Strangely, the walkway leading up to the tombs is far more interesting than the tombs themselves. Only three of the thirteen have been excavated, and it's a lot of work to get to any of them with relatively little reward. The tombs have been ransacked many times, so the interiors are largely empty marble rooms buried in the middle of a mountain. Above the tomb there's usually a big hall with a statue of the dead emperor, but it's all pretty spartan.

It's a good half day trip, and afterwards we returned to the city for some dim sum, and headed to the airport for our flight back to the (comparatively) clean air of Bangkok.

As you can see, the Sacred Way is lined with huge animal and people statues, meant to guard the entrance and ward off evil spirits. Strangely, the Sacred Way is slightly curved in order to confuse the spirits as an additional entrance barrier, which seems pretty weak to me. The pretty path eventually leads to the great gate, which is the largest gate in China, which also serves as the visitor center.

Monday started off with the usual crummy breakfast at the hotel, but we got a bonus fifty percent off today because Somchai found a big hair in his congee. Then we drove about an hour and a half north of Beijing to the Ming Emperors Tombs. It's a big valley encircled with mountains, important for the usual Feng Shui reasons. The thirteen Ming emperors from 1400 to mid 1600's are all buried here, each in his own palace mausoleum underneath his own mountain. The whole place is surrounded by a 40 km wall, but since the emperors needed their elbow room, even in death, it's very spread out and hard to get around. The main attraction is actually the Sacred Way, a seven kilometer walkway in the center of the area that connects all the farflung tombs.

We then spent the rest of the day shopping. Beijing is now groaning with malls housing all the big luxury names, and Wangfujing Street has been a famous shopping street in China for centuries. Why I don't know since it's just a big ugly mess filled with unattractive department stores. But there's no reason to come to Beijing for shopping, since 99 percent of what China makes fills your local WalMart anyway. So instead we just went to a couple of small streets that have miraculously missed being developed over, and now supposedly constitute Beijing's antiques district. All fake of course, but they are pretty streets to walk around. That is, if you can ignore the pleasant shopkeepers standing outside their shops yelling "Get in here!" at each passerby. After a stop at a local tea shop, we called it quits for the day and headed back to the hotel.

The Temple of Heaven is the chief Taoist temple complex, built around 1420 and thereafter visited every year by the emperor until the revolution. It's built on very expansive grounds that are in serious need of a makeover. The earth is parched and only patchilly covered with grass, which is ironic because the sole purpose of the temple was to pray for rain. There are all sorts of numerical tricks involved in the construction which are meant to represent certain numerical facts about the universe. To the layman, however, the main point is the large multi-tiered altar representing various levels of the universe. On top of that is the Hall for the Prayer for Good Harvests, which is an impressive building used only by the emperor once a year. There were all sorts of complicated rituals surrounding the rain prayers, and any slight mistake or bad omen would presage a disastrous growing season, so this was taken very seriously. The interior is dazzlingly colorful and airy as well.

We next took a taxi to Beijing's most famous temple complex, the Temple of Heaven. Of course, the taxi driver had no idea where we wanted to go, and neither did we, so we just sort of drove around the city. I think he knew we wanted something religious and since I was a westerner he first brought us to a dumpy little Christian church, but he kept trying and an hour later we passed something that looked like I thought something called the Temple of Heaven would look. So we stopped there, and my instincts proved correct. And the fare for that tour of Beijing? About three dollars.

We ate lunch at a very local restaurant on a street near the park. Of course, if English is a struggle at our deluxe hotel, it's non-existent at a local streetside restaurant. And they haven't picked up the convenient Japanese method of displaying plastic versions of their offerings for the customer to point at. So instead we just pointed at various parts of the menu to see what happened. We never really knew what we were eating, and it wasn't weird enough to be remembered. Here are some cute photos of the neighborhood, including an outdoor barber shop and a big mah jongg game. Seems they play it very differently than my mother's mah jongg group did when I was a kid.

The Cold War ambience is enhanced by the silly buildings surrounding the square. There is the massive, and massively ugly, hall where the National People's Congress meets, a very large memorial where Chairman Mao's body is displayed in a mausoleum, and a museum about the Communist Revolution. In the center of the square, and the only object interrupting the sea of stone, is the nondescript Monument to the People's Heroes. We had planned on visiting Mao, but as you can see in the photo, the line was about a mile long, not atypical in a country of 1.3 billion people. Maybe next time.

The square used to be filled with various government ministries but they were damaged during various rebellions in the nineteenth century. Rather than repair them, the government leveled them, creating the groundwork for the current Tiananmen Square. However, at that time, China's most important gate stood at the center of the square, and was used for special imperial ceremonies. After the Communists took over, they destroyed the gate in the mistaken belief that the square needed to be opened up. It's now a vast expanse of concrete, with no trees, benches or other signs of life. While for most Chinese it's just a vast expanse they have to trudge through to get somewhere else, it of course shot to worldwide fame during the student riots and subsequent clampdown in 1989. There's no sign of any of that here, but it is the only place in China that still feels like a Communist country. The rest of the country has embraced capitalism with a frenzy and the government has long ago given up trying to micromanage this unmanageable country. But this huge empty square, with Mao and military parades, is still very cold war.

To the south of the Forbidden City lies Tiananmen Square, the world's largest, and least hospitable, open space. It is separated from the Forbidden City by a series of bridges and an imposing gate, the highest in the Forbidden City complex. This is the perch from which Mao now looks down at the monotony of Tiananmen. It's also lined with reviewing stands where party officials can view the various military parades commemorating some revolutionary accomplishment.

The only real reason to climb to the top of Jingshan Park is for the amazing views over the Forbidden City. Of course, what you really see is how revolting the air is here. While it just shows up in the close up photos of the palace as a grey sky, from a distance, the soupy air is quite shocking. You can't really see much, but the entire fogged in area behing the walls is the Forbidden City and its endless courtyards. The clearer photo was obviously taken at closer range, and shows the moat that provided the dirt for Jingshan Park. Also, to clear up any confusion, the photos in the previous post were from the internet, and are either heavily photoshopped or taken one a very rare clear day in Beijing; these photos are what you can expect while you're here.

Towards the back of the complex the rigid design scheme of endless courtyards loosens up a bit, as various emperors added some gardens or other personal touches to make the place a bit more human. There's also an audioguide commentary by Sean Connery which is actually quite good, and adds some more warmth to the sea of stone here.

After the Communists took over, they weren't quite sure what to do with the complex. Initially, apart from hanging a big Mao painting off the front, they left it alone, at various times they planned to raze the whole thing and build either a people's park, or a mega bus/train interchange on the space. None of this came to pass, but during the Cultural Revolution some of the most famous buildings in the complex were leveled to make room for a display of mud sculptures of revolutionary heroes. When I visited only about half the place was open, but the government recently announced a twelve year restoration plan to restore the site to its imperial condition. I don't think it will help if it just makes it bigger by opening up the other half I didn't see, but if they restore the interiors as well it could be quite a sight.

Another reason for the sterile feeling, apart from the lack of trees, is the lack of things generally. For such an enormous place, there are relatively few rooms, and in fact I'm pretty sure you never go inside any room in the whole complex. Most of the rooms are large, ceremonial rooms in the center of each of these massive barriers, with sappy names like the Hall of Eternal Harmony, the Hall of Perpetual Harmony, and the Hall of Harmonious Union... you get the idea. As the emperors degenerated into opium addicts in the nineteenth century, much of the treasure housed at the palace was stolen by the palace eunuchs. When the last emperor was thrown out of the palace in 1924, the remaining treasure was displayed here in a museum, but again much of that was lost to the Japanese during World War 2, and much ended up being taken by the departing Chinese army fleeing to Taiwan, where it still resides. So what little is left is totally insufficient to fill all this space.

In addition to being impossibly grand, it's also remarkably sterile. The basic idea is that you walk in the main gate, with the famous portrait of Mao Tse Tung (added since the time of the emperors). Then there's a massive, stone plaza, and a huge staircase leading up to another ceremonial building/gate. This in turn leads to another huge plaza, and another building, and it goes on pretty much forever. As you'd expect from the name, nobody was allowed in the complex without the emperor's permission, but that permission would also dictate how many of these gates and plazas you could cross, with nobody ever allowed to enter the back half of the complex, the Inner Court, where only the emperor and his immediate family lived. Throughout this whole arrangement, there are barely any trees, with almost all the plazas paved in stone.

We took a taxi early Saturday morning to the Forbidden City, for many centuries the seat of the Chinese emperors. The complex is astonishingly large, eight hundred buildings arrayed along massive plazas. It was built around 1400 by a workforce of 200,000 happy campers over fourteen years. Much of the construction involved huge pillars and staircases that were constructed elsewhere but were far too heavy to move. So they flooded the streets throughout China each winter, and then moved these massive pieces over the resulting ice all the way to Beijing.