'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Beijing: Summer Palace and Bei-Da

I'm back home in Virginia. I have two further "China travelogue" posts I want to write as soon as I can, but things are pretty crazy in my life right now.

The second of these posts will be about Xian, the amazing spot in central China that anchored the eastern end of the "Silk Road"; the place that 2200 years ago was the first capital of a unified China; and a place that is a very important location for the absorption and transmission of both Buddhism and Islam across the Asian land-mass...

But here's the other China post I wanted to write:

One delightful day last week, Bill, our friend Ann Womack, and I went to visit the Summer Palace, situated in the northwest of today's Beijing. The visit would only be a short one because at 2 p.m. I was scheduled to talk to Dr. Wang Suolao's class on Middle East politics at Beijing University, which is near the Summer Palace. Beijing is a huge city and the traffic situation there a multi-laned morass of congestion, so we'd planned our itinerary to combine the two trips, which worked out well.

The Summer Palace was just as lovely as the guide-books made it out to be. What we actually visited was described as the "new" Summer Palace. It had long been an imperial garden, and had many of its structures built in the 18th century. But in 1860 a British-French punitive expedition burned down much of this complex as well as the 12th century "Old" Summer Palace complex not far away. The Dowager Empress Cixi then set about rebuilding it, though the Anglo-French forces tried to burn it down again in 1900.

Perhaps of special interest to my Middle Eastern readers is the fact that one of the British officers in charge of the first of those incineratory expeditions was Capt. Charles Gordon. He later used the nickname "Chinese" Gordon, and went on to become British Governor of the Sudan. He was killed in Khartoum in, I think, 1885, during an uprising by the Mahdist army there. Here is a little text by him that we found in the Frommer's guidebook. It's an excerpt from a letter he wrote in 1860, describing one aspect of what his people had done in Beijing:

You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them; in fact, these palaces were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralizing work for an army. Everybody was wild for plunder.

Well, don't you just feel so sorry for them all, that they were so "pressed for time" that they couldn't plunder the palaces "carefully"?

That expedition, by the way, was launched to uphold the whole system of European privileges and "concessions" in China at the time, an integral part of which was the British empire's insistence on being freely able to sell opium to the Chinese market. There's yet another reason I'm sometimes ashamed to be British.

... Well, we walked along the 800-meter-long covered walkway that defines part of the northern shore of the huge lake that dominates the Summer Palace complex. Every three meters or so along the walkway a lintel crosses it. These lintels, and the ones that run along the sides of the long roof, are all decorated with fabulous paintings, many of them very detailed renderings of folk-story themes, or natural scenes, or spare depictions of plum-blossoms, or cats, or goldfish. In fact, there are so many lovely paintings along the walkway that the guide-book says they total some 8,000 in number.

Halfway along the walkway is a large hall called the Cloud Dispelling Hall. from there we climbed steeply northwards up the hill behind it to, respectively, the Buddhist Fragrance Pavilion, the Temple of the Sea of Wisdom, and Buddhist Tenants' Hall. That was all a pretty good workout! The halls are separated by vertiginous stone buttress walls, and to mount from one hall to the next you have to climb steep steps that zigzag up the faces of the walls. But the view from the top was spectacular: back down across the yellow-tiled roofs of the lower halls and across the hazy expanses of the lake to the dimly visible temples on its other shores.

After that brief visit to a small portion of the Summer Palace, we got a cab to Beijing University, which Chinese people refer to familiarly as "Bei-Da". The cabbie dropped us at a gate to the campus that seemed not to be a main gate, and the guards there didn't speak any English. Since Brantly wasn't with us, we were momentarily at a loss how to proceed, until Bill approached a student walking by with a cell-phone and asked in English if he could help us contact Professor Wang. The student expressed delight at being able to help-- he said Dr. Wang was one of his favorite teachers!-- and immediately called him on our behalf. Within minutes, Dr. Wang had come to meet us, and we walked slowly back to his classroom through Bei-Da's beautifully landscaped campus. (As far as I could figure, the campus may have included part of the "Old" Summer Palace.)

The session with his students was really interesting for me. There were about eight of them. Dr. Wang said I should go ahead and give my presentation in English-- that the students could handle that. I talked mainly about the Palestinian issue, drawing a little bit on my February visit there and also reflecting on the momentous nature of Bush's April 14 giveaway to Sharon. I had gathered from my emails with Dr. Wang beforehand that I could expect his students to be much more familiar with recent developments in the Israeli-Palestinian field than, for example, the students I'd spoken to at ECNU the week before, so I'd prepared a completely separate presentation to take that into account. Butduring the discussion period that followed I was amazed at the familiarity Wang's students showed with many different aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian question. It was truly impressive.

All the students were Chinese except one young woman who was Korean and one young man who was Japanese. The Chinese students had all prepared questions for me, and some of them more than one. Actually, it was an intriguing experience, since Wang had set as the assignment for the students prior to the class that they should read this blog, so several of them displayed intimate awareness of things I'd been writing here recently. Wow! I travel halfway round the world and there are a bunch of really smart, interesting young people who have already seen into my brain??? (I exaggerate. My brain is not coterminous with the content of the blog. But still, when I write in the blog it does come out much more stream-of-consciousness-y than when I'm writing for dead-tree publications.)

So we had what I thought was a really interesting discussion. At one point, one of the students asked about the analogy or disanalogy between the US position in Iraq and its earlier position in Vietnam. Bill had joined in the discussion during the Q&A period, and he answered first. I thought maybe I could convey the supplementary thing that I wanted to convey more effectively with a picture than with words, so I picked up a marker and drew two quick maps side-by-side on the whiteboard. One was of Iraq and its neighbors, the other of Vietnam and its neighbors. I indicated that in Vietnam, the US side was able to deliver war materiél all along the coast to its forces in S. Vietnam, while the anti-US insurgents had to rely on the long , vulnerable stretches of the Ho Chi Minh trail for their re-supply. In Iraq, by contrast, the US has to funnel nearly everything in through the bottleneck of Kuwait, while the anti-US insurgents (or at least, those of them that have good relations with Iran) can have access to the many scores of good roads and trails that criss-cross between Iran and the concentrations of population in southern Iraq...

Toward the end of the discussion, I turned the tables a bit and asked the students what they were hoping to do after they graduated. One replied that it seemed early for them to decide, yet. I asked if any of them had any interest in, for example, joining a force like the small (12-person!) force of Chinese police officers that had been shown in the newspapers deploying to go and be part of the UN operation in Kosovo. That same student said something like, "But we still have many important tasks to do here in China." I would have loved to continue that discussion for longer.

I also asked the students if any of them had their own web sites. "No!" came the chorus of replies. Later, Dr. Wang explained that even the academic department he worked in did not have its own site; but that the School of International Studies of which it's a part has one.

Anyway, after a 2.5-hour session, we had to leave. But I had really enjoyed having the chance to meet Dr. Wang and his students. It would be fun to go back to Bei-Da sometime.