The Liu Xiaobo Project

Saturday

My wakeup call was at 6:15, for a 6:45 breakfast and 7:45 departure. It was not snowing, but still quite hazy. Our first stop of the day was the Beijing Zoo, to see the pandas. Pandas are boring. They’ve overspecialized to the extent that they seem intent on extinction. They’re not even interested in breeding, for heaven’s sake, even when coddled and fed and shown (I am not making this up) “panda porn.”

“Red pandas,” more closely related to raccoons, with cute catlike faces and long tails, are feisty and active on the other hand (“agitated” might be more accurate, for a while, after not only a pack of obnoxious children but the adults accompanying them were shouting and banging on the enclosure. They should have been in the cage). A golden pheasant was breathtaking, looking like an enameled jewel that moved. And that was about it for the zoo this day.

From there we went directly to Tiananmen Square. Jia gave historical background on the way, about the evolution of the square, its rank as the largest public square in the world, and for those too young, perhaps, to know—or at any rate to personally remember—an account of the events of June, 1989. She stressed that it would not be okay to ask her questions about that time while in the square, as she could get in trouble if overheard. Our schedule, in fact, had changed twice, from an early morning visit to an afternoon one to a late morning one, due to the fact that a national political party congress was convening adjacent to the square, with heightened security. I certainly hope that’s not the normal level; military, police, and incredibly obvious “plainclothes” security were everywhere. She also said quietly, as an army platoon marched in formation across the square (the first of several) not to photograph them (I’m afraid I did out of sheer defiance, though surreptitiously. I remember the massacre, and the hopeful days leading up to it, as if it were yesterday). She pointed out the Beijing Hotel up wide Chang’an Avenue to our right, from which the famous photo of the unknown man confronting a line of tanks was taken. After duly photographing the huge square and the Gate of Heavenly Peace from that angle, we crossed the busy thoroughfare via a wide, bustling tunnel.

Just inside the Gate there is a security headquarters; a line of additional “plainclothes” emerged in identical black down jackets, heading back toward the square.

Like the center of any empire, everything in or (because there are layers of approach—“Outer” and “Inner” functional and ceremonial courtyards before the actual residential areas of the emperor and all the vast array of family and concubines and eunuchs, etc.) near the Forbidden City squeezes out yet more “wows” by its sheer immensity, its grandeur, its onetime richness (gold leaf!). On this day, let it be remembered that every moat (and later, a lake—photos!) was frozen solid enough—in one instance, at least—to skate on. People of many nationalities were there to bear witness, including jostling, pushing throngs of Chinese. I can’t imagine it being more crowded, and yet surely it is in balmier weather.

Absolute power certainly, if you’re not one of the dime-a-dozen underlings or slaves, has its perks. Its downside, too, once you’re only a descendant of a dynasty creator, when the bureaucracy has multiplied to hem you in and isolate you. When assassination had been a common enough theme that the concubine du jour (or nuit) had to receive the eunuch naked to be carried into the emperor’s presence, to be sure she wasn’t carrying any sort of weapon.

From a museumist’s (yes; I just made that up) point of view, there seems what I can only call a certain passive-aggressiveness about the Forbidden City as museum. It’s open to the public, yes, but I certainly wouldn’t say it’s maintained. We were told only a part of the vast complex, much as it seems, is actually accessible, due to inability to fund preservation of all the rest. Yet—aside from the heavy layer of dust over it all, the same grime that accumulates on any stationary object in Beijing—everywhere the gilt is peeling or gone, the paint is cracked, the glass is dirty. The great halls are off-limits to foot traffic, but still stand open and certainly not climate-controlled. The overwhelming onslaught of visitors is barely restrained.

It would be incredibly expensive to properly maintain the complex. Two words: Beijing Olympics. (Or “Catherine Palace,” outside St. Petersburg, obliterated by the Germans in World War II and painstakingly rebuilt, right down to the astonishing Amber Room. Or Versailles.) It’s a question, if not of half-heartedness, of grudging reference to the pre-Communist (pre-Republic) past, of priorities—and everywhere in China, it appears the priority is the future, whatever that may mean, rather than the past. There are symbolic nods to the past, seemingly more for tourist consumption than anything else, but all the while hutongs are razed for condominiums, the Three Gorges Dam displaces over a million people and drowns village after village and thousands of years of history.

On this day we walked five miles, more or less. When we finally exited the Forbidden City, in our scrounged time, our bus took us to a late lunch. The dining rooms in this restaurant were large, old-fashioned, dark—and the young waitresses were in full old-style regalia: silk dresses, large Manchu headdresses, traditional platform shoes (which seemed downright cruel for a busy standing job). The lazy Susans went round and round, we ate and ate, blah, blah. All the women but me refused to use the restroom; their loss (they asked, on my return, whether it were “nice.” I said that “nice” was perhaps too strong a word, but that it did have soap, and the hand dryer worked—unlike our shared experience earlier in the Forbidden City—and that it even blew hot air, a plus in our pretty chilled state).

Onward, to the Summer Palace built by the real Dragon Lady, she of perpetual regency by virtue of repeated murders. This was the site of the frozen lake, where ducks were walking, but also of a long, long, curving arcade covered with non-repeating hand-painted scenes. Also a little drinks stand our “boys” discovered sold coffee; I looked for the German woman who lives in Miami to give her the news, but couldn’t spot her—and then she materialized with tea for me, after my bemoaning that lunch’s chrysanthemum tea wasn’t going to provide any caffeine to keep me awake.

From there we drove to an official government pearl “factory,” where the Chinese process of seating us all in a room for an actual lecture repeated, on the history and uses of freshwater pearls this time. Of course, as at the “jade factory,” (though this lacked a gallery) there were breathtakingly beautiful displays, of pearls in all their naturally-occurring colors (and unnaturally, in a more low-end part of the shop).

Finally we dragged our weary selves back into our hotel. After an hour or so another woman and I went up the street for a bite to eat—a bite that wound up being Sichuan, requiring two tall pale Tsingtao beers to—alleviate, if not quench.