JJ's thought of the day - China part II
It's safe to say that Beijing has more than can be explored in four days, or four months. As you can see from Angela's posts, we saw a lot of things, but there were still plenty of other sites that we didn't get a chance to explore. Beijing strikes you with its immensity. High rises are everywhere. Little stores are everywhere. Traffic is everywhere. But Beijing was more "Western" than I expected. Sure, there are plenty of differences between Beijing and Durham, but there are more similarities than you would expect. You can actually get around the expressway reading English-language signs that tell you the names of the exits. Air conditioning is everywhere. Seemingly wherever you are, there are 10 restaurants, a newstand and a slew of stores within walking distance. Walk through the Hutong provinces' bar section and if you didn't hear the language, you may not know you're not in a slightly run down bar area of a college town. Being the non-chinese member of the Cooper/Wong contingent, Beijing is the Chinese city I knew the most about coming in. What strikes you when you are there is how much history China has. We hear stories about how the U.S. is young compared to Europe, where a 500-year-old cathedral is nothing unusual. But Europe is young compared to China. The Great Wall preceeds Julius Caesar. When you hear about the Roman empire, or Carthage or the gardens of Babylon, they are all pieces of history, long gone except for some remnants of buildings and aqeuducts. But the Chinese have been living in the same country, under a largely unbroken line of unified goverment for more than 2,200 years. A 2,200 year old city in China is nothing unusual, and there really isn't a time where you can point to and say "that's when the Chinese settled down in this area." As one book I was just reading put it, the Chinese seem older than the rocks, they've just always been there. That all strikes you when you walk the Great Wall. Here's a structure that has been around for more than 100 generations. Manpower has never been a problem in China. Need a wall built that requires millions of men to construct the bricks, move them to the frontier and then build a 4,000 mile fortress? The emperor simply commands it, and it's done. By the way, each brick was signed by its maker. It was the Chinese version of quality control. If the brick proves to be faulty, the brick maker is killed. It's safe to say that brick makers were quite good at their craft. One other interesting Great Wall story. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the cultural revolution was throwing China into disarray, farmers would take bricks from the great wall to use on their farms. At the time, Mao and the other leaders seemed to want to create chaos and forget all of China's great history, so it was almost encouraged. Finally in the 1970s, the authorities came to their senses and started repairing the wall, although there are still many parts where the wall has been reduced to a couple of bricks lying side by side.