The following day I set out determined to see Tiananmen Square. It was about half an hour's walk from the hotel, opening a huge space on both sides of a major 8-lane boulevard with an underground passage to get across. I wanted to see Mao's Masoleum, so I dumbly followed the crowds north through one of two big doors in a traditional Chinese building with Mao's portrait front and center. This turned out to be the Tiananmen Square entrance to the Forbidden City, and there was no way to go back. I had to walk all around and redo half the distance from the hotel all over again. I was a member of the thronging masses who only moved forward (in history); no, I could not go back through one of the portals. I had to walk the entire mile around to get back to where I started in Tiananmen Square.
With masked and mounted sanitation worker in the foreground, the main Tiananmen Square gate to the Forbidden city looms in the background, with a big portrait of Mao on it. I entered by mistake and had to walk about a mile around to get back to the main square.
Each time one entered the square you had to go through security. Apparently there had been a recent terrorist incident involving Tibetans, so they were on their guard. But they would take one look at me and assess my risk as non-existent, despite all my photographic equipment, and whisk me through.
This second time, I took the under-the-roadway passage and ended up in the main part of the Square. Mao's Masoleum lay before me, but to get in the line to pay my respects, I first had to check my camera across the street: no cameras, no water, no food. This place was sacred. So after checking my camera and one lens (for 10 yuan), I recrossed the street, barely made it into the line before they closed it at noon, went through security, passed the merchants selling single yellow flowers in cellophane for the true devotees, and proceeded up the stairs to the sacred place. I doffed my hat.
Inside was a 3-times life size marble statue of Mao looking genial, as if you were about to hold a conversation with him (not austere like Lincoln in his Memorial, in essentially the same position). In the center of the room was a large receptacle for the flowers. You could get out of line if you had a flower to contribute--about a quarter of the people did. The flowers overflowed the wooden box, and piles of them were stowed behind. I wondered why they couldn't just recycle them, since the purchasers actually held them for maybe 5 minutes. This was not Mao's tomb.
We next proceeded into the room where the Great Man lay. He was embalmed, under glass, presumably hermetically sealed if not in a vacuum, with a spotlight on his face, the rest of his portly frame under a cover. Yes, there he was, the real Mao; not underground, but in the room with us, an angelic light shining from his visage.
We were out in less than two minutes, walking down the steps, flanked by two larger-than-life heroic socialist realist sculptural ensemble of workers, naturally, leading the Revolution. We're overly familiar with this style from the Soviet period, but the original most probably goes back to the French Revolution, and the very similar ensembles one sees in the Pantheon in Paris, but of 18th Century figures.
South (exit) face of Mao's masoleum, with one of the heroic statue ensembles; closesups below
I continued walking, passed through a massive Chinese city gate, and soon found myself on a pedestrian mall full of fashionable shops. There were a few interesting life-size statues of old Chinese types outside one of the shops, but otherwise I could have been in Anaheim, California--until I stepped one block to my right and found myself walking along a row of rather dilapidated more popular establishments that still evoked the Old China.
I continued walking--blocks are long in Beijing--and finally found myself at my next destination, the Beijing Natural History Museum. I thought they might have some special exhibit on Peking Man, the way the Kenya National Museum paid tribute to its anthropological finds, but there wasn't a trace. Instead, it was very much a kid-oriented museum, and when I arrived happened to be filled with--kids! There must have been 15 school groups there, yelling, chasing each other around, being yelled at by exasperated teachers, and showing each other the neat devices they had bought. I followed them into the Hall of Reptiles, which sported some pretty good dinosaur skeletons, and then--a revelation--Dinosaur Park: three rooms of audio-animatronic life-size dinosaurs, grunting, threatening, baring their teeth, rotating their absurdly long necks, and the children, of course, loved it. This would be considered too undignified for our American Museum of Natural History in New York, something more appropriate to a roadside attraction in Florida. But maybe they know something we don't. There was even a special display case with a mama dinosaur encircling her babies as they craned their necks, breaking out of their shells. This stop was not on the tourist circuit, but I felt as though I had hit the jackpot, especially with the presence of the children. No one objected to me taking photos--I think the language barrier helped.
They also had decent exhibits on Africa, "Our Friends the Animals," the plant world, and a very frank department on the human body in the basement with lots of specimens, many of them evoking the visible body exhibition that has a number of outlets in the U.S., including one at the South Street Seaport in New York. All of the specimens are Asian, and I suspected they were Chinese (political executees?) Now here I was seeing more that seemed to come from the same series.
Leaving the museum, I proceeded south a short way into the park that housed the Temple of Heaven, a Ming Dynasty creation that served various ceremonial purposes. It turned out to be of moderate interest, really a contiuation of the architectural themes I had been thoroughly saturated with in the Forbidden City. There was a sacred music department, however, where I learned that the midieval Chinese had devised a twelve-tone more or less equal tempered system. They also had some interesting multi-head drums on display. The actual Temple of Heaven had three components, a large circular stone platform, where people took turns standing in the center and having their picture taken; a circular "echo wall," with a traditional building inside, and the temple itself, in front of which there was a large cultivation of roses. Right outside the temple complex a woman in traditional dress was dancing to recorded music--with no tip jar!
(For some reason these images uploaded in reverse order.)
It took me two hours to walk back to my hotel. I stopped for a meal on the way at a dumpling house, but I was beyond exhausted when I arrived about 7 pm.
With masked and mounted sanitation worker in the foreground, the main Tiananmen Square gate to the Forbidden city looms in the background, with a big portrait of Mao on it. I entered by mistake and had to walk about a mile around to get back to the main square.
Each time one entered the square you had to go through security. Apparently there had been a recent terrorist incident involving Tibetans, so they were on their guard. But they would take one look at me and assess my risk as non-existent, despite all my photographic equipment, and whisk me through.
This second time, I took the under-the-roadway passage and ended up in the main part of the Square. Mao's Masoleum lay before me, but to get in the line to pay my respects, I first had to check my camera across the street: no cameras, no water, no food. This place was sacred. So after checking my camera and one lens (for 10 yuan), I recrossed the street, barely made it into the line before they closed it at noon, went through security, passed the merchants selling single yellow flowers in cellophane for the true devotees, and proceeded up the stairs to the sacred place. I doffed my hat.
Inside was a 3-times life size marble statue of Mao looking genial, as if you were about to hold a conversation with him (not austere like Lincoln in his Memorial, in essentially the same position). In the center of the room was a large receptacle for the flowers. You could get out of line if you had a flower to contribute--about a quarter of the people did. The flowers overflowed the wooden box, and piles of them were stowed behind. I wondered why they couldn't just recycle them, since the purchasers actually held them for maybe 5 minutes. This was not Mao's tomb.
We next proceeded into the room where the Great Man lay. He was embalmed, under glass, presumably hermetically sealed if not in a vacuum, with a spotlight on his face, the rest of his portly frame under a cover. Yes, there he was, the real Mao; not underground, but in the room with us, an angelic light shining from his visage.
We were out in less than two minutes, walking down the steps, flanked by two larger-than-life heroic socialist realist sculptural ensemble of workers, naturally, leading the Revolution. We're overly familiar with this style from the Soviet period, but the original most probably goes back to the French Revolution, and the very similar ensembles one sees in the Pantheon in Paris, but of 18th Century figures.
South (exit) face of Mao's masoleum, with one of the heroic statue ensembles; closesups below
I continued walking, passed through a massive Chinese city gate, and soon found myself on a pedestrian mall full of fashionable shops. There were a few interesting life-size statues of old Chinese types outside one of the shops, but otherwise I could have been in Anaheim, California--until I stepped one block to my right and found myself walking along a row of rather dilapidated more popular establishments that still evoked the Old China.
I continued walking--blocks are long in Beijing--and finally found myself at my next destination, the Beijing Natural History Museum. I thought they might have some special exhibit on Peking Man, the way the Kenya National Museum paid tribute to its anthropological finds, but there wasn't a trace. Instead, it was very much a kid-oriented museum, and when I arrived happened to be filled with--kids! There must have been 15 school groups there, yelling, chasing each other around, being yelled at by exasperated teachers, and showing each other the neat devices they had bought. I followed them into the Hall of Reptiles, which sported some pretty good dinosaur skeletons, and then--a revelation--Dinosaur Park: three rooms of audio-animatronic life-size dinosaurs, grunting, threatening, baring their teeth, rotating their absurdly long necks, and the children, of course, loved it. This would be considered too undignified for our American Museum of Natural History in New York, something more appropriate to a roadside attraction in Florida. But maybe they know something we don't. There was even a special display case with a mama dinosaur encircling her babies as they craned their necks, breaking out of their shells. This stop was not on the tourist circuit, but I felt as though I had hit the jackpot, especially with the presence of the children. No one objected to me taking photos--I think the language barrier helped.
They also had decent exhibits on Africa, "Our Friends the Animals," the plant world, and a very frank department on the human body in the basement with lots of specimens, many of them evoking the visible body exhibition that has a number of outlets in the U.S., including one at the South Street Seaport in New York. All of the specimens are Asian, and I suspected they were Chinese (political executees?) Now here I was seeing more that seemed to come from the same series.
Leaving the museum, I proceeded south a short way into the park that housed the Temple of Heaven, a Ming Dynasty creation that served various ceremonial purposes. It turned out to be of moderate interest, really a contiuation of the architectural themes I had been thoroughly saturated with in the Forbidden City. There was a sacred music department, however, where I learned that the midieval Chinese had devised a twelve-tone more or less equal tempered system. They also had some interesting multi-head drums on display. The actual Temple of Heaven had three components, a large circular stone platform, where people took turns standing in the center and having their picture taken; a circular "echo wall," with a traditional building inside, and the temple itself, in front of which there was a large cultivation of roses. Right outside the temple complex a woman in traditional dress was dancing to recorded music--with no tip jar!
(For some reason these images uploaded in reverse order.)
It took me two hours to walk back to my hotel. I stopped for a meal on the way at a dumpling house, but I was beyond exhausted when I arrived about 7 pm.
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