

In the long corridor

In the long corridor, detail

The corridor is a place to take a rest

"Qiong dao chun yin"

On the shore of the island is a "stele," a carved stone erected in 1751 to display Emperor Qianlong's description of the spot: qiong dao chun yin, which means "jade island in spring shade." It's one of those four-character poems that typify Chinese thought. On the other sides of the erection are longer poems by the Emperor, to be read from top to bottom, and it has a relief of mythical figures round its base.

I sat on a stone step--the benches being fully occupied--to eat an improvised picnic from what I'd found in a supermarket this morning, including a tub of yoghurt with integral spoon. Dairy products are generally not so popular, but the Chinese do seem to like yoghurt. I'd failed to find any cheese; they prefer tofu. Then I slowly retraced my steps to the North Gate, leaving the cacophony behind (one man on a saxophone was teaching his fellows to play Auld Lang Syne ... over and over again) and the gentleman with his spinning top on a string, and the park's cats, sparrows, swallows and magpies, for the cacophony of the traffic on the street beyond the wall.

We'd walked so far yesterday that today my knees had started to hurt; I decided to take the tubes back “home” with a long stop at the Costa Coffee shop on the way and this time did manage to withdraw some more cash from an ATM at Beihai Bei station. In the mall, I also managed to locate the restaurant called "Tasty" whose advert Chris had noticed yesterday and where we ate tonight: steak and salmon, served in a very posh way, with a bread basket, vegetables, fruit tea, beer for Chris and desserts for us both, this whole meal costing the equivalent of a light weekend brunch in Ottawa, about $30. And they don't expect any tips.

Chris, having had a demanding but apparently satisfying day working with intelligent people at the university is in bed, fast asleep, as I type this. It's not yet 9:30pm.