Mao Tse-tung announced to the world the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, less than two blocks from our hotel, and that’s where our day began—at sunrise, when most of us joined the crowds (mostly Chinese from out of town) who gathered in Tiananmen Square to watch the hoisting of the Chinese flag over the largest square in the world. The army team of something like 400 soldiers are part of a crack unit that is quartered in the Forbidden City, just as the soldiers were under the Emperor. The troop marches out at sunset, stands at attention, the colors are raised, and the loudspeakers blare Qilai, the Chinese national anthem. You may have heard it at the Olympics when China swept to so many medals. Oh, did I mention that sunrise is at 4:55—which explains why most of the thousands who attend are not foreigners; many are just getting back from the night life in this capital city at that time. When I asked the students who went what they’d seen, the best answer was, “The Chinese Superbowl.” It’s a real indicator of the patriotism the Government embraces as part of its effort to promote social stability and remain in power.
Most of those students who came to the ceremony returned to sleep, but 5 in the morning is a great time in Beijing; it is cool, not many people crowd the streets, and there’s always, at least in our area, fascinating places to explore. For example, most of the Forbidden City is still forbidden, or at least parceled off into parks that require more time and a separate admission. The one I visited this am is in the Southeast corner of the grounds, and houses the Imperial Ancestral tablets. In a society where ancestor worship was part and parcel of the fabric of society, this was an important place. And in a palace that was forbidden to ordinary people (and parts to anyone other than the imperial family), this was an even more still area. It had the main temple, the red buildings with the blue borders and yellow roofs, typical of the rest of the Forbidden City, some interesting features like a rockery (mountains are an important part of the Chinese feng shui, the forces that determine fate, and so the emperors hauled rocks from Tai Hu, Lake Tai, near Shanghai, nearly 800 miles to be piled up to make “mountains” for their viewing pleasure. As Deng Xiaoping put it, ”To be rich is glorious.”
When we went to Tiananmen later in the day, the square was already mobbed with the tourists we were going to jostle for the next three hours for views of the Palace Museum. Built in 1402 and completed in 1420, the Forbidden city was the home of the and Qing dynasties until 1924, when a warlord removed Pu Yi, the last Qing Emperor, who began the descent chronicled in The Last Emperor, winding up as a gardener in Beijing (after being puppet emperor of Manchukuo under the Japanese from 1932 until 1945) It has been a public museum since.
Going from South to North, one goes from the public to the private quarters, which is typical of traditional Chinese houses. In the case of the Emperor, that transition takes one through the public halls to the throne room, where, I have long theorized, the failure of Westerners to do the 9 prostrations to the Emperor led to the conflicts which began the century of humiliation. Our guide assured us that the Palace is being renovated, but until the treasures that went with the Kuomintang to Taiwan (which the mainlanders view as a province of mainland China, not a country), it will remain as “one palace, two museums”.
What remains (our guide said Chiang Kai shek took 3000 items with him to Taiwan, leaving 1 million in the palace) is imperial. One can only be impressed and awed—as one was supposed to be, by the wealth and power of the royal family, even if the actual count of rooms is only around 8500, rather than the 9999 (there’s a lot of nines in the palace; it’s the “lucky” number for the emperor.
Three hours later, having passed through the private quarters of the emperor and his concubines, including the shadow of the palace area being renovated for Qianlong’s private residence—whose contents were in Milwaukee last year!—we were out.
Our next stop was a tour of the traditional Manchu area of the city (Beijing was actually several forbidden cities. Part was forbidden to anyone but Manchus. Part was forbidden to non westerners—after the Boxer Uprising in 1900, the Legation quarter was also sealed off. When I first came to China, there were a lot of hutongs. Gradually, many of these houses-a four or five room apartment, centered around a courtyard, were torn down and replaced with high rises. Those that remain have been refurbished to provide water, electricity, and in many cases, toilets. Someone asked me why there were so many public toilets in Beijing, and the answer is that there are so few private ones.
The hutong tour has become a big business, as Chinese on bicycles pedal foreigners around, especially the lovely area that fronts on Beihai Park and the lakes created for the royal family north west of the forbidden city. I’ve wandered there by day, because many famous officials (the Soong sister who married Sun Yat-sen, and became part of the communist party lived there; her sister, Meiling married Chiang Kai-shek) had homes which have become museums. At night, the area becomes alive with bars and night clubs, being at least one of the places in Beijing that prevents tourists from making the flag raising in the morning.
One other aspect of the royal families was the temple of heaven, which we visited yesterday when we got into Beijing. Probably as well known as any building in Beijing, the Temple of Heaven was an important place for an emperor, whose right to rule depended on providing prosperity at home and peace abroad. Thus, the praying for good harvests was a form of election protection. So important that when Korea threw off its vassalage to China in 1905, and established itself as a Kingdom in a vain attempt to fend off the Japanese, one of the first things the Koreans did was build a temple of heavan for the King.
The first was the Confucian temple and the Imperial College. These buildings were the “university” system in traditional China, were passing the exams were even more important than the college boards today. From the Mongols in the 14th century until 1908 or so, those exams allowed upward mobility. If you were successful, you became an official, and if you became an official, you became rich (I’m not sure if that’s changed, since the topic of corruption is alive and well in China today
As I explained, education today in the Asian colleges, even more than in the United States, is still important. I cited the case of a Korean president of Motorola University in Beijing. I asked her at the end of her presentation whether she had graduated from Seoul National or Yonsei Universities. She looked surprised, and answered, Seoul National. I knew that Motorola hired only from those two schools, the Illinois Wesleyan Universities of Korea, a country which borrowed a lot, culturally, from China.
Our final stop was at the Lama Temple. The temple was the birthplace of the Qianlong emperor (I bet there will be more to say about him from Chengde; he was emperor for 1732 until 1791). He and his grandfather, Kangsi, who was emperor for the longest time in China (dutiful grandson, Qianlong stepped down as emperor so as not to serve longer than Kangsi), ad indeed the Qing dynasty generally, had a warm spot for the Mongols and the Tibetans—the writings were in four languages—Chinese, Manchurian, Mongolian, and Tibetan—and turned the palace into a monastery for the Tibetan Yellow hat sect. It is the most unusual Buddhist Temple in Beijing, because Tibetan Buddhism incorporated the animistic religion preexisting in Tibet, with blue demon headed Buddhas found nowhere else. At one time, obviously, the relations between the Tibetans and the Qing dynasty were amicable—which is quite a change in the new China.
Long and satisfying day.