China, day 2: The Forbidden City
Jul. 27th, 2006 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienSunday
It's probably simplistic to say that today's lunch sums up modern China in a nutshell, but really, drinking a Starbucks' iced mocha in the middle of the Forbidden City does rather neatly bring together the changes that China has gone through in the last century.
I started the day by getting lost in my hotel, twice -- once on the way to breakfast, and again, rather more thoroughly, while trying to meet the rest of the group to go to the Forbidden City. The place is a small campus in itself, and even the individual buildings are labyrinthine. Breakfast, when I found it, was a fairly elaborate and eclectic buffet. I had coffee, a pinkish liquid labeled 'hawthorn nectar', a banana, a small but tasty peach (I peeled it), a pretzel-shaped and rather greasy Chinese donut, a bowl of warm egg custard, a couple of small frank-type sausages, a fried corn cake, and a 'bacon cookie.' The breakfast room in the Friendship Palace is quite something, with colourful porcelain flowers hanging from the ceiling in the center of the round room and modern-arty murals. The food is laid out in that circular central area; the entrances are adorned with carved marble panels set into the floor and covered in glass, which are rather disconcerting to walk over.
When the Forbidden City expedition finally convened, we took two taxis. It took the best part of an hour to get there, and cost about five bucks. We were dropped at the north entrance, so we went through the palaces backwards, starting in the gardens and fancy little pavilions and finally ending up at the Tiananmen gate. It was impressive -- not only in the scale, but in the level of opulent detail on the buildings, with processions of little figures on the corner of every roof, and elaborate tilework and stone carvings everywhere, down to the patterned tile roundels on the edges of the roofs.
Dragons are popular motifs, on tiles and painted woodwork and statuary, on the stone ramps leading up to the palaces
There are also lions, and the odd turtle and elephant.
Some parts show the wear of the centuries, with some of the paved courtyards in very rough shape, while others have been recently restored, with shining gilding, colourful paintwork, and I suspect in some cases completely replaced stonework. Still other buildings are swathed in scaffolding as restoration work goes on; apparently the 2008 Olympics provide a big incentive to get the place spiffed up. At intervals, a voice over the public address announced in English -- and presumably in Chinese -- that the palace was under reconstruction and visitors should be careful in the construction areas.
It was very crowded, with plenty of Western tourists but even more Chinese, many of them in their Sunday best, some in huge tour groups sporting matching hats, others in families. Parasols, or umbrellas doing duty as parasols, were popular accessories. The weather was hot, humid, and hazy, not ideal for either sightseeing or photography, but at least there was no rain. Dainty lacy and beaded tops were very popular among the younger women, and some of the little girls wore what looked like party frocks. [Which reminds me: I saw a young lady in the hotel lobby this evening in what looked for all the world like a full-length white wedding gown. I thought white was supposed to be the colour of death in Chinese culture, so I've no idea what that signified. She wasn't acting much like a bride; she was just hanging out at the bellstand.]
At one stage we were waylaid by a polite young lady who lured us into a prefab hut -- an air-conditioned prefab hut, which made the luring easier -- and tried to sell us paintings she claimed were by the students and teachers at her school. They were nice work, but not something I'd pay thirty dollars for. One of our party allowed himself to be persuaded; the Chinese can be very insistent about selling things, it seems.
After that, we escaped from the crowds to some extent by paying an extra 10Y to get into a part of the palace that featured air-conditioned exhibit halls with imperial treasures: carved jade and semi-precious stones; elaborate gold and stone utensils; crowns and trinkets; stone drums from 300-something BC carved with poetry. The nine-dragon frieze is in the same area; it's an impressive piece of colourful tilework, with very lively-looking dragons.
Then it was lunchtime, but no-one was really hungry, and those of us who took in any calories did it in the form of an iced mocha from that surreally-sited Starbucks.
We carried on making our way southwards, passing a couple of large and impressive buildings that were in course of renovation and barely visible behind their scaffolding and hoardings, to the courtyard with the river, and out through a long, high tunnel into the public squares between that, the Meridian Gate and the Tiannamen Gate.
The latter is also open to the paying public, but, being presumably more politically sensitive with its view over Tianammen Square and its prominent portrait of Chairman Mao on the south wall, requires visitors to check their bags and pass through a metal detector (men on the left, women on the right.) We did it, but remained unenlightened by the display of arrays of ornate chairs and large paintings inside the upstairs hall. The ceiling painting, with its stylized design of blue and gold dragons, was quite impressive. Around the back, for some reason, there's a huge vase, eight or ten feet high, shrouded in a red flag and standing in its own doorway.
Finally, we wandered a little way on the vast, stony -- and quite cheerfully bustling -- expanse of the Square itself, brushing off eager vendors of hats and kites, found a flowerbed with dahlias and lotus blossoms, and then got taxis back to the hotel. (The taxis all seem to be Hyndai Elantras, in two-tone colour schemes.)
After that much exposure to the Forbidden City, it's easy to see where the inspiration for this hotel's architecture -- and that for quite a lot of other buildings around here -- comes from.
Oh, and those lilac-like flowers I mentioned in yesterday's piece? On closer inspection, they look a lot like my old friend, crepe myrtle.
Other randomness: the label on the free mineral water bottles provided by the hotel reads:
GRAND mineral water originates from the migmatite of the Archaean Group below the ground 87 meters that is appraised as a type of mineral water with high etc by the Ministry of Geology and Minerals, Ministry of Public Health and Ministry of Light industry.
Somebody (not Chinese) told me tofu was invented as an accidental result of a Chinese attempt to reproduce yogurt without knowing what it was.
Somebody else told me that the Chinese dragon mythology was based on the abundance of dinosaur fossils.
It's probably simplistic to say that today's lunch sums up modern China in a nutshell, but really, drinking a Starbucks' iced mocha in the middle of the Forbidden City does rather neatly bring together the changes that China has gone through in the last century.
I started the day by getting lost in my hotel, twice -- once on the way to breakfast, and again, rather more thoroughly, while trying to meet the rest of the group to go to the Forbidden City. The place is a small campus in itself, and even the individual buildings are labyrinthine. Breakfast, when I found it, was a fairly elaborate and eclectic buffet. I had coffee, a pinkish liquid labeled 'hawthorn nectar', a banana, a small but tasty peach (I peeled it), a pretzel-shaped and rather greasy Chinese donut, a bowl of warm egg custard, a couple of small frank-type sausages, a fried corn cake, and a 'bacon cookie.' The breakfast room in the Friendship Palace is quite something, with colourful porcelain flowers hanging from the ceiling in the center of the round room and modern-arty murals. The food is laid out in that circular central area; the entrances are adorned with carved marble panels set into the floor and covered in glass, which are rather disconcerting to walk over.
When the Forbidden City expedition finally convened, we took two taxis. It took the best part of an hour to get there, and cost about five bucks. We were dropped at the north entrance, so we went through the palaces backwards, starting in the gardens and fancy little pavilions and finally ending up at the Tiananmen gate. It was impressive -- not only in the scale, but in the level of opulent detail on the buildings, with processions of little figures on the corner of every roof, and elaborate tilework and stone carvings everywhere, down to the patterned tile roundels on the edges of the roofs.
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Dragons are popular motifs, on tiles and painted woodwork and statuary, on the stone ramps leading up to the palaces
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There are also lions, and the odd turtle and elephant.
 |  |
 |
Some parts show the wear of the centuries, with some of the paved courtyards in very rough shape, while others have been recently restored, with shining gilding, colourful paintwork, and I suspect in some cases completely replaced stonework. Still other buildings are swathed in scaffolding as restoration work goes on; apparently the 2008 Olympics provide a big incentive to get the place spiffed up. At intervals, a voice over the public address announced in English -- and presumably in Chinese -- that the palace was under reconstruction and visitors should be careful in the construction areas.
 |  |  |
It was very crowded, with plenty of Western tourists but even more Chinese, many of them in their Sunday best, some in huge tour groups sporting matching hats, others in families. Parasols, or umbrellas doing duty as parasols, were popular accessories. The weather was hot, humid, and hazy, not ideal for either sightseeing or photography, but at least there was no rain. Dainty lacy and beaded tops were very popular among the younger women, and some of the little girls wore what looked like party frocks. [Which reminds me: I saw a young lady in the hotel lobby this evening in what looked for all the world like a full-length white wedding gown. I thought white was supposed to be the colour of death in Chinese culture, so I've no idea what that signified. She wasn't acting much like a bride; she was just hanging out at the bellstand.]
At one stage we were waylaid by a polite young lady who lured us into a prefab hut -- an air-conditioned prefab hut, which made the luring easier -- and tried to sell us paintings she claimed were by the students and teachers at her school. They were nice work, but not something I'd pay thirty dollars for. One of our party allowed himself to be persuaded; the Chinese can be very insistent about selling things, it seems.
After that, we escaped from the crowds to some extent by paying an extra 10Y to get into a part of the palace that featured air-conditioned exhibit halls with imperial treasures: carved jade and semi-precious stones; elaborate gold and stone utensils; crowns and trinkets; stone drums from 300-something BC carved with poetry. The nine-dragon frieze is in the same area; it's an impressive piece of colourful tilework, with very lively-looking dragons.
Then it was lunchtime, but no-one was really hungry, and those of us who took in any calories did it in the form of an iced mocha from that surreally-sited Starbucks.
We carried on making our way southwards, passing a couple of large and impressive buildings that were in course of renovation and barely visible behind their scaffolding and hoardings, to the courtyard with the river, and out through a long, high tunnel into the public squares between that, the Meridian Gate and the Tiannamen Gate.
 |  |  |
The latter is also open to the paying public, but, being presumably more politically sensitive with its view over Tianammen Square and its prominent portrait of Chairman Mao on the south wall, requires visitors to check their bags and pass through a metal detector (men on the left, women on the right.) We did it, but remained unenlightened by the display of arrays of ornate chairs and large paintings inside the upstairs hall. The ceiling painting, with its stylized design of blue and gold dragons, was quite impressive. Around the back, for some reason, there's a huge vase, eight or ten feet high, shrouded in a red flag and standing in its own doorway.
Finally, we wandered a little way on the vast, stony -- and quite cheerfully bustling -- expanse of the Square itself, brushing off eager vendors of hats and kites, found a flowerbed with dahlias and lotus blossoms, and then got taxis back to the hotel. (The taxis all seem to be Hyndai Elantras, in two-tone colour schemes.)
After that much exposure to the Forbidden City, it's easy to see where the inspiration for this hotel's architecture -- and that for quite a lot of other buildings around here -- comes from.
Oh, and those lilac-like flowers I mentioned in yesterday's piece? On closer inspection, they look a lot like my old friend, crepe myrtle.
Other randomness: the label on the free mineral water bottles provided by the hotel reads:
GRAND mineral water originates from the migmatite of the Archaean Group below the ground 87 meters that is appraised as a type of mineral water with high etc by the Ministry of Geology and Minerals, Ministry of Public Health and Ministry of Light industry.
Somebody (not Chinese) told me tofu was invented as an accidental result of a Chinese attempt to reproduce yogurt without knowing what it was.
Somebody else told me that the Chinese dragon mythology was based on the abundance of dinosaur fossils.