Our hostel is located in an anarchic warren of ramshackle backstreets somewhere behind the south gate of Tiananmen Square. Turn left out of the hostel, walk through the atmospheric little streets, and you find yourself in a colourful, noisy, wonderful street market full of shoppers, bikers, rickshaw men, street vendors, students, medicine shops and restaurants. Red lanterns bob in the breeze; multi-coloured ticker-tape flags flutter above your head; red and gold New Year lucky hangings and pictures adorn every door. People grab at you, follow you, invite you into their shop or to their exhibition, which always seems to be on its last day and so has reduced prices especially for you. A hum of 'CD-DVD, CD-DVD' and 'Hello watch! Hello wallet!' follows you like a cloud of mosquitoes. Thumping Chinese dance music provides the soundtrack.
Turn left at the end of this bombardment of sound and colour, and you head towards the hub of the city, Tiananmen Square. The contrast between the warm, packed, noisy market streets and the wide-open space of the square hits you like a cold blast of air from a crypt as you approach. The busy streets give way to stern, stark, self-important government buildings and statues, each of them surrounded by acres of space on the massive square. A towering, phallic, white obelisk rises in ungainly fashion like an unwanted, embarrassing erection. A squat, wide, pillared building sits surrounded by vending stalls and guards, and is the home to the embalmed corpse of Chairman Mao. The most eye-catching building on Tiananmen Square is the entrance gate, called 'The Gate of Heavenly Peace', a grim misnomer if ever there was one. The gate, in its original form, was built in the fifteenth century, but destroyed and then rebuilt, like so many of China's cultural 'relics'. In 1949, Chairman Mao had stood up there and announced to the clamouring millions China's revolution, his legacy to crush their demonstrating descendents with tanks.
The centre of Beijing is an unholy triumvirate of architectural jumble. Here and there, you have the rebuilt or renovated relics of China's ancient history, colourful pagoda roofs and temples nestling quietly in tree-lined parks; in between lie the government buildings, humourless, ugly ducklings, ostentatious and masculine; all around this hotchpotch are thrusting, pushy high-rise shopping malls, office blocks and skyscrapers. This confusion of the old and the now, the ascetic and the political and the practical, the uncomfortable bedfellows of art, politics and business, left me unsure as to whether I thought Tiananmen Square and its environs fascinating, ugly or crude.
This confusion was intensified after buying my ticket to The Forbidden City (40 Yuan, off-season). I wish now I hadn't looked at the back of the ticket, but I did, to find out one of the most famous of China's historical and cultural landmarks was sponsored. By Nestlé. All images I had of Chow Yun Fat gliding over serried rooftops vanished in a flash. Pictured on the back of the ticket were twenty-odd children, all wearing the red neckerchief of the Communist Party's version of the Cub Scouts, all of them smiling inanely, each one holding up to the camera, for maximum product exposure, a different Nestlé drink.
The Forbidden City is so-called because for many years no one was allowed into it, except by royal decree. The Manchus destroyed it in the seventeenth century and thus it's another re-building job, from the eighteenth. There are 9,000 rooms apparently, but most were forbidden to us, either locked up or protected by red rope barriers; perhaps it was because it was the off-season. As we walked through the giant white courtyards, surrounded by mazes of pagoda rooftops, we at first enjoyed the peace, quiet and relative lack of tourist throngs, then began to get quite bored. In fact, we were dying for a cup of tea.
We found the Imperial Tearoom in an ornate, geometrical rockery with stone pathways, whorled limestone and ancient, gnarled pagoda trees. Here we were introduced to the traditional Chinese Tea Ceremony. Utensils:
One Teapot.
One Pouring Jug.
One Smelling Jug.
One Drinking Cup.
The crockery was decorated with pictures of dragons (to represent male) and phoenixes (female), which changed colour ingeniously from black to red as hot water was added to the utensil. Method:
1. All utensils are warmed with hot water.
2. Hot water is added to the pot then poured away. This cleanses the tea- leaves.
3. The pot is filled with hot water again and the tea left to infuse.
4. The tea is then transferred to the pouring jug.
5. The tea is poured from the pouring jug into the smelling cup.
6. The short, squat drinking cup is then put on top of the taller, narrower smelling cup, the whole lot flipped upside down, so the tea falls into the drinking cup.
7. Then you run the warm, aromatic smelling cup through your fingers and inhale the sweet fumes.
8. Then you drink once from the drinking cup for health.
9. Then once from the cup for wealth.
10. Then a third time, for happiness.
We left the Forbidden City full to the brim with tea, and wobbled our way through the side streets back to the hostel.
In the evening, after booking our tickets to the Great Wall, Danuka and I failed to catch up with the others who were going to the theatre to watch the Beijing Opera. We were hopelessly lost for a while, until an Irish theme bar appeared, offering over-priced Guinness. A strange trade-off: swapping fake Chinese culture laid on for the tourists for fake Irish culture laid on for the ex-pats. But at least the music was better.
