WARNING: Long, rambly post that's a mix of personal experiences, historical summary and hot-take opinionating.
My first glimpses of China were surreal and desolate. The landscape looked positively Siberic in an almost hallucinatory way; dry, dusty fields smothered with snow and ice stretched to the horizon, only interrupted by groups of austere commieblock-filled xiaoqu that seemed almost copypasted, rising out of the surrounding countryside like strange alien monoliths. I was travelling from the international airport to downtown Beijing, and all the way to Dongzhimen the winter sun streamed in through the windows of the carriage, lighting up the interior with a wan glow. After some time spent navigating the Dongzhimen station trying to transfer to a new line (involving an encounter with a genuinely revolting public toilet), I was well and truly exhausted. I made it to the front desk of my hotel as soon as the sun started to set, stumbled my way through a conversation with a receptionist who knew just enough English for me to converse with, got my connection working for just enough time to check in, and dragged myself and all my luggage into the hotel room. I slotted my keycard into the holder just by the door, and every light began to turn on. Inside, it was exceptionally well-insulated to the point it actually felt hot, which was rather surprising considering how chilly it had been outside of the hotel.
Relieved, I spent some time showering and unpacking, then made my way down to the front desk again just to ask if the bottled water in the room was free. Once I got back to my room, the phone by the bed started to ring, and upon picking it up an automated message began to come through informing me that a delivery had been made to me. I opened the door, and found myself staring blankly at a small, kind of cute robot standing in front of the threshold to my room. There was a display on its head with a button that instructed me to "press to open", and upon touching it a panel on the robot slid open to reveal a large hollow space containing two water bottles.
One thing was for sure: I was not in Kansas anymore.
China is one of these rare destinations that's really hard to get any kind of remotely objective take on; it's such a polarising country that anything you read really needs to be taken with a 2 kg block of salt. There is no way to get a somewhat neutral, slice-of-life take on China; not even on YouTube where you might expect to see the equivalent of channels like Abroad In Japan, the country is just so polarising that everything either turns into a SerpentZA-like channel wherein everything in China is awful and nothing is ever allowed to be good, or outright China proselytising. Both sides are extremely committed to their worldviews, and both sides shout extremely loudly - though I will say the China detractors are considerably more loud in the West, which makes sense due to geopolitical anxieties surrounding its meteoric rise; the Place, China meme accurately summarises a whole lot of the discourse around the country. It's a place that has been sensationalised to hell and back, but oddly enough few international tourists actually seem to want to see what it's like for themselves.
I will say that it is not the easiest place to travel, though not for the reasons that other countries are challenging for travellers. Usually travel is difficult due to safety or infrastructure concerns when a country is significantly undeveloped, China is quite the opposite - infrastructure is mostly convenient and reliable and the country is very safe. Rather, the issue here is that the country is its own world that really doesn't seem to care about catering to any laowai not already entrenched within its ecosystem or way of doing things. While it's offered visa-free travel to many countries, reducing barriers for travel, at a minimum you will need to set up Alipay, WeChat and Gaode Maps on your phone and make sure you know how to use them beforehand (including the DiDi mini app on Alipay), get an esim that allows you to circumvent the Great Firewall, and make sure you have a good translate app and a cursory knowledge of phrases like "Hello, I don't speak Chinese", something that I'm sure you'll be using very often because it's rare to find even basic English comprehension in China. Note that Alipay and WeChat require a lot of account verification, including scanning your passport and your face, and it can only be properly set up and used when you are in China, so you will only know that it works once you touch down. And a lot of these apps are irritating bloatware that harvest your data. Your data plan can still be sluggish as hell at points, something that I think may be due to security measures creating extreme latency though I'm not fully sure what causes it (locals don't seem to have this problem, at least). Oh, and I've heard it's difficult to drive in China due to aggressive driving behaviours being common; the repeated refrain from travellers is that you should just use public transport and DiDi if you want to get where you want. And smoking is sometimes a noticeable issue. But the country is so old and so spectacular that the juice is well worth the squeeze. It may be my favourite place in Asia at this point, and I have plans to go again this December.
It goes without saying that China is just different, to the point that this has been the hardest trip report for me to write so far. And barely anyone has a correct view of what it is actually like. It is like looking at a barely-recognisable, funhouse-mirror, heavily sinified alternate history of the world where everything just turned out differently. There are a million and one notable aspects of travelling in China I could have mentioned when covering this country, ranging from everything from the very good to the very frustrating, and there are aspects which I genuinely barely even know how to make up my mind up on. It's a very ancient country with its own set of deeply ingrained norms that hugely conflicts with the party line (though there's a lot to say about how the state in practice is a lot less ideological or centralised than people tend to portray it as), it's ostensibly communist but on the ground seems hypercapitalist in a way that pretty much no Western country is, and it's recently experienced a rise that's nothing short of meteoric, having speedrun its way from being poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s to a world power today. The contradictions are blistering to the point it feels like being flashbanged, there are so many aspects of China that are just really difficult to properly synthesise.
I woke up early the next morning and headed down into the subway, tapped my international bank card at the turnstiles, sent my sling bag through the mandatory security scanner, and made my way to the platform. Beijing’s subway network is vast and impressively comprehensive, but I found navigating it to be very disorienting. The station was downright maze-like, with many long corridors and layered passageways that blurred together, and there was also a lot of security and surveillance; bag checks were routine, and cameras could be seen everywhere. But the system was efficient and the commuters moved very quickly, which I appreciated. After living in Sydney, where slow walkers have sometimes caused me to miss trains (seriously, people here walk at the speed of Roombas), I quite enjoyed the efficiency of movement in China. Admittedly this was a double-edged sword, since at times during the trip I felt like I couldn't relax because people there were always hustling.
Surprisingly enough, though, being in a crowd was never all too hard to handle, since people in China are actually more orderly than people tend to think; they push and shove far less than is usually imagined in the foreign public consciousness. In spite of the perception of Mainland Chinese as being notoriously selfish and opportunistic and incapable of maintaining order in situations that call for it, I didn't find it to be bad at all. Vietnam was an order of magnitude worse in this regard, the amount of people who just carelessly shoved straight through lines was almost unbelievable. I found Chinese people to be much more rule-abiding and pro-social; perhaps that wasn't the case a decade ago or so, but at this point China's not that much worse than everywhere else in this regard, it's just far more dense population-wise. Granted, other things such as people clearing their throat and spitting on the sidewalk still exists, though in my opinion it's really not that obstructive to you personally if you're not super picky about everyone around you conforming to strict norms of propriety. It is a different country and culture after all.
Once I disembarked, I made my way toward the Forbidden City, the largest preserved palace complex in existence (depending on how you define this, the Summer Palace and its gardens may be larger, though its grounds are mostly water). It's a veritable maze of halls that sits directly in the heart of Beijing, oriented on a north-south axis aligned with such precision that it deviates only one degree from geographic north. This axis extends far beyond the confines of the palace itself, continuing through a massive urban corridor approximately 7,500 meters in length which features several of the capital’s most significant monuments. These include the Drum and Bell Towers to the north and, to the south, the Temple of Heaven, the Temple of Agriculture, and the Zhengyangmen Gate Tower. It really only became the seat of power relatively recently (well, recent for Chinese standards, which basically means nothing) when the Yongle Emperor designated Beijing as a secondary capital in 1403, diminishing the previous capital of Nanjing in importance. Once it eventually became the principal capital, the Forbidden City would be the seat of political power for the rest of traditional Chinese history.
On my way to the palace, I noticed that every street seemed to go on forever, stretching into the distance in a manner that I found to be almost dizzying. There is something incredibly agoraphobia-inducing about how all of Beijing is designed, but it leans into it so much that it actually loops back around into making the city kind of distinctive in its own way. This isn't a consequence of modern Chinese city-planning either; when determining the layout of the new city, Ming Dynasty planners based it on ancient manuals going all the way back to the Zhou, specifically the Kaogong Ji (regulations of construction). The capital was always meant to be an expression of imperial power and cosmic order, and its stipulations included that the capital be "a square of nine li" criss-crossed by "nine lanes going north-south and east-west, each of the former being nine chariot tracks wide" that bisected the urban fabric into regular squares. Visitors to the city in the early 20th century described it as a maze of "walls, walls and more walls", something that can be easily seen in many of the old streets extant today. Beijing was designed to be monumental, not cosy, and much of the modern city actually is still somewhat built on the bones of the old one, with the nine thoroughfares of the old capital now expanded into staggering multi-lane highways that extend far beyond the borders of what used to be Ming Dynasty Beijing. Pretty much every artery in the urban core, whether it be modern or traditional, is laid out in the same symmetrical, rhythmic manner that has characterised the city for centuries. In other words, Beijing is very intimidating, and not because the government is extremely overbearing or people act particularly antisocially, rather it's because most of the city's vernacular constructions from every era of its history are inherently so monumental in size, so stately and so anonymised that you get this strange feeling of being dwarfed by its endless grid of streets.
I eventually found myself in a series of lanes lined with the archetypical grey-brick hutongs that Beijing is known for. Some lanes featured many vendors selling tanghulu, rice cakes, and other snacks; others were much quieter and very local, with older Beijingers wandering about, scooters buzzing past, and laundry strung up overhead. Before long I reached Donghuamen Gate (the eastern entrance that conveniently avoids the security at Tiananmen Square), and from there I wandered along the edge of the palace toward the southern entrance for ticket checks. As I walked, towering red abutments and pavilions loomed above me, mirrored in the partially frozen waters of the moat. Bare willow branches hung over the ice, and the path featured everyone from elderly locals to hanfu-clad Douyin girls stopping every few steps for photos against the crimson backdrop. When I finally reached the Meridian Gate, I joined a surprisingly short queue, handed over my passport, scanned my sling bag, and walked through the towering entrance.
The original Forbidden City built by the Ming Dynasty was an extremely luxurious palace, which used precious and rare Phoebe zhennan wood from the jungles of southwestern China to construct its halls (this was an extremely valuable timber in ancient China, and was even more so when fossilised; that was known as "black wood" and to this day it fetches prices of up to thousands upon thousands of dollars per cubic metre). Grand terraces and stone carvings were built by means of massive blocks of quarried stone, which were able to be transported only through covering the ground with a layer of ice in deep winter and then pulling the blocks along. Halls were paved with expertly crafted bricks, made with clay from multiple provinces; each batch took months to make. The interior pavings, seen today, are these very six-century old originals. But a good number of the wooden structures within the Forbidden City date back to the Qing, as the palace complex did not escape the end of the Ming Dynasty unscathed. After Li Zicheng and his rebel troops marched on Beijing in an attempt to overthrow the Ming Dynasty, after the Chongzhen Emperor hung himself in despair and ruin in the gardens of the palace, after the Manchus conquered China with the help of a Ming general who let them into the country, the three main halls in the central axis of the palace, among others, had burned to the ground. The Qing reconstructed the halls of the palace carefully with pinewood, and maintained the general layout rather faithfully (though they did make every plaque within the palace bilingual, featuring Chinese and Manchu scripts alike). Some parts of the palace, however, are still extant from the Ming Dynasty, such as the Wanchun Pavilion in the imperial garden.
I stepped into an immense courtyard bisected by a sinuous waterway (named the "Inner Gold Creek", or Nejinshui) with five stone bridges plunging over it. Two stone lions stood watch over the entire courtyard. At the northern edge rose another grand entrance beyond which lay an even larger square, which rewarded me with a striking view of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Rebuilt most recently in 1695, it's a huge wooden structure built on a stone platform, used for everything from enthronment and wedding ceremonies to banquets for solstices. I couldn’t enter the vast interior, though; the front of the palace was crowded and I was only able to get distant glimpses of the imposing throne inside. As I tilted my head upward, I noticed rows of small glazed ceramic figures marching along the roof’s ridgelines which were believed to ward off misfortune in ancient China. Customarily, a man riding a phoenix would stand at the head of the procession while the tail terminated with a dragon. Between these two figures, there would be an odd number of mythological creatures, the total number of which signified the rank or importance of the building. Each ridge on the Hall of Supreme Harmony featured ten of them in total.
The Forbidden City is an absolute labyrinth of a palace, and I can confidently say that I got lost multiple times navigating the complex of nested courtyards that make up the Inner Court; it felt like being stranded in a maze of red walls and intricate yellow-roofed buildings. Out of everything I think my favourite part of the palace was the small Imperial Garden just north of the three main halls of the Outer Court, which is a finely-wrought park full of rock gardens, pavilions and other architectural elements that create a feeling of intimacy otherwise not found in other parts of the palace. The Wanchun Pavilion in the garden is probably the finest structure in the whole palace, featuring a spectacular domed caisson created by the successive layering of wooden brackets, the very top of which is adorned with a finely carved bas-relief of a dragon. Another structure that really caught my eye was the intricately glazed Nine-Dragon Screen in the northeastern part of the palace, a piece of auspicious iconography that appears only in palaces (there are only three of them extant today).
I left the Forbidden City through the northern gate and walked further to Nanluoguxiang, one of these trendy hutong streets that have been transformed into shopping districts; as I walked there I passed through a whole lot more of these authentic local hutongs. Honestly I was constantly surprised by just how extensive these hutong neighbourhoods were; at times, they seemed to stretch on endlessly, like a Backrooms-esque parallel dimension made entirely of these gridlike lanes. Before arriving, I’d seen people on travel forums wondering whether any "real" authentic hutongs were left at all, but after visiting Beijing, these questions seem borderline laughable - walk in any given direction from the Forbidden City and it almost seems as if you can't get out of the hutongs (and no, I'm not talking about the more old-style but obviously new constructions, I'm talking about local hutongs that barely seem renovated). In spite of Beijing's reputation as a modern city, a large portion of the urban sprawl is actually not like that; I'd even go as far as to say that Beijing is the most ancient-looking major city I've ever seen in East Asia. I honestly think the people bemoaning China's "lack of heritage" either haven't visited China, didn't make even a token attempt to go find any of it, or are generally unaware of how bad the situation regarding preservation can be in the rest of Asia (or are just repeating a canard they've heard without considering it that much). China is by far the most historically dense place I've visited in the entire continent, and despite the fact that my expectations were sky-high beforehand even I didn't expect so much history from the country.
I do want to temper this quite a bit, though. While I saw a lot of extant preserved old architecture, I don't want to overly glorify or romanticise these neighbourhoods, since many of them are obviously barely gentrified or modernised at all. China modernised very fast and very unevenly, and despite their status as a symbol of old Beijing, people in the hutongs often seem to live without a lot of infrastructure (such as proper plumbing systems). I can understand why the Chinese government has not precluded renovation of the hutongs, even after its announcement of a protection order on these neighbourhoods. They're not always very glamorous places to be, and personally I agree with an approach that introduces more modern amenities into these hutongs while still preserving its fundamental character; it would be nice to see improvements in the quality of life for the people living there.
The next day I woke up to a gloomy winter morning, with thick mist and fog hanging over all the streets of downtown Beijing. Everything looked almost colourless, like some kind of vintage grey filter had been placed over the entire city, and it was freezing. Northern China is climactically awful and is largely a cold, grey, arid wasteland in winter, to the point that Beijing actually boasts colder temperatures than Helsinki during this time of the year in spite of its lower latitude (due to the directional nature of the Coriolis effect, east coasts are generally far colder than west coasts; as a particularly stark example of this, Vladivostok, Russia is on the same latitude as Florence, Italy). The fact that any civilisation was able to flourish here in spite of the horrific climate and the Yellow River's constant catastrophic flooding is actually astonishing to me.
I pulled myself out of bed, descended into the subway again, trudged past a bunch of commieblocks which gave way to more of these local hutongs (seriously they are everywhere) and made my way to the first stop of the day: Zhihua Temple. It's an obscure but well-preserved Ming Dynasty wooden temple built in 1443, hidden within the backstreets of Beijing, painted in such a vivid crimson and adorned with such deeply black roof tiles that to my eyes it seemed to practically pop in the sea of fog and mist. Making my way towards the shanmen gate of the temple, I noticed a marble plaque above it with Chinese characters that stated "Gifted by the Imperial Court to Zhihua Temple". Entering the grounds revealed a courtyard of modest size, flanked by temple halls all around. A small number of robed men exited a room, and headed into the main hall to play traditional ritual music from the Ming Dynasty, which had been passed down for 27 generations in this very temple. They sat down in front of a modest altar featuring three wooden-lacquered Buddha statues on lotus pedestals, and in the cold dark Beijing winter I watched them play a very strange and sweet music.
After the music was over, I proceeded to see what the other halls had in store. To the west of the main hall, there was another wooden building housing an incredible wooden zhuanlunzang (sutra case) covered in intricate carvings of bodhisattvas, heavenly kings and warriors and topped with a small caisson that a tiny Vairocana Buddha sat in. A bit awestruck, I walked around the entire thing, just taking in the immense level of detail. Deeper to the back of the complex, there was a large two story pavilion featuring three huge statues, surrounded by walls covered in niches featuring what is said to be 9,999 tiny renderings of the Buddha. I later learned that this hall was, quite aptly, named the "Thousand Buddha Hall". I would have spent more time at this temple but the biting cold was beginning to get to me, so I ducked into a small teashop in the hutong and had some rather medicinal-tasting flower tea alongside a small rice cake as I decided on where to venture next.
I scrolled some possible destinations on my phone in the cosy warmth of the teahouse, and resolved to visit the Yonghe Temple towards the north of the city. Yet again, I was seemingly trapped in a parallel dimension full of hutongs the entire way, and had to use some extremely suspect communal toilets if I wanted to relieve myself. Note this is coming from someone who's probably better equipped to use Chinese toilets than most Westerners - they're mostly squat, and having grown up in Southeast Asia I'm used to squat toilets and generally prefer them (if you can't squat properly, that is your skill issue, it is objectively superior ergonomically and cleaner). But the toilets in these very old parts of Beijing are legitimately terrible and feature toilets with dividers instead of a dedicated stall, meaning everyone can see you defecate - and they are extremely dirty, I often found piss covering the floor and at least one squat toilet covered in diarrhoea. It is incredible to me how a country that's so obviously advanced in multiple important ways can be so undeveloped in others. Though I will grant that the hutongs are uniquely bad in this regard, having been barely modernised ever since the Qing; other parts of China are far better with this (though unless you find yourself in a shopping mall, they will still often lack essentials like soap and toilet paper; you must bring your own when going to China, this is non-negotiable).
Eventually I made it to a huge food street just ahead of the Yonghe Temple, featuring a large variety of snacks and congregations of people lining up in front of every shop. It's not uncommon at all in Asia to find bustling food-filled squares near popular temples, providing nourishment and a social space for templegoers. For now, I ignored the street and made my way to the temple, intending to grab some food on my way out. I approached the visitor counter, grabbed a ticket, and walked into the compound through some intricate yellow-and-blue entrance archways flanked by stele pavilions and stone lions on each side. The pathway opened up into a courtyard featuring sweeping views of a monolithic red-and-yellow hall named the Yonghegong (Hall of Harmony and Peace), which hosted a plaque displaying inscriptions in Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu and Mongolian. Masses of lay worshippers stood in prayer in front of a bronze burner, with wafts of warm, fragrant smoke rising up from the forest of incense sticks and mixing seamlessly with the mist and cloud overhead.
When Yonghe Temple was built in the 1690s, it was not initially conceived of as a temple but as a royal residence, and it would end up housing two future Qing emperors before they ascended the throne and moved into the Forbidden City. The residence was initially built for Prince Yong, who would eventually become the Yongzheng Emperor, and it was in its East Compound that his fourth son (the future Qianlong Emperor) would be born. After Yongzheng died there was a proposal for it to be converted into a residence for other royals, but Qianlong instead issued an edict legislating it be turned into a Tibetan lamasery, as he was a particularly large supporter of the religion. Although the Qing court generally patronised and funded Tibetan Buddhism pretty heavily as a method of gaining support from outlying territories such as Tibet and Mongolia (and in general bending Tibetan Buddhism to serve the empire's needs), Qianlong took this to another level; he practiced Yellow Hat Buddhism in his private life, and even had a guru who believed he was the reincarnation of Kublai Khan. After its consecration in 1745, Yonghe Temple rose to become the foremost Buddhist temple in China, hosting monks from across Tibet and Mongolia. Its turquoise roof tiles were replaced with lavish yellow ones to signify imperial status.
Inside the hall, a gleaming triad of bronze statues depicting the Buddhas of the Three Ages stood front and centre, each one backed by stunning nimbuses, auspicious iconography and mythical creatures. Here, even more worshippers could be found, prostrating themselves and praying in front of the deities. And the rest of the hall was just as sumptuous - the scene here can only be described as an explosion of colour, with the entire interior covered in floor-to-ceiling paintings and calligraphy inscribed onto every pillar. On the sides of the building, facing the central Buddhist triad, stood two rows of painted Qing arhats, all harbouring different expressions and poses. Next up along the main axis of the temple lay the Yongyoudian (Hall of Everlasting Protection), another extremely picturesque hall housing yet another Buddha triad; this one was perhaps even more intricately rendered than the last. After exploring some of the auxiliary buildings located to the left and right of the main halls, which were themselves filled to the brim with an insane concentration of Buddhist treasures and crowded with worshippers, I navigated to the next hall, named the Falundian (Hall of the Wheel of the Law), and immediately felt as if I was intruding on something sacred. Inside stood a monumental statue of the master Tsongkhapa surrounded by traditional Chukor banners, with a mass of red-robed Buddhist monks sitting cross-legged around his idol and chanting in an almost trance-like reverie. Masses of lay worshippers stood or sat to the side, their heads bowed penitently. It was quite a powerful atmosphere, and I lingered here for a while listening to the ceremony.
I had some reservations about this temple given its commonality on Beijing itineraries; I feared that it wouldn't be authentic, that it would just be a tourist trap, that perhaps it wouldn't even be old, but it was the polar opposite. This, and many other experiences like it, challenged a pretty big misconception about China: that the country lacks traditional culture or religion due to The Cultural Revolution or some other event in recent Chinese history. But there's a lot of extant tradition in Mainland China, much of which is based on a longstanding cultural meta that's imperfectly comprehensible to a Western visitor, though it's frustrating that a lot of outsiders barely even seem to acknowledge it exists. It’s not uncommon for people to suggest that traditional culture and history has been all but destroyed on the mainland and maintained only on the fringes of the diaspora in places like Taiwan or Southeast Asia, I've even heard people say that the Japanese preserved Chinese culture better than China (but, having read extensively about the aggressively iconoclastic nature of Meiji Japan, I’m not even certain Japanese culture itself can be said to be all that undisturbed).
To elaborate, I’m a Malaysian Chinese who spent 16 years of my life embedded in that community, and yet in the span of two weeks in China, I saw a large amount of religious activity and traditional rituals, similar to that of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia - in spite of what Straits Chinese like to say about themselves. To spoil parts of the remainder of this trip report, it wasn't just this temple where I encountered it, either. In Pingyao’s walled city, I walked the main thoroughfare while a massive crowd of men carried a dragon float down the street to a din of clanging drums. I stayed above a jade shop in Datong, and every morning woke up to the old jade craftsman quietly working on a new piece with a pot of fresh tea bubbling beside him. At the Ming Dynasty-era Great Mosque of Xi’an, I watched as hordes of Muslims assembled in front of the hall (off limits to me, since I’m not Muslim) and sat quietly in worship. If tradition is anywhere close to dead in China, then clearly my lying eyes deceive me.
I also don’t think that the level of religiousness of the Chinese population is properly captured in surveys. People in East Asia are generally not "religious" in any kind of organised way, sure, and will often describe themselves as atheist or nonaffiliated, but will often still engage in superstitious cultural rituals and rites that are ultimately rooted in a religious view of the world without fully adhering to or caring much about strict doctrine. In general, East Asian religion is just different, and China is no exception. There are plenty of religious and at least superstitious people who follow folk practices to some degree, but for the most part they don’t spray it around very conspicuously in public, and they don’t particularly care about specifically identifying as Part Of A Group. It’s just something they do, and is individual to them in a more understated and personal way. That’s true among virtually all Chinese communities, in my opinion, but on the mainland the Han constitute the vast demographic majority, and without any other point of comparison all this just gets perceived as the baseline societal meta; you typically don't recognise the water in which you swim. Hell, I’m in accounting and still work with a lot of people hailing from the mainland now, and I recall one of them couldn’t cook in the new house she bought until the old one had finished being sold and enough time had elapsed, or something similarly insanely ritualistic. In general, a very common theme throughout this trip report is me constantly finding the culture to be rather well-preserved, even more so considering the tumultuous and often catastrophic shifts that Mainland China experienced during the 20th century.
Eventually I left the monks behind, hearing the chanting echo behind me, and progressed to the final hall in the complex: the Wanfuge (Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses). It was a towering structure, featuring a three-story wooden pavilion flanked by two side buildings and connected by overhead walkways - a somewhat unusual element to see in Chinese architecture. Fewer worshippers congregated here than in the front halls, and the relative quiet lent the space a more contemplative atmosphere. I paused briefly to take it in before stepping inside, and a titanic mass emerged out of the darkness of the hall. A colossal statue of the Maitreya Buddha, nearly twenty metres tall, dominated the centre of the pavilion; walkways on each level circled the immense figure, allowing it to be viewed from every height. Carved from a single piece of sandalwood, this was a gift from the Dalai Lama to the Qianlong Emperor, and it was so unwieldy that it took three years to transport to Beijing. It's in the Guinness Book of Records, it's an absolutely monumental piece of art, and if you ever come to Beijing this is one of the best things you can see. It's fucking awesome. In general, I highly recommend the Yonghe Temple, it would be my favourite temple in Asia if not for another unbelievable temple near Pingyao, later on in the trip.
I grabbed a snack after exiting the temple (this sinfully rich meat-filled flaky pastry, I think it was called shaobing) and made my way to the final stop of the day: the iconic Temple of Heaven. It's really only a component part of a larger-scale religious complex in Beijing, alongside the Temple of the Sun, Temple of Earth, and Temple of Moon, but the Temple of Heaven is by far the best-known of these ceremonial complexes. It sits in a massive tree-filled park bisected by a series of famous halls, the most recognisable of which is the Qiniandian (Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests), a massive triple-gabled circular hall on a square terrace reflecting the East Asian cosmological concept of a square Earth and round Heaven. This was an extremely important ceremonial site in ancient China, being the place where the Emperor made ceremonial sacrifices to Heaven for, well, good harvests. Twice a year, the Emperor and his retinue would set up camp within the complex and perform a very specific ritual which no member of the public could observe. The ceremony had to be performed perfectly, or it would signify a bad omen for the coming year.
The weather was still extremely foggy when I got there, which isn't particularly ideal for the Temple of Heaven, but I grabbed a ticket anyway and proceeded into the park down a long tree-lined path. Slowly the Hall of Prayer of Good Harvests came into view, and I climbed up the massive stone platform onto the main bulk of the structure alongside many other visitors. It seems I got there all too late, as it was extremely crowded and there were way too many hanfu-clad girls posing in front of the temple in order to really enjoy it. But it was a very beautiful building; photos don't properly convey this, but the way the pavilion extrudes out from that huge circular stone pedestal induces a sense of vertigo akin to staring up into the night sky and almost makes it seem as if it's touching the heavens. It's an example of absolutely incredible Qing Dynasty design and architecture; I just wish I had better weather and less crowds for this one, and if I had to do this again I'd visit much earlier in the morning before the masses of Chinese tourists start pouring in. As it was, though, I personally preferred the parts of the park outside of the main complex of halls, where one could still see the recognisable peak of the hall protruding from far above the surrounding landscape. Here things were much more local and less touristy, with families bringing their children to play and performing activities in the park, and there were still some other historical buildings of note within the less-visited parts of the complex, which now mostly hosted museums and exhibitions.
The sun was beginning to set now, so I unfortunately had to rush through the remainder of the complex, and after I was satisfied with sightseeing I took the train to Qianmen station for dinner. At this point I was ravenous so I made my way to street level and was immediately met with the sight of the Zhengyangmen gate tower all spectacularly lit up at night, one of the quintessential icons of Old Beijing. After quickly snapping some pictures of the tower, I walked along the food street and located a relatively inconspicuous-looking eatery named Duyichu. This is one of the most acclaimed of Beijing's old restaurants, having originated in the 3rd year of Emperor Qianlong (for anyone that uses normal people dates, that's 1738); for context, at this time the US was still an imperial colony of the British, and Napoleon didn't even exist yet. But that year, this humble eatery popped up in front of the Imperial Quarter of Old Beijing and started specialising in the delicate steamed dumplings that we all now recognise as shaomai. This would spread south and become common throughout the Chinese diaspora, such that you can find it in Cantonese dim sum joints in Hong Kong and in many Chinese places in the Western world. It was here, at this very spot in Beijing, where the dish was first popularised and made into a staple of Chinese cuisine.
Surprisingly, there were no lines in front of the door considering the venerable nature of the establishment. I was able to get a table immediately, where I promptly ordered some assorted shaomai and Qianlong baicai (fresh cabbages with a thick sesame dressing, named after the titular emperor). The food came in no time at all, and I quickly discovered that Beijing's flavour profiles have a tendency to confound my tastebuds; the cabbage was tasty but a bit too acidic and heavy, though I enjoyed it nonetheless. In general, Beijingers seem to enjoy extremely heavy and simple flavours without much of the depth that I usually expect from Chinese food - food in China isn't at all one thing and the Chinese food most Westerners are accustomed to eating really primarily comes from one specific city in Canton (Taishan). The shaomai was the clear highlight to me; it was very succulent, though I can't say it was anything you couldn't get elsewhere in Asia. It's kind of been a victim of its own success I think, everybody seems to have copied the example it set, and now it's just one of the many shops that specialise in the popular dish. I polished off the meal in short order, grabbed some tea and returned to my hotel.
The next day, I found myself waiting for a bus in an aggressively nondescript Beijing street, one so crowded with towering identikit commieblocks they almost seemed to block out the dim sunlight. I was out so early that dawn hadn't broken yet, and the sky was still blanketed with fog, the poor weather from yesterday still not having abated. It was extremely humid and cold, and so I had just gotten jianbing (Chinese savoury crepes) alongside some doujiang (soy milk) from a nearby local stall, which were both comfortingly warm and tasty in the blistering Beijing winter. The doujiang in particular was incredible, and while I don't usually like soy milk, this one tasted so smooth that I wanted whatever crack cocaine they were putting in there. I sipped the drink slowly, huddling into my puffer jacket while the sun rose and the streetlights slowly flickered off. It was peaceful.
Standing there in the early morning silence, I couldn't help but think back to my limited experiences in North America; if you transplanted this place into the downtown core of many major North American cities, it would probably already be hosting a colourful, cosmopolitan, and vibrant cast of drug addicts and homeless people (this problem basically doesn’t exist in Asia, and was a major point of culture shock for me when visiting North America; you often don’t feel safe). In spite of the endless sneering about Third Worldism you can find on this forum, the biggest takeaway I’ve had in my travels throughout Asia is that very large swaths of it are starting to feel very not third world; granted, modernisation throughout the region (and even within Beijing) is uneven, infrastructure can be spotty, but many aspects of it are starting to feel more first world than even the first world. Now I'm not saying that Chinese average living standards are on par with the US yet, but its major urban areas and eastern coastal provinces are looking and feeling far more like Czechia than they are Cambodia. It’s the interior that drags this down hugely, and the state is quickly working to urbanise them all. They’re also pumping out STEM graduates en masse. From a personal standpoint, experiencing this change firsthand is quite the sight. I grew up in Asia and now large swaths of it are just unrecognisable to me; seeing the sheer pace of change in real time is just breathtaking and it’s a topic that deserves a post of its own. It’s something I’m grateful to have experienced myself, partially because living through it is incredibly existential, but also because you get the opportunity to see unique elements of local life that will soon be transformed forever as the continent charges headlong into gleaming industrial modernity, for better or for worse.
I got onto the bus alongside a number of other tourists, and it promptly pulled out of the lot, barreling down the misty roads into the suburbs of Beijing. The sun continued to inch higher and higher in the sky as we passed further into the countryside, casting a wan, diffuse glow that illuminated a barren landscape smothered in snow and fog. Before long, our bus was winding up into the mountains, where the mist began to thin out, and eventually sunshine could be seen streaming through the gradually-parting clouds. The sky slowly but surely turned blue, and after tolerating the intensely grey and foggy weather of Beijing for a good day and a half, it was refreshing to see colour again. Our bus stopped at a large tourist centre for the Mutianyu Great Wall featuring a metric fuckton of cafes and souvenir shops and weird ass VR experiences, where we went on to buy tickets for a cable car then went our own separate ways.
The legacy of the Great Wall of China stretches all the way back to the Spring and Autumn period, but this history was highly discontinuous and fractured, with there not even being a recognisable "wall" during many dynasties. Most of the extant masonry that you can see today dates from the Ming Dynasty (15th/16th centuries); granted they were built roughly along the path that the earlier Qin/Han Dynasty earthen fortifications followed, but the Ming wall was essentially a new structure since the previous dynasties' walls had almost entirely eroded and fallen into disuse. This means that there was essentially no real Great Wall during the time of the Mongols, and in fact at the time building a wall was actually considered an admission of diplomatic failure to be avoided whenever possible. Even the Ming Dynasty's wall building program was not a systematic building of fortifications to keep the invaders out wholesale, rather it was an accumulative series of defences which were constructed on an ad hoc basis in response to evolving needs, and the disparate sections of the wall were never linked up.
This was a feature, too, not a bug. For context, the main problem the Chinese encountered when defending their northern border was that attacks could come from any direction, and the enemy could also retreat in any direction. The point of building a wall was not to prevent enemies from entering China per se; rather it made sure that attacks could be confined to regular, predictable areas that could be militarised, and forced the enemy to retreat using the same avenue through which they entered. This ended up being a major issue that faced many northern invaders, such as with Hong Taiji's raids into Hebei. In addition, the wall acted as a communicative and transport structure, with any observed raids triggering a large string of warning beacons that would be funnelled all the way back to Beijing. The main point I want to stress here is that the wall itself was not meant to be the primary obstacle for an enemy, but rather as only one component of a layered defence strategy ultimately centred around the army that lay beyond it. This concept of a Great Wall is a Western concept not introduced until later in Chinese history once the walls no longer had any purpose - at the time, the Ming would instead have referred to its defence system as the Nine Garrisons (placing foremost importance on the manpower that the fortification was ultimately built to serve), rather than any kind of unified Wall.
I passed through the tourist centre and boarded a cable car that carried me further up the mountain. Below, slopes lined with leafless trees unfurled in every direction, while the sunlight grew steadily harsher as I ascended. At last, the crest of the range revealed itself, with its summit crowned by a formidable masonry wall that stretched endlessly across the horizon. I was deposited unceremoniously at a platform near the wall, where I walked past a row of vendors and stepped onto the structure. The bulk of the edifice came into view, and I watched as the ridges of innumerable mountains faded one after another into the distant haze, with the wall snaking over every single twist and turn. It was absolutely breathtaking, and at this time of year I had it largely to myself - the further I walked from the chairlift, the more the crowds thinned out, to the point where I was alone on large sections of the wall. From time to time, a vendor would call out from the margins of the wall, peering through one of the many crenellations that had now been repurposed as makeshift counters for offering snacks and drinks to weary travellers.
I eventually reached the very western end of the accessible wall and found myself faced with a particularly steep section called the "Hero Slope", which featured 600+ steps at a brutal incline of 70 degrees. Within minutes I was gasping, legs trembling as the strain built with every step, until I found myself nearly collapsing against the side. By the time I reached the highest accessible watchtower, my legs had turned to jelly and my breathing had become ragged and uncontrollable. Then I turned around, and was greeted with one of the most arresting scenes I have ever seen in my life: an endless panorama of mountains rising from a sea of mist, fine tendrils of fog curling through distant, faded peaks, and the wall itself winding and folding over the ridgelines until it vanished from sight entirely. The view was so poetic and dreamlike that it felt like stepping into a Chinese ink painting, and it really warrants every superlative people have lavished upon it, to the point I'd say that the wall alone is worth the trip to China. There's absolutely nothing else in the world like this.
After soaking in the view for a long while, I turned around and made my way back to the chairlift, this time hiking down a path that adjoined the wall. From this angle, I caught sight of a vendor on the wall from a completely different perspective; he was standing on a plank precariously buried in the side of the wall and suspended far above the surrounding mountains, just so he could take advantage of the crenellations to sell food and drink to tourists. He reached for a plastic bag of goods that sat just beyond his grasp, then calmly balanced on one leg and stretched out his arm to retrieve it, as if the dizzying drop below barely registered to him. I gaped at him for a moment, then continued down the trail and down the mountain.
Once back down at the tourist centre, I had more time to spare, so I transferred onto a chairlift that took me to the more commercialised eastern portion of the wall. My photo was taken while I was on it so they could sell a printed version of the image to me back down at the base of the mountain; tourism with Chinese characteristics is very extra. This part of the wall was more crowded and less spectacular than the western end, but was still incredibly interesting with the largest and most complex watchtower I'd seen yet. This one featured a main masonry structure flanked by two corner towers which is probably the most iconic structure on the Mutianyu Great Wall, featuring quite prominently in photographs of the area. There was also a toboggan leading down from this section of the wall which I lined up for, and I'm well aware this is clear tourist bait, but I will defend it wholeheartedly because it was extremely fun to slide down to the bottom of the mountain. I haven't tobogganed before, but the fact that the first time I've ever done so was from the fucking Great Wall is going to mean that any subsequent adventures in tobogganing are gonna struggle to top it.
By the time I returned to the urban sprawl, the thick fog had parted and the once-grey city was bathed in deep sunset hues. I passed by the Yonghe Temple again, watching its yellow rooflines glow in the warm light as I made my way to Fangzhuanchang No.69, a popular zhajiangmian restaurant just across the street from it. I seated myself at one of the tables, and ordered a bowl of their signature black bean noodles alongside a Chinese yoghurt known by the name of nai pi zi. The noodles came with massive sides of toppings ranging from edamame to bean sprouts, all of which I scraped into my bowl and ate together. It was good but I would've enjoyed a stronger flavour, for some reason a huge amount of Beijing's savoury dishes don't tickle my fancy. But the nai pi zi, on the other hand, was delicious and beats Western yoghurts any day. The texture was so creamy and far less curdy than your bog-standard yoghurt, and had a milder, sweeter flavour that I really jived with.
On my final day in Beijing, the skies at last cleared to a deep, cloudless blue. This was my last chance to visit a site I had been anticipating since arriving in China: the Yiheyuan, or Garden of Nurturing Harmony, better known in English as the Summer Palace. Much of what stands today is a late-Qing reconstruction commissioned by Empress Dowager Cixi after both it and the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) were destroyed during the Opium War. The complex unfolds across a vast landscape of some 3,000 structures, organised around a monumental lake that dominates most of the grounds. To its north, the principal sequence of palatial buildings cascades over the slopes of Longevity Hill, supported by a series of expansive artificial terraces.
While China thinks of the original destruction of the Summer Palace as a ghastly and undue act by European colonial powers (being extremely sore about that is somewhat warranted, to be fair, and the Opium Wars are generally hard to defend), the history of how that happened is a lot more nuanced and a lot more interesting than simply "Britain bad". The inciting incident that led to the destruction was an act of aggression conducted during peace talks between an Anglo-French delegation and the Qing Dynasty. The Allied powers detained the Qing prefect of Tianjin claiming they were regrouping and staging an ambush; whether this is true or not has likely been lost to history. In retaliation, the Qing detained the delegation and its envoys, and this escalated into further conflict as forces advanced on the delegation's last location in an attempt to free them. The Qing managed to procure thirty-eight captives in total, and due to execution or torture during imprisonment twenty-one died. As news of this treatment spread throughout the British forces, there was strong support for some kind of punitive action to be taken, and Lord Elgin and Baron Gros (respectively spearheading the British and French military action) were tasked with deciding what this retaliation should be. Neither party was particularly interested in causing further harm to Chinese civilians during the war, and there wasn't much support among the European populace for that either.
Something that occasionally gets overlooked in highly nationalist tellings of the event is that the primarily ethnically-Manchu ruling elite and the ethnically-Han majority did not necessarily see themselves as the same peoples with the same interests. The Qing was a colonial power itself that practiced a form of imperial and ethnic segregation; Beijing's inner city was designated as a place for Manchu bannermen, and across the empire similar segregated cities such as this existed - in fact the entire region of Manchuria was largely off-limits to most Han (this relaxed later in the Qing though). They imposed the queue hairstyle upon Han Chinese men specifically as a sign of submission to the Manchu-led state, with sizeable executions of men following upon disobedience in the early stages of Qing conquest. Burning and sacking the Summer Palace, which only the Manchu ruling elite would have had access to, was seen as less destructive than a wholesale sack of Beijing, and so this was the course of action Elgin and Gros settled on. It was both an act of retaliation and a signal to the public that their war was not with the Chinese people, but the Qing state. Keep in mind, there were certain contemporary segments of the Han populace who may not have thought of the destruction of the Summer Palace as a bad thing.
Despite all this turbulent history, the current late-Qing iteration of the Summer Palace is ridiculously lovely and ethereal. As I entered through the back gate, I was met with a stunning Tibetan-inspired palace named Sidabuzhou (Four Great Regions) that dominated the north end of Longevity Hill, yet another example of the Qing's support for Tibetan Buddhism. It was painted in a deep red and adorned with a litany of finely glazed tiles and bricks, with chimes hanging from every eave; they shimmered and tinkled quietly as the winter wind blew. Climbing the palace steps led me into an intimate rock garden threaded with pavilions, shaded with still-green trees and punctuated by small viewing towers, which I found myself exploring in a tactile, almost playful way as I wove between stones from one structure to the next. As I continued my ascent, the view constantly changed and morphed and shifted, and it struck me just how different Chinese landscaping philosophy was from the Western tradition. While European palatial gardens are often formal, geometric and open, Chinese gardens are the very opposite, being based on the philosophy of bu yi jing yi. This roughly translates to "scenes change as steps move", with the goal here being to creatively conceal aspects of the garden to create a constant sense of progression and unveiling and make a small space feel much larger than it really is. You can never get a full view of a properly designed Chinese garden from any vantage point.
I finally reached the top of the hill, and found myself gazing upon a two-story beamless hall crafted entirely from yellow-and-green glazed bricks. Each brick housed a niche with a mediating Buddha inside; in total there must have been over a thousand of these niches all over the building. The hall was framed by beautiful lush vegetation that was honestly refreshing to see after spending time in the generally grey metropolis of Beijing, where most trees had already dropped their leaves. From here the path bifurcated into a deep forest covering the ridgeline of the hill, and I took the path that went around its eastern side, all the while catching glimpses of what lay on the other side of the ridge through the leaves and branches. At certain vantage points, I could get a good view of Kunming Lake, the vast body of water that occupied about three-quarters of the Summer Palace. It was a striking sight made even more impressive by its origins: the lake was manually excavated across some 2.2 square kilometres, with the displaced earth piled up over time until it swelled into what is now Longevity Hill.
As I made my way down to the other side of the hill, I came across a series of palace buildings that led into a grand covered wooden walkway called the Changlang, or Long Corridor. I strolled along it for what felt like forever; the winding corridor traced the edge of Kunming Lake for some 728 metres, with nearly every beam in the structure adorned with vivid caihua murals. My gaze stayed fixed on the ceilings and rafters as I walked, taking in a cascade of scenes - Sun Wukong battling Nezha, Zhang Fei’s exploits from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Battle of Zhuxian County between the Song and Jin dynasties, and countless others. The sheer number and density of murals here was staggering to witness; around 14,000 paintings, no two alike, every single one illustrating scenes from classical Chinese novels, myths, and landscapes. I loved this place, it's a seriously stunning piece of architecture and probably the finest collection of mural paintings I've seen anywhere.
The corridor opened up into a large palatial complex that spilled down the south-facing end of the hill. In its centre sat the Foxiang Ge (Tower of Buddhist Incense), a lovely 3-story, 41-metre tall pagoda jutting out from a 20-metre stone platform built straight into the slope of Longevity Hill, surrounded by a rambling complex of palace buildings, courtyards and steles. I laboriously ascended the over 400 steps leading to the tower, and was rewarded with increasingly gorgeous views over the palatial complex and Kunming Lake as I went. The top of the stone platform was occupied by a small courtyard overwhelmingly dominated by the bulk of the pagoda; through some opened windows I could see into the interior of the structure, where a finely-wrought bronze sculpture of the Thousand-Hand Guanyin Bodhisattva stood surrounded by religious polychrome paintings. This would have been Empress Dowager Cixi's private place of worship back in the days of the Qing Dynasty, but considering how many steps there are and how crotchety that woman looks I can only assume she could only access the pagoda by being carried.
There's a lot more I could discuss about the Summer Palace since the grounds are huge, but I assume you're tired of my superlatives by now so I'll just say that I really liked this palace, far more than I did the Forbidden City. Personally I think Asian palaces are at their most beautiful when they look naturalistic and follow the contours of the landscape on which they're built (another good example is Changdeokgung in downtown Seoul). The Forbidden City, with all its strict symmetry and rigid layout, felt a bit regular and repetitive after a while. The Summer Palace, though, is the complete opposite; more relaxed, more varied, and just a lot nicer to wander through. It blends imperial architecture with Tibetan influences and takes a lot of cues from classical Chinese gardens south of the Yangtze, and the whole place ends up feeling surprisingly natural and intimate. It's an amazing place.
At the end of the day, as I got onto the high-speed train leading out of the old imperial capital (that's a really good word to describe the city in general: "imperial"), I left feeling like I had only seen a small portion of what there was to see; the city in many places is practically overrun with interesting old buildings and monuments from the Ming and Qing dynasty. But that's all juxtaposed against a backdrop of increasing modernity - throughout my visit I couldn't help but notice that the contrast between the old and the new was extremely stark, with towering skyscrapers and ten-lane thoroughfares giving way to authentic lived-in temples from the Qing dynasty and backstreets of old hutongs that barely even seemed modernised, where an increasingly elderly demographic still lived like they would have in an earlier era even as the city mutated around them. You can be delivered lunch by an automated system one second and be surrounded by deteriorating communist-era infrastructure the next. It's a really strange mix. As cliche as it is, the Anthony Bourdain quote about China is true: "The one thing I know for sure about China is I will never know China. It’s too big, too old, too diverse, too deep. There’s simply not enough time."
The suburbs of Beijing gradually faded away, and before long the train slipped into the night.
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Notes -
Not all that hard - well, hard for SJers, but not so hard for others. The fundamental problem was that "China did not want to be equal"; the Qing government did not recognise the existence of foreign nations, only tributary subjects (who could beg for favours, but not negotiate) and rebels (to be crushed). That attitude wasn't compatible with having functional international relations in a period in which the so-called Central Kingdom was not, in fact, the global or even regional hegemon. And, well, the usual result of nonfunctional international relations between countries with interests in the same region is war.
The precise causes of the Opium Wars were not amazingly sympathetic, but ultimately they, or something very much like them, were inevitable; the only way the Qing were ever going to start taking international relations seriously was to have their teeth kicked in.
(An obvious parallel in the West, if less bloody, was Pope Boniface VIII. He essentially declared himself feudal overlord of the world in the infamous papal bull Unam sanctam; the French king proved otherwise by sending an army to kidnap Boniface, resulting in the Pope's death and the Avignon Papacy.)
I'd say the first Opium War is easy to defend. For all that Britain wanted to force open China for trade, they had genuine grievances over treatment in Canton by the time the attack began.
But you can barely describe it as a "war". Britain peeled off a small expeditionary force from India, essentially to seek redress, probably expecting that a small show of force would be enough to bring proper negotiators to the table, instead of the belligerents that were positioned in Canton.
It turned out that the Chinese empire was in such disarray that this relatively tiny force was enough to basically sweep through the entire nation. They didn't particularly aim to cause major damage, inflict casualties, or loot the Chinese, unlike the second opium war.
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The precise causes of the Opium Wars not being very sympathetic is primarily what I meant. On a larger scale, I think it should be clear by the tone of the rest of the section that I don't view the Qing in all of that as solely a "passive victim of colonialism". I do tend to agree the Qing getting its teeth kicked in was inevitable, and maybe even good in the long run. The High Qing period was a period in which China was legitimately too successful for its own good - after the elimination and assimilation of any regional competitors via their annexation of Xinjiang, they developed a highly ineffective bureaucracy that saw them crippled by interest groups to the extent they were still funding armies established in the seventeenth century. The Chinese state at this point had metastasised to the cusp of stagnation, and the century of humiliation in general was largely what broke all this down.
I also alluded to this, but there is also the fact that China itself at the time was a highly colonial state which ruled over many subjects not entirely happy with their rule (there's at least one instance of ethnic cleansing, with the Qianlong Emperor basically exterminating the Dzungars), and that's not exactly the kind of regime that can really object to colonialism.
I will confess to skimming your post. Mea culpa. I also didn't particularly mean to call you an SJer - I was more gesturing at their influence over academia and thus the "default view".
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