Beijing: Summer Palace and Bei-Da

I’m back home in Virginia. I have two further “China travelogue”
posts I want to write as soon as I can, but things are pretty crazy in my
life right now.

But here’s the other China post I wanted to write:

One delightful day last week, Bill, our friend Ann Womack, and I went to visit
the Summer Palace, situated in the northwest of today’s Beijing. The
visit would only be a short one because at 2 p.m. I was scheduled to talk
to Dr. Wang Suolao’s class on Middle East politics at Beijing University,
which is near the Summer Palace. Beijing is a huge city and the traffic
situation there a multi-laned morass of congestion, so we’d planned our itinerary
to combine the two trips, which worked out well.

The Summer Palace was just as lovely as the guide-books made it out to be.
What we actually visited was described as the “new” Summer Palace.
It had long been an imperial garden, and had many of its structures
built in the 18th century. But in 1860 a British-French punitive expedition
burned down much of this complex as well as the 12th century “Old” Summer
Palace complex not far away. The Dowager Empress Cixi then set about rebuilding
it, though the Anglo-French forces tried to burn it down again in 1900.

Perhaps of special interest to my Middle Eastern readers is the fact that
one of the British officers in charge of the first of those incineratory
expeditions was Capt. Charles Gordon. He later used the nickname “Chinese”
Gordon, and went on to become British Governor of the Sudan. He was
killed in Khartoum in, I think, 1885, during an uprising by the Mahdist army there.
Here is a little text by him that we found in the Frommer’s guidebook.
It’s an excerpt from a letter he wrote in 1860, describing one aspect
of what his people had done in Beijing:

You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the palaces we burnt.
It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these palaces were so large,
and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully.
Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was
wretchedly demoralizing work for an army. Everybody was wild for plunder.

Well, don’t you just feel so sorry for them all, that they were so “pressed
for time” that they couldn’t plunder the palaces “carefully”?

That expedition, by the way, was launched to uphold the whole system of European
privileges and “concessions” in China at the time, an integral part of which
was the British empire’s insistence on being freely able to sell opium to
the Chinese market. There’s yet another reason I’m sometimes ashamed
to be British.

… Well, we walked along the 800-meter-long covered walkway that defines
part of the northern shore of the huge lake that dominates the Summer Palace
complex. Every three meters or so along the walkway a lintel crosses
it. These lintels, and the ones that run along the sides of the long
roof, are all decorated with fabulous paintings, many of them very detailed
renderings of folk-story themes, or natural scenes, or spare depictions of
plum-blossoms, or cats, or goldfish. In fact, there are so many lovely
paintings along the walkway that the guide-book says they total some 8,000
in number.

Halfway along the walkway is a large hall called the Cloud Dispelling Hall.
from there we climbed steeply northwards up the hill behind it to,
respectively, the Buddhist Fragrance Pavilion, the Temple of the Sea of Wisdom,
and Buddhist Tenants’ Hall. That was all a pretty good workout! The
halls are separated by vertiginous stone buttress walls, and to mount from
one hall to the next you have to climb steep steps that zigzag up the faces
of the walls. But the view from the top was spectacular: back down
across the yellow-tiled roofs of the lower halls and across the hazy expanses
of the lake to the dimly visible temples on its other shores.

After that brief visit to a small portion of the Summer Palace,
we got a cab to Beijing University, which Chinese people refer to familiarly
as “Bei-Da”. The cabbie dropped us at a gate to the campus that seemed
not to be a main gate, and the guards there didn’t speak any English. Since
Brantly wasn’t with us, we were momentarily at a loss how to proceed, until
Bill approached a student walking by with a cell-phone and asked in English
if he could help us contact Professor Wang. The student expressed delight
at being able to help– he said Dr. Wang was one of his favorite teachers!–
and immediately called him on our behalf. Within minutes, Dr. Wang
had come to meet us, and we walked slowly back to his classroom through Bei-Da’s
beautifully landscaped campus. (As far as I could figure, the campus
may have included part of the “Old” Summer Palace.)

The session with his students was really interesting for me. There
were about eight of them. Dr. Wang said I should go ahead and give
my presentation in English– that the students could handle that. I
talked mainly about the Palestinian issue, drawing a little bit on my February
visit there and also reflecting on the momentous nature of Bush’s April 14
giveaway to Sharon. I had gathered from my emails with Dr. Wang beforehand
that I could expect his students to be much more familiar with recent developments
in the Israeli-Palestinian field than, for example, the students I’d spoken
to at ECNU the week before, so I’d prepared a completely separate presentation
to take that into account. Butduring the discussion period that
followed I was amazed at the familiarity Wang’s students showed with many
different aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian question. It was truly
impressive.

All the students were Chinese except one young woman who was Korean and one
young man who was Japanese. The Chinese students had all prepared questions
for me, and some of them more than one. Actually, it was an intriguing
experience, since Wang had set as the assignment for the students
prior to the class that they should read this blog, so several of them displayed
intimate awareness of things I’d been writing here recently. Wow! I
travel halfway round the world and there are a bunch of really smart, interesting
young people who have already seen into my brain??? (I exaggerate.
My brain is not coterminous with the content of the blog. But
still, when I write in the blog it does come out much more stream-of-consciousness-y
than when I’m writing for dead-tree publications.)

So we had what I thought was a really interesting discussion. At one
point, one of the students asked about the analogy or disanalogy between
the US position in Iraq and its earlier position in Vietnam. Bill had
joined in the discussion during the Q&A period, and he answered first.
I thought maybe I could convey the supplementary thing that I wanted
to convey more effectively with a picture than with words, so I picked up
a marker and drew two quick maps side-by-side on the whiteboard. One
was of Iraq and its neighbors, the other of Vietnam and its neighbors. I
indicated that in Vietnam, the US side was able to deliver war materiél
all along the coast to its forces in S. Vietnam, while the anti-US insurgents
had to rely on the long , vulnerable stretches of the Ho Chi Minh trail for
their re-supply. In Iraq, by contrast, the US has to funnel nearly
everything in through the bottleneck of Kuwait, while the anti-US insurgents
(or at least, those of them that have good relations with Iran) can have
access to the many scores of good roads and trails that criss-cross between
Iran and the concentrations of population in southern Iraq…

Toward the end of the discussion, I turned the tables a bit and asked the
students what they were hoping to do after they graduated. One replied
that it seemed early for them to decide, yet. I asked if any of them
had any interest in, for example, joining a force like the small (12-person!)
force of Chinese police officers that had been shown in the newspapers deploying
to go and be part of the UN operation in Kosovo. That same student
said something like, “But we still have many important tasks to do here in
China.” I would have loved to continue that discussion for longer.

I also asked the students if any of them had their own web sites. “No!”
came the chorus of replies. Later, Dr. Wang explained that even the
academic department he worked in did not have its own site; but that the
School of International Studies of which it’s a part has one.

Anyway, after a 2.5-hour session, we had to leave. But I had really
enjoyed having the chance to meet Dr. Wang and his students. It would
be fun to go back to Bei-Da sometime.