May 2009

Was it less than 48 hours ago that we said goodbye to the students and to Carrie?

It seems longer, but when I tell you all that we have been doing (we being me and JR), I think you’ll understand my disorientation.

On Friday, we got up early (at least some of us did) and went to Liulichang, one of the few “traditional” streets left in Beijing. The students had a choice, and a number of them decided to sleep in, but I had a favorite tea shop there and offered the students one last opportunity to see Beijing…We took the subway, which always makes me feel grown up, and got to the street around 9:30.

Two of the students decided they wanted to wander, but the other (there were three) joined me and JR as we wandered down the street. Pretty soon we were in an art shop, and had a new “best friend” who was the owner; before we left, he’d sold us a few paintings, took pictures with us, and introduced me to his 2-year-old daughter, with the knowledge that I had a 2-year-old daughter grandson who speaks Chinese.

When we left his shop, a young lady came up to me with a picture she’d taken in her shop a few years ago, and said, “lao peng you” (old friend) I thought I recognized you. I’ve moved my tea shop. Come have a look.” For the next hour, we had a personal discussion/demonstration of eight different teas, a discussion of the world and what we’d done since we saw her last (she recognized JR—but everyone remembers him here), and, joined by the other two students who wandered by, left with teapots, tea bricks, and a better understanding of the tea business—and less Chinese money to change into dollars at the airport.

We met the rest of the students at the “Silk Street” store, which is one of the most touristy places in Beijing. It used to be an outdoor street mall that got enclosed into six floors of everything you saw in China but hadn’t bought yet (if you’re a tourist) including extra luggage, “North Face” items (says so on the label), and a variety of T-shirts, souvenirs, etc. It said a lot to me that, when I went to find lunch, all I could find there was pizza. Our guide remarked that the young Chinese don’t shop there because they’re embarrassed to be seen with fakes…..Intellectual property has come a long way in China, but it’s not entirely where many foreign companies think it needs to be.

We escorted the class to the airport, and on the way got a lesson from our guide (she’s one of the best I ever had) on why China is a “democracy,” even if it’s not like ours; “China’s,” she told us, “is efficient.” It may be true, but that doesn’t make it a democracy, we chided, but Ms. Love Country Love Beijing person (my Chinese name for her) would have none of it, reinforcing (albeit with a small sample size—1) what I’d heard about young Chinese being nationalistic and defensive about their country, especially to foreigners.

When we came back to the city, Carrie, JR, and I spent some time wandering around the outskirts of the Forbidden City. As I’ve mentioned, it’s much bigger than the parts that tourists usually see; parts are closed off—the new emperors live there—but the streets around it offer interesting shops and hutongs. We wound up in a temple that’s not on any guidebook list, but was once an ancestral hall where the emperors prayed—fairly typical of the kinds of things you can stumble into when you have time and a sense of adventure in Beijing.

Since our train was leaving at 7:40 the next morning, we got back and packed up for what I’d like to think of as my “reward” for the previous three weeks of shepherding students around Asia. I don’t think of it as work, but life becomes a lot easier when you have only two people to worry about.

The Trans Mongolian Express will be the last train ride for me this trip. Fittingly, it was the longest—30 some hours to go the nearly 1,000 miles from Beijing to Ulanbataar, the capital of what was once called Outer Mongolia, but is now simply Mongolia. The trip took us through the countryside—about 19 hours of it was on the Chinese side, increasingly high (we were over 5,400 feet at one point) and increasingly dry. One reason the trip was so long was that we spent 3 hours at Erlian, at the border, where the train was whisked away somewhere and the wheel carriages changed for the narrow gauge necessary for Mongolia and Russia (the Transmongolian express links up with the Transsiberian Railroad at the Mongolian/Russian border, near Lake Baikal). By the time we crossed over into Mongolia (an hour stop at customs, naturally around 1 a.m.), we were in the Gobi dessert, which covers the southern half of Mongolia. It doesn’t look like the Indiana Dunes, but there was some sand—and a lot of grass (surprisingly) that fed a lot of horses and cows and sheep.

Mongolia is a big, but thinly settled country. I think our guide said it was 4 or 5 times the size of France, but the population is around 2.5 million, nearly 40% here in the capital city, Ulanbataar (meaning, “Red Hero”; it was Urga before the communists occupied the country in 1921). Europe has had several skirmishes with people from this part of Asia, and come out on the short end of it every time. The Huns swept from here to ravage Europe; so did the Turks; and finally, so did the armies of Ghengis Khan. The latter has gotten a particularly bad rap from Europeans, who are not good losers, but in the 13th century the Mongol armies swept from Beijing to Budapest, and established a global village that brought religious tolerance to a world (or at least regions) that killed thousands for making the cross with two fingers instead of three, and a pax Mongolica that lasted until the black death destroyed much of the European population, and the successors of the Great Khan proved much less able than Ghengis himself. The dynasty (Yuan) his grandson, Kublai, established in China barely outlasted Kublai himself, and in 1368, the Mings replaced Yuan (who took the seals and moved to Mongolia and tried to maintain the pretense of being the Northern Yuan dynasty). The Mongols pop up elsewhere later—Akbar, who united much of Northern India into the Moghul Empire, was a descendant of Ghengis Khan, and the Manchus brought the Mongols into the Qing Empire as another important non-Han member; Mongol was an official language of the Empire, along with Manchu, Tibetan, and Chinese. By 1911, the ties to the Chinese were snapping, and Mongolia eventually (after a crazy Baltic German, the Mad Baron, took over the country and proclaimed himself the successor of Ghengis Khan—that’s the book I read on my Kindle on the way here) became a communist country to become independent of China (but not of Russia). It was heavily Stalin influenced; the Russian dictator, whose statue is in a restaurant in Ulanbataar (UB), something I’ve not seen elsewhere, found a henchman to bring the purges in 1937 that nearly destroyed the Russian Army to Mongolia; 100,000 monks were killed, and hundreds of monasteries demolished. Not until 1991, when the communists were overthrown (the politics here are interesting. The leader of the democracy movement was assassinated in 1998; the murder is unsolved. The communist party, heavily backed in the more conservative countryside, won the last election. Urban democrats burned the communist party headquarters) was Buddhism restored to favor. It’s a Buddhism that’s a close cousin to the Tibetan version, and the Dalai Lama (whose title came from a Mongolian Buddhist) is revered here; our Chinese guide called him a “traitor.”

The Soviet period influence is obvious. The large square in honor of a revolutionary hero looks sort of like Red Square in Moscow, but the buildings are colorful (the national theater is pink, as is the stock exchange; the Post Office is covered with a two-story high poster for Coca-Cola) and have statues of Ghengis Khan and his sons and assorted warriors. If you’ve ever been to Budapest, UB’s square is sort of like the 1897 square commemorating the 900th anniversary of the arrival of the Magyars (probably from this area too) into Hungary. There’s also a Lenin statue, a statue to a Mongolian general who helped the Russians defeat the Japanese along the Manchurian-Mongolian border in 1939, a battle which the national museum here said convinced Japan to go south and attack the United States, rather than fight an enemy that cost them 70,000 lives in this Asia prelude to Pearl Harbor. We saw a lot of ger coming in, the yurts that we’re going to spend the next few nights in.

I said the train ride was our last. I may remember it fondly. The next two days will be on the road—to Karakhorum, or what’s left of it. The Mongols, as nomads, didn’t build cities until after their conquest years. Karakhorum was the first. The Chinese armies, however, responding to Kublai’s successors fleeing Beijing and calling themselves the Northern Yuan, leveled the city. We’re spending two nights in gers, and I may miss the train’s charcoal heated samovar (for hot water) and warm beds. And, given the roads, maybe the relatively smooth railroad beds.

Tomorrow is children’s day in much of the world, including here. Celebrate it for me in the United States.

The guidebooks say that there are four must-dos in Beijing. We did two of them yesterday—climb the Great Wall and eat Peking duck.

The Great Wall is one of China’s relics from ancient times. It runs from the ocean nearly 3,000 miles into the Taklamakan Desert, ending at Jiayuguan on the Silk Road. Consolidated nearly 2,000 years ago by the First Emperor (he of the underground army at Xi’an fame), the current incarnation dates from the Ming Dynasty (or where we were, reconstructed in the last 10 years). Meant to keep the barbarians from the north out (the very Mongols JR and I are traveling to visit beginning Saturday), it failed when put to the test (the Mongols came through in the 14th century and Kublai Khan became emperor of China, with his capital at Dadu, Beijing), and the Manchurians came through (and ruled from 1644 until 1911 as the Qing Dynasty).

The Great Wall remains impressive. Guides used to say it was the only man-made object visible from space, but I think truth in advertising laws made that claim obsolete. The nearest the wall comes to Beijing is about 20 miles, and that’s where we made our pilgrimage (Mao is reputed to have said you’re not a hero until you’ve climbed the Great Wall, and we’re heroic). The area was a crisscross of walls (it was a key pass; Beijing is surrounded by mountains on the north), but we chose the steepest. My GPS said we climbed over 1,000 feet in ½ a mile of horizontal distance. Someone steeped in math said that averages about a 36% gradient, and it certainly seemed that steep. Maybe steeper.

But the wall is not the only Great thing to do. On the way, tourists get whisked to the Ming Tombs, an area which contains the remains of 14 emperors, assorted empresses, and two tombs for the concubines (the other Ming emperors were buried in Nanking, which was their original capital), but for me the impressive part of the tombs is the sacred way. For about a mile, there is a walkway that contains statues of the animals and imperial servants waiting to serve the emperor in the afterlife. It’s an impressive testimony to the solemnity and wealth of the imperial family—and like much of Beijing, a model for other countries influenced by the Chinese. There’re much more modest examples in Korea (I’ve been to the tomb of King Sejong, who gave the country its alphabet) and Vietnam (I’ve been to the tombs of the Nguyen Dynasty in Hue). The Mings were not the first rulers of China to have a sacred way, but they are the closest to Beijing. For example, I’ve been to the tomb of the Empress Wu (the only woman to have been the emperor of China) near Xi’an, and it has an enormous sacred way. What emphasizes the importance of the tombs is that the Qing dynastic founder (whose tomb is in Shenyang) had one constructed for the last Ming emperor, who hanged himself in the park across from the Forbidden City.

The other activity yesterday was the Peking duck dinner, one of the “musts” in Beijing. Over the years, my students have come to refer to it as “duck burritos” since the duck gets sliced and put into a crepe-like pancake, with onions, plum sauce, and cucumbers. Invariably, someone doesn’t like it, which means I can usually eat more than I should, but less than I want.

As for great things, today (Thursday), we continued to sample the delights of a city that has been the capital of China for nearly 600 years, and is imperial in every sense of the word. The morning began with a visit to the Temple of Heaven. Probably the second most familiar building in Beijing (after the Bird Nest and maybe before the Forbidden City), the Temple played an important role in dynastic survival for nearly 500 years. In an agricultural society (then as now), bountiful harvests ensured the survival of the regime. Hence, the emperor’s efforts to tease rain and ensure bountiful harvests made this Temple (to Heaven, not to a Buddha) significant in the empire. The current emperors read history and also know that unruly peasants have overthrown numerous dynasties. At least twice a year the imperial presence trooped from the Palace to the Temple to speak, as only the Emperor could, directly to Heaven, and slaughter the calves or whatever was necessary to feed the people and ensure the stability of the dynasty. This function was so important that when Korea became an empire in 1905 to try to block the Japanese, the king turned emperor built his own temple of heaven. The importance of agriculture (then as now) helped foreign experts (then being the Catholic missionaries, who came with some astronomical knowledge) gain entrée to the Court in Beijing.

An added benefit was a stay at the Tiantan park (where the Temple is located), which is a mecca for retired people to play cards, musical instruments, dance, do tai chi and exercise. It is mostly my generation that gets up in the morning, takes their canaries in cages and other birds to the park, and spends time with friends. Younger Chinese, like younger Americans, either are at work, or played too hard the night before to be in the park, as we were, by 8:30 a.m.

Beijing has other Great things, and we visited them, too, relics of the days when China was the most powerful nation in the world, the middle kingdom between heaven and earth, and the model for nations in the region. In the 1790s, the Qianlong emperor told a British delegation that the west had nothing China wanted or needed, a statement that was pretty much true until the British started selling opium from India….but that’s another story.

The Qianlong Emperor, who ruled for nearly 60 years, was responsible for building what has always been one of my favorite temples—the lama temple, which was his way of saying China is multicultural because it is the largest (and maybe the only) Tibetan temple in Beijing. He converted a prince’s home into a Tibetan temple which houses the largest standing Buddha in the world. As for the Tibetan version, Buddhism tends to absorb and blend with local religions, and Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia is recognizably Buddhist, but its adherents reflect the preexisting demons—there’s a blue-headed demon for example that were I DePaul, would make the mascot. And having been to Tibet, I can recognize more of the differences between the lama Yellow Hat version and the more basic Chinese version.

Near the Lama Temple is the center of the traditional civil service (from the Yuan dynasty to 1908)—the local Confucian temple and the attached university where for nearly 500 years the best scholars in the nation studied the analects of Confucius to prepare themselves for the meritocracy (at its best) that constituted the civil service. At an annual exam, students competed for the right to be officials in the dynastic service; the successful candidates (14,000+ anyway) have their names posted on stone steles for posterity. The “library” has over 100 stone books with 620,000 characters in the Analects of Confucius, the book for the exam for the career.

Our guide told me an interesting story about the Confucian temple that I think shows why people interested in contemporary China should understand the past. She said when she was in college, her teacher’s daughter was applying for college. The teacher took her daughter to the Confucian temple to pray. Sure enough, she got into the school she wanted, which led to her returning and giving thanks.

The final site was the summer palace, thronged with visitors because today is part of a four-day holiday centering on dragon boat racing in the south and the making of a sticky rice item that is exclusive to the holiday. A sign at the palace indicated that there had been 11,000 visitors yesterday, expected 18,000 today, and probably 25,000 over the weekend. There’s a man-made lake with pavilions for residence of officials and the emperor (the Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled China for much of its late 19th and early 20th century decline, moved the court to the summer palace in the summer from 1903 until her death in 1908). Lost in the walking through the longest covered corridor that has paintings from novels and Chinese scenery are reminders that Western troops ravaged the palace in 1860 and again after the Boxer Uprising, so what we see has been mostly rebuilt in the last century; and reminds us that China has endured a century of humiliation that is an anachronism in Chinese history.

Our farewell dinner was in a “theme park,” the theme being the Imperial Court, a fitting theme given what we’ve seen in Beijing. We came to a former prince’s house that had been taken over by a Hong Kong restaurateur (recently), and retrofitted to look like the Manchus had returned. We had yellow everything (the yellow being the color of the Emperor exclusively), imperial food (including lily and a “concubine’s smile” salad). The servers were dressed in court elegance, and spoke Manchu to us (with an occasional and needed translation into English). An appropriate ending to a 3-week long trip that began with our arrival in Bangkok almost exactly 3 weeks ago.

I said I’d say a few words about what I’ve seen in China. Bear in mind it’s based mostly on what I’ve seen in Beijing, and, despite what Beijingers think, Beijing is the capital of China; it is not China.

Our visit to John Deere highlighted one of the most important issues re: the current government of China—the need to generate at least 8% growth to maintain political and economic stability. That’s challenged in two ways—the first is that China depends a lot on the economic climate elsewhere in the world. That’s a problem; almost 30 million workers in factories that make the goods for the rest of the world went home for the New Year’s Holiday in January and were told not to come back. Further, the importance of tourism, and the existence of a reasonably-priced, world class infrastructure of hotels and restaurants, demands tourists. Tourism is down here, too.

China’s response seems to be to encourage domestic consumption of goods and services. The bailout package here is toward consumers—to purchase cars and appliances, perhaps speeding up the embourgeoisment of the world that Marx predicted, and something that has been happening more and more quickly in the 19 years I’ve been visiting China.

The second challenge, as the Deere manager made clear, is the need for China to feed itself. I marvel as I look out the window of the train at how intensively China cultivates its arable land (much of China is not good for farming). It’s not enough. Yet making agriculture more efficient (the average farm is 1 acre, and if 300 million Chinese left the farm for the city, the average-size farm would still be under 5 acres) presses the need to find more jobs. Hence, the challenge to the regime isn’t from “democracy,” but from those forces that have granted or removed the mandate of heaven for thousands of years in the past—the need for prosperity at home and prestige and security abroad.

The smorgasbord of Asia ends for the class members with their flight back to the United States tomorrow. It’s only a 20-minute flight by the clock; they leave Beijing at 4:10 and land at O’Hare at 4:30, no mean feat. Parents, collect your sons and daughters, mindful that they’ve had a frame-breaking change experience. Someday, they’ll thank me, hopefully in my lifetime.

As my reward, I get to go on to Mongolia. As the Chinese saying goes, “Yi lu ping an.” May you have a peaceful journey.

Two quotes infuse today’s blog. The first is Carolyn’s exclamation: “You’re not making them take four train rides, are you?” Well, no. It’s five, as one of the students pointed out, but the last one—hopefully the one they’ll remember best—was both the longest and on the most comfortable train.

We left Hong Kong about 3:30 in the afternoon (after another torrential rain in the morning, and another wonderful meal with my friend, Eleanor; this one was a dim sum in another upstairs restaurant with no English speakers, no English menu, and no tourist prices, with Carrie and the two students who wanted the experience) for the 23-hour train ride to Beijing. The train was non-stop, meaning we cleared customs in Hong Kong, but did not have to face the temperature gun—literally—until we arrived 23 hours later in the capital of the People’s Republic of China. We had four-person compartments that were sleepers, and I was probably the only one of the group who did not take advantage of the opportunity to sleep for 20 hours. Instead, I was up early, watching the miles roll by (at times we reached 150 km/h (so said the train marquee, though it said we were going 82 km/h when we were standing in the station) and I saw us cross the Yellow River (China’s sorrow, which looked like it was shy of water; I later saw it was down 13% from the previous year, reflecting the drought that has afflicted north China for many years) and go through Zhengzhou, a big rail junction and one of the ancient cities I visited three years ago. We shifted from rice to wheat, but everywhere we saw at least two things: incredible infrastructure spending on superhighways (China has really encouraged the purchase of automobiles, unlike Singapore and Vietnam, for example, which have limited license to purchase auctions, once up to $50,000 Singaporean, now down to $8,000), and high tariffs for Singapore, and high tariffs for Vietnam. See the cover story about Shanghai: the New Detroit in Newsweek), and people in the fields. If you go from Bloomington to Chicago, you never see anyone in the fields unless it is harvest time or planting time. Rice fields especially require a lot of labor. One of the books I finished on the trip was Malcolm Caldwell’s The Outliers, which has a chapter on rice versus other farming, and on math, which helps explain the Chinese work ethic.

So yes, we did have another train ride, but I think it was one everyone enjoyed; recharged batteries will help them in the rigors we have planned in Beijing.

The second part of this blog comes with a quote from J.R. Glenn, a 2005 graduate of IWU who joined us yesterday around midnight. He and I have travelled to Burma and Tibet, and when I suggested Mongolia for this year, he promptly agreed. When we got in from our Peking Opera last night, he was standing in line to check in, his plane having arrived an hour-plus early. “I’m home,” he told me, and it occurred to me that in some ways, I am, too.

Like everywhere we’ve been on this trip, we have too little time in this capitol of the world’s largest country in terms of population. I say that about Beijing because I know what one can do here, and I’m doing my best to make sure we do as much as we can in the time we’re here. I’m happy to say we have the best guide we’ve had anywhere (not always the case in this city), and she and I sat down when we got in and talked about what we might be able to do. She’s managed to make most of my requests into can-dos (in return for which I told her we’d do the “factory visits” we didn’t have to do, but she gets credit for taking us to them. I understand how tourism works better than most trip leaders, and I want to see her get the good marks she’s earned with us).

Our days start early and end late. Certainly our day and a half in Beijing fit that description. When we got in, we had a short turnaround time before our trip to the Qingmen Hotel for a brief introduction to Peking Opera (if you want to know more, rent Farewell My Concubine, by Zhang Yi Mou). A brief introduction is usually enough for foreigners, although the program had more acrobatics than singing. The second number featured the monkey king (a figure common in Buddhist/Hindu lands, and some really funny aspects and some spectacular acrobats. When that let out, some of the students decided to walk back to the hotel, but the guide offered to take anyone who wanted to go to Ah Fun Ti, a Xinjiang restaurant that features Hui (Muslim) foods that I’ve had in Xinjiang. About half of us showed up at the restaurant (which has a floor show including belly dancing) just in time to see the end of the show. We ate, and I asked if the manager would start the belly dancing. Instead, he turned on the music, the musical ball, and Whitney Durham and I started dancing, and by the time we were done, the restaurant staff was on the stage with all our students and the few remaining patrons in what could have been dancing, but a good time was certainly had by all.

Today was another busy day. It started with a 6:30 wakeup call, and an 8 o’clock departure for another spectacular place that most of the group had read about, but never been to—the Forbidden City. As many times as I’ve been to it, I’m still in awe. Built by the second or third Ming Emperor by 1420, and about to celebrate its 600th birthday, the palace was home to 14 emperors until the 1911 revolution abolished the monarchy. It’s been a public spectacle since the 1920s, when Pu-yi (known as the last emperor even though there was an attempt by Yuan Shih-kai to name himself emperor for 86 days in 1916), was evicted, I think by a warlord. Pu-yi went on to flirt with the Japanese who made him their emperor of Manchukuo in the 1930s.

We didn’t see many of the 9,999 rooms (a room being defined as the space between 4 pillars, but there’s still a lot of our kind of rooms) although we walked from the southern entrance (Tiananmen, the gate of heavenly peace) to the north. The palace has been refurbished, partly for the Olympics, partly with an eye on the 2020 celebration sure to come, at a cost of several billion dollars, and I didn’t see the faded or peeling paint so common in the past, and the Starbucks that was once in the City has been evicted (as a result of an Internet campaign!), but I did see the mobs of tour groups that prove, once again, tourism is the world’s biggest business. From south to north, we went from impressive public gathering places to the Throne room to the private quarters where the royal family (the emperor had around 3,000 cohorts; he chose his 2-hour companions by drawing their names from bamboo). The new emperors live in a part of the Forbidden City that is, well, forbidden!

We were able to do something I’ve never done on a tour before, but has always been one of the highlights of the city for me—a climb of Coal Hill in a park across the street (now) from the Forbidden City. Builders of the moat dumped the dirt they excavated in a pile which became Coal Hill, a royal playground overlooking the Forbidden City. I convinced our guide it was a good idea to go there, and we got the best views of the entire layout possible without an airplane.

From the Forbidden City, we went to a local area nearby, a “hutong,” the small alleyways where 3 generations of families live in a square compound that is a little version of the Forbidden City, where we had lunch with a local family, who’d owned the place for 3 generations. Though the government has torn down 80% of these quaint buildings (which have public but not private washrooms), this area has been spared the wrecker’s ball, and many of the hutongs fronting on the artificial lake have been refurbished as bars and restaurants (hopefully with internal washrooms).

In the evening, we went to probably the most professionally choreographed show I’ve seen in China, “The Story of Kung Fu,” which made more sense to me than the last time I saw it because I’ve since visited the Shaolin Monastery, the location of the source of Kung Fu. Many of us got dropped off at Wangfujing (which used to be known as Morrison Street when it was part of the foreigners’ forbidden city; after the Boxer Uprising, the legations and embassies had a wall around them fit for new emperors, and it was as forbidden to ordinary people as the nearby Forbidden City of the emperors. Once a street full of quaint shops (including the ancient deer and antler pharmacy, which I think is where linguists discovered the Shang bones that gave them a clue to the origins of Chinese writing, it’s been converted into a shopping mall ala Michigan avenue, name brand stores, etc. There is still a food court there, with hawkers who sell snake, cicadas, scorpions and other creepy crawly things that are not on the usual restaurant menus—nor on anything else.

I’m going to skip our business visit and some observations of Beijing and China until I get a chance later. We’re off to the Great Wall soon and I want to get this onto e-mail. As I said, we’ve been busy. Sleep when we get home! Oh, that’s right, I’m at home here (almost!) Zaijian.

Forbidden City