Great Wall, Terra Cotta Soldiers Museum and Three Gorges Hiking Tour

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2003 Hiking Group Diary click here

"This trip may only last for fifteen days, but the experience of Chinese Culture/History and the memory of beautiful mountain scenery will last for a lifetime."

Beijing

( photos of Beijing )

The brash modernity of BEIJING (meaning Northern Capital) comes as a surprise to most visitors. Traversed by freeways (it's the proud owner of more than a hundred flyovers) and spiked with high-rises, this vivid metropolis is China at its most dynamic. For the last thousand years, the drama of China's imperial history was played out here, with the emperor sitting enthroned at the centre of the Chinese universe, and though today the city is a very different one, it remains spiritually and politically the heart of the country. Between the swathes of concrete and glass, you'll find some of the lushest temples, and certainly the grandest remnants of the Imperial Age. Unexpectedly, some of the country's most pleasant scenic spots lie within the scope of a day-trip, and, just to the north of the city, is one of China's most famous sights, the old boundary line between civilizations, the Great Wall .

First impressions of Beijing are of an almost inhuman vastness, conveyed by the sprawl of identical apartment buildings in which most of the city's population of twelve million are housed, and the eight-lane freeways that slice it up. It's an impression that's reinforced on closer acquaintance, from the magnificent Forbidden City , with its stunning wealth of treasures, the concrete desert of Tian'anmen Square and the gargantuan buildings of the modern executive around it, to the rank after rank of office complexes that line its mammoth roads. Outside the centre, the scale becomes more manageable, with parks, narrow alleyways and ancient sites such as the Yonghe Gong , Observatory and, most magnificent of all, the Temple of Heaven , offering respite from the city's oppressive orderliness. In the suburbs beyond, the two Summer Palaces and the Western Hills have been favoured retreats since imperial times.

Beijing is an invaders' city, the capital of oppressive foreign dynasties - the Manchu and the Mongols - and of a dynasty with a foreign ideology - the Communists. As such, it has assimilated a lot of outside influence, and today it is perhaps the most cosmopolitan part of China, with an international flavour appropriate to the capital of a major commercial power. Only in Beijing will a foreign face elicit no second glances. The city is home to a large expat population , housed for the most part in separate suburban ghettos with little contact with the local Chinese. Indeed, it's quite possible to spend years in Beijing eating Western food, dancing to Western music, and socializing with like-minded foreigners - hardened veterans of the expat scene compare it favourably with Hong Kong.

Beijing is the front line of China's attempts to grapple with modernity - the cranes that skewer the skyline and the white character chai ("demolish") painted on old buildings attest to the city's furious pace of change. Students in the latest baggy fashions while away their time in Internet cafés and McDonald's, drop outs spike their hair and mosh in punk clubs, businessmen are never without their laptops and schoolkids carry mobile phones in their lunchboxes. Red-light districts and gay bars have begun to appear as the city hits its own sexual revolution.

Rising incomes have led not just to a consumer-capitalist society Westerners will feel very familiar with, but also to a revival of older Chinese culture - witness the sudden re-emergence of the tea house as a genteel meeting place, or a recent fad for "nostalgia cuisine" - dishes from the Cultural Revolution eaten in restaurants named after revolutionary slogans. In the evening you'll see large groups of the older generation performing the yangkou (loyalty dance), Chairman Mao's favourite dance universally learned a few decades ago, and in the hutongs, the city's twisted grey stone alleyways, men sit with their birds and pipes as they always have done.

Beijing is a city that almost everyone enjoys. For new arrivals it provides a gentle introduction to the country and for travellers who've been roughing it round outback China, the creature comforts on offer are a delight. But Beijing is essentially a private city, and one whose surface, attractive though it is, is difficult to penetrate. Sometimes it seems to have the superficiality of a theme park. Certainly there is something mundane about the way tourist groups are efficiently shunted around, plugged from hotel to sight, with little contact with everyday reality. To get deeper into the city, wander the labyrinthine hutongs, "fine and numerous as the hairs of a cow" (as one Chinese guidebook puts it), and check out the little antique markets, the residential shopping districts, the smaller, quirkier sights, and the parks, some of the best in China, where you'll see Beijingers performing tai ji and hear birdsong - just - over the hum of traffic. Take advantage, too, of the city's burgeoning nightlife and see just how far the Chinese have gone down the road of what used to be called spiritual pollution.

If the Party had any control over it, no doubt Beijing would have the best climate of any Chinese city; as it is, it has one of the worst. The best time to visit is in autumn, between September and October, when it's dry and clement. In winter it gets very cold, down to minus 20°C, and the mean winds that whip off the Mongolian plains feel like they're freezing your ears off. Summer (June-August) is muggy and hot, up to 30°C, and the short spring (April & May) is dry but windy.

Getting to Beijing is no problem. As the centre of China's transport network you'll probably wind up here sooner or later, whether you want to or not, and to avoid the capital seems wilfully perverse. On a purely practical level, it's a good place to stock up on visas for the rest of Asia, and to arrange transport out of the country - most romantically, on the Trans-Siberian or Trans-Mongolian trains. To take in its superb sights requires a week, by which time you may well be ready to move on to China proper. Beijing is a fun place, but make no mistake, it in no way typifies the rest of the nation.

The City

Beijing requires patience and planning to do it justice. Wandering aimlessly around without a destination in mind will rarely be rewarding. The place to start is Tian'anmen Square , geographical and psychic centre of the city, where a cluster of important sights can be seen in a day, although the Forbidden City , at the north end of the square, deserves a day, or even several, all to itself. The Qianmen area, a noisy market area south of here, is a bit more alive, and ends in style with one of the city's highlights, the Temple of Heaven . The giant freeway, Chang'an Jie , zooming east-west across the city, is a corridor of high-rises with a few museums, shopping centres and even the odd ancient site worth tracking down. Scattered in the north of the city, a section with a more traditional and human feel, are some magnificent parks , palaces and temples , some of them in the hutongs. An expedition to the outskirts is amply rewarded by the Summer Palace , the best place to get away from it all.

******** History ******

It was in Tian'anmen, on October 1, 1949, that Chairman Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag to proclaim officially the foundation of the People's Republic . He told the crowds (the square could then hold only 500,000) that the Chinese had at last stood up, and defined liberation as the final culmination of a 150-year fight against foreign exploitation.

The claim, perhaps, was modest. Beijing's recorded history goes back a little over three millennia, to beginnings as a trading centre for Mongols, Koreans and local Chinese tribes. Its predominance, however, dates to the mid-thirteenth century, and the formation of Mongol China under Genghis and later Kublai Khan . It was Kublai who took control of the city in 1264, and who properly established it as a capital, replacing the earlier power centres of Luoyang and Xi'an. Marco Polo visited him here, working for a while in the city, and was clearly impressed with the level of sophistication:

So great a number of houses and of people, no man could tell the number I believe there is no place in the world to which so many merchants come, and dearer things, and of greater value and more strange, come into this town from all sides than to any city in the world

The wealth came from the city's position at the start of the Silk Road and Polo described "over a thousand carts loaded with silk" arriving "almost each day", ready for the journey west out of China. And it set a precedent in terms of style and grandeur for the Khans, later known as emperors, with Kublai building himself a palace of astonishing proportions, walled on all sides and approached by great marble stairways.

With the accession of the Ming dynasty , who defeated the Mongols in 1368, the capital temporarily shifted to present-day Nanjing, but Yongle, the second Ming emperor, returned, building around him prototypes of the city's two greatest monuments - the Imperial Palace and Temple of Heaven. It was in Yongle's reign, too, that the basic city plan took shape, rigidly symmetrical, extending in squares and rectangles from the palace and inner-city grid to the suburbs, much as it is today.

Subsequent, post-Ming history is dominated by the rise and eventual collapse of the Manchus - the Qing dynasty , northerners who ruled China from Beijing from 1644 to the beginning of the twentieth century. The capital was at its most prosperous in the first half of the eighteenth century, the period in which the Qing constructed the legendary Summer Palace - the world's most extraordinary royal garden, with two hundred pavilions, temples and palaces, and immense artificial lakes and hills - to the north of the city. With the central Imperial Palace, this was the focus of endowment and the symbol of Chinese wealth and power. However, in 1860, the Opium Wars brought British and French troops to the walls of the capital, and the Summer Palace was first looted and then burned by the British, more or less entirely to the ground.

While the imperial court lived apart, within what was essentially a separate walled city, conditions for the civilian population, in the capital's suburbs, were starkly different. Kang Youwei, a Cantonese visiting in 1895, described this dual world:

No matter where you look, the place is covered with beggars. The homeless and the old, the crippled and the sick with no one to care for them, fall dead on the roads. This happens every day. And the coaches of the great officials rumble past them continuously.

The indifference, rooted according to Kang in officials throughout the city, spread from the top down. From 1884, using funds meant for the modernization of the nation's navy, the empress Dowager Cixi had begun building a new Summer Palace of her own. The empress's project was really the last grand gesture of imperial architecture and patronage - and like its model was also badly burned by foreign troops, in another outbreak of the Opium War in 1900. By this time, with successive waves of occupation by foreign troops, the empire and the imperial capital were near collapse. The Manchus abdicated in 1911, leaving the Northern Capital to be ruled by warlords. In 1928 it came under the military dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek's Guomindang , being seized by the Japanese in 1939, and at the end of World War II the city was controlled by an alliance of Guomindang troops and American marines.

The Communists took Beijing in January 1949, nine months before Chiang Kaishek's flight to Taiwan assured final victory. The rebuilding of the capital , and the erasing of symbols of the previous regimes, was an early priority. The city that Mao Zedong inherited for the Chinese people was in most ways primitive. Imperial laws had banned the building of houses higher than the official buildings and palaces, so virtually nothing was more than one storey high. The roads, although straight and uniform, were narrow and congested, and there was scarcely any industry. The new plans aimed to reverse all except the city's sense of ordered planning, with Tian'anmen Square at its heart - and initially, through the early 1950s, their inspiration was Soviet, with an emphasis on heavy industry and a series of poor-quality high-rise housing programmes.

In the zest to be free from the past and create a modern, people's capital, much of Old Peking was destroyed , or co-opted: the Temple of Cultivated Wisdom became a wire factory and the Temple of the God of Fire produced electric lightbulbs. In the 1940s there were eight thousand temples and monuments in the city; by the 1960s there were only around a hundred and fifty. Even the city walls and gates, relics mostly of the Ming era, were pulled down and their place taken by ring roads and avenues.

Much of the city's contemporary planning policy was disastrous, creating more problems than it solved. Most of the traditional courtyard houses which were seen to encourage individualism were destroyed. In their place went anonymous concrete buildings, often with inadequate sanitation and little running water. In 1969, when massive restoration was needed above ground, Mao instead launched a campaign to build a network of subterranean tunnels as shelter in case of war. Built by hand, millions of man-hours went into constructing a useless labyrinth that would be no defence against modern bombs and served only to lower the city's water table. After the destruction of all the capital's dogs in 1950, it was the turn of sparrows in 1956. A measure designed to preserve grain, its only effect was to lead to an increase in the insect population. To combat this, all the grass was pulled up, which in turn led to dust storms in the windy winter months. Recent years have seen an attempt to do battle with some of the worst pollution, and factories that can't modernize have been closed. The city's open spaces have been revitalized with a massive tree-planting campaign. And to help with problems of overcrowding, there are ambitious plans for a series of satellite cities. Now the city's main problem is its traffic - car ownership has rocketed, contributing to the appalling air quality, and the streets are nearing gridlock.

About Tour Operator Tony

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To Learn About China

Year 2005 Tour schedule

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This website is divided into five sections.

Overview gives a general description of the aims and scope of this tour.

Itinerary provides a detailed look at the daily activities.

References allows others who have taken this tour to talk about their experiences.

Details talks about what's included in the tour, as well as the costs.

Registration will bring you to the China Hiking Adventures Inc. Online Registration System Page for secure registration.

Is China Economy a Bubble ?

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For you to have a second opinion Link to: Travel With A Challenge click here

Pour encourager le développement des relations entre le Québec et la Chine

Audience: Day Hiking, as opposed to back packing, means that each day after breakfast, a bus takes us to the beginning of a hike, transfers our luggage, and pick us up at the end of the hike. A hot shower always awaits us at the next hotel. Although the hiking is not difficult, daily hikes of 10 to 15 km (1 km = 0.621 mile) require good endurance. You should be an enthusiastic, experienced day hiker to enjoy this trip.

Photos from hikers in the past
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Buddhism in China

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