The Great Wall of China and Robert Frost

Huh?

But this week following my visit to the Great Wall, my determined (grimly, in part) walk to station 23–the last stop on the Beijing portion of the wall where tourists are technically allowed–I’m thinking about Robert Frost’s poem, “The Mending Wall.” So I’ll copy it here and leave it at that, for now.

Mending Wall

By Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Hello C!

Pingyao old and new.

Hard Sleeping

The ride from crusty coal-town Datong to pretty Unesco-World-Heritage-site Pingyao was eight hours on a hard sleeper.

I think when a bed is called a “hard sleeper,” everyone understands the double meaning. Yes, it is on a third-class car, which offers a few opportunities for complaint. And the padding is limited and there are six beds—I’m using the term “bed” loosely—to a room, three narrow steel slabs to a side, each with a clean-enough pillow and comforter folded and waiting. I’m on a middle one which means I can’t sit up fully and have to use stirrups to get up and down from my berth.

All this implies something about the bathroom which will be no surprise to anyone who’s travelled in Asia or Africa ever – or even Spain in the 80’s. It means that the bathroom is a hole in the train with a bucket on the side. I’m aware of it, I’m not exactly scared of it, but I’m doing my damnedest not to go in there for the entire 8-hour ride.

I don’t mind, really. I’m feeling cheerful, even, because some of the people I’m travelling with are kvetching and I’m so determined not to be the hater in this crowd.

There are other issues they are complaining about—mostly China in general—but that’s more complicated.

As I go on this trip I’m listening to a biography of Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang, which is also the story of the long, bitter end of China’s empire days, a tale fascinating and sickening in turns. Our guide has likened Cixi to a female figure on Game of Thrones, and she is with me every day. For most of her life, she drank human breast milk with her tea, as recommended by a doctor when she was young. And she made her second adopted son, the one she brought on when he was three so that she could continue to rule, call her Papa. What a woman.

But the larger history is just as harrowing, especially now, as the book approaches the Boxer Rebellion, where gangs of impoverished angry men took to the streets to kill foreigners withCixi’s tacit approval. Ugly turns like this make the bathroom a little less significant; but her tale, her rulership of the world, also seems connected to why such a bathroom is there at all.

Breast milk in your tea, anyone?

New Hashtag for Pingyao: Pingwow

It’s impossible not to fall for this jewel box of a town, a Unesco World Heritage site. Pingyao is a great place to be a tourist.

Web too slow to post accompanying photo while in China. Sorry. This would be a real post if it had a pic!

Sadness in Datong draft

Check my instagram @lexquinlan for pictures of the hanging monastery or — better — google it. it’s fantastic.

Datong is like what I expected from all of China: a terrifying pollution. In Beijing, the haze was mean, definitely cough-worthy, but we arrived to Datong on a syrup-heavy summer night and woke to an inescapable thickness to the air, a gray pall over everything and knew this place was different.

The 3.37-million person city, whose name means “place of great harmony,” is China’s energy center, a city grown wealthy from two enormous coal mines and a nuclear plant, also (not surprisingly) known as the vast, polluted country’s most polluted city. Most of this is passed on the way to the one of the main tourist attractions, a cliff on Mount Heng an hour and a half from town. Also passed: serious city walls, built in 1392 when Datong was a major military base in the Ming Dynasty. And coal factories, too, and fields of corn and potato and, in an optimistic touch, a couple of acres of solar panels.

About that cliff? You’ll have heard of it if you’ve seen anything on Chinese tourism. Set on one of China’s five sacred mountains, here are justly famed 1500-year-old “hanging temples,” 14 exquisite rooms dedicated to China’s three main religions, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The narrow stair cases, the wooden pagoda-rooms, tortuous corners were so packed with tourists that you can’t help but pray for China’s army corps of engineers, or whoever is charged with making sure they don’t go tumbling 27 meters down to the river below.

The threat of a fall could have been worse. Thanks to time and dams—the guide wasn’t sure which—the river is much higher than its former 90 meters away. This means of course that the temples were much further from solid ground, though that wouldn’t make any difference to its brilliant engineers. According to all evidence, this intricate masterpiece was built by men hanging from suspension cords from the mountaintop, chiseling the mountainside, fitting the oak crossbeams, working day by day for years. They set the whole thing beneath a cliff that extends outward, thus protecting the wooden structure from the worst rain and sun damage. Even now the Chinese government has stepped in—there definitely are no monks around here—and placed twenty metal rods that extend from the mountain side below and appear to prop the whole thing up. But, according to our guide, they don’t do anything structural, and actually wobble if you touch them.

There was no moment when other tourists, mostly Chinese, weren’t inches from me on either side, and I wished mightily for a moment to take it in. Too soon we were on the bus again, headed to our first mediochre meal at a large hall no doubt designed for tour buses like ours, and then back to ashen Datong.

How to Serve a Goat

Horses everywhere in Inner Mongolia

More sculptures than live ones, but they are an article of faith here….

Why bother putting these up?

Our guide said we should have some sympathy for the Chinese man who works all the time when his wife won’t let him have any money or fun. Give him his cigarettes!

Rough Notes

So tonight after the Peking duck dinner–which was after the Chinese acrobatic show, which was after the lunch, which was after the climb along the Great Wall–I was hovering in the alcove where Internet generally works sort of in the hotel when I shared my first bad idea with my travel friends, others on the press trip. I say, I think I’ll go get a foot massage at that shady place down the shady road from our shady hotel. It was roughly 10 o’clock, I was bone tired but wired from the same tiredness along with the Great Wall and the liver and slugs and duck for dinner. They wished me luck and I took off.

I sort of knew I wouldn’t go through with it and yet I was restless and walked accompanied by a pedi-cab driver who kept whispering Tianamen, Tianamen to me among other things I couldn’t understand. Walking down the fluorescent-lit stairs and meeting the totally normal but scary guys who pulled out an English-ish menu of services that was itself tattered and filthy and tried to steer me to a 260 yuan foot massage rather than the 120 one I saw immediately and wanted. I said I would think about it and fled. And then I was walking back to the hotel, relieved, tired, followed by now three fellows on rickshaws talking to me as if I might know one word of their language and again mentioning Tianman Square.

Back in the alcove with my travel pals, I say, let’s go to Tianamen Square. I said, I like to see a world capital at night. They looked up from their computers and said, Yes! Said, Adventure! One said he’d been there before at night and it was wonderful!

Second bad idea. Because it wasn’t easy to get a cab at all, even with a trip back to the hotel where they didn’t help, and once we finally got one, the driver didn’t seem to understand where we were going. Tianamen Square, we said again and again and Dianman, he inquired. Finally we agreed, yes, must be Dianman. One fellow said he must be using the Mandarin pronunciation so were optimistic as we bombed along through town, broad Beijing avenues, once seeing a sign that said Tianaman Sq 2k and squealing in delight and still driving, driving, through a busy part, lots of cafes, real life—foot massage parlors even, though I didn’t make a fuss about it—and people walking, talking, very different from the district our hotel was in, and then finally it was clear even to their unsuspicious minds that we’d been farther than 2k. Dianman was a little corner we wouldn’t have wanted to visit, that was definite.

Eventually we got there and all had a laugh over the difference between Dianman and Tianamen but I knew I would wake in the night thinking of how he ripped us off, how he must have known exactly where a trio of Westerners wanted to go.

Anyway.

Right away it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to get anywhere near it. Lots of guards in white and green staring straight ahead as if fixed on the one true light, and we passed them, walking, walking. The boulevards are broad enough for many many army tanks and are lined with bubble streetlights—enormous streetlights with arms holding pretty balls of light (not all of them working, incidentally) as far as the eye could see. The night was cool, almost, and the trees were cooling, too. It was gorgeous and eerie, which is all I ever wanted from a night visit to a capital. It was also wholly alien. One woman came and offered to sell us a chairman Mao plastic heart for 20 yuan so I bought 2 for 10 yuan, naturally.

And still we kept pacing the enormous brutalist buildings, the size of them, the horror. These buildings built only for one purpose—to make people feel small and powerless—and Jesus they were doing their job.

After a long while, seeing no cabs, realizing the subways were closed for the evening, our driver was able to read the name of our hotel on our key cards and to take us there without much fuss. It was a three-minute ride, half the cost of the other.

In the morning we would see the square in the light with our group and a guide.

Soup for Breakfast

What’s more comforting than a bowl of soup for breakfast? At our Beijing hotel, the Chong Wen Men, breakfast is served at the Maxim’s which does seem to be related to the Maxim’s Paris in some way.

I liked the looks of the chef, seen here–I hope–and asked him via hand gestures to prepare a soup he liked. Gorgeous won tons with beef. Only later when I saw how much he was coughing did I worry. But, hey, the heat of the broth will kill any germs–right?