Before/After: air quality in Beijing in May 2012, and January 2013

By Jack Brummet, Travel Editor

On top is a photo I shot in Beijing in May, 2012. On bottom is a photo by Feng Li/Getty Images taken a couple weeks ago, when the off-the-scale pollution was at its peak (so far).

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One more wacky sign from Beijing

By Jack Brummet, China Travel Editor

I can't remember the name of the highway over which this is posted, but I took this shot on a road coming into town from the airport...

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The Model XHZLC 40 Filtering Respirator For Fire Self Rescue

By Jack Brummet, China Travel Editor


I've never seen the The Model XHZLC 40 Filtering Respirator For Fire Self Rescue (or anything similar) in any country I've been to recently--Turkey, Greece, Mexico, England, or India--but my hotel room had two of these on the shelf in the closet.  I resisted the urge to play with it, or wear it around town.  I especially like the cover illustration, where the evacuee is wearing a two button suit and tie.

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Visiting a redeveloped Hutong and Shichahai Lake in Beijing

By Jack Brummet, China Travel Editor

Hutongs (simplified: 胡同; traditional: 衚衕) are narrow streets or alleys, 

"most commonly associated with Beijing, China. In Beijing, hutongs are alleys formed by lines of siheyuan, traditional courtyard residences. Many neighbourhoods were formed by joining one siheyuan to another to form a hutong, and then joining one hutong to another. The word hutong is also used to refer to such neighbourhoods," according to Wikipedia, which also says:  "Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, many of the old hutongs of Beijing disappeared, replaced by wide boulevards and high rises. Many residents left the lanes where their families lived for generations for apartment buildings with modern amenities. In Xicheng District, for example, nearly 200 hutongs out of the 820 it held in 1949 have disappeared."However, many of Beijing’s ancient hutongs still stand, and a number of them have been designated protected areas. The older neighborhoods survive today, offering a glimpse of life in the capital city as it has been for generations."Many hutongs, some several hundred years old, in the vicinity of the Bell Tower and Drum Tower and Shichahai Lake are preserved amongst recreated contemporary two- and three-storey versions. This area abounds with tourists, many of which tour the quarter in pedicabs."

Shichahai Lake contains three lakes: Qianhai (前海), Xihai (西海) and Houhai (后海).  I don't know which of these three lakes we strolled around, but it was the one lined with bars and restaurants.  A promenade between the shops and the lake ran all around the lake.  It was a fascinating walk, and we were only subtly hustled by a few women and greeter types, asking if we wanted to go to "a lady bar."


Strolling through the hutongs was fascinating, and I hope to visit others on my next trip to Beijing. . .

The Hutong we visited had some residents along the side alleys, but along the main alleys and streets, the houses had been redeveloped into shops.  This is much preferable to the usual alternative--they are often razed to make way for large, characterless apartment buildings.

Jack with Bill Willis outside a tree-lined alleyway

Kids out for the night, and one of the few cop cars I saw the whole time I was in Beijing

three policemen in the shadows

this unit looked like it was still being lived in--you saw a few outliers along the main streets

Liang Liu, Leon Yao, and Bill Willis

trinkets

flags

a hostel in the Hutong

 Shichahai Lake contains three lakes - We walked all around this one (it's about a mile around), but I'm not sure which one this is!  The lakes are Qianhai (前海), Xihai (西海) and Houhai (后海).

this was a typical bar around the lake - the music was usually western pop/folk (I heard some Carpenters, Beatles, and Bob Dylan).

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A racy statue in Beijing's central business district

By Jack Brummet, China Editor

I stumbled onto this interesting sculpture not far from our office in Beijing's CBD. . .

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Soup dumplings, a/k/a Xiaolongbao, in Beijing last week

By Jack Brummet, China travel and restaurant editor


After our trip to Beijing's Forbidden City last Friday, my friend Liang took me out for soup dumplings in Beijing.  The restaurant was glitzy, on the top floor of a fashionable atrium style mall that sold very high end consumer goods like Coach handbags, diamonds, Brooks Brothers, perfume stores, and all sorts of gear for the disposable income set. 

A bamboo steamer with Shanghai hairy crab soup dumplings (Xiaolongbao)

The dumplings, or, Xiaolongbao, are traditionally filled with pork, but variations include other meats, seafood and vegetarian fillings. The soup-filled kind are created by wrapping solid meat aspic inside the skin alongside the meat filling. Heat from steaming then melts the gelatin-gelled aspic into soup. They are just amazing.  We had a great lunch of a little bit of grilled pork, a plate of sauteed spinach, some soup, and three varieties of Xiaolongbao: vegetable, pork, and Shanghai Hairy Crab a/k/a mittens crab.  They're not actually hairy, but like our local Dungeness crabs, their claws look hairy.  The hairy crab is actually a freshwater crab that only goes into saltwater to breed and later to fetch their young uns.  Soup dumplings have recently become a very hot item in the Seattle area, with a couple of restaurants serving them and people waiting on line for two hours to get in. . .

Liang

I think I can reverse engineer these fairly easily.  I think the main trick will be in sealing the dumplings, which are not dropped into boiling water, but steamed in bamboo steamers.  Making the aspic will probably be the only big P.I.T.A.

Lunch

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Photos and notes from Beijing's Forbidden City

By Jack Brummet, China Travel Editor 

The Forbidden City, 紫禁城, literally translated by most as The Purple Forbidden City,  was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located smack dab in the middle of Beijing, and now houses the Palace Museum, who run the place. For almost 500 years, it was the home of emperors and their households, as well as the ceremonial and political center of China's government. Mao Zedong later lived just on the edge of the city.  The site includes an amazing 780 buildings on about eight million square feet (or, 178 acres!).  According to The Wikipedia, in the fifteen years in the Ming period when then city was under construction, it employed one million workers.  I saw a fraction of it in three hours.  I look forward to going back later this year to explore it further. 

Roof guardians - many of the buildings have these wonderful gargoyle sentries

This painting, from the Ming Dynasty period (mid-1400's) depicts the completed Forbidden City looking just about like it does today.

At the gate to the forbidden city.  In this photo, I am facing Tiananmen Square, just across the way.  Next to the Great Wall, I think this entrance, with the picture of Mao Zedong (who in my youth was still known as Mao Tse Tung), is probably the most photographed image in all of China.

a plan of the Forbidden City from Airphoto International - it only shows the largest structures

There are wonderful images of dragons all around the Forbidden City.

A lion that was carved almost six hundred years ago guards the entrance.  I wonder if these have been restored?  You would think the air pollution in Beijing would make short work of them, but they look like they could have been carved this year.  In Seattle, we have two ancient Egyptian sculptures of camels outside our Asian art museum on Capitol Hill.  About 20 years ago, they brought them inside and put copies outside.  They did the same thing in Florence with massive statue of David.  These lions are tough!

Yeah, I was bad about writing down the names of buildings.  I can only name a few of them.

It's virtually impossible to take a photo without someone (or hundreds) of tourists in it

Most of the interiors are closed off, but you can see in to the throne and sitting rooms

Many of the buildings have these vast bronze cauldrons (some covered in gold leaf) out front.  They were the Ming equivalent of fire hydrants.  They were always kept filled with water in case of fire; in the winter, they would keep fires lit beneath them to keep the water from freezing.  When a fire broke out, presumably some sort of bucket brigade sprung into action.  I'm not sure how effective these were--many  buildings, mostly built in the early 15th century eventually burned down and were reconstructed.

Just when you think you are at the end of the city, you stumble upon a new row of buildings.

This is a 200 ton sculpture that was quarried and carved far away from Beijing.  It was brought to the Forbidden City (presumably by slaves).  We know it was transported on the road in the winter.  They would pour water on the road, and drag the sculpture fifty feet and begin the water/freeze/drag procedure once again.  I wonder how many slaves it took to push 200 tons of rock across the iced roads?

This was just amazing.  It is not sculpted or carved.  It is a pile of gigantic, fantastically shaped rocks that they built a hill from and then topped it with a pagoda.  The Emperor would come here with his wife on special occasions and climb up the hill into the pagoda.

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Photos and notes from Tiananmen Square, Beijing

By Jack Brummet, China Travel Editor

Tiananmen Square is El Centro of China; the very heart of the country.  The Communist Party began building the square after the 1949 revolution.  It was the parade ground upon which The Party would hold its massive parades of soldiers, tanks, and missiles.  Eventually, it would contain Mao Zedong's tomb, and many other museums, monuments, and memorials.  TS sits squarely in the center of Beijing, China, and is named after the Tiananmen Gate (Gate of Heavenly Peace--a phrase lifted from the I Ching) just across the street to its North, and a few hundred feet south of the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square is one of the largest city squares in the world--roughly 100 acres.  It has enormous cultural significance as the site of numerous important events in post-revolution Chinese history.  


Almost every citizen I asked about the square didn't want to talk about what happened there in 1989. They didn't refuse to talk about it, but their answers were always a little muddy and vague.  To us, outside China, the square is known as the focal point of the protests of 1989, the pro-democracy movement which abruptly ended on June 4th, 1989, with a declaration of martial law in Beijing, the iconic images of a tank killing a protester, and the death of several hundred civilians.  It was a sobering visit for me, partly because no one really wants to discuss what happened with an obscure American blog site.  People seem aware of what happened, but no one was willing to open up on how it affected the citizens. In any case, this is one of the most popular tourist sites in China.  There were literally thousands of Chinese tourists the day I visited there, and maybe one or two dozen Europeans and Americans.  


Tiananmen Square is the biggest square I have ever seen (the biggest square I've seen prior to this was El Plaza Mayor in Madrid--a mere 129 by 94 metres).  There are many beautiful and culturally significant features, but for me it was impossible to be there without remembering the savage beatdown the Party put down on its citizens in  1989.  I was utterly unable to determine what the events of June 4th mean to the regular folk in China; I encountered the same reticence every time I asked people about membership in the Communist Party.

This photo captures maybe one third of the vastness of Tiananmen Square.  The building you see

directly in front, behind the red video screen on the right, is Mao Zedong's tomb.

A view of the Great People's Hall

 I didn't verify this, but these two video displays (this is just one--roughly 150 feet wide--may be the biggest I have ever seem.  They mostly display scenes from various parts of China and messages for The People.  

The obelisk is a memorial for fallen soldiers.

The leading edge of a sculpture just to the left of Mao Zedong's temple 

(in which the taxidermied Mao Zedong is available for viewing three hours a day).

Another view of the sculpture outside Mao's memorial.  Someone just pointed out to me that they 

thought this sculpture resembled the famous photograph of Americans planting the flag on Iwo Jima. 

Mao Zedong's tomb, which closed at noon, frustrating hundreds of Chinese tourists

The next few shots are of the colorful topiaries on the west side of the square.

The flag

A six hundred year old lion sculpture

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