Moss and Squeekie just before she began to climb up the Great Wall

Squeek waves at Moss from high up on the Great Wall

How steep are the steps on the Great Wall!

Squeekie photographs Moss from high up on the Great Wall

Moss photographs Squeekie from lower on the Great Wall

Squeekie climbs very high up on the Great Wall

Squeekie waves at Moss from a signal tower high on the Great Wall
Squeekie cheers after having climbed up the Great Wall

Panorama of the Great Wall in Juyongguan Pass, looking east

Moss and Squeek after she climbed the Great Wall

The swimming venue for the Beijing Olympics

The National People’s Congress Hall on Tiananmen Square

Tiananmen Square in Beijing; Mao’s mausoleum is to the right of the People’s Victory Monument—to its right in the far background is a KFC!

Carving the Peking Duck for our group

The former Peking East Railway Station, now the Railway Museum

Squeek and Moss in front of the Tiananmen Gate into the Forbidden City

Squeekie next to the Phoenix (Empress) carving inside the Forbidden City

Reboarding the Rotterdam in Shanghai—we are glad to be welcomed home!

The view outside our verandah—Pudong and the Huangpo River!


Forty-seventh day (Saturday, March 7, 2009)-- This was the second full day we spent in the interior of China, and we were beginning to feel the fast pace, but it still is fascinating! Squeekie and I awoke at 5:30 am and were downstairs for breakfast by six o’clock. By seven am our group had assembled at the bus and was on its way to the Xian International Airport for the short flight to Beijing. Watching this industrial city awake was interesting, but of especial interest was the arising of the sun. The sun rose in the east as a red ball in a heavily polluted sky which reminded me of how Los Angeles had been back in the early 1960s. Of course, the major source of pollution in LA back then was automobile exhaust from the burning of petroleum, while here it was still coming from the burning of coal, although auto traffic was clearly on the rise. . . .

We got to the airport and had sufficient time for Squeekie to do a bit of shopping before it was time to board the plane. Then there took place an event that I had not experienced since the early 1960s. We had to take a bus out to where the airplane was located on the tarmac, and then we had to climb up the old-style stairs to board the plane! This was the first time in over forty years that I was required to climb stairs in order to board an airplane at a major airport. The flight to Beijing was alright, not as bumpy as the one to Xian had been, but the Chinese guy sitting next to me (he was already seated when Squeek and I arrived at our seats) made no effort to avoid crowding my space and for the entire flight jabbed his elbow into my ribs. Admittedly, that is an easy target because of my large size, but it still was uncomfortable. I did not say one word to him for the entire flight, but I felt uncomfortable and a bit crowded as well.

The flight was just over an hour long, and when we landed at Beijing International the sky was every bit as smoggy as when we had left Xian. We collected our checked baggage, picked up a new “local guide” who sported the name of Arthur (that was not his Chinese name, of course, but the Anglo name made it easier to remember who he was), and boarded a new bus for the long trip out of Beijing to the Great Wall. As we drove out of the Beijing urbanized area to the northeast; the city seemed to get smaller and more scattered, and the farmed land seemed to reappear in patches.

Arthur, our guide for this segment (although we also kept our Xian guide, Lin, who was a WONDERFUL and knowledgeable tour guide), had a practice that we soon found to be unfortunate (or, in my opinion, outright dishonest). Arthur knew the main facts of an area but not the details, and I soon found myself mentally correcting his factual errors. He did not know how to weave a good story so as to bring the historical facts to life, nor did he seem to care. He apparently had deals made with a number of business entrepreneurs along his route to stop his tour bus at their facility for some shopping; this cut into the time available at the historic site. So, on our way to the Great Wall our tour bus stopped “for lunch” at a factory where cloisonné was made. Now I must admit that this was of technical interest to me because I had no idea how this lovely product was made (nor was I aware that this was another of those technologies that the West had received from China), but DAMMIT, in addition to the groups of artisans called a factory but in reality just a display spot in the store, there was a HUGE store with a sales staff eager to talk you into buying something. Well, needless to say, Squeekie and I did buy something (actually several somethings). They are beautiful to say the least, and it was interesting to watch them being made, but we were supposed to be enroute to the Great Wall!!! After lunch and the cloisonné factory, we continued on toward the Great Wall.

A brief historical interlude-- The Great Wall is a world-famous architectural monument that in several ways symbolizes China’s relationships with its neighbours in early times. The idea of using walls to defend against aggressive neighbours predates the Chinese Empire; several of the pre-Imperial (that is, before 221 BC) Chinese kingdoms from the “Warring States Era” used sections of wall in their own protection. However, it was the “First Emperor” Qin Shihuangdi who decreed that a long line of walls and signal towers should be built to defend his northern and western frontiers against the especially aggressive Xiong-nu tribes (we in the West know these brutes better as the “Huns”). Subsequent Imperial Dynasties expanded upon this defense system. By the time of the Ming Dynasty, China’s last native ruling dynasty, the wall extended some 10,000 kilometers from the shore of the Yellow Sea into the vastness of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, and had been reconstructed entirely of stone (many early sections had been boundary of China and to protect against the invasions of pony-riding raiders from Mongolia. It symbolized how the Chinese saw their own kingdom: their nation, called Zhuong-guo (the “Middle Kingdom”), was the focal point of all knowledge and understanding, while those who lay outside were inferior and secondary, unworthy of attention.

Back to our adventure-- We arrived at the location of the Great Wall in a region known as Juyangguan Pass. This is a very historic site, one of eight passes the ancient Chinese found it essential to protect from invasion, and all the more important once Beijing became the capital of Imperial China in the reign of Kublai Khan (late 13th century). The complex of walls, fortresses and watchtowers which presently dominate Juyangguan Pass date from the late 1300s at the start of the Ming Dynasty. The crucial tactical design here is a complex of two wall lines on the southern and northern crest line of mountains bordering the pass, with walls forming a large fortress area on the floor of the pass. In this area the wall line rises steeply along the crest line and can be very difficult to climb as my beloved Squeekie found out.

The bus deposited us in the floor of the pass on the west side, where we were able to walk easily into the “ground floor” level of the Great Wall. Stretching ahead of us to the west was a long line of wall, occasionally interspersed with watch towers, which climbed the crest line toward the west. My eager Squeekie, who had already climbed the Sydney Bridge and the temple at Borobudor, decided to head off up the wall. I followed at a slower pace, determined to get as far as the first watch tower, from where I hoped to photograph Squeekie up ahead with my telephoto lens, just as I had done in Sydney and on Java. As the pictures attached to this blog entry show, Squeekie did climb high up the Great Wall, and I did take her picture from below with my telephoto. I am PROUD of her effort to go so high up; the fact that she climbed much of the way with our new Canadian friends John and Janet Hanna just makes it better.

When she returned to the lower wall level where I walked, she whooped a great cheer—she had every right to be happy for what she had done. At the bottom of the wall, where a gift shop welcomed tourists, Squeek bought a t-shirt and I bought some books. While we were there at the lowest level of the Great Wall, a passenger train came around the corner into our view, and we both took pictures of it.

Our group reassembled back at the bus for the trip into Beijing. It was only about one hour’s drive along the tollway from Juyangguang Pass into the outskirts of the capital city. Our group had asked tour guide Arthur if it would be possible to “drive by” the Olympic venues on the way to our hotel, and he (with some apparent reluctance) agreed to do this. We passed by several of the Olympic venues and, although we did not stop nor did we slow down very much, we found that seeing these places in reality was of special interest. We saw the computer centre, the communications centre, the swimming venue, the famous “birds’ nest” stadium, and the Olympic Village. All of them were of interest both because of what had happened there and because we were seeing them “up front and personal.”

When we arrived at our hotel in Beijing we learned that some important politicians attending the National Peoples Congress which was going on this week were staying at the hotel. I was surprised (and more than a bit angry) at having to go through an airport-style security check, complete with x-ray machines, between the hotel check-in desk and the elevator lobby, but that was the reality of the time. Inside our hotel room I discovered that my large luggage piece had been trashed and the zipper ruined, so I could not open the case. As a result of this I could not change clothes for dinner this evening.

Dinner tonight was Peking Duck served at a famous restaurant which has served this dish for many generations. I had looked forward to this event! We bussed through Tiananmen Square, while Squeekie and I both got night shots of the famous buildings in the area, and pulled up to the “Bei Jing Quan Jude Hei Ping Len” Restaurant, which apparently has existed in some form for hundreds of years. I was interested to learn that the restaurant serves some 6,000 roast ducks EACH NIGHT! We were assembled in a private room on the sixth floor of the restaurant and served dinner, capped by the carving and serving of the roast duck. I LOVED the experience, and Squeekie had some of the duck too, but didn’t see what the hype was all about. I confess to having been surprised that the roast duck we were served was very mild and had little flavour. Of course, I am accustomed to eating wild duck, not the farm-raised variety, but even I thought that the bird would have benefited from some spices in the carcass. Such seasoning would have enhanced the experience, so that the meat would not just have been an “eat the crunchy fat skin” experience.

Then we reboarded our bus to go back to our hotel, which is located just one long block away from the Tiananmen Gate entrance to the Forbidden City. Famous Tiananmen Square has been closed to foot (and wheeled) traffic all week because of the People’s Congress going on, but in our night journey back to the hotel we were allowed to skirt the east side of the square, and Squeekie took some night shots with her little ELPH Canon camera. Arthur also pointed out the former Peking East Railway Station, which is now a railway museum, but when I asked him if it would be possible for him or a member of his staff to stop in and purchase a guide book for me (on their own schedule, not during this trip) he refused to do so. For this and other reasons I have come to dislike Arthur, who is filled with Communist propaganda and misinformation on the history of his own nation. I did get a nice night shot of the railway museum, but I guess a visit shall have to wait for another time.

Fortunately, I did notice that just “catty-corner” from Mao’s mausoleum, which is prominently displayed in the middle of Tiananmen Square, there is a garishly-advertised Kentucky Fried Chicken Store in business. Mao must be rolling angrily in his display case over this. I find it ironic that, despite still being ruled by a party which calls itself “Communist,” China today is relying on capitalist activities to gain great power status both politically and economically.

Back at the hotel, our tour guide Lin came up to our room and opened the broken zipper on my case—this does not permanently fix the problem, but enables me to use the case for the rest of the overland tour and to get stuff home from the ship before I dump the case, or so I hope. . . . I stayed in the hotel but Squeekie went out again to visit the night market with Audry and Stella.


Forty-eighth day (Sunday, March 8, 2009)-- I slept the sleep of the exhausted, as did Squeekie, who is feeling the muscle pains inherited from her climb up the Great Wall yesterday. We awakened at 6:15 am.

After breakfast in the hotel’s dining room our entire overland travel group exited the hotel and walked along Dong Chang-an Street, paralleling the wall which once guarded the Forbidden City from the people of Peking until we arrived in front of Tiananmen Gate (and Tiananmen Square) where we had a group picture taken in front of the gate (where a picture of Chairman Mao is still prominently displayed). Across the street from where we stood is the National Peoples’ Congress Hall, where the big meeting was assembling for the day as we watched. There were plenty of police and armed soldiers standing “guard,” and a large crowd of people as well.

(It was in this interesting moment that I collected a new type of “manhole cover” for my collection of pictures of these usually-ignored products of the iron-founders’ craft. Arthur pointed out some rectangular covers on the ground in a long row. When he saw that I photographed these he told me that they covered pit-style “squatter toilets” that were used by crowds in Tiananmen Square during political events.)

After this interesting, if political, moment, we walked through Tiananmen Gate into the Forbidden City. We walked over the Golden River Bridges and up into (and through) the Gate of Supreme Harmony into the Outer Courtyard, where we were greeted with the vast structure described as the Emperor’s office, in fact the throne room in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Walking through the “harmony” complex we went through the Gate of Heavenly Purity into the interior of the palace complex. We walked down the side of this innermost portion of the palace, unfortunately bypassing many interesting rooms because our tour guide Arthur was in a hurry. Eventually we elbowed our way through a large crowd into the palace gardens, where we stopped for a visit to the museum gift shop before exiting out the Gate of Divine Prowess, where the sight of some of Beijing’s renowned trolley busses greeted me. We then had to elbow our way through very persistent vendors selling junk to get back to our coach. The Forbidden City was fascinating, but we hurried through it way too fast and I missed a great deal of what I would like to have seen had time permitted. Still, I did get to see some of it, and took some interesting panorama pictures of the vast courtyards and gate structures.

Then Arthur, our local guide, pulled another of the stunts I did not appreciate. Although asked to take us past the Temple of Heaven so that we could photograph it, instead he had the bus driver take us to a silk “factory” where we were given time to buy fabrics. Yes, they did have some samples of silk production techniques, but I missed a very important landmark in Beijing. I AM VERY PISSED OFF!!! Then we went to lunch at a “private dining club” type of restaurant, where we had our own room just for our group. The food was bland—at this point in our tour we are all beginning to tire of Chinese food. On our way out to the airport we drove past a highrise building which had burned out not long ago. This event had made the international news, and I must look for it on the internet when we get home. We dumped Arthur at the Beijing airport. I am glad to see him go. He seemed more eager to get us to spend dollars than to interpret historical sites; he certainly knew very little about many things I asked him about during his part of the trip.

The flight to Shanghai was longer than I would have liked and rather uncomfortable, but at last we landed, picked up our bags, and boarded our last bus for the ship, which had docked in Shanghai early this morning (after an apparently rough passage through the Taiwan Straits which we were fortunate to have missed). We landed at the old Shanghai Downtown airport—it was old and dirty, as is the entire old town of Shanghai, but there are apparent efforts to clean up this famous (and much damaged by war and time) city. There were many high rises in the city, and not all of them were located in Pudong across the river. As our bus threaded through Shanghai to the cruise ship terminal where Rotterdam was docked, we were thrilled to be returning “home.” For the first time on this voyage, the sign “welcome home” posted on the side of the ship as we reboarded had true significance.

Historic observations-- First, my observations on the Forbidden City and on China’s problems in the nineteenth century. The emperor was VERY isolated from all his subjects, and this mirrored (and also exacerbated) China’s inability or unwillingness to cope with contact with westerners (and western technology) from the sixteenth century onward, especially after Western technology began to improve at a rapid rate in late eighteenth century. Chinese belief in themselves as Zhuong-guo, the “Middle Kingdom” (that is, the centre of the universe) made this inability to cope that much worse by enhancing this sense of isolation and increasing the unwillingness of Chinese to adapt to change. In this way China and her ruler lost their ability to deal with change.

One example of this, as expressed in the book 1421 by Gavin Menzies, is the story of the world explorer Zheng He, who sailed out into the world (some think even to South America, although this is not certain), but whose discoveries were suppressed after his return from his last voyage. Another example of this is reflected in the unwillingness of the Manchu Dynasty to cope with European visitors until forced to do so by the Opium War of 1839.

Second, my observations on the allegation expressed in the book 1434 by Gavin Menzies that the Chinese triggered Europe’s Renaissance. This claim is weakened by the argument (offered by some professors of philosophy, among others) that a key element of the European Renaissance was the development of new process of argumentation and logic. This thought process could not have come from China because her scholars didn’t think in this way. An additional aspect of this argument is that China’s technologies were exported to the West from the time of Marco Polo onward. While it is true that some Chinese processes did come West over time (silk making being one), this argument ignores key facts, such as: 1) silk making, which certainly was discovered or invented in China as early as the 1200s BC, had reached Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire by 6th century Ad, many hundreds of years before the start of the Renaissance; 2) the design of Western sea-going vessels, popularly known as “galleons,” which were good enough to carry Europeans around the world by the end of the fifteenth century, was derived from German “cogs” and was apparently superior to, even if smaller than, the ships built by the Chinese for Zheng He; and 3) Chinese technologies that Europeans did export (such as the making of glazed porcelain china, cloisonné, etc.) were borrowed (stolen?) from the sixteenth century onward, long after the intellectual revolution in Europe brought about by the Renaissance and, most importantly, soon enough were applied in ways the Chinese had never considered even in their hundreds of years of the manufacture of those products; this latter reflects an intellectual “freeze” or rejection of new ideas or applications which ultimately would prove troublesome to the Chinese as they encountered the European Industrial Revolution in the Nineteenth Century.

None of this thought is intended to diminish in any way the achievements of modern China in the last three decades. Quite the opposite is true: after two centuries of decline, oppression, and shame they have done much to improve their intellectual and technological standing in world culture but, having said that, I cannot ignore that all this has been done by a society which does not truly accept the important Western ideas of personal freedom and democracy. What this will mean for the people of China in the Twenty-first century remains to be seen. . . .