Beijing -- Forbidden City and night market

Pedicab, anyone?

I am in Beijing, in the courtyard of my hotel. It is a remodeled courtyard house of the kind that Beijing was once filled. There are rooms arranged around a central courtyard which is lush and flowery and all is feng-shui-ed. This place is small and hard to find, and surprisingly quiet and peaceful considering that it is 1km from the Forbidden City and immediately surrounded by huge 6-storey shopping centers. There is a night food market nearby. This is a block of street merchants selling all kinds of food, from skewered lamb, shrimp, squid to scorpions, small whole sharks, seahorses and the like; tripe soup, veggie pastries, strange desserts served in half pineapple shells, bubble tea that is actually bubbling like a science fair volcano, all kinds of things. Pretty greasy on the whole though. I think I prefer the paella wagons on Ile de Re, even though they are less dramatic.

At the Forbidden City

On the first whole day, I set out to see the Forbidden City, a 15 minute walk from where I am staying. It rises up immense, and looks just like the pictures.  There are endless surging waves of people, thousands of them (including around here, zillions of Chinese tourists),but things seem to work out, including traffic. It is a different kind of orderliness, and the rules are more subtle than a list of rules, but not hard to do operationally--  just dive in. The Forbidden City is as if all of Capitol Hill and the Pentagon were walled in in one big reservation. There are dramatic huge pavilions, but along the sides there are alleyways where officials lived: behind the doors (which are not open to the public) are courtyard houses. I saw some workers hustling some lotuses in giant pots down one of these alleys, towards the garden at the back; otherwise staff were pretty much invisible. Workers lived outside the Tienanmen gates and came in every morning, out every evening. Though very grand, the built structures seem sterile to me. But it is filled with tour groups, almost all Chinese. It is one big photo op, and sometimes visitors from the countryside to whom I am an exotic creature want to take my picture. Or students want me to pose with them. I learned how to offer to take pictures of whole families with their cameras (so a parent would not be omitted) and then have them take one of me, often with part of the family. And I must appear hundreds of times incidentally in other people's photos-- click, click, click. I have an alibi!
The Forbidden City is set up as a huge walled area with one building after another, in sequence. At the very end are the Emperor's private quarters. In the first big open area, there was an informal basketball court! Must be for after hours play by staff. Souvenir booths sold fans with pictures of Mao, Chou En Lai, and Hu Jintao. And battery operated GI Joes (well, Chinese, of course) that wriggled across the ground shooting; plastic honeycomb hats like party decorations; and all manner of junk. And vast, vast empty spaces-- or rather, areas full of wandering people. Building after building, the whole thing is almost a kilometer long. There are huge pots around the walls that reminded me of the pots the Janissaries overturned to indicate revolution; and the originals (?) of the pair of lions that appear all over the place in Beijing and sometimes in front of fancy Chinese Restaurants here. I hadn't realized there is a male, with his foot on a ball indicating potency, and a female with her foot on a lion cub, indicating fertility and the future of the nation. 

 Some of the roof lines had interesting gargoyles. One of those things that I would know all about if I understood Chinese.  There was an interesting display in one of the halls showing domestic items and telling about the machinations around imperial weddings, relationships among the imperial family and advisers, and so on. It seemed like, as usual in situations where there are concubines who are expected to produce heirs, there was a lot of scheming on behalf of these sons. 
As my time in Beijing went by, and I saw more and more of these sites, they started to seem the same. Perhaps there was considerable destruction during the cultural revolution and it was all rebuilt along the same lines. The Forbidden City is so huge and daunting, it is impossible to really absorb it. At the end, there was a park/garden, and back out into the living city.


There is an interesting scam which I have encountered three times. A couple of young women approach and speak in English-- are you visiting, where are you from, etc. -- practicing English? No, they are art students and their final projects for the year are on display; would I like to see them? The first time they took me to the fifth floor of an office building where there was artwork on display, but it was obviously production line junk, in garish colors. But they went on about the traditions of Chinese art etc. Then as I am politely extricating myself they ask if I want to buy . . . the next time was on the grounds of the Forbidden City; I somehow thought that this scam wouldn't be happening here, but lo and behold, exactly the same artworks on display! I guess anyone who buys deserves it and may even be happy to have real artwork purchased at the Forbidden City.