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Beijing, China
I sailed a wild, wild sea, climbed up a tall, tall mountain, I met an old, old man beneath a weeping willow tree
From Seattle, my ANA 787 flight took me to the international transfer lounge at Tokyo-Narita and then on to Shanghai-Pudong. Then after a quick overnight in an airport hotel, I was on to Beijing and my first real stop in China.
Beijing is everything you think it is. It's physically huge, it's busier than you can imagine, it's unbelievably cheap, it occasionally produces a smell that you try your best to ignore and it seems doomed by a depressing smog that makes it hard to see even beyond a block or two. My introduction to the city was a rather harsh one. As the train from the airport arrived at the terminal at Dongzhimen, throngs of people pushed into the train and I literally had to fight my way out. This was not an isolated phenomenon. Every stop, every train you had to fight your way out. Despite the signs explaining to the locals that it's in their best interest to let you out first so that there's some room on each impossibly crowded train, everyone would always still push their way in. And push. And push. Welcome to Beijing.
This first picture is far away from the pushy subway and relatively empty, all things considered. This is the Temple of Heaven, built by the emperors as a place to worship (and rebuilt in Florida by the Walt Disney Company as a place to watch a movie). Historic Beijing is all about symmetry and grids and perfect views, despite the skewed angle seen below.
You know that if I went all the way to Beijing and all the way to the Temple of Heaven, I was going to come back with more than just one picture. And if it looks like I added a filter to some of these pictures it's because that depressing smog in Beijing is pretty inescapable, following me not only to the gates of the Temple of Heaven but even deep underground into that impossibly crowded (but also insanely inexpensive) subway.
The real and unmistakable center of Beijing is Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, where Mao lives eternally and where all of those protesting students had famously met their untimely ends. Tiananmen Square itself is a vast, scaleless, paved non event, a huge space where nothing is really happening. On its north end however is this, the Meridian Gate, the far southern entrance of the Imperial Palace, Beijing's Forbidden City, where gate after gate and ceremonial hall after ceremonial hall form the perfect symmetrical heart of the original grid city.
This location was also home to a bit of controversy when I was there. At this very spot on the morning that I landed, three people driving an SUV set it on fire, hopped the curb and drove it right into these stone bridges, killing themselves and two additional tourists. The people driving the car were Uyghurs, ethnic Chinese who are scattered about the People's Republic. The Chinese government immediately declared the attack a suicide terrorist act and security seemed stepped up, although I really have no way of really knowing since it was my first day in Beijing. Already there were metal detectors at Tiananmen Square and bag scanners at all subway entrances, as well as red army guys menacingly pacing back and forth all of the time. From my hotel (only a few blocks east of this spot) I watched the English language version of CCTV to hear the government's (and no one else's) side of the story. A more objective person might question why three people would drive into a bridge in a flaming car as an act of defiance against the government, but there's nothing objective about Beijing I guess.
Once inside the Forbidden City, this handy electronic map and audio tour tried its best to utilize technology that seemed similar to the Electronic Detective game or Coleco Electronic Quarterback game I had in grade school like 30 years ago, although possibly not quite as advanced.
The key word in Forbidden City is probably not Forbidden but rather City. The reason I say that is the place is huge and hard to get around, although luckily for me that ancient looking electronic map generally got me around the surprsisingly big city within a city without too much trouble.
North of downtown is the Olympic Park, home to the PTW’s Water Cube and to Herzog and de Meuron's iconic bird's nest National Stadium. All lit up in blue or yellow and red (they're really into red there), it was surprisingly popular at night, despite being closed to the public at the time.
One of the reasons that I wanted to go to Beijing was to see this, OMA's CCTV Tower, 44 stories of looping, cantilevering wonder. The tower is out near the Dengshikou Subway Station, near the city center and near a lot of other new buildings that are not nearly as nice as this one. The circles underneath the cantilever are sections of glass floors where visitors can gasp in awe and wonder about the massive structural undertaking they are standing in. That is of course if they actually allowed visitors. CCTV is the Chinese national television network and (as a sensitive government installation) they do not allow visitors and harbor no immediate plans to do so. A real shame and a lost opportunity, at least for now.
My hotel (Raffles Beijing) was in a pretty good location in the heart of the city. I was only a few blocks away on Chang’an Avenue from the entrance to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, which was a bit of a disappointment. It’s a big (really, really big) empty space with too much security and a giant video screen showing you somewhere else with bright blue skies, an escape from the brown gray smog that is unavoidable, even on the subway. But if you stayed on Chang’an Avenue just another block or two, you would soon see a much nicer public space just around the corner.
The Grand National Theatre of China was designed by French architect Paul Andreu and is everything you would think a grand, national theatre might be. It is shaped like a giant egg floating in a lake, and to enter the theatre you need to first go underwater. A pathway with overhead skylights leads under the lake and right to the egg, where a generous (or perhaps giant) multi floor, scaleless lobby awaits.
Contemporary architecture is all over Beijing, if you know where to find it. It’s easy enough to find the Water Cube and the Birds’s Nest, and the Grand National Theatre was only a few blocks away from my hotel. The CCTV Tower was a little out of the way but not all that bad, however the Linked Hybrid was a pain in the ass to get to.
Once you ride it enough, you start to reconcile yourself to the facts of the Beijing Subway and start to develop strategies. Stay calm and push back, and even if you have to wait for the next train, make your way to the very first or the very last subway car, which will be standing room only but usually at least have room to stand. To get to the Linked Hybrid, the best way is to go back to Dongzhimen (or “Dimension” as auto-correct desperately wants to change it to) and then start walking north, get lost a few times, check the map on your phone, double back again since the road looks too dangerous to cross, get slightly annoyed and then you’re there.
Just like Seattle, we’ve been to a Rem Koolhaas OMA building that is iconic and easy to find (Seattle Central Library and the CCTV Tower) and now a Steven Holl building that is a lot less famous, involves a lot of walking on boring streets and is hard to photograph once you get there (Chapel of St Ignatius and the Linked Hybrid). The Linked Hybrid is exactly what you think it is (it’s very well named) and consists of a ring of towers, lots of sky bridges and a central lake with bridges and follies all over the place.
This is the very, very nice Nanluoguxiang Hutong, where crowds enjoy a pleasant stroll through old Beijing. Hutongs are basically neighborhoods of low one story buildings and grids of back alleys- this is where the population of Beijing lived for centuries, but not anymore. The hutongs are being wiped out with new developments as the city continues to westernize. A sad reality only mitigated by the fact that most of the hutongs are not nearly as nice as Nanluoguxiang and most of them seem to have a bit more of that old time, ungentrified feel.
