'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

The (Great) Wall that Failed

So yesterday I finally got to see, and climb along, a section of the edifice of which Richard Nixon memorably said after seeing it, "Why, it sure is a great wall!" My Australian colleague Andrew Vincent and I had signed up for an all-day tour that promised us visits to the Wall, the Ming Tombs, a jade factory, and a center for Traditional Chinese Medicine; a Chinese lunch; and sundry other delights.

We ended up in a small bus along with five Chinese people visiting the capital from other parts of the country, two Korean men, and an incredibly talented and energetic bilingual guide who told us her 'English' name was Alexandra "but please call me Alex."

It was a longish ride out to our first destination, the jade factory, but driving through morning-rush-hour Beijing and then its suburbs was interesting in itself. The city is enormous, with countless clusters of 25- to 35-story high-rises and a sky full of cranes hard at work building yet more. The traffic moved fairly well-- plus, our driver had nerves of steel and seemed to win every contest of fast-traffic 'chicken' that he engaged in. (Save one. On that occasion, the bus crunched to a halt just two inches shy of a small passenger car and all of us got tipped off our seats.) Alongside the motor traffic, streams of bicycles, pedi-carts, and the occasional bike-ricksha plied endlessly along the bikeways, clustering to a stop at some interesections then streaming over them when their own separate traffic lights showed green...

The scenery started out fairly bleak and with the brown monotones and bare branches of a harsh winter. Several of the shrub plantings beside the traffic lanes had been meticulously wrapped in green canvas. Many trees looked recently pruned. (Heck-- should have done mine in C'ville before I left home!) Until we got out into the countryside there was scarcely any litter to be seen. Once there, it was the third-world-wide phenomenon of blown plastic bags that marred the landscape a little.

Jade factory: tourist trap; I'm not into jade.

So then, the Wall! We drove to the edge of the broad, flat basin in which the city lies and came abruptly to the sharp, young, brown mountains to the north and east. You can see sections of the GW snaking up and down the dentelles from quite a distance. We drove up a valley to a place where a small dam has been built near where the GW crosses the valley. Baddaling, I think it's called.

Clearly, a lot of the GW here had been reconsrtucted. 'Alex' had told us (in two separate bilingual renderings) that its construction had continued, on and off, for around 2,000 years, and during that time various emperors had chosen to invest more or less of their treasury in the task. It's nearly 1,500 kilometers long, and was designed to keep out the "minority" (= non-Han) peoples from the north and east who wanted to come down into Han-land because the land there (here) is richer and more abundant.

At times, Alex said, the Emperor would require the labor of one in every five able-bodied Chinese person to do full-time work on the project. Many scores of thousands died in the process. Just trying to walk up the small section of the Wall that we visited--even without having to carry huge blocks of stone as we went-- it was evident how and why that had happened. She said that frequently when sections of the Wall crumble, you can see human bones as well as rough stones in the filling of it.

Andrew, my travel companion, wasn't up to too much exertion and we hadn't done much bonding yet with the other toursists, so I set off to hike up a few sections there on my own. Hike?? It is actually an extremely arduous climb, made possible for most people only at all by the fact that the route is cut into steps. But frequently, these steps take you up an incline that is at ways more than 45 degrees to the horizontal. Many visitors were huffing and puffing and clutching onto the handrails even before we'd gotten to the first of the little guard-houses there...

I made it to the third one before thinking that caution was advised. I remembered the "downhill hike" Bill and I made from the summit of Miyajima in Japan back in 2000, and how our calf muscles seemed to totally seize up for about three or four days after we'd made that descent. I was worried that descending the GW might be equally tough on the muscular system. Actually, it did not turn out that way. I'm writing this from the lounge at Beijing Airport about 24 hrs after the visit to the GW, and my leg muscles feel totally fine...

Before I started the descent I climbed to the roof of the little stone guard-house that I had reached and looked out over the jagged, darkbrown upthrusts of the bleak and forbidding mountains around. I tried to imagine myself a Chinese border guard of 1,000 years ago, keeping vigilant watch for the approach of the threatening Manchu horde. (The task was not made easier because at this section the wall beneath me had machiciolations only on the south-facing side. Still haven't figured that one out!)

I guess there are many different sections of the GW that a person can visit, and this section is one of the most reconstructed and most tourist-heavy. Despite that, it was an impressive place to be. Impressive to get even that glimpse of the size, scale, and sheer difficulty of the undertaking of having built it. And important, from my prespective, because despite all that heavy investment of funds, human energy, and human lives into the project, in the end the whole Wall project notably failed. The Manchus swept in around 400 years ago-- not quite sure how-- and founded the Ch'ing dynasty in Beijing. So that's how it goes....

So, continuing our pursuit of Alex's relentlessly organized schedule we were taken down to massive nearby "Friendship Store" comples for lunch. It was a huge lunch hall, with maybe 60 or 80 ten-place tables. Our group of nine took one, and we were served a really excellent lunch on a large central Lazy Susan. Many appetizers, a soup, and about seven or eight really tasty "main" course dishes. Complimentary tea and mai-tai (!); pay-as-you-go western-style soft drinks. Orange wedges. But here as elsehwere in China, no fortune cookies.

We went to a cloisonne factory. I hate cloisonne, too. (Though my Aunty Katy of blessed memory used to love it.) It was, however, kinda interesting to see how they make it. Plus, they had some good other stuff to buy there apart from cloisonne and the omnipresent jade.

On, to the Ming Tombs. Actually, just one Ming Tomb, which is all that Zhou Enlai was able to save from the destructive attentions of the Red Guards back in the Cultural Revolution. He did so, Alex told us, because he was able to wave in the faces of the RGs an actual photograph of a 1954 episode in which Chairman Mao himself had (gasp!) vitied this particular tomb. It also, by happy happenstance, happened to be the oldest and therefore--according to some theory by which no emperor would build a tomb larger than his fathers'--of the 16 or so Ming Tombs that once dotted this particular extended burial ground.

Tomb. The term doesn't really convey to an English-cuyltured person the sheer vastness of this complex. It would be, I suppose, like describing one of the Great Pyramids of Giza as simply a "tomb". In this case, as there, there is an extensive cosmology relateing to the importanbce of the afterlife and its intricate and many-layered relationship with the visible earthly life... All of which leads to the concept of "tomb" as mandating constructions of extensive edifices and enclosures that relate to each part of these relationships.

The Ming Tomb we visited yesterday was like a slightly smaller version of (the ceremonial parts of) the Forbidden City, that we had visited on both Wednesday lunchtime and--at greater length--on Thursday afternoon. At the Tomb, as at the FC, there was a series of large, south-facing courtyards with the progression from south to north taking us from the more mundane portions to the ever more elevated portion. Each courtyard was separated from the next by a large and lovely structure. At this Ming omb, one of these buildings was a massive, tile-roofed halls built around 60 massive pillars, each cut from the trunk of a single tree that, at the time of its cutting some 600 years ago was already some 1,000 years old...

At the Tomb, unlike at the FC, the northernmost large, rectangular courtyard is bounded by a high, square tower of a building that to its north overlooks a vast round enclosure with a large earth mound in the middle of it, the whole thing covered by a psarse covering of trees. This is the tomb itself. (The rest was just foreplay.)

The burial chamber is, acording to Alex, buried some 27 meters underneath the earth mound, and it has not been excavated yet. The main burial chamber contains, along with the entire, unembalmed body of this emperor himself, unknown but undoubtedly huge numbers of lovely phsyical treasures. In large tombs flanking each side of the main tomb were buried--alive, according to Alex-- a large number of human trasures: that is, the choicest among the emperor's thousands of wives and concubines who were buried there for his subsequent delectation in the afterlife. Yuk!!!

For now, though, the government apparently doesn't have the money to excavate the tomb. That's what Alex said. It seemed like a strange claim, given the size of the construction-related excavation projects all over Beijing, these days... Anyway, if there are treasures untold down there, it might not be a bad idea to keep them safe and undisturbed a while longer... Why not?

As we left the Tomb we saw a large reproduction of the famed photo of Mao at the Tomb that had saved its life back in the 1970s.

Mao is an interesting presence in Beijing these days. At one point, Alex, who must be in her mid-20s, said, "People my age heard only a little about his role in building the new country here-- but we heard a lot about what he did during the Cultural Revolution...." She didn't say anymore about that, but the little grimace that followed her words spoke volumes.

Meanwhile, as noted here previously, there is still an iconically strong presence of Mao throughout the country. In the tchotchke shops you can certainly find little busts of him, or his image on all kinds of tchotchkes, copies of the Little Red Book, etc etc. I did not have time to get to his mausloeum, but it is reportedly still the center of a lot of pilgrimages from people visiting the capital from throughout the country.

Anyway, just to finish my account of yesterday's tour. We ended up at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for an extraordinary performance in what one might call touristic medical voyeurism. There was a large entrance hall lined with pictures of various world figures undergoing TCM. Among them, of course, the obligatory photo of Chairman Mao getting his, late in his life. (Eyesight problems; no hint here of sexual dysfunction.)

Then, pink-uniformed young women led our group into one of a series of rooms that looked like an old-fashioned version of med-school classrooms. At the front: large charts of naked men with their skin peeled off and their muscles displayed (on one side) and their acupuncture points all marked (the other side). A doctor-like figure in a white coat came in and gave us a rapid-fire intro to TCM, in Chinese and then in English. Then he said, "Now the doctors will come in!" and the pink-uniformed young woman opened the door. The original, doctor-like figure tried to lead us in a rousing round of applause, without much success. Four white-jacketed doctors came in and spread around the nine of us to strut their professional stuff.

The one who came to my chair had me lay my right wrist on a pad and with three fingers felt the pulses there that relate to various organs. He did the same with my left wrist. With a pink-clad young woman translating he asked me to stick out my tongue, and asked a couple of questions about how I slept, etc. Then, through the interpreter he asked if I had "rabbits jumping about in my chest" sometimes. I told him I hadn't had that happen for a long while. (I have actually on one previous occasion been diagnosed with a mild heart arrhythmia, and I did used to have a racing heart at night sometimes, when my kids were going through tough times and I was feeling under a bunch of stress.) I told the doc that I haven't had the "rabbits jumping around" thing for a while now, ever since I started managing my stress through meditation...

"Meditation?" the interpreter queried. Well, I couldn't quite explain the combination of some Buddhist breathing exercizes plus Quaker worship plus regular running that seems to work for me, stress-management-wise. A naughty gremlin urged me to say, "Yes, meditation-- you know, like the Falun Gong", but I immediately suppressed him. "Yes, meditation, like the Buddhists, you know... " I said. She looked a little skeptical.

I also volunteered the fact that I sometimes get migraines-- no spontaneous diagnosis of that fronm the doc, there. At the end of this mini-consultation he came out with advice for two kinds of herbal pills I should take from the academy's formulary: one for the heart and one for the migraine. For each, he recommended a two-month course of pills at 430 yuan (just over $50) a month... No, I could not just take his prescription and get it filled elsewhere...

I said I needed time to think about this. Maybe I should have tried his pills? It would certainly be worth it if he could nail my migraines once and for all, which he said was a distinct possibility. (By brother-in-law John, a British GP, also thinks it's possible the migraines could maybe be nailed once and for all with a course of the British NHS's anti-migraine meds... Interesting idea that.)

Anyway, the Chinese doc moved right along to Andrew, who was sitting next to me and had been overhearing my consultation with some interest. Now I got to overhear his. The doc expressed great concern about the state of Andrew's arteries, and his blood sugars, etc etc... Just from doing the pulse thing and the tongue inspection! What he didn't catch at all was Andrew's fairly dickey lungs, whose problems A had already told me about a bit some time earlier, when he had to take a rest halfway up some stairs.

Oh well, I'm sure TCM has a lot of wisdom and validity to it. It's evidently not fair to make a judgment on its efficacy based on a 4-minute consultation like that. That little whole part of the tour was interesting, though, since we hadn't been expecting it at all. Seems like everyone in China, including the Academy of TCM, is in the entrepreneurship business these days.

Hah! I'm writing this portion of this post on the Korean Air flight to Seoul and we're almost landing. I'm looking out of the left window, down into what I assume is North Korea. I guess, though, that we're so near landing that I should shut this down now.