Puning Si, houses largest wooden Buddha in world
The new Chengde
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The Bus Ride from hell... to Chengde
This past weekend I went to Chengde with some friends from my program. Chengde is a city home to the Qing emperor's old summer palace and several impressive Buddhist temples dating from the 18th century. To get there we took a bus..the bus ride from hell.
Getting settled into our bus at Liuliqiao Station, everything seems fine--the bus is rather comfortable. Annoyance number one, however, is made apparent to us when we get going: Beijing traffic sucks. It's a Saturday morning and traffic is worse than the 405 at rush hour on Beijing's not 1st, not 2nd, not 3rd, but 4th ring road. Black Audis, Volkswagen, Nissans with strange names, and the ubiquitous Jinbei mianbaoche (colloquial nickname meaning bread car) all clog the road and change 4 lanes in an instant. Believe what you've heard: Chinese roads are dangerous.
An hour later we are still in Beijing, somewhere on the northern outskirts of the city, just beyond the 4th ring road on the Jingmi Expressway. Now, let me tell you about the Jingmi Expressway. It's basically a country road, like any you would find in the United States, two lanes and undivided. But it's clogged with myriad buses, pedestrians, bicyclists, men and women peddling odd vehicles burdened with towering stacks of recycled plastic, horses pulling carts, and motorcyclists. All of this developing-world hubbub is directly adjacent to the recently built Airport Expressway that passes above our heads. I wonder, "why don't we use this road?"
The next outrage occurs soon as the bus pulls over to the side of the road and remains there for the next twenty minutes. A few people get off to pee, get back on, and I think "ok we can leave now." No. The bus driver has decided to have a long and apparently engrossing conversation with a friend who happens to be sitting on the side of the road. Twenty minutes later he comes back on the bus to inform us that the bus is broken and we must switch to another bus.
It's another fifteen minutes on this bus until we actually depart. We clank along this busy two lane road, past the hodgepodge northern fringe of Beijing home to exclusive expat compounds evocative of American suburbia, impromptu car-repair shops, factories of multinational corporations, and horses.
The rest of the ride consisted of us clanging along this bumpy highway, while a perfectly good, brand-new high speed expressway ran directly next to us. I cursed the idiocy of the driver, which turned into more general puzzlement. I wondered, "why is it that this 5,000 year old civilization that invented gunpowder, typing, and fireworks is unable to figure out how to operate buses.
The scheduled arrival time of 2:00 turned into 3:30. And of course it could have been worse. But when we finally got off in Chengde, nestled within the brown mountains of the hibernating Chinese countryside, we were rewarded with a visit to the beautiful Puning Si temple, an active Buddhist temple. We were also able to stay in a hotel in the temple itself. The next day we visited the Emperor's summer resort park (Bishushanzhuang), and another temple modelled on the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, designed to accomodate visiting Tibetan emissaries. The trip was worth it, but next time I think we'll take a train.
Getting settled into our bus at Liuliqiao Station, everything seems fine--the bus is rather comfortable. Annoyance number one, however, is made apparent to us when we get going: Beijing traffic sucks. It's a Saturday morning and traffic is worse than the 405 at rush hour on Beijing's not 1st, not 2nd, not 3rd, but 4th ring road. Black Audis, Volkswagen, Nissans with strange names, and the ubiquitous Jinbei mianbaoche (colloquial nickname meaning bread car) all clog the road and change 4 lanes in an instant. Believe what you've heard: Chinese roads are dangerous.
An hour later we are still in Beijing, somewhere on the northern outskirts of the city, just beyond the 4th ring road on the Jingmi Expressway. Now, let me tell you about the Jingmi Expressway. It's basically a country road, like any you would find in the United States, two lanes and undivided. But it's clogged with myriad buses, pedestrians, bicyclists, men and women peddling odd vehicles burdened with towering stacks of recycled plastic, horses pulling carts, and motorcyclists. All of this developing-world hubbub is directly adjacent to the recently built Airport Expressway that passes above our heads. I wonder, "why don't we use this road?"
The next outrage occurs soon as the bus pulls over to the side of the road and remains there for the next twenty minutes. A few people get off to pee, get back on, and I think "ok we can leave now." No. The bus driver has decided to have a long and apparently engrossing conversation with a friend who happens to be sitting on the side of the road. Twenty minutes later he comes back on the bus to inform us that the bus is broken and we must switch to another bus.
It's another fifteen minutes on this bus until we actually depart. We clank along this busy two lane road, past the hodgepodge northern fringe of Beijing home to exclusive expat compounds evocative of American suburbia, impromptu car-repair shops, factories of multinational corporations, and horses.
The rest of the ride consisted of us clanging along this bumpy highway, while a perfectly good, brand-new high speed expressway ran directly next to us. I cursed the idiocy of the driver, which turned into more general puzzlement. I wondered, "why is it that this 5,000 year old civilization that invented gunpowder, typing, and fireworks is unable to figure out how to operate buses.
The scheduled arrival time of 2:00 turned into 3:30. And of course it could have been worse. But when we finally got off in Chengde, nestled within the brown mountains of the hibernating Chinese countryside, we were rewarded with a visit to the beautiful Puning Si temple, an active Buddhist temple. We were also able to stay in a hotel in the temple itself. The next day we visited the Emperor's summer resort park (Bishushanzhuang), and another temple modelled on the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, designed to accomodate visiting Tibetan emissaries. The trip was worth it, but next time I think we'll take a train.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Hutong Life
Since I have been living in a modern dormitory building for a month now I thought I'd reflect on my first few days in Beijing living in a courtyard hotel in a hutong, or alleyway, neighborhood.
Before 1949 hutong neighborhoods covered most of Beijing's old walled inner city. After the Communists came to power, Mao began ordering many of them leveled and replaced with new Soviet-style housing blocks. Though most still remained even up through the 1990's, the era of rampant commercial real-estate speculation has finally turned the hutong into an endangered urban species.
A hutong is basically a lane running east to west, lined with traditional siheyuan, courtyard homes. Traditionally, Beijing's urban fabric consisted entirely of these homes patterned across the city like bricks and subdivided by hutongs. Today, there are several preservation districts but even these special restrictions against 拆-ing (chai) meaning destroy, are sometimes not enough to prevent developers with important connections from tearing down neighborhoods and evicting residents, who are often old and powerless people.
Hutong life is a glimpse into the past, quite different from the modern lifestyle that most Beijingers enjoy. There are no cars, residents must use public toilets, and often no heating except for coal burning. But despite the lack of creature comforts, hutongs are living communities. In the alley, local kids play soccer under the watch of the elderly, women buy their groceries, and men play Chinese checkers on the stoop of their home. Often inaccurately called slums, hutongs are more accurately low-rent neighborhoods that have suffered from years of neglect and with some upgrading could be turned into very comfortable modern environments. Hopefully the authorities will realize this and decide that preserving the old environments is essential to preserving the soul of the city.
Before 1949 hutong neighborhoods covered most of Beijing's old walled inner city. After the Communists came to power, Mao began ordering many of them leveled and replaced with new Soviet-style housing blocks. Though most still remained even up through the 1990's, the era of rampant commercial real-estate speculation has finally turned the hutong into an endangered urban species.
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