"...the blame rests with the government, which in the oldest empire on earth right up to the present day, has not been able, or has among other things, neglected to cultivate the institution of empire sufficiently clearly so that it is immediately and ceaselessly effective right up to the most remote frontiers of the empire." --Franz Kafka "The Great Wall of China," trans. Ian Johnson /c/2009
An invisible north-south axis runs from the throne room of the Imperial Palace, aka the Forbidden City, that huge building complex that was the seat of the Chinese Empire "under heaven," and the masoleum of Mao Tse-Tung, and specifically his spotlighted embalmed body under glass. The remoteness that Kafka evoked in his 1917 short story (first published posthumously in 1931) is very easy to understand through a visit to the Forbidden City, where the immense imperial court lived in splendid isolation from the masses of Chinese poor, enslaved to the land by an ancient system of land ownership enforced by a rigid social hierarchy. This was the very thing that Mao sought to overthrow, and did, making a number of terribly costly historical mistakes in the process, but eventually, a generation and a half after his death in 1974, liberating the energies of the Chinese people to create the contemporary powerhouse in industry and finance that China is today, outpacing the United States in both areas. And he and his heirs have done it by making the Chinese state "immediately and ceasely effective right up to the most remote frontiers of the empire"--as we experienced at the many highway checkpoints in Tibet, where our passports were examined and our speed since the last checkpoint was controlled.
All this success is manifestly visible in Beijing
We arrived in Beijing on time, 8 am on May 14. Barbara had the name of our hotel, but not its address or phone number. There was no Internet on the train, and none in the station. We found our way to the taxi line ("taxi" is a universal word, fortunately), and then while in the cab my T-Mobile phone functioned sufficiently to give us an address and phone number. We were there by 10 am.
The Emperor Forbidden City Hotel is a charming boutique establishment, with very contemporary room layouts, featuring a bathroom enclosed in frosted glass (ending in a Chinese skyline) half-way down, and clear the rest of the way, so you can exchange glances (or grimaces) from the beds with someone taking a shower. It's so fashionable the gooseneck bed reading lamp (LED) is much too dim to read by (don't we hip people only read light-emitting e-books now?) Also, the hotel is so personable, so idiosyncratic, the rooms don't even have numbers--only names--in Chinese! I can neither remember nor pronounce ours (why make it easy?) but they know us by now.
I'm getting used to being surrounded by Chinese; it seems so normal by now. I just figure at some point I'll have to learn it. The people seem so reasonable and attractive, so contemporary. We share the same global/technological/popular culture. It seems incongruous that communication is so laborious. I used to think of written Chinese as so primitive, so quaint; now it just seems like another medium I'd better pick up--and fast.
That first afternoon we headed straight for the Forbidden City, since it was quite close. After you buy your ticket the entrance is at the end of an immense plaza. You go through a roofed "gate," really a long hallway, that opens onto--another immense plaza! On the other side is another huge building with an elaborate Chinese roof, but now surrounded by other buildings that serve as museum spaces. The whole thing goes on like this for several more iterations.
The actual museum holdings are spread among a large number of buildings, and it's not easy to find a particular one. At one point you encounter women dressed in colorful traditional costumes, and it turns out you can rent one of these and become the subject of a green-screen novelty in which you are flying through the Forbidden City.
That first day I saw some beautiful ceramics, and what impressed me even more, Buddhist and Hindu bronzes (often divine sex scenes with multiple heads and/or arms), all under 14 inches tall. The stone carving on a slant between two stairways leading up to the buildings was also quite impressive: free-form dragons in the landscape, all of them pretty much the same. Here and there were imposing bronzes: a crane, a dragon-tortose, heaters of various sorts, and a stone-carved measure for grain. The emperors took very seriously their role to standardize weights and measures.
And Time, I thought, judging from the preeminince of the clock and watch museum as part of the complex (separate ticket entry), but a visit to it the following day convinced me I was wrong. Clocks, whose mechanisms were perfected technologically in the 18th Century, became the amusements of the rich, pretexts for the imaginative exercise of the metalsmith's art, often animated home entertainment that, although restricted to a single scene, foreshadowed later forms of mechanized entertainment, such as radio and TV. The wealthy, and a fortiori the emperors, collected them, placing several of them in a single drawing room. There must have been at least 150 clocks of different sizes in that exhibition. The Chinese-manufactured ones played mostly on Chinese architecture, but the collection included many from France and England, chiefly from the 19th Century. Scenes and themes included pastorals, jungle scenes, a rhinoceros, a hot-air balloon, an elephant procession, a man writing a letter...I had just made it in before the ticket office closed, and they threw me out 25 minutes later, but I managed to photograph the vast majority of them in the dim light.
The grand finale of the Forbidden City is the Imperial Garden at the very end, touted as the place the Emperor cavorted with his wives and concubines. Here ancient cypresses contort their trunks into fantastic shapes amid rock structures that seem to quote Max Ernst's most extravagant decalcomania patterns. One easily sees the Chinese taste for visual complexity and patterning expressed here in natural objects. Certain trees, or their dead trunks, seem to have venerable personalities, with their deeply grooved paunches, polished through centuries of casual palping. My super-wide angle lens was essential here, and I lay directly on the ground to take in as much of certain trees as I could, emphasizing their grandeur. The various pavilion buildings, smaller versions of the main buildings of the complex, completed the Garden. And everywhere, of course, were tourists like me, taking pictures of themselves and each other, mostly with cell phones.
At about 4:40 pm we were all urged out, and by 5 everyone was outside, through the last gate, into the broad plaza flanked by the wide moat, and ringed with souvenir merchants. It was about a 20-minute walk back to the hotel, along the moat, passing more merchants and beggars with various tragic mutilations.
An invisible north-south axis runs from the throne room of the Imperial Palace, aka the Forbidden City, that huge building complex that was the seat of the Chinese Empire "under heaven," and the masoleum of Mao Tse-Tung, and specifically his spotlighted embalmed body under glass. The remoteness that Kafka evoked in his 1917 short story (first published posthumously in 1931) is very easy to understand through a visit to the Forbidden City, where the immense imperial court lived in splendid isolation from the masses of Chinese poor, enslaved to the land by an ancient system of land ownership enforced by a rigid social hierarchy. This was the very thing that Mao sought to overthrow, and did, making a number of terribly costly historical mistakes in the process, but eventually, a generation and a half after his death in 1974, liberating the energies of the Chinese people to create the contemporary powerhouse in industry and finance that China is today, outpacing the United States in both areas. And he and his heirs have done it by making the Chinese state "immediately and ceasely effective right up to the most remote frontiers of the empire"--as we experienced at the many highway checkpoints in Tibet, where our passports were examined and our speed since the last checkpoint was controlled.
All this success is manifestly visible in Beijing
We arrived in Beijing on time, 8 am on May 14. Barbara had the name of our hotel, but not its address or phone number. There was no Internet on the train, and none in the station. We found our way to the taxi line ("taxi" is a universal word, fortunately), and then while in the cab my T-Mobile phone functioned sufficiently to give us an address and phone number. We were there by 10 am.
The Emperor Forbidden City Hotel is a charming boutique establishment, with very contemporary room layouts, featuring a bathroom enclosed in frosted glass (ending in a Chinese skyline) half-way down, and clear the rest of the way, so you can exchange glances (or grimaces) from the beds with someone taking a shower. It's so fashionable the gooseneck bed reading lamp (LED) is much too dim to read by (don't we hip people only read light-emitting e-books now?) Also, the hotel is so personable, so idiosyncratic, the rooms don't even have numbers--only names--in Chinese! I can neither remember nor pronounce ours (why make it easy?) but they know us by now.
I'm getting used to being surrounded by Chinese; it seems so normal by now. I just figure at some point I'll have to learn it. The people seem so reasonable and attractive, so contemporary. We share the same global/technological/popular culture. It seems incongruous that communication is so laborious. I used to think of written Chinese as so primitive, so quaint; now it just seems like another medium I'd better pick up--and fast.
That first afternoon we headed straight for the Forbidden City, since it was quite close. After you buy your ticket the entrance is at the end of an immense plaza. You go through a roofed "gate," really a long hallway, that opens onto--another immense plaza! On the other side is another huge building with an elaborate Chinese roof, but now surrounded by other buildings that serve as museum spaces. The whole thing goes on like this for several more iterations.
The actual museum holdings are spread among a large number of buildings, and it's not easy to find a particular one. At one point you encounter women dressed in colorful traditional costumes, and it turns out you can rent one of these and become the subject of a green-screen novelty in which you are flying through the Forbidden City.
That first day I saw some beautiful ceramics, and what impressed me even more, Buddhist and Hindu bronzes (often divine sex scenes with multiple heads and/or arms), all under 14 inches tall. The stone carving on a slant between two stairways leading up to the buildings was also quite impressive: free-form dragons in the landscape, all of them pretty much the same. Here and there were imposing bronzes: a crane, a dragon-tortose, heaters of various sorts, and a stone-carved measure for grain. The emperors took very seriously their role to standardize weights and measures.
And Time, I thought, judging from the preeminince of the clock and watch museum as part of the complex (separate ticket entry), but a visit to it the following day convinced me I was wrong. Clocks, whose mechanisms were perfected technologically in the 18th Century, became the amusements of the rich, pretexts for the imaginative exercise of the metalsmith's art, often animated home entertainment that, although restricted to a single scene, foreshadowed later forms of mechanized entertainment, such as radio and TV. The wealthy, and a fortiori the emperors, collected them, placing several of them in a single drawing room. There must have been at least 150 clocks of different sizes in that exhibition. The Chinese-manufactured ones played mostly on Chinese architecture, but the collection included many from France and England, chiefly from the 19th Century. Scenes and themes included pastorals, jungle scenes, a rhinoceros, a hot-air balloon, an elephant procession, a man writing a letter...I had just made it in before the ticket office closed, and they threw me out 25 minutes later, but I managed to photograph the vast majority of them in the dim light.
The grand finale of the Forbidden City is the Imperial Garden at the very end, touted as the place the Emperor cavorted with his wives and concubines. Here ancient cypresses contort their trunks into fantastic shapes amid rock structures that seem to quote Max Ernst's most extravagant decalcomania patterns. One easily sees the Chinese taste for visual complexity and patterning expressed here in natural objects. Certain trees, or their dead trunks, seem to have venerable personalities, with their deeply grooved paunches, polished through centuries of casual palping. My super-wide angle lens was essential here, and I lay directly on the ground to take in as much of certain trees as I could, emphasizing their grandeur. The various pavilion buildings, smaller versions of the main buildings of the complex, completed the Garden. And everywhere, of course, were tourists like me, taking pictures of themselves and each other, mostly with cell phones.
At about 4:40 pm we were all urged out, and by 5 everyone was outside, through the last gate, into the broad plaza flanked by the wide moat, and ringed with souvenir merchants. It was about a 20-minute walk back to the hotel, along the moat, passing more merchants and beggars with various tragic mutilations.
What a treat to see these rarely-seen details through your eye -- the amazing clocks, the intricate and revered tree roots. Thanks Joel for taking the time & effort to make this wonderful blog!
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