Jason Shannon's Blog
February 20, 2017
Sleeping on Scissors?
Sleeping on Scissors?:
Beads, Breasts, Bush, and Language Barriers at Beijing’s Panjiayuan Market[1]
[1: Wherever unavoidable, I will be translating Mandarin using the pinyin system, rather than Wade-Giles. Moreover, as I was in Beijing, and both of my primary sources (Pimsleur and Mark Frobose) use the ‘Pekingese’-accented Beijing dialect, which might be described as the pirate dialect of Mandarin for the frequency with which it contorts words to have an arr! sort of ending, the letter R may appear at the ends of pinyin translations where, elsewhere in the country, or standard Mandarin, it may not.]
Date: Monday, October 10th – Saturday, October 15th, 2016
You’re out at the Summer Palace, a cottage retreat for the Chinese emperor, built along a man-made lake. It’s an overcast day, and your tour guide has only given you an hour to walk down the length of this lake and explore around the palace. Beijing smog is everywhere and it looks like you’re in a post-apocalyptic film. More than one person is wearing a disposable medical mask. It’s here that you see one young woman in a low-cut shirt and a pushup bra, the first cleavage you’ve seen in days. Slight and petite, almost all women dress modestly. Unlike Hong Kong, where the hotel elevator screen played a Victoria’s Secret fashion show on repeat, Mainland China is much more reserved. Being white, you stick out like a sore thumb, and local try and sneak pictures with you. There’s a small island just inside the main gate of the palace itself, with a gazebo on it. Crossing the bridge towards it, a middle-aged Chinese man, just in front of you, turns, and, to someone behind you, he barks, “Yo, nigga!”[2]
[2: Na ge is a Chinese filler word, similar to the English like, um, uh, so, etc. It literally means ‘that one’.]
I was saying at Sunworld Dynasty Hotel, located at the corner of Wangfujing Avenue and Dengshikou Street, in the heart of downtown Beijing. The Forbidden City, Tienanmen Square and Beihai Park are within walking distance. It’s about an hour from the airport, where the cabbie zips in and out of traffic like he’s competing to become the next playable character in Mario Kart. Fake taxis are at the airport, meeting you in the terminal and, in decent English, offering you rides for double the price. It’s best to have an idea ahead of time as to what the ride should cost. Licensed taxis in Beijing are yellow, but sometimes even they will go off the meter and try to pocket a higher cost. Insist on dabiao,[3] while pointing at the meter, before going anywhere.
[3: Meter]
Just up the way is the Wangfujing Night Market, a back alley place where they sell deep-fried scorpions and millipedes on a stick, and all the cheap touristy stuff you’d expect at a dense Chinatown market. Be prepared to deal with very pushy salesmen – at one silk scroll stand, I actually walked away from the guy when, after I repeatedly told him I wanted to browse his stuff to find the right thing, he wouldn’t leave me alone and kept thrusting different things in my face. Oriental Plaza, a large mall, is a little further down, though I never quite made it there. Along the way there’s all sorts of designer fashion stores, tourism storefronts, and a Foreign Language Bookstore, where, had it been a little cheaper, I might have picked up a DVD set of The Qin Empire, a 2009 series set during the reign of Duke Xiao (381-338 BCE). The APM Mall, a five-storey Western-style mall, with a giant Apple store and a dozen decent restaurants, is across the road. It was here that, after struggling with the language, we were told to go to find a Subway restaurant; the hotel front desk, upon hearing the word subway, brought out a map of the underground train system. They like their thousand islands dressing here in China; the spicy chicken sandwich I got was bathed in it, and, a week before, in Hong Kong, I got a pizza with thousand islands instead of tomato sauce.[4]
[4: Both were pretty good, actually.]
Wangfujing is tourist central, and (despite the legion of cops with their bomb-sniffing dogs), the scammers are out. Mainly it’s the tea house scammers, young women trying to seduce you into a bar or tea house of their choosing, where your bill is going to several times what it should be. But there’s also calligraphy artists, rickshaw scammers and prostitutes. One night, upon leaving Sunworld Dynasty, a middle-aged woman, prowling outside the hotel, approached me and spoke softly in Mandarin. “Wo bu mingbai,” or, ‘I don’t understand’, I said.
In contrast to other scammers (though prostitution isn’t necessarily a ‘scam’), she spoke very little English. Your first cause for concern should be a high degree of fluency with strangers. She struggled, eventually said, “Lady... to your room.”
(I very much got the impression that she wasn’t offering her own services here, but rather those of other women.) “Bu, bu,”[5] I said, and walked away from her.
[5: Basically ‘no, no’, but in fact it’s a negative particle. Standard Mandarin doesn’t have direct translations for yes and no.]
For the better part of two years, I’ve been attempting to learn the speak Mandarin Chinese. It hasn’t been easy; the US Foreign Service Institute, which ranks the world’s languages by degree of difficulty to learn (and therefore teach to diplomatic staff), places Mandarin in Category IV, the hardest to learn, with an estimated 2,200 hours required, alongside Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean.[6]
[6: Category I, the easiest to learn (five hundred and seventy-five to six hundred hours) includes Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, etc. Category III contains the hardest of all European languages to learn, including Russian, Icelandic and Hungarian (which includes up to thirty-five language cases, compared to English, which, at most, has three – I, me, mine), along with most languages you might expect to be rather difficult – Urdu, Vietnamese, Nepali, Mongolian, Tamil, Tagalog, Burmese, etc. As I write this, I’m now dabbling in Korean, in preparation for another vacation a few years away; why am I yet again choosing a Category IV language destination?]
I am still quite amateurish, as evidenced by a ‘conversation’ I had with a Chinese in the flight from Macao. I think he was trying to ask if it would bother me to have his jacket draped over the back of his seat (he was sitting in front of my brother and I), but he spoke too quickly, and I was left merely to sputter “Wo bu mingbai.” This, too (along with the price), was the reason I hesitated when it came to The Qin Empire, the pre-imperial, Qin kingdom historical drama in the Foreign Language Bookstore; I would in no way be able to follow it, and the point at which I might be able to is still years away.
Out on Wangfujing, I attempted to practice with a couple women that were obviously tea house scammers, allegedly from Harbin. It was my first night there, cops were everywhere. Two women, one in a bright red coat and speaking decent English, and her friend, who seemed to only know a few words. Somehow it came out that I was learning Chinese, and they seized on this. “Ni Zhongwen mingzi jiao shenme?” the one with little English asked, interrupting her friend.
I did some quick mental calculation: mingzi is ‘name’, jiao shenme is ‘what called’ – asking my name? What I’d learned was ni jiao shenme mingzi. Wait, Zhongwen was in there – Chinese name, she’s asking my Chinese name.[7]
[7: I don’t have one, as I told her.]
Towards the end of the week, down at the Wangfujing Night Market, I ran into a similar situation of language improvisation. We were there late, getting a charcoal sketch done. Locals gathered in droves to see Westerners pose and watch the skill of this old Chinese artist. The market was closing up by the time we were on our way out. A group of five of six people, I’d say in their twenties, who’d watched the majority of the sketching session, followed us out. They seemed friendly enough, but they clearly spoke no English. One bigger guy, broad-chested and commanding in his presence, called out as I walked through the back alleyways, now closing up. He spat out some long sentence, then began repeating fragments of it. I picked out one word: zhaopian.
Ah, photograph. He wants a photograph. This is a common thing; foreigners often sneak you into selfies with covert use of a selfie stick, or asked to pose. “Hao,”[8] I say, and his girlfriend, a cute young woman, steps up and takes a couple pictures. I always tried to sneak in my own pictures with these locals, and after her boyfriend had clicked the camera, I handed over my phone and said, “Wo ye xiang zhaopian.”[9]
[8: Okay]
[9: I also want a photo.]
The hotel concierge had at least one employee that spoke excellent English, yet the front desk, more often than not, did not have a good grasp on it. Some of the women there spoke a little bit, and they were eager to help, but you really had to struggle to get your meaning across. On the phone with them, it would turn out, was even worse, as you couldn’t use gestures to make yourself understood. After about the third day of sleeping on paper-thin pillows, I could take no more and called down to try and get another one.
“Ni hao,”[10] came the voice on the phone.
[10: Hello]
This is where all those hours with my audio courses paid off, for, without even thinking about it, I found myself effortlessly uttering the words, “Ni hao, ni huishuo Yingwen ma?”[11]
[11: Hello, do you speak English?]
“Deng yi huir,”[12] she said, and then, momentarily, a new voice.
[12: Wait one moment.]
I requested another pillow. “Pee-low?” she asked, this one clearly with a heavy language barrier herself.
So I tried explaining it. “To put your head on, when you sleep. For the bed.”
“Ah, yes, yes,” she exclaimed.
Five minutes later, our housekeeper showed up. I answered the door expecting (and yet half not expecting) to see her with a pillow. When I opened the door, her hands were in pockets, and her face went from relaxed and confident, to one of confusion. Of course, she had no pillow.
This was the same housekeeper we’d had all week, a young, twenty-something woman who was always very friendly, with a beaming smile and would always greet us when we saw her in the hallway. Yet the past few days had made it clear she spoke perhaps five words of English. She said, “See-sors?”
“Scissors?” I asked.
She held up a finger, pulled out her phone. She brought up an app, or a message of some kind, with a single English word, which apparently had been her instruction: Scissors.
I smiled. “Deng yi huir,” I said, and ran back, past the bathroom to the bed. I picked up one of the pillows, appeared back in the doorway and said, struggling, “Geng duo de zhege,” which, while the grammar is probably horrible, roughly translates to ‘Another of this’. Her face lit up; she understood exactly what I meant and went scurrying off.
On the final the final day in Beijing, we visited the Panjiayuan Market, a large, sprawling flea-market sort of place with as many as 3,000 vendors. I was advised to get the hotel concierge to write the name of the market in Chinese characters for the cab. They already had business cards with various attractions on them, and circled it. Through the crowded, free-for-all streets and, quickly, we arrived. It was here that, in the span of three minutes, I saw two different young women in skintight, oil-black leather pants, as though they were wearing the bottom half of a dominatrix’s getup.
Inside the gate are a number of walking streets and long, two-storey buildings of various cramped shops. The upper level, accessible by a balcony, was the art section. Yet, though many of these shops did sell little figurines of elephants, panthers and dragons, the shelves crammed in the dank, closet-sized storefronts, many also sold superfluous material. There was coffee and tea, there were numerous public washrooms with squat toilets and trough urinals, and there was a shop that sold packing material – for example, cylindrical cardboard tubes (¥10, or about CAD$2) to sheath paintings. To the right was an open courtyard, where vendors gathered in rows, laid out a blanket and packed it full of nicknacks and curios. It was still early and many vendors were still setting up, though all were eager to try and market their wares. Here are Buddha statues, tea sets, jade carvings or little brass figurines of lions, qilins, xiezhis,[13] dragons and more. There are signs for a used book market a little farther down, and at the back side of this open courtyard are tremendous concrete statues of the above Chinese creatures, the sort of thing you might put out front a bank or mall.
[13: A unicorn-goat-like creature that instinctively knew the innocent from the guilty, and would butt its horn against the guilty. The animal was used as a symbol by the Censorate, an Internal Affairs-sort of bureau responsible for rooting out corruption amongst government officials.]
We began to amble through the rows. You have to be careful not to point at anything or make eye contact with the vendor, or they’ll instantly get pushy, though they’re not as bad here as at Wangfujing. One common figurine here was an elongated dragon, standing erect on its hind legs, stretched out. It had that slippery, serpentine look, yet I already had two dragon statues from Hong Kong, and didn’t really care for a third. I would have liked to have gotten a qilin, a semi-giraffe-like Chinese mythical figure, revered for discerning between trustworthiness and deceit, yet these seemed to only come in a couple different, mass-produced stances, and none of them looked as flattering – or as fearsome – as the larger statues you can see outside businesses, or at the Forbidden City.
Down the back side of the two-storey businesses, and then you come to a roofed block of booths, each encased in a cage-like sort of chain-link fence. Here are large no smoking signs, numerous Chinese characters, and the words ‘Art Section’ in English.
When I was in Hong Kong, I’d already picked up four paintings – one of horses in gallop, one of the Great Wall, and two reminiscent of paintings I’d picked two years before, in Cuba. I wasn’t really keen on finding wall space for another, yet I had some time to kill, and this was my last day in China, so let’s take a quick walk through. These booths were still opening up, and a good two thirds of them were empty, or locked cases with nothing on display. People were pinning their work to the sides of their booth, clipping paintings to one another. There was another art section on the upper floors of those buildings, which I mentioned earlier, but that was more in the realm of fancy, art-dealer-style paintings. Here is where the cheap, amateur painters gathered. Most of this was calligraphy-based, a white canvas with a handful of Chinese characters painted on it.
This too was a common scam in Beijing. A calligraphy painter or art dealer will approach you in the street, advertise their gallery, come up with some story about struggling artists. Wangfujing seems to be a central hub for this as well. Like the tea house scams, someone will approach you with excellent English – in this case, it’s usually men – trying to befriend you with questions about where you come from, etc. Here they’ll try and wrangle you into coming to their gallery, where everything is highly overpriced, and cheaply reproduced. There was one gentleman operating right out of the hotel, giving him the veneer of being above board, who entered into a long spiel about painting your name or Chinese zodiac symbol, and then pleas of how he’s trying to establish his business. And I saw at least two other art scammers hanging out in the general vicinity of the hotel in the same capacity as the tea house ladies and the madam. At Panjiayuan, however, I have no doubt that this calligraphy is more ‘authentic’ (though, like all art here, it is excessively reproduced, and you can see multiple copies of the same work at different booths), and the prices are probably fairer, because of your negotiation. That being said, while I understand calligraphy has its place in Chinese history, it’s an art form that doesn’t much interest me.
Much of what else I saw on this initial sweep through was not of great quality. There was some Buddhist imagery that looked more Indian than Chinese, and a few animals. I recall seeing a tiger, but its head was misshapen, as were a few other animals. No dragons, no other mythical figures like the qilin, xiezhi or huli jing.[14] One painting I came across, down a row nearly abandoned, featured a topless woman, yet her arm was pressed censoriously into her breasts, and the art quality was lacking.
[14: Literally ‘fox spirit’, this creature is a mythical shapeshifting seductress, simultaneous a cunning fox and a ravishing woman. This could have been an interesting image put to the canvas, though it wasn’t, at the time, one I was looking for. Neither did I see any figurines of such.]
Two years before, in Holguín, Cuba, I had picked up a couple of nude paintings at the local market, down the beach from our resort in Guardalavaca. Three different resorts hugged the beach, and at the far end was a small market that sold bullhorn and wood carvings, hats and shirts and humidors with Che’s face on them, sandals and other beachwear, and numerous oil paintings. My friend Andrew, as we walked through for the first time, spotted one of a buxom woman, kneeling, her back to the ‘camera’, yet turned so the viewer could catch sight of one breast, and grabbed me by the arm to say, “Oh, dude...” I bought it, as well as another, this one of a woman on her back, her biceps pushed forward to accentuate herself. Then, on our last day in Cuba, Andrew made one last trip to the market, and I went with him, where I came across a duplicate of a Boris Vallejo painting, with a nude angel and demon seductively close to kissing. Given that that was then the background art on my phone, I also had to buy that one.
(Little did I know, there was a tax on art in Cuba. I’d tightly rolled the paintings to protect them, wrapping them in newspaper and dirty laundry, and airport security had easily spotted the tube in my luggage during x-ray. They’d pulled me aside, told me to pull them out, then sent me over to a tax desk, where I had to roll out three sensuous nude paintings to a cute, early twenties senorita, where she looked them over, stamped them and charged me a $9 tax.)
Fast forward to Hong Kong, where I went to the Temple Street Night Market, slightly hidden behind a cluster of roadside sex toy shops, filled to the brim with dildos, vibrators and blowup dolls. Here I was looking for (among other things) knockoffs of a Sichuanese artist named Li Zhuangping. He’d aroused some controversy when, a few years ago, he’d painted a series of nudes of his twenty-three-year-old stepdaughter, Li Qin. While I didn’t find anything resembling Li, I did find two others, one of a flat-chested water girl and one of a model, posing, resting on an elbow.
I still had an eye out, therefore, on this walk through the art section of Panjiayuan, for a Li copy. That, and a Li Gonglin knockoff (circa 1085, Song Dynasty), which I doubted I’d find because of the intricacy of it. Alas, nothing much stood out when I passed through.
Further down, the entire end section of the market was people selling beads – bracelets, necklaces and the like. I circled back around. Do I go back to the front and look through the figurines again? As I walk, more art vendors are open, I see. Still not everyone, but there’s a landscape shot that looks nice – better quality, at least. I walk through again. Still a lot of empty booths. I walk down one aisle that’s virtually abandoned. That’s when something catches my eye. There’s no vendor in the booth. I step inside and begin flipping through a stack of paintings. An old man appears beside me. Are these yours? He speaks not a word of English, but is smiling and pointing to an eleven-digit phone number clipped to the side. He eagerly dials it. That’s when I come across, not a Li, but something that grabs my eye.
Everything I’ve mentioned thus far – the three Cuban paintings, the water bearer and the model, Li’s work – has been ‘tasteful’. Breasts and butts, yes, but no vulvae, no penetration; in other words, nothing ‘pornographic’. This one, however, was what you might call san dian qian lou, or full-frontal.[15] Cute Asian, slight of build, medium-sized za’er,[16] prominent bush. The artist, whom this other vendor had just called, appearing presently, similarly didn’t speak any English. She communicated with me by typing into a calculator and through my halting Mandarin. Did I really want this hanging on my wall?
[15: The literal translation is ‘three points all showing’; a euphemism for a naked woman.]
[16: Vulgar Beijing slang, ‘tits’.]
Yes, yes I did.
“Duo xiao qian?”[17] I asked. There was some haggling on the price, which involved a lot of typing back and forth into her cheap calculator. The artist, like the vendor in Hong Kong, stressed the pencil work (all by gesture, that is) put into the subject’s hips, she himmed and hawed, as they all will, and finally agreed to a negotiated price.
[17: How much does it cost?]
She, a woman of perhaps forty, had painted all these herself, she told me as I consulted the Lonely Planet phrasebook in my pocket; I asked, “Ni shi...” – flipping through the pages – “huajia ma?”[18]
[18: Are you the painter?]
“Shi, shi,”[19] she replied eagerly. She was proud of her work, flipped down a little more in the stack to show me a white woman in a similar pose (also san dian quan lou). I’d already seen that one while flipping through; it was also a lovely painting, but I’d decided to go with the Asian.
[19: Literally ‘I am, I am’, though is grammatically a way of just saying yes.]
“Wo xihuan zhege,”[20] I replied, tapping the one she was rolling up.
[20: ‘I like this one’, yet it can also simply mean ‘I like this’, which might explain why she then began pushing other full-frontal paintings on me.]
She brought out her phone. She went through her text messages, showing me a string of pictures she’d sent to someone, various other nude paintings of a similar sort. I didn’t have any more wall space, however, and one bush on my living room wall is enough. She wrote out her eleven-digit phone number on a scrap piece of paper, and scribbled her name in several chicken-scratch Chinese characters.
So, can you survive in Beijing without learning Mandarin? Yes, certainly you can, but I’m glad I put in the effort to learn what I did. Whether it’s the scams, taking pictures with the locals, or knowing the context when locals shout racial epithets, a vacation, to me, means immersing yourself in the place, the history, the culture, the experience. Beaches are well and good, but these engaging, enveloping trips are the sort of thing for me. And so, with that said, Hangug-e jeonjin...[21]
[21: Korean: Onward to Korea.]
Sources
“Languages”. US Department of State. http://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgove..., Acc. December 22, 2016.
Abdullah, Kia and Peter Watson. “Foreign Service Institute Language Difficulty Rankings”, Atlas and Boots, http://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-..., Acc. December 22, 2016.
Chao, Eveline. Niubi! The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School. New York: Plume, 2009
Coleman, Matt and Edmund Backhouse. Dirty Chinese: Everyday Slang from “What’s Up?” to “F*%# Off!”. Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 2010.
Frobose, Mark. Power Mandarin Accelerated. Champaign, Illinois: Language Audiobooks Inc., 2012
Humphreys, Andrew and Chen Chao. Top 10 Beijing. London: DK Eyewitness Travel, 2015
Lonely Planet. Mandarin Phrasebook & Dictionary, 8th Edition. Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, 2012.
Pimsleur. Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese I. Concord, Massachusetts: Simon and Schuster, 2000
Pimsleur. Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese II. Concord, Massachusetts: Simon and Schuster, 2002
Pimsleur. Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese III. Concord, Massachusetts: Simon and Schuster, 2003
Beads, Breasts, Bush, and Language Barriers at Beijing’s Panjiayuan Market[1]
[1: Wherever unavoidable, I will be translating Mandarin using the pinyin system, rather than Wade-Giles. Moreover, as I was in Beijing, and both of my primary sources (Pimsleur and Mark Frobose) use the ‘Pekingese’-accented Beijing dialect, which might be described as the pirate dialect of Mandarin for the frequency with which it contorts words to have an arr! sort of ending, the letter R may appear at the ends of pinyin translations where, elsewhere in the country, or standard Mandarin, it may not.]
Date: Monday, October 10th – Saturday, October 15th, 2016
You’re out at the Summer Palace, a cottage retreat for the Chinese emperor, built along a man-made lake. It’s an overcast day, and your tour guide has only given you an hour to walk down the length of this lake and explore around the palace. Beijing smog is everywhere and it looks like you’re in a post-apocalyptic film. More than one person is wearing a disposable medical mask. It’s here that you see one young woman in a low-cut shirt and a pushup bra, the first cleavage you’ve seen in days. Slight and petite, almost all women dress modestly. Unlike Hong Kong, where the hotel elevator screen played a Victoria’s Secret fashion show on repeat, Mainland China is much more reserved. Being white, you stick out like a sore thumb, and local try and sneak pictures with you. There’s a small island just inside the main gate of the palace itself, with a gazebo on it. Crossing the bridge towards it, a middle-aged Chinese man, just in front of you, turns, and, to someone behind you, he barks, “Yo, nigga!”[2]
[2: Na ge is a Chinese filler word, similar to the English like, um, uh, so, etc. It literally means ‘that one’.]
I was saying at Sunworld Dynasty Hotel, located at the corner of Wangfujing Avenue and Dengshikou Street, in the heart of downtown Beijing. The Forbidden City, Tienanmen Square and Beihai Park are within walking distance. It’s about an hour from the airport, where the cabbie zips in and out of traffic like he’s competing to become the next playable character in Mario Kart. Fake taxis are at the airport, meeting you in the terminal and, in decent English, offering you rides for double the price. It’s best to have an idea ahead of time as to what the ride should cost. Licensed taxis in Beijing are yellow, but sometimes even they will go off the meter and try to pocket a higher cost. Insist on dabiao,[3] while pointing at the meter, before going anywhere.
[3: Meter]
Just up the way is the Wangfujing Night Market, a back alley place where they sell deep-fried scorpions and millipedes on a stick, and all the cheap touristy stuff you’d expect at a dense Chinatown market. Be prepared to deal with very pushy salesmen – at one silk scroll stand, I actually walked away from the guy when, after I repeatedly told him I wanted to browse his stuff to find the right thing, he wouldn’t leave me alone and kept thrusting different things in my face. Oriental Plaza, a large mall, is a little further down, though I never quite made it there. Along the way there’s all sorts of designer fashion stores, tourism storefronts, and a Foreign Language Bookstore, where, had it been a little cheaper, I might have picked up a DVD set of The Qin Empire, a 2009 series set during the reign of Duke Xiao (381-338 BCE). The APM Mall, a five-storey Western-style mall, with a giant Apple store and a dozen decent restaurants, is across the road. It was here that, after struggling with the language, we were told to go to find a Subway restaurant; the hotel front desk, upon hearing the word subway, brought out a map of the underground train system. They like their thousand islands dressing here in China; the spicy chicken sandwich I got was bathed in it, and, a week before, in Hong Kong, I got a pizza with thousand islands instead of tomato sauce.[4]
[4: Both were pretty good, actually.]
Wangfujing is tourist central, and (despite the legion of cops with their bomb-sniffing dogs), the scammers are out. Mainly it’s the tea house scammers, young women trying to seduce you into a bar or tea house of their choosing, where your bill is going to several times what it should be. But there’s also calligraphy artists, rickshaw scammers and prostitutes. One night, upon leaving Sunworld Dynasty, a middle-aged woman, prowling outside the hotel, approached me and spoke softly in Mandarin. “Wo bu mingbai,” or, ‘I don’t understand’, I said.
In contrast to other scammers (though prostitution isn’t necessarily a ‘scam’), she spoke very little English. Your first cause for concern should be a high degree of fluency with strangers. She struggled, eventually said, “Lady... to your room.”
(I very much got the impression that she wasn’t offering her own services here, but rather those of other women.) “Bu, bu,”[5] I said, and walked away from her.
[5: Basically ‘no, no’, but in fact it’s a negative particle. Standard Mandarin doesn’t have direct translations for yes and no.]
For the better part of two years, I’ve been attempting to learn the speak Mandarin Chinese. It hasn’t been easy; the US Foreign Service Institute, which ranks the world’s languages by degree of difficulty to learn (and therefore teach to diplomatic staff), places Mandarin in Category IV, the hardest to learn, with an estimated 2,200 hours required, alongside Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean.[6]
[6: Category I, the easiest to learn (five hundred and seventy-five to six hundred hours) includes Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, etc. Category III contains the hardest of all European languages to learn, including Russian, Icelandic and Hungarian (which includes up to thirty-five language cases, compared to English, which, at most, has three – I, me, mine), along with most languages you might expect to be rather difficult – Urdu, Vietnamese, Nepali, Mongolian, Tamil, Tagalog, Burmese, etc. As I write this, I’m now dabbling in Korean, in preparation for another vacation a few years away; why am I yet again choosing a Category IV language destination?]
I am still quite amateurish, as evidenced by a ‘conversation’ I had with a Chinese in the flight from Macao. I think he was trying to ask if it would bother me to have his jacket draped over the back of his seat (he was sitting in front of my brother and I), but he spoke too quickly, and I was left merely to sputter “Wo bu mingbai.” This, too (along with the price), was the reason I hesitated when it came to The Qin Empire, the pre-imperial, Qin kingdom historical drama in the Foreign Language Bookstore; I would in no way be able to follow it, and the point at which I might be able to is still years away.
Out on Wangfujing, I attempted to practice with a couple women that were obviously tea house scammers, allegedly from Harbin. It was my first night there, cops were everywhere. Two women, one in a bright red coat and speaking decent English, and her friend, who seemed to only know a few words. Somehow it came out that I was learning Chinese, and they seized on this. “Ni Zhongwen mingzi jiao shenme?” the one with little English asked, interrupting her friend.
I did some quick mental calculation: mingzi is ‘name’, jiao shenme is ‘what called’ – asking my name? What I’d learned was ni jiao shenme mingzi. Wait, Zhongwen was in there – Chinese name, she’s asking my Chinese name.[7]
[7: I don’t have one, as I told her.]
Towards the end of the week, down at the Wangfujing Night Market, I ran into a similar situation of language improvisation. We were there late, getting a charcoal sketch done. Locals gathered in droves to see Westerners pose and watch the skill of this old Chinese artist. The market was closing up by the time we were on our way out. A group of five of six people, I’d say in their twenties, who’d watched the majority of the sketching session, followed us out. They seemed friendly enough, but they clearly spoke no English. One bigger guy, broad-chested and commanding in his presence, called out as I walked through the back alleyways, now closing up. He spat out some long sentence, then began repeating fragments of it. I picked out one word: zhaopian.
Ah, photograph. He wants a photograph. This is a common thing; foreigners often sneak you into selfies with covert use of a selfie stick, or asked to pose. “Hao,”[8] I say, and his girlfriend, a cute young woman, steps up and takes a couple pictures. I always tried to sneak in my own pictures with these locals, and after her boyfriend had clicked the camera, I handed over my phone and said, “Wo ye xiang zhaopian.”[9]
[8: Okay]
[9: I also want a photo.]
The hotel concierge had at least one employee that spoke excellent English, yet the front desk, more often than not, did not have a good grasp on it. Some of the women there spoke a little bit, and they were eager to help, but you really had to struggle to get your meaning across. On the phone with them, it would turn out, was even worse, as you couldn’t use gestures to make yourself understood. After about the third day of sleeping on paper-thin pillows, I could take no more and called down to try and get another one.
“Ni hao,”[10] came the voice on the phone.
[10: Hello]
This is where all those hours with my audio courses paid off, for, without even thinking about it, I found myself effortlessly uttering the words, “Ni hao, ni huishuo Yingwen ma?”[11]
[11: Hello, do you speak English?]
“Deng yi huir,”[12] she said, and then, momentarily, a new voice.
[12: Wait one moment.]
I requested another pillow. “Pee-low?” she asked, this one clearly with a heavy language barrier herself.
So I tried explaining it. “To put your head on, when you sleep. For the bed.”
“Ah, yes, yes,” she exclaimed.
Five minutes later, our housekeeper showed up. I answered the door expecting (and yet half not expecting) to see her with a pillow. When I opened the door, her hands were in pockets, and her face went from relaxed and confident, to one of confusion. Of course, she had no pillow.
This was the same housekeeper we’d had all week, a young, twenty-something woman who was always very friendly, with a beaming smile and would always greet us when we saw her in the hallway. Yet the past few days had made it clear she spoke perhaps five words of English. She said, “See-sors?”
“Scissors?” I asked.
She held up a finger, pulled out her phone. She brought up an app, or a message of some kind, with a single English word, which apparently had been her instruction: Scissors.
I smiled. “Deng yi huir,” I said, and ran back, past the bathroom to the bed. I picked up one of the pillows, appeared back in the doorway and said, struggling, “Geng duo de zhege,” which, while the grammar is probably horrible, roughly translates to ‘Another of this’. Her face lit up; she understood exactly what I meant and went scurrying off.
On the final the final day in Beijing, we visited the Panjiayuan Market, a large, sprawling flea-market sort of place with as many as 3,000 vendors. I was advised to get the hotel concierge to write the name of the market in Chinese characters for the cab. They already had business cards with various attractions on them, and circled it. Through the crowded, free-for-all streets and, quickly, we arrived. It was here that, in the span of three minutes, I saw two different young women in skintight, oil-black leather pants, as though they were wearing the bottom half of a dominatrix’s getup.
Inside the gate are a number of walking streets and long, two-storey buildings of various cramped shops. The upper level, accessible by a balcony, was the art section. Yet, though many of these shops did sell little figurines of elephants, panthers and dragons, the shelves crammed in the dank, closet-sized storefronts, many also sold superfluous material. There was coffee and tea, there were numerous public washrooms with squat toilets and trough urinals, and there was a shop that sold packing material – for example, cylindrical cardboard tubes (¥10, or about CAD$2) to sheath paintings. To the right was an open courtyard, where vendors gathered in rows, laid out a blanket and packed it full of nicknacks and curios. It was still early and many vendors were still setting up, though all were eager to try and market their wares. Here are Buddha statues, tea sets, jade carvings or little brass figurines of lions, qilins, xiezhis,[13] dragons and more. There are signs for a used book market a little farther down, and at the back side of this open courtyard are tremendous concrete statues of the above Chinese creatures, the sort of thing you might put out front a bank or mall.
[13: A unicorn-goat-like creature that instinctively knew the innocent from the guilty, and would butt its horn against the guilty. The animal was used as a symbol by the Censorate, an Internal Affairs-sort of bureau responsible for rooting out corruption amongst government officials.]
We began to amble through the rows. You have to be careful not to point at anything or make eye contact with the vendor, or they’ll instantly get pushy, though they’re not as bad here as at Wangfujing. One common figurine here was an elongated dragon, standing erect on its hind legs, stretched out. It had that slippery, serpentine look, yet I already had two dragon statues from Hong Kong, and didn’t really care for a third. I would have liked to have gotten a qilin, a semi-giraffe-like Chinese mythical figure, revered for discerning between trustworthiness and deceit, yet these seemed to only come in a couple different, mass-produced stances, and none of them looked as flattering – or as fearsome – as the larger statues you can see outside businesses, or at the Forbidden City.
Down the back side of the two-storey businesses, and then you come to a roofed block of booths, each encased in a cage-like sort of chain-link fence. Here are large no smoking signs, numerous Chinese characters, and the words ‘Art Section’ in English.
When I was in Hong Kong, I’d already picked up four paintings – one of horses in gallop, one of the Great Wall, and two reminiscent of paintings I’d picked two years before, in Cuba. I wasn’t really keen on finding wall space for another, yet I had some time to kill, and this was my last day in China, so let’s take a quick walk through. These booths were still opening up, and a good two thirds of them were empty, or locked cases with nothing on display. People were pinning their work to the sides of their booth, clipping paintings to one another. There was another art section on the upper floors of those buildings, which I mentioned earlier, but that was more in the realm of fancy, art-dealer-style paintings. Here is where the cheap, amateur painters gathered. Most of this was calligraphy-based, a white canvas with a handful of Chinese characters painted on it.
This too was a common scam in Beijing. A calligraphy painter or art dealer will approach you in the street, advertise their gallery, come up with some story about struggling artists. Wangfujing seems to be a central hub for this as well. Like the tea house scams, someone will approach you with excellent English – in this case, it’s usually men – trying to befriend you with questions about where you come from, etc. Here they’ll try and wrangle you into coming to their gallery, where everything is highly overpriced, and cheaply reproduced. There was one gentleman operating right out of the hotel, giving him the veneer of being above board, who entered into a long spiel about painting your name or Chinese zodiac symbol, and then pleas of how he’s trying to establish his business. And I saw at least two other art scammers hanging out in the general vicinity of the hotel in the same capacity as the tea house ladies and the madam. At Panjiayuan, however, I have no doubt that this calligraphy is more ‘authentic’ (though, like all art here, it is excessively reproduced, and you can see multiple copies of the same work at different booths), and the prices are probably fairer, because of your negotiation. That being said, while I understand calligraphy has its place in Chinese history, it’s an art form that doesn’t much interest me.
Much of what else I saw on this initial sweep through was not of great quality. There was some Buddhist imagery that looked more Indian than Chinese, and a few animals. I recall seeing a tiger, but its head was misshapen, as were a few other animals. No dragons, no other mythical figures like the qilin, xiezhi or huli jing.[14] One painting I came across, down a row nearly abandoned, featured a topless woman, yet her arm was pressed censoriously into her breasts, and the art quality was lacking.
[14: Literally ‘fox spirit’, this creature is a mythical shapeshifting seductress, simultaneous a cunning fox and a ravishing woman. This could have been an interesting image put to the canvas, though it wasn’t, at the time, one I was looking for. Neither did I see any figurines of such.]
Two years before, in Holguín, Cuba, I had picked up a couple of nude paintings at the local market, down the beach from our resort in Guardalavaca. Three different resorts hugged the beach, and at the far end was a small market that sold bullhorn and wood carvings, hats and shirts and humidors with Che’s face on them, sandals and other beachwear, and numerous oil paintings. My friend Andrew, as we walked through for the first time, spotted one of a buxom woman, kneeling, her back to the ‘camera’, yet turned so the viewer could catch sight of one breast, and grabbed me by the arm to say, “Oh, dude...” I bought it, as well as another, this one of a woman on her back, her biceps pushed forward to accentuate herself. Then, on our last day in Cuba, Andrew made one last trip to the market, and I went with him, where I came across a duplicate of a Boris Vallejo painting, with a nude angel and demon seductively close to kissing. Given that that was then the background art on my phone, I also had to buy that one.
(Little did I know, there was a tax on art in Cuba. I’d tightly rolled the paintings to protect them, wrapping them in newspaper and dirty laundry, and airport security had easily spotted the tube in my luggage during x-ray. They’d pulled me aside, told me to pull them out, then sent me over to a tax desk, where I had to roll out three sensuous nude paintings to a cute, early twenties senorita, where she looked them over, stamped them and charged me a $9 tax.)
Fast forward to Hong Kong, where I went to the Temple Street Night Market, slightly hidden behind a cluster of roadside sex toy shops, filled to the brim with dildos, vibrators and blowup dolls. Here I was looking for (among other things) knockoffs of a Sichuanese artist named Li Zhuangping. He’d aroused some controversy when, a few years ago, he’d painted a series of nudes of his twenty-three-year-old stepdaughter, Li Qin. While I didn’t find anything resembling Li, I did find two others, one of a flat-chested water girl and one of a model, posing, resting on an elbow.
I still had an eye out, therefore, on this walk through the art section of Panjiayuan, for a Li copy. That, and a Li Gonglin knockoff (circa 1085, Song Dynasty), which I doubted I’d find because of the intricacy of it. Alas, nothing much stood out when I passed through.
Further down, the entire end section of the market was people selling beads – bracelets, necklaces and the like. I circled back around. Do I go back to the front and look through the figurines again? As I walk, more art vendors are open, I see. Still not everyone, but there’s a landscape shot that looks nice – better quality, at least. I walk through again. Still a lot of empty booths. I walk down one aisle that’s virtually abandoned. That’s when something catches my eye. There’s no vendor in the booth. I step inside and begin flipping through a stack of paintings. An old man appears beside me. Are these yours? He speaks not a word of English, but is smiling and pointing to an eleven-digit phone number clipped to the side. He eagerly dials it. That’s when I come across, not a Li, but something that grabs my eye.
Everything I’ve mentioned thus far – the three Cuban paintings, the water bearer and the model, Li’s work – has been ‘tasteful’. Breasts and butts, yes, but no vulvae, no penetration; in other words, nothing ‘pornographic’. This one, however, was what you might call san dian qian lou, or full-frontal.[15] Cute Asian, slight of build, medium-sized za’er,[16] prominent bush. The artist, whom this other vendor had just called, appearing presently, similarly didn’t speak any English. She communicated with me by typing into a calculator and through my halting Mandarin. Did I really want this hanging on my wall?
[15: The literal translation is ‘three points all showing’; a euphemism for a naked woman.]
[16: Vulgar Beijing slang, ‘tits’.]
Yes, yes I did.
“Duo xiao qian?”[17] I asked. There was some haggling on the price, which involved a lot of typing back and forth into her cheap calculator. The artist, like the vendor in Hong Kong, stressed the pencil work (all by gesture, that is) put into the subject’s hips, she himmed and hawed, as they all will, and finally agreed to a negotiated price.
[17: How much does it cost?]
She, a woman of perhaps forty, had painted all these herself, she told me as I consulted the Lonely Planet phrasebook in my pocket; I asked, “Ni shi...” – flipping through the pages – “huajia ma?”[18]
[18: Are you the painter?]
“Shi, shi,”[19] she replied eagerly. She was proud of her work, flipped down a little more in the stack to show me a white woman in a similar pose (also san dian quan lou). I’d already seen that one while flipping through; it was also a lovely painting, but I’d decided to go with the Asian.
[19: Literally ‘I am, I am’, though is grammatically a way of just saying yes.]
“Wo xihuan zhege,”[20] I replied, tapping the one she was rolling up.
[20: ‘I like this one’, yet it can also simply mean ‘I like this’, which might explain why she then began pushing other full-frontal paintings on me.]
She brought out her phone. She went through her text messages, showing me a string of pictures she’d sent to someone, various other nude paintings of a similar sort. I didn’t have any more wall space, however, and one bush on my living room wall is enough. She wrote out her eleven-digit phone number on a scrap piece of paper, and scribbled her name in several chicken-scratch Chinese characters.
So, can you survive in Beijing without learning Mandarin? Yes, certainly you can, but I’m glad I put in the effort to learn what I did. Whether it’s the scams, taking pictures with the locals, or knowing the context when locals shout racial epithets, a vacation, to me, means immersing yourself in the place, the history, the culture, the experience. Beaches are well and good, but these engaging, enveloping trips are the sort of thing for me. And so, with that said, Hangug-e jeonjin...[21]
[21: Korean: Onward to Korea.]
Sources
“Languages”. US Department of State. http://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgove..., Acc. December 22, 2016.
Abdullah, Kia and Peter Watson. “Foreign Service Institute Language Difficulty Rankings”, Atlas and Boots, http://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-..., Acc. December 22, 2016.
Chao, Eveline. Niubi! The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School. New York: Plume, 2009
Coleman, Matt and Edmund Backhouse. Dirty Chinese: Everyday Slang from “What’s Up?” to “F*%# Off!”. Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 2010.
Frobose, Mark. Power Mandarin Accelerated. Champaign, Illinois: Language Audiobooks Inc., 2012
Humphreys, Andrew and Chen Chao. Top 10 Beijing. London: DK Eyewitness Travel, 2015
Lonely Planet. Mandarin Phrasebook & Dictionary, 8th Edition. Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd, 2012.
Pimsleur. Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese I. Concord, Massachusetts: Simon and Schuster, 2000
Pimsleur. Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese II. Concord, Massachusetts: Simon and Schuster, 2002
Pimsleur. Pimsleur’s Mandarin Chinese III. Concord, Massachusetts: Simon and Schuster, 2003
The Harem and the Barbarian [PART 2]
--- continued from PART 1---
“The Summer Palace,” says Bruce Lee, “was built by the Emperor Qianlong. He liked to travel down to Shanghai, always brought back the best tea, fruits, concubines. But there was one thing he couldn’t bring back, and that was a garden there. So he had one built here.” Presumably Bruce Lee was talking about one of the imperial gardens in Suzhou here.
The entire day had been overcast, with a little rain just as we were heading towards the Forbidden City. Now the sky is quite grey.
“There are two ways to see the Summer Palace,” says the guide as we drove. “One is to walk. We get there, you go alongside Kunming Lake to the palace. The other, you take a boat. It costs you an extra–”
And I don’t remember what the number was. He left it to use to decide what we wanted to do. The Australian woman sat up front and didn’t voice an opinion either way. There was some discussion with the British couple, and then we decided we were fine with walking. “Okay,” says Bruce Lee. Like the tea house (and also a pearl store he took us too), I’m certain he was profiting off of these little extras, so he didn’t seem too happy we decided to walk.
Qianlong (1711-1799) built this palace – he’s Qing Dynasty, which followed the Ming – so there’ll be no speculation here on Qiyu romping about with his harem. The palace surrounds Kunming Lake, a large, serene body of water. You walk in not far from the Seventeen-Arch Bridge, an elaborate stone bridge leading to South Lake Island. To the right, down the side of the lake, is the palace itself, and beside that a Buddhist temple on a hill.
“Free time,” says Bruce Lee, who’d given us our brief history lesson on Qianlong in the van. “Meet back here, one hour. The palace is down that way,” he says, pointing.
“What’s over that bridge?”
He looks. “Nothing,” and then gave a quick explanation as to the number seventeen in Chinese numerology.
There wasn’t enough time to see the palace properly. We had to rush back to fit within the one-hour time limit. No one went over the bridge – which is a shame because, as I would later read, that was the location of a small temple I’d have liked to have seen. Leaving the Temple of Heaven, I’d even asked Bruce Lee about it, but he wasn’t understanding my pronunciation, and when I mentioned the Yuan Dynasty, he smiled politely and shook his head. The Summer Palace was from the Qing. I don’t think he knew about it.
Yelü Chucai, one of the founders of the Yuan, was an administrative adviser to both Genghis and Ogedei Khan, following the Mongol conquest of the Jin Dynasty. He’s an interesting figure – he stood at the great height of six foot eight, had a beard down to his waist at the age of twenty-five, and may have been the last person to be able to read and write the Khitan language – oh, and he also may have prevented a genocide of as many as 23 million people.
With an average depth of about five feet, Kunming is a man-made lake which Qianlong had commissioned, however it was built out of the existing Wengshan Pond and Xihu Lake, which are much older than the Qing Dynasty. Yelü was buried there. I knew his small temple was around the lake somewhere, but I also knew it wasn’t on or near Longevity Hill, where the palace and the Buddhist temple were located. Probably somewhere in the backwoods, I reasoned. Bruce Lee was unaware of it. So along the shoreline we walked towards the palace and away from the Seventeen-Arch Bridge. Young women would try to use their selfie sticks covertly to sneak pictures with foreigners, and the sky darkened until it looked like it might rain, but never did.
Back to the entry point, and there’s the British couple, who entered into a long story about their travels through Siberia and Mongolia, the substandard conditions of the Trans-Siberian and the experience of sleeping in a Mongolian ger out in the steppe. The Australian woman is nowhere to be seen, and neither in Bruce Lee. Did he say to meet us here, or out in the parking lot? No, it was definitely here. If we go out to the parking lot, we go through the turnstile and can’t get back in. He definitely said here. That Australian seemed pretty confused – she thought he said two hours instead of one? Well, he’s fifteen minutes late, did he say two hours? No, he made it clear to her that it was one hour. One hour doesn’t seem like a lot. Did you see the whole thing? We had to run. Hey, there’s another tour guide (they all carry those little collapsible flags), maybe we should ask her to call him (Bruce had given us his number in case we got lost). She doesn’t speak English.
I wasn’t that confident in my Mandarin capabilities to ask this woman to make a phone call, so I didn’t volunteer to try and ask. Finally the British woman got in touch with him. Meet by this pagoda, a little to the left. He’ll be there soon.
It was more than an hour and a half we were at the Summer Palace, because, at the last minute, the Australian had decided she did want to take the boat, and Bruce Lee then had to get her in line to pay for it. I could have quite easily crossed that bridge (I stood not far from it for thirty minutes), where, on South Lake Island, I would learn later, Yelü Chucai Memorial Temple was located.
Back to the hotel, where hopefully we’d find the English-speaking concierge, Eason, to get our cheap deal for Mutianyu. Everyone else was quoting much higher prices. Bruce Lee had offered us a private tour (assuming he didn’t get an assignment from his company), but it was more than double the price. Out on Wangfujing, in a couple of one-room storefronts next to souvenir shops selling carved wooden elephants and many-armed Buddhas, and t-shirts featuring President Obama written as ‘Oba-Mao’, were three or four different tour companies. These were sales offices, and probably all had contacts to the same company, as all their tours were the same, varying in price by a couple of yuan. Mutianyu was offered here, combined with the Ming Tombs, for only a half a day, and it was still more expensive than what Eason had offered.
The previous day, without having booked anything through the hotel, had been a free roam day. This is the heart of Beijing. Beihai Park is up this way somewhere, I said looking at my pocketbook map, and we can circle around this way for–
If you need a wake up call for the authoritarian nature of the Chinese regime, just walk through Tienanmen Square.
This was the site of bloody democratic protests in 1989, producing one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century, that of the Unknown Rebel, or Tank Man, who prevented the passage of a People’s Liberation Army tank column with his body. Like the National Mall in Washington DC, if one is going to hold a political protest in China (wouldn’t necessarily recommend; you may find a slightly different reaction than that of Washington’s Metropolitan PD), this is the place to do it. This was where Falun Gong protestors self-immolated in 2001, leading to the deaths of two and maiming of many others.[17] This was also the site of a 2013 Uyghur separatist suicide attack, claimed by Xinjiang’s Turkestan Islamic Party, which played out as a sort of Chinese version of the 2016 attack in Nice, France.[18]
[17: This incident is highly disputed. Falun Gong leaders have disavowed it, and the teachings are explicitly anti-suicide. There are many inconsistencies in the story put out by state-run media. Public sympathy for Falun Gong plummeted after the event. It has been suggested this was staged by the Communist Party to discredit the movement.]
[18: Unlike in Nice, there was no exchange of gunfire. Instead, the van the perpetrators used burst into flames, killing those inside. Two others died in the rampage, and thirty-eight others were injured.]
“It’s just up this way,” I say, looking at my map and comparing it to a map outside a subway station. The Beijing haze is omnipresent, and everything looks drab and dirty. It’s crowded on Chang’an Avenue. People are hawking and spitting everywhere. The women dress more modestly, with very few low cut shirts, though tight black leather pants and skirts seem to be a bit of a trend. There are also far fewer piercings (even the ears), hair dye or tattoos. A few women wear high heels, though more common are the Kim Jong-il-style platform sneakers. The men are dressed largely in Western fashion, with sports jerseys and stylish jackets. A lot of the younger men are sporting the hipster fauxhawk, but Asians manage to pull it off without looking like pretentious fad-following snobs. More than one person is wearing a disposable medical mask. There are tourists here, a few Westerners, but also many tourists from elsewhere in China. You can tell this by the number of them that try to snap pictures with you.
And there’s Chinese PLA soldiers everywhere, stationed on every corner. Rigid, military stances, in green uniforms with hats and white gloves. I was wearing my GoPro, and also had my camera attached to my belt. Their eyes were on me – all of them. No one says anything, I act normal. There’s a tourist over there, white, dusty blond hair, and he seems a little lost. He’s asking a PLA soldier something while pointing to a folding map. I don’t want to talk to the PLA, as I don’t want to risk my cameras being confiscated (some of them have that look in their eye), and I’d really prefer not have to present them my tourist visa, so I observe this tourist. The soldier smiles politely, points; there’s clearly a language barrier. The tourist smiles back, points to the camera around his neck. He wants a picture. The soldier’s smile is gone and he’s waving his hands as he steps back. Okay, no pictures of the soldiers.
You find yourself being shuffled into a lineup, half the sidewalk being blocked by fences. There’s a sign in English: security check. You’re in this line for maybe twenty minutes. Police are up ahead – not PLA (though you still see them everywhere), but police, in dark blue uniforms, with flashing epaulettes and bomb-sniffing dogs. You’re being shepherded into a checkpoint with metal detectors and airport-style x-ray conveyor belt scanners. Backpacks, purses, bags through the scanner. My cameras? I point, but they’re more concerned with getting people through the line. They wave me through.
Now you have access to the underpass, which takes you across Chang’an and into the square. Tienanmen itself, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace, also built during Zhu Di’s reign in 1420 – along the Dragon Line that keeps everything symmetrical for Heaven’s pleasure – is to the right. There’s now a giant picture of Mao on the front of it. Behind that is parkland, and behind that is the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City.
Across the road is the square, a wide open expanse filled with people. Mao’s Mausoleum is here, and so is the Great Hall of the People and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, an obelisk in the square’s centre dedicated to communist revolutionary martyrs. There’s a ministry to the east, and just to the north of the obelisk is an colossal bouquet of flowers. PLA soldiers are here, too, marching in military fashion.
It was this overt display of the Chinese police state that made me hesitate, the following day, on emailing a friend. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are blocked. So is Google and its affiliated companies. Outlook worked, so when I returned home from my tour with Bruce Lee, I sent an update to a friend back in Canada. Today we toured the Forbidden City, I wrote. I went on to joke, My new life goal: become the Chinese emperor and gain three thousand concubines. Time to form a new dynasty.
Sipping from a Suntory Japanese whiskey (a little sweet for my taste) and eating a ripoff Cadbury Dairy Milk bar named Milka, I realized that if the hotel registered our passports with the Chinese government upon arrival (they did), that there was a chance, perhaps a slim chance, that they might be monitoring the hotel wifi, and they might not take to kindly to the words ‘form a new dynasty’. I added, (I really hope the Chinese government isn’t monitoring these; for clarification Mr. Xi,[19] I am not advocating any sort of regime change, this is joke about wanting my own harem).
[19: Even here I carefully chose the words ‘Mr. Xi’, as I thought his given name, Jinping, or the word ‘President’ might be too many keywords for an algorithm to hone in on.]
Back across the road, and now there’s a contingent of soldiers decked out in full camo, their helmet straps on, and holding assault rifles. To the west of the Tienanmen parkland is what I thought was Beihai Park, the imperial garden enjoyed by the emperors. On any map, it’s all green, but it turns out the whole thing is the headquarters of the Communist Party and the State Council. It’s all walled, there’s guards everywhere, soldiers are marching down the sidewalk in formation. There’s also cameras everywhere, because whenever a delivery vehicle shows up at any of the gated access points, the massive wooden doors are already opening and five or six soldiers are ready to march out and aid the driver with his pallet jack. There are a few shops and restaurants along this street, and there’s the odd hutong (a narrow, self-contained alley or street community, often with small shops) branching off, but for the most part its brick walls on both sides – the Forbidden City to the east, Zhongnanhai (as it’s called) to the west.
Finally, north to Wenjin Street (it becomes Jingshan Front, on the back side of the Forbidden City, around a curve). Beihai Park is just over there. There’s no smocking in the park, and no lewd cehavior, proclaims a Chinglish sign. Inside the gate and you see the white dagoba atop the hill in the distance. This sits at the zenith of Qiongdao Island, across the bridge. Just the other side of the bridge is a patio with a few restaurants, including one that sells tripe and a dish simply labelled ‘Reasonable’, as well as a pretty good Kung Pao chicken. The majority of the park is the Northern Sea, and you can see plenty of small boats as you circle around the island to the west.
This is where a frolicking young emperor might spend a relaxing day with a gaggle of courtesans. There’s a dozen of them with you, including a young woman named Tang, who you’ve recently developed a bit of a crush on. You’ll eventually give her the title of imperial noble consort, and she’ll be buried alongside you when you die (she’ll also be... ahem... helped to the grave so she can be buried at the same time). She playfully splashes water at you from the Northern Sea as eunuchs paddle the dragon boat. Two others you like, Xi’er and Gongjingxian, giggle playfully as you splash her back. Six other women in another dragon boat are threatening the head eunuch with death by a thousand cuts if he doesn’t bump your own boat for a laugh.
Suxiao is there, too, but she’s seven months pregnant, and is relaxing towards the rear of the boat. The doctors are quite confident the child will be a boy; all the auspicious signs are there. Daoist fortune tellers are predicting a strong young lad. Jianji, they suggest, is a good name. You are currently twenty-six years old, and by now have two other children. Those were both born from your first wife, Xiaoyuanjing, and both are girls. (With three thousand women in your harem, you probably have a number of other children as well now that you’re four years into your reign, but they’re most likely all girls as well, or else their names might have made it into the historical record.) Officially (this was the deal reached with the war minister when your brother was pushed into retirement), your nephew is the crown prince; your brother’s line is meant to be the one that holds the throne, while your own fades back into the aristocracy. With the birth of a son, however... well, there are legal scholars looking into that for you.[20]
[20: I’m completely messing around with the timeline for the purpose of my narrative. In actuality, Zhu Jianji was born in 1448, before Qiyu ascended to the throne. This is probably what elevated Suxiao within the ranks of the harem. Jianji was designated crown prince in 1452, and died within a year – possibly by poisoning. In fact, he would have already been dead at the time I’m setting this particular outing to Beihai Park (late 1453).]
Lihua has sent you another letter (covertly, of course, without the knowledge of her darling husband). Her early warning of the attack on Red Salt Lake proved invaluable, and your commanders were able to prevent a devastating raid. There was some... unfortunate collateral damage, when your men massacred a group of Mongol women and children, but terms like ‘war crimes’ haven’t been invented yet, so you’re not too concerned about it.[21] Esen is, however, is quite irate about the whole affair, your sister writes. He hasn’t yet figured out how to diplomatically demand reparations, as, after all, there’s a lot of your own people either in the ground or in barbarian beds because of raids he’s conducted. Why not... you can sense the hesitancy with which your sister writes... why not, offer another marriage alliance? Esen would probably accept, she writes. Her own value as a piece on the board kind of diminished after you, ahem, retired your brother, but with a new emperor comes a new opportunity to make peace – by sending a daughter. Esen has just named his son Amasanj as his heir, and before the Khalkha Mongols or the Manchurian tribes can offer wives, why not send an offer yourself?
[21: Again, this happened in 1473. Both Qiyu and Esen would be long dead if this was accurate to the timeline.]
You came to Beihai today to forget about such statecraft, but even as you hold Tang’s hand, the comfort in her touch isn’t quite enough. As the other girls splash water at the next boat, your new crush pats you on the back, nuzzles herself into you for comfort. She can imagine what you’re going through; if she ever has a daughter, you might one day be contemplating sending that girl away to the wastelands of Inner Asia.
You leave the girls, Suxiao and Tang included, with the eunuchs. Go, have fun, paddle around the lake, you tell them. You need some privacy for private contemplation. Suxiao, holding her stomach as a eunuch helps her off the dragon boat, gives you a kiss before you leave them – she’s not as confident as the Daoists at court that her child will be a boy, and wants to drop a few hints that shipping away daughters would be... well, perhaps ill-fated. You kiss her on the forehead, but tell her to get back in the boat, have some fun with the other concubines. You leave her there, watching you go, as you climb the stone path across the way from the dock.
In the centre of Qiongdao Island, at it’s highest peak, is the white dagoba, a forty meter Buddhist stupa. (Actually, this was built about two centuries later, but let’s just go with it.) It’s a place of meditation. The outer ring of the island is a brick path going all the way around, partly covered by wood-framed corridors and quiet rock gardens filled with the same jagged, coral-reef-type scholar’s rocks you have in the Imperial Garden at the north end of the palace. Branching off from that circular path are perhaps a dozen winding stone staircases leading up to the stupa, and to a Buddhist temple on the east side of the island. It’s all very green here, and within two minutes, you don’t even hear the concubines giggling anymore. A twist, a turn, a sweat breaking out as you climb (perhaps you’ve been enjoying too much Beijing duck), and there’s the stupa. You find a kneeling bench, close your eyes, and contemplate. Should you send one of your daughters with Xiaoyuanjing to the grasslands?
Outside the hotel, taxis are blaring their horns as they fly up the bike lane. Public buses running with electrical trolley car connections to the overhead grid cut in and out of traffic, their connector arms swaying back and forth on a hinge as they change lanes. There’s a Ferrari delivery van parked in the lot out back. The middle-aged woman that hangs around here pimping out Chinese prostitutes isn’t yet out, but it’s still early. I walk through the giant revolving door of the hotel. There’s that same gentleman with the crooked teeth trying to hock his calligraphy. Ah, here’s Eason, thankfully. Mutianyu? Yes, yes, I can book a car for you. Eight hundred, yes? He picks up the phone. This too, I’m certain, was an off-the-books deal Eason was arranging with his driver, a man named Wong. Wong would not speak any English, but if there were issues, he would call Eason directly. We would leave the following morning.
It was about ninety minutes’ drive, on a long, winding, zigzaggy course. Wong drove in silence for a time, before popping in a CD of Chinese songs and playing it on repeat. He was a more reasoned driver, not going onto the shoulder to zip ahead one car length, blaring his horn every thirty seconds or cutting up the bike lanes. We passed by a Wumart – a convenience store ripoff of a certain American big box store, with the same font and colour scheme – and a Drunk Beer and Coffee, then up the highway towards the airport until we entered a series of suburban, and then finally country roads. The Beijing smog never lifts. Signs can be seen every ten minutes or so once you’re in the country, Mutianyu written in the Latin alphabet alongside a block of Chinese text.
This is China’s wonder, often called the Eighth Wonder of the World. It’s often said it can be seen from space (it can’t). It (roughly) runs along what is the modern Inner Mongolian border, a vast province larger in area than Ontario, though elongated, starting in the Gobi and hooking around the eastern end of Mongolia proper to reach all the way to the Siberian border in Manchuria. Parts of it stretch across the Manchurian provinces up to the Yellow Sea, and there are even sections in Mongolia proper, though these are now little more than ridges in the grasslands. Measured by Russian standards, the Wall stretches across three timezones (measured by Chinese standards, it’s only one, because all of China conforms to a single timezone, Beijing time).
When you get to Mutianyu, there’s first a bus, then a cable car. There is a walking path, but you wouldn’t want to walk it. There’s a placard there, in Chinese, English and Mongolian Cyrillic, proclaiming when the Mutianyu site was first constructed (1404), its modern renovation (1983) and opening to the public (1988), as well as a sign denoting the cable car precautions, which prohibits, in broken Chinglish, drunkards, the insane, and women who suffer from habitual abortions.
The crowds are not thick here, and there’s no wait for the cable car, which takes you up a steep green mountainside, the bottom of the cable car brushing a tree as you go. The forest coverage here is ninety-six percent, so it looks today very much like it would have looked two hundred years ago, or two thousand years ago for that matter. The stone is new (relatively). The Wall (a bit of a misnomer as there’s no singular wall) began its first incarnation more than 2,000 years ago. This one, which is virtually gone now, was built of rammed earth. The First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, is often credited with beginning the Wall in the 210s BCE, but in reality his project was to link up a series of state walls each maintained by feuding principalities during the end of the Zhou Dynasty. The First Emperor was a ruthless, brutal tyrant, and his rammed earth wall was built by a workforce of hundreds of thousands by royal fiat. “Qin’s ideologues would have approved of Machiavelli, and of Fascism: power was the only virtue.”[22] The stone wall you see today was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The purpose of the Wall was to define the northern frontier, and to keep out the barbarians – men like Esen. When the Ming came to power, a complete overhaul of the northern defences was needed, and thus we have the modern tourist attraction.
[22: Man, pg. 25.]
Leaving the cable car, you see a little restaurant and patio area where people just litter over the side of the mountain, then a staircase. It leads to a terrace with a stone inscription and a set of stairs–
There, over the barrier, you can see it. The perpetual Beijing haze is strong even here, in the mountains, this far from the city, but you can still see down the ridge of the mountain, curving here and there, guard towers spread along the snaking dragon. Then it turns to the left, up a steep incline, Chinese characters written across the hillside. It was truly like stepping into fantasy – stepping into history. Men died building this, men died defending this. Defence at the northern frontier – this was a project that was ongoing for centuries, for dynasties.
You climb up onto the Wall. It hugs the top of the mountains. On the far side is Inner Mongolia. It’s about as green as can be. Steep slopes on either side of the Wall. There’s one camera on a pole perhaps a kilometre away, and folding tables inside every third or fourth guard tower selling Tsingtao beer and bottled water. These – plus the Beijing smog and the tourists – are the only indications you’re walking along a twenty-first century tourist site, instead of a fifteen century military stronghold.
Picture this: the year is 1568. You’re a young man, perhaps twenty-five years old. No, you’re no longer Zhu Qiyu. We’re going to jump ahead more than a century. Qiyu didn’t have too many good days left after that outing to Beihai Park in 1453 anyway – he was deposed by the retired emperor in 1457. He may have died of a sickness, or he may have been conveniently murdered by eunuch assassins acting on orders from the brother he’d had confined to house arrest. He’d been twenty-eight years old. His son had predeceased him, as had his beloved Suxiao. The rest of his concubines had been ordered to commit suicide upon his death. His first wife, Xiaoyuanjing, survived the whole mess, and the resulting court purges by the reinstated brother, possibly because she’d hidden Qizhen’s son, the crown prince that was supposed to succeed her ex-husband until Qiyu deposed the lad. Her daughters, Princess Gu’an and an unnamed daughter who refused to marry and instead became a Buddhist nun, also survived.
But anyway, let’s forget about him. Now we’ve gone a century ahead and you’re a Chinese military officer. You’re fairly well off, have a darling wife back home in Guandong Province, whose currently overseeing a small handful of labourers farming wet rice on your estate. You haven’t seen her, or any woman for that matter, in two years. You’ve got enough money to buy yourself a command. You are currently standing halfway up an unbroken staircase of brick that stretches for more than six hundred steps at close to a forty-five degree angle. It’s December, you have snow on your uniform. You’d never seen snow until you worked your way into this command. You oversee five other men no older than yourself, the youngest a mere sixteen. It’s midnight and you’re looking down the snowy mountainside into the abyss. Five hundred years from now, it’ll be Inner Mongolia, a province of your country, but for now, it is the edge of the known world. And your sworn duty is to defend the very cradle of civilization at your back from the beasts beyond.
It really is like something out of Game of Thrones. You are the watcher on the wall, the shield that guards the realms of men. Only your wall isn’t fantasy, it isn’t a fictionalization of Hadrian’s wall stretching across the thinnest part of an island, and you aren’t defending against ice zombies or giants (or Scots). And nor is it made of ice. No, your wall is more than 45 million cubic metres of brick, and stretches through mountain, desert and plain for a distance greater than that of the Arctic Ocean to Panama. And your enemy, the ghost in the night that could have scouts even now in these Inner Mongolian hills, the virtual centaurs fused at the hip with their horses, are the very origin of the term ‘barbarians’.
Esen, too, is dead now. He died in 1455, two years before Qiyu did. Esen, however, was a nobody, who’s great claim to fame was capturing a emperor (a feat which ultimately gained him nothing). He’d been leader of the western barbarian groups, the Oirat, and as such had no leg to stand on when it came to pronouncements about his heritage and noble bloodline. He was just a warlord, a strongman. The new guy, however, has the lineage, has the undivided political support, and has the name: Altan Khan (it literally translates to ‘Golden Leader’[23]). He is simultaneously politically cunning and villainously barbaric: He’s recently accepted some 16,000 Chinese refugees fleeing their homeland because of persecution of their religion (some might say cult).[24] He is also strengthening his family’s stranglehold on the throne and gaining himself a powerful ally by creating the position of Dalai Lama in Tibet.[25] How is he barbarous? Well, he’s married his granddaughter for a start. In fact it nearly sparked a Mongol civil war, as the girl was betrothed to another. She’s seventeen, and Altan is sixty.[26] In fact, your informants operating on the north side of the Wall just recently brought that information back.
[23: He also had a twin sister named Mönggön, or Silver.]
[24: 1551. They would go on to found the modern Inner Mongolian capital of Hohhot.]
[25: 1578. Several princes of Altan’s family, beginning with his grandson, would be discovered as the reincarnated Dalai Lama until the corruption was outlawed by our old friend Qianlong, the commissioner of the Summer Palace, after the Qing Dynasty conquest of Mongolia.]
[26: This was not an instance of his son adopted a stranger for some sort of political manoeuvring. This was a direct blood relation, the daughter of his daughter. Her name was Noyanchu Jünggen.]
The edifice upon which you stand, and the apparatus maintaining it, is, perhaps, the greatest national expenditure in all of human history – both in terms of resources, and lives. Greater than the pyramids, the moon landing, or the entire Allied expenditure of the Second World War. As of now, the Wall is nearly 1,800 years old, transcending a dozen dynasties.
One of your men, his name is Zhao, lost a sister to the barbarians. He’s from northern Gansu, 3,000 li (roughly 1,500 kilometres) from here. The swine road in in the night, lit a dozen homes on fire. Mr. Jin’s livestock pen was tied to the saddles of five horses and pulled down, a dozen horses and three times as many sheep corralled away by the bandits. Ten people were shot down with arrows. And Zhao’s sister, just sixteen years old, was snatched up as she fled her burning house, thrown over the bridle of a horse. They disappeared into the night as quickly as they’d come. Zhao volunteered to be a scout, to learn that bastard language and disguise himself as a merchant, go off into the unknown. Instead he wound up here, bowing to you. You’ve sworn to him he will have his vengeance.
Suddenly, to your right, a light. It’s a fire, five guard towers down, about five hundred meters away. You’re paralysed for a half a second before you snap into action. This is the code red you’ve trained for. Now a fire four towers down. Mission critical. Now three. Red phone ringing in the White House while Soviet nukes are in the air. You forget everything else and run. Three-hundred-plus icy steps in the dead of winter, no handrails. Your sole duty is to light the bonfire in your own tower. You have a bow, but there’s no sense fighting them; you have five men, and their entire army is comprised of trick shooters that could pluck a bird from flight while charging at full speed on their horse. You need to light that fire, alert the next station. They’ve probably come for a raid – the same sort of thing that saw the abduction of Zhao’s sister – but it could just be they’ve come for empire.
And you are all that stands in their way....
You can get to sections of the Wall with little to no tourists, find loops in the curving structure where you’re all alone. We met a Swiss woman who spoke in halting English on a five week vacation that included Tibet. There was an older British-New Zealander man who’d been living and teaching in China for nine years; he told us that to this day he refuses to drive on their free-for-all roads, and that a drug dealer caught in China is sentenced in the morning and dead by sundown. There were a couple of frat brothers with what sounded like a German accent taking pictures. As we snaked up, down and around, through guard towers and up uneven stairs, we saw people in matching t-shirts. As it turned out, they were a Run For the Cure sort of cancer funding group, half teens and twenty-somethings and half middle-aged, and more and more of them congregated as we approached that staircase I mentioned in our hypothetical 1568 invasion.
I reached a guard tower. Your bed might have been a straw mattress if you were assigned here. There’s no shutters on these things. Maybe they had a fire pit in here, but it would still be damned cold in the winter. Latitudinally, you’re somewhere around the area of Washington DC, and you’re up in the mountains, so I imagine it gets frigid in the winter. There were plenty of pictures at the base of the chairlift showing a thick coating of snow along the Wall. Most of the guard towers are every hundred meters at Mutianyu. This particular guard tower I’d arrived at was a sort of base camp for this cancer run group. There was maybe twelve of them there, stretching their calves and hamstrings. Not all guard towers have access to the roofs, but this one does, as you have to go up the stairs to continue along the Wall.
From here, in an unbroken line, is what one member of that cancer group called the ‘Stairway to Heaven’, an unbroken staircase of six hundred steps at a steep incline. I didn’t count the steps, and from what I’ve been able to pull off Chinese tour company websites, the actual Stairway to Heaven seems to be at another Wall section, Simatai, but this seemed like a good candidate to me.
Despite the cooler autumn weather throughout the rest of the week, it was actually quite warm that day – or maybe it was just the exhausting hike up that staircase. The sun was out, attempting to cut through the haze, and I was sweating. There are these little stone walls every fifty steps or so up the staircase, first on the left, then the right. I’m not sure if they were meant as cover, in case Altan’s men breached the Wall and were chasing you up this thing, or if they were meant to stop you from tumbling all the way down if you tripped.
About three quarters of the way up, and there’s a Chinese woman that wants a picture. We pose, and who should we see coming down from the next guard tower but Fidel and Anabel, the Mexican couple I sat beside on the flight to Hong Kong. They’d flown five hours from Mexico City to Toronto, then fifteen hours to Hong Kong, where, at one point during the flight, he disappeared for a solid four hours. I bumped into them in the cable car lineup at Ngong Ping in Hong Kong, where he said they were flying out the next day. They were visiting Hangzhou, Shanghai and Xian as well on their trip, and here I was, bumping into a Mexican couple on the Great Wall of China, some 2,000 kilometres away from the Po Lin Buddhist Monastery where I’d last seen them.
Our driver, Wong, met us back at the strip of shops and restaurants where the bus dropped us off, next to a Burger King and a Carles Coffee Tea Bars (a Starbucks ripoff). The walk along the Wall was physically exhausting, but phenomenal. There was an acrobatics show and a trip to the Panjiayuan Antique Market the following day, but the highlight of the trip was easily the act of stepping into imperial Chinese history.
There were challenges in Beijing – the smog, the cultural differences, the police state, the language barrier (I really need to work on my Mandarin). The flight from Macao was delayed because (so claimed a Chinese man interjecting) the Chinese premier was flying in without notice and the entire airport needed to be locked down for his arrival. There was the crazy driving, taxis going up bike lanes, scooters and bikes going wherever they pleased. The tea house scams and the omnipresent eyes of the People’s Liberation Army. But it was an experience like no other.
You might expect me to end on a fictional afternoon with Zhu Qiyu in a bathhouse with two dozen courtesans. Instead, I’m going to go back to our friend Altan Khan, out in a ger somewhere in the Mongolian grasslands, in bed, being kept warm by his seventeen-year-old granddaughter (I feel dirty). I end here because we’ve only gotten one side of this story. Altan didn’t lead an invasion in 1568. Neither did Esen a hundred years before. There may have been raids, but there was no great war. We’ve heard about the villainous ‘barbarians’, but we haven’t heard about how they saw the giant to the south, building a Wall and restricting trade and making them dependent, sending assassins and provocateurs to disrupt their way of life. I think about Altan, beneath a wolf’s pelt, cuddling with Noyanchu, thinking about the religious dimension he could exploit with his new allies. He probably had no idea he’d be primarily responsible for shamanism almost vanishing from Mongolia. Shortly after his death, a political rival, trying similarly to cozy up to the Tibetans, built Erdene Zuu Monastery, a tremendous walled temple rivalling anything in Tibet, on the grounds of Ogedei Khan’s old imperial capital, Kharakhorum, dead centre in Mongolia.
And perhaps it will be there, in a few years time, where I can once again pick up Altan’s story, and add it to these pages....
Sources
Atwood, Christopher P.. Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2004.
Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2013.
Cawthorne, Nigel. Daughter of Heaven: The True Story of the Only Woman to Become Emperor of China. London: Oneworld Publications, 2007.
Gutmann, Ethan. The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2014.
Humphreys, Andrew and Chen Chao. Top 10 Beijing. London: DK Eyewitness Travel, 2015
Jiang Yun Feng. “Beijing – Temple of Heaven – The ceremony of sacrifice at the winter solstice.” gbtimes. http://gbtimes.com/life/beijing-templ.... Acc. October 27, 2016.
Lewis, Simon. The Rough Guide to Beijing. London: Rough Guides, 2008.
Man, John. The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2008.
“The Summer Palace,” says Bruce Lee, “was built by the Emperor Qianlong. He liked to travel down to Shanghai, always brought back the best tea, fruits, concubines. But there was one thing he couldn’t bring back, and that was a garden there. So he had one built here.” Presumably Bruce Lee was talking about one of the imperial gardens in Suzhou here.
The entire day had been overcast, with a little rain just as we were heading towards the Forbidden City. Now the sky is quite grey.
“There are two ways to see the Summer Palace,” says the guide as we drove. “One is to walk. We get there, you go alongside Kunming Lake to the palace. The other, you take a boat. It costs you an extra–”
And I don’t remember what the number was. He left it to use to decide what we wanted to do. The Australian woman sat up front and didn’t voice an opinion either way. There was some discussion with the British couple, and then we decided we were fine with walking. “Okay,” says Bruce Lee. Like the tea house (and also a pearl store he took us too), I’m certain he was profiting off of these little extras, so he didn’t seem too happy we decided to walk.
Qianlong (1711-1799) built this palace – he’s Qing Dynasty, which followed the Ming – so there’ll be no speculation here on Qiyu romping about with his harem. The palace surrounds Kunming Lake, a large, serene body of water. You walk in not far from the Seventeen-Arch Bridge, an elaborate stone bridge leading to South Lake Island. To the right, down the side of the lake, is the palace itself, and beside that a Buddhist temple on a hill.
“Free time,” says Bruce Lee, who’d given us our brief history lesson on Qianlong in the van. “Meet back here, one hour. The palace is down that way,” he says, pointing.
“What’s over that bridge?”
He looks. “Nothing,” and then gave a quick explanation as to the number seventeen in Chinese numerology.
There wasn’t enough time to see the palace properly. We had to rush back to fit within the one-hour time limit. No one went over the bridge – which is a shame because, as I would later read, that was the location of a small temple I’d have liked to have seen. Leaving the Temple of Heaven, I’d even asked Bruce Lee about it, but he wasn’t understanding my pronunciation, and when I mentioned the Yuan Dynasty, he smiled politely and shook his head. The Summer Palace was from the Qing. I don’t think he knew about it.
Yelü Chucai, one of the founders of the Yuan, was an administrative adviser to both Genghis and Ogedei Khan, following the Mongol conquest of the Jin Dynasty. He’s an interesting figure – he stood at the great height of six foot eight, had a beard down to his waist at the age of twenty-five, and may have been the last person to be able to read and write the Khitan language – oh, and he also may have prevented a genocide of as many as 23 million people.
With an average depth of about five feet, Kunming is a man-made lake which Qianlong had commissioned, however it was built out of the existing Wengshan Pond and Xihu Lake, which are much older than the Qing Dynasty. Yelü was buried there. I knew his small temple was around the lake somewhere, but I also knew it wasn’t on or near Longevity Hill, where the palace and the Buddhist temple were located. Probably somewhere in the backwoods, I reasoned. Bruce Lee was unaware of it. So along the shoreline we walked towards the palace and away from the Seventeen-Arch Bridge. Young women would try to use their selfie sticks covertly to sneak pictures with foreigners, and the sky darkened until it looked like it might rain, but never did.
Back to the entry point, and there’s the British couple, who entered into a long story about their travels through Siberia and Mongolia, the substandard conditions of the Trans-Siberian and the experience of sleeping in a Mongolian ger out in the steppe. The Australian woman is nowhere to be seen, and neither in Bruce Lee. Did he say to meet us here, or out in the parking lot? No, it was definitely here. If we go out to the parking lot, we go through the turnstile and can’t get back in. He definitely said here. That Australian seemed pretty confused – she thought he said two hours instead of one? Well, he’s fifteen minutes late, did he say two hours? No, he made it clear to her that it was one hour. One hour doesn’t seem like a lot. Did you see the whole thing? We had to run. Hey, there’s another tour guide (they all carry those little collapsible flags), maybe we should ask her to call him (Bruce had given us his number in case we got lost). She doesn’t speak English.
I wasn’t that confident in my Mandarin capabilities to ask this woman to make a phone call, so I didn’t volunteer to try and ask. Finally the British woman got in touch with him. Meet by this pagoda, a little to the left. He’ll be there soon.
It was more than an hour and a half we were at the Summer Palace, because, at the last minute, the Australian had decided she did want to take the boat, and Bruce Lee then had to get her in line to pay for it. I could have quite easily crossed that bridge (I stood not far from it for thirty minutes), where, on South Lake Island, I would learn later, Yelü Chucai Memorial Temple was located.
Back to the hotel, where hopefully we’d find the English-speaking concierge, Eason, to get our cheap deal for Mutianyu. Everyone else was quoting much higher prices. Bruce Lee had offered us a private tour (assuming he didn’t get an assignment from his company), but it was more than double the price. Out on Wangfujing, in a couple of one-room storefronts next to souvenir shops selling carved wooden elephants and many-armed Buddhas, and t-shirts featuring President Obama written as ‘Oba-Mao’, were three or four different tour companies. These were sales offices, and probably all had contacts to the same company, as all their tours were the same, varying in price by a couple of yuan. Mutianyu was offered here, combined with the Ming Tombs, for only a half a day, and it was still more expensive than what Eason had offered.
The previous day, without having booked anything through the hotel, had been a free roam day. This is the heart of Beijing. Beihai Park is up this way somewhere, I said looking at my pocketbook map, and we can circle around this way for–
If you need a wake up call for the authoritarian nature of the Chinese regime, just walk through Tienanmen Square.
This was the site of bloody democratic protests in 1989, producing one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century, that of the Unknown Rebel, or Tank Man, who prevented the passage of a People’s Liberation Army tank column with his body. Like the National Mall in Washington DC, if one is going to hold a political protest in China (wouldn’t necessarily recommend; you may find a slightly different reaction than that of Washington’s Metropolitan PD), this is the place to do it. This was where Falun Gong protestors self-immolated in 2001, leading to the deaths of two and maiming of many others.[17] This was also the site of a 2013 Uyghur separatist suicide attack, claimed by Xinjiang’s Turkestan Islamic Party, which played out as a sort of Chinese version of the 2016 attack in Nice, France.[18]
[17: This incident is highly disputed. Falun Gong leaders have disavowed it, and the teachings are explicitly anti-suicide. There are many inconsistencies in the story put out by state-run media. Public sympathy for Falun Gong plummeted after the event. It has been suggested this was staged by the Communist Party to discredit the movement.]
[18: Unlike in Nice, there was no exchange of gunfire. Instead, the van the perpetrators used burst into flames, killing those inside. Two others died in the rampage, and thirty-eight others were injured.]
“It’s just up this way,” I say, looking at my map and comparing it to a map outside a subway station. The Beijing haze is omnipresent, and everything looks drab and dirty. It’s crowded on Chang’an Avenue. People are hawking and spitting everywhere. The women dress more modestly, with very few low cut shirts, though tight black leather pants and skirts seem to be a bit of a trend. There are also far fewer piercings (even the ears), hair dye or tattoos. A few women wear high heels, though more common are the Kim Jong-il-style platform sneakers. The men are dressed largely in Western fashion, with sports jerseys and stylish jackets. A lot of the younger men are sporting the hipster fauxhawk, but Asians manage to pull it off without looking like pretentious fad-following snobs. More than one person is wearing a disposable medical mask. There are tourists here, a few Westerners, but also many tourists from elsewhere in China. You can tell this by the number of them that try to snap pictures with you.
And there’s Chinese PLA soldiers everywhere, stationed on every corner. Rigid, military stances, in green uniforms with hats and white gloves. I was wearing my GoPro, and also had my camera attached to my belt. Their eyes were on me – all of them. No one says anything, I act normal. There’s a tourist over there, white, dusty blond hair, and he seems a little lost. He’s asking a PLA soldier something while pointing to a folding map. I don’t want to talk to the PLA, as I don’t want to risk my cameras being confiscated (some of them have that look in their eye), and I’d really prefer not have to present them my tourist visa, so I observe this tourist. The soldier smiles politely, points; there’s clearly a language barrier. The tourist smiles back, points to the camera around his neck. He wants a picture. The soldier’s smile is gone and he’s waving his hands as he steps back. Okay, no pictures of the soldiers.
You find yourself being shuffled into a lineup, half the sidewalk being blocked by fences. There’s a sign in English: security check. You’re in this line for maybe twenty minutes. Police are up ahead – not PLA (though you still see them everywhere), but police, in dark blue uniforms, with flashing epaulettes and bomb-sniffing dogs. You’re being shepherded into a checkpoint with metal detectors and airport-style x-ray conveyor belt scanners. Backpacks, purses, bags through the scanner. My cameras? I point, but they’re more concerned with getting people through the line. They wave me through.
Now you have access to the underpass, which takes you across Chang’an and into the square. Tienanmen itself, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace, also built during Zhu Di’s reign in 1420 – along the Dragon Line that keeps everything symmetrical for Heaven’s pleasure – is to the right. There’s now a giant picture of Mao on the front of it. Behind that is parkland, and behind that is the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City.
Across the road is the square, a wide open expanse filled with people. Mao’s Mausoleum is here, and so is the Great Hall of the People and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, an obelisk in the square’s centre dedicated to communist revolutionary martyrs. There’s a ministry to the east, and just to the north of the obelisk is an colossal bouquet of flowers. PLA soldiers are here, too, marching in military fashion.
It was this overt display of the Chinese police state that made me hesitate, the following day, on emailing a friend. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are blocked. So is Google and its affiliated companies. Outlook worked, so when I returned home from my tour with Bruce Lee, I sent an update to a friend back in Canada. Today we toured the Forbidden City, I wrote. I went on to joke, My new life goal: become the Chinese emperor and gain three thousand concubines. Time to form a new dynasty.
Sipping from a Suntory Japanese whiskey (a little sweet for my taste) and eating a ripoff Cadbury Dairy Milk bar named Milka, I realized that if the hotel registered our passports with the Chinese government upon arrival (they did), that there was a chance, perhaps a slim chance, that they might be monitoring the hotel wifi, and they might not take to kindly to the words ‘form a new dynasty’. I added, (I really hope the Chinese government isn’t monitoring these; for clarification Mr. Xi,[19] I am not advocating any sort of regime change, this is joke about wanting my own harem).
[19: Even here I carefully chose the words ‘Mr. Xi’, as I thought his given name, Jinping, or the word ‘President’ might be too many keywords for an algorithm to hone in on.]
Back across the road, and now there’s a contingent of soldiers decked out in full camo, their helmet straps on, and holding assault rifles. To the west of the Tienanmen parkland is what I thought was Beihai Park, the imperial garden enjoyed by the emperors. On any map, it’s all green, but it turns out the whole thing is the headquarters of the Communist Party and the State Council. It’s all walled, there’s guards everywhere, soldiers are marching down the sidewalk in formation. There’s also cameras everywhere, because whenever a delivery vehicle shows up at any of the gated access points, the massive wooden doors are already opening and five or six soldiers are ready to march out and aid the driver with his pallet jack. There are a few shops and restaurants along this street, and there’s the odd hutong (a narrow, self-contained alley or street community, often with small shops) branching off, but for the most part its brick walls on both sides – the Forbidden City to the east, Zhongnanhai (as it’s called) to the west.
Finally, north to Wenjin Street (it becomes Jingshan Front, on the back side of the Forbidden City, around a curve). Beihai Park is just over there. There’s no smocking in the park, and no lewd cehavior, proclaims a Chinglish sign. Inside the gate and you see the white dagoba atop the hill in the distance. This sits at the zenith of Qiongdao Island, across the bridge. Just the other side of the bridge is a patio with a few restaurants, including one that sells tripe and a dish simply labelled ‘Reasonable’, as well as a pretty good Kung Pao chicken. The majority of the park is the Northern Sea, and you can see plenty of small boats as you circle around the island to the west.
This is where a frolicking young emperor might spend a relaxing day with a gaggle of courtesans. There’s a dozen of them with you, including a young woman named Tang, who you’ve recently developed a bit of a crush on. You’ll eventually give her the title of imperial noble consort, and she’ll be buried alongside you when you die (she’ll also be... ahem... helped to the grave so she can be buried at the same time). She playfully splashes water at you from the Northern Sea as eunuchs paddle the dragon boat. Two others you like, Xi’er and Gongjingxian, giggle playfully as you splash her back. Six other women in another dragon boat are threatening the head eunuch with death by a thousand cuts if he doesn’t bump your own boat for a laugh.
Suxiao is there, too, but she’s seven months pregnant, and is relaxing towards the rear of the boat. The doctors are quite confident the child will be a boy; all the auspicious signs are there. Daoist fortune tellers are predicting a strong young lad. Jianji, they suggest, is a good name. You are currently twenty-six years old, and by now have two other children. Those were both born from your first wife, Xiaoyuanjing, and both are girls. (With three thousand women in your harem, you probably have a number of other children as well now that you’re four years into your reign, but they’re most likely all girls as well, or else their names might have made it into the historical record.) Officially (this was the deal reached with the war minister when your brother was pushed into retirement), your nephew is the crown prince; your brother’s line is meant to be the one that holds the throne, while your own fades back into the aristocracy. With the birth of a son, however... well, there are legal scholars looking into that for you.[20]
[20: I’m completely messing around with the timeline for the purpose of my narrative. In actuality, Zhu Jianji was born in 1448, before Qiyu ascended to the throne. This is probably what elevated Suxiao within the ranks of the harem. Jianji was designated crown prince in 1452, and died within a year – possibly by poisoning. In fact, he would have already been dead at the time I’m setting this particular outing to Beihai Park (late 1453).]
Lihua has sent you another letter (covertly, of course, without the knowledge of her darling husband). Her early warning of the attack on Red Salt Lake proved invaluable, and your commanders were able to prevent a devastating raid. There was some... unfortunate collateral damage, when your men massacred a group of Mongol women and children, but terms like ‘war crimes’ haven’t been invented yet, so you’re not too concerned about it.[21] Esen is, however, is quite irate about the whole affair, your sister writes. He hasn’t yet figured out how to diplomatically demand reparations, as, after all, there’s a lot of your own people either in the ground or in barbarian beds because of raids he’s conducted. Why not... you can sense the hesitancy with which your sister writes... why not, offer another marriage alliance? Esen would probably accept, she writes. Her own value as a piece on the board kind of diminished after you, ahem, retired your brother, but with a new emperor comes a new opportunity to make peace – by sending a daughter. Esen has just named his son Amasanj as his heir, and before the Khalkha Mongols or the Manchurian tribes can offer wives, why not send an offer yourself?
[21: Again, this happened in 1473. Both Qiyu and Esen would be long dead if this was accurate to the timeline.]
You came to Beihai today to forget about such statecraft, but even as you hold Tang’s hand, the comfort in her touch isn’t quite enough. As the other girls splash water at the next boat, your new crush pats you on the back, nuzzles herself into you for comfort. She can imagine what you’re going through; if she ever has a daughter, you might one day be contemplating sending that girl away to the wastelands of Inner Asia.
You leave the girls, Suxiao and Tang included, with the eunuchs. Go, have fun, paddle around the lake, you tell them. You need some privacy for private contemplation. Suxiao, holding her stomach as a eunuch helps her off the dragon boat, gives you a kiss before you leave them – she’s not as confident as the Daoists at court that her child will be a boy, and wants to drop a few hints that shipping away daughters would be... well, perhaps ill-fated. You kiss her on the forehead, but tell her to get back in the boat, have some fun with the other concubines. You leave her there, watching you go, as you climb the stone path across the way from the dock.
In the centre of Qiongdao Island, at it’s highest peak, is the white dagoba, a forty meter Buddhist stupa. (Actually, this was built about two centuries later, but let’s just go with it.) It’s a place of meditation. The outer ring of the island is a brick path going all the way around, partly covered by wood-framed corridors and quiet rock gardens filled with the same jagged, coral-reef-type scholar’s rocks you have in the Imperial Garden at the north end of the palace. Branching off from that circular path are perhaps a dozen winding stone staircases leading up to the stupa, and to a Buddhist temple on the east side of the island. It’s all very green here, and within two minutes, you don’t even hear the concubines giggling anymore. A twist, a turn, a sweat breaking out as you climb (perhaps you’ve been enjoying too much Beijing duck), and there’s the stupa. You find a kneeling bench, close your eyes, and contemplate. Should you send one of your daughters with Xiaoyuanjing to the grasslands?
Outside the hotel, taxis are blaring their horns as they fly up the bike lane. Public buses running with electrical trolley car connections to the overhead grid cut in and out of traffic, their connector arms swaying back and forth on a hinge as they change lanes. There’s a Ferrari delivery van parked in the lot out back. The middle-aged woman that hangs around here pimping out Chinese prostitutes isn’t yet out, but it’s still early. I walk through the giant revolving door of the hotel. There’s that same gentleman with the crooked teeth trying to hock his calligraphy. Ah, here’s Eason, thankfully. Mutianyu? Yes, yes, I can book a car for you. Eight hundred, yes? He picks up the phone. This too, I’m certain, was an off-the-books deal Eason was arranging with his driver, a man named Wong. Wong would not speak any English, but if there were issues, he would call Eason directly. We would leave the following morning.
It was about ninety minutes’ drive, on a long, winding, zigzaggy course. Wong drove in silence for a time, before popping in a CD of Chinese songs and playing it on repeat. He was a more reasoned driver, not going onto the shoulder to zip ahead one car length, blaring his horn every thirty seconds or cutting up the bike lanes. We passed by a Wumart – a convenience store ripoff of a certain American big box store, with the same font and colour scheme – and a Drunk Beer and Coffee, then up the highway towards the airport until we entered a series of suburban, and then finally country roads. The Beijing smog never lifts. Signs can be seen every ten minutes or so once you’re in the country, Mutianyu written in the Latin alphabet alongside a block of Chinese text.
This is China’s wonder, often called the Eighth Wonder of the World. It’s often said it can be seen from space (it can’t). It (roughly) runs along what is the modern Inner Mongolian border, a vast province larger in area than Ontario, though elongated, starting in the Gobi and hooking around the eastern end of Mongolia proper to reach all the way to the Siberian border in Manchuria. Parts of it stretch across the Manchurian provinces up to the Yellow Sea, and there are even sections in Mongolia proper, though these are now little more than ridges in the grasslands. Measured by Russian standards, the Wall stretches across three timezones (measured by Chinese standards, it’s only one, because all of China conforms to a single timezone, Beijing time).
When you get to Mutianyu, there’s first a bus, then a cable car. There is a walking path, but you wouldn’t want to walk it. There’s a placard there, in Chinese, English and Mongolian Cyrillic, proclaiming when the Mutianyu site was first constructed (1404), its modern renovation (1983) and opening to the public (1988), as well as a sign denoting the cable car precautions, which prohibits, in broken Chinglish, drunkards, the insane, and women who suffer from habitual abortions.
The crowds are not thick here, and there’s no wait for the cable car, which takes you up a steep green mountainside, the bottom of the cable car brushing a tree as you go. The forest coverage here is ninety-six percent, so it looks today very much like it would have looked two hundred years ago, or two thousand years ago for that matter. The stone is new (relatively). The Wall (a bit of a misnomer as there’s no singular wall) began its first incarnation more than 2,000 years ago. This one, which is virtually gone now, was built of rammed earth. The First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, is often credited with beginning the Wall in the 210s BCE, but in reality his project was to link up a series of state walls each maintained by feuding principalities during the end of the Zhou Dynasty. The First Emperor was a ruthless, brutal tyrant, and his rammed earth wall was built by a workforce of hundreds of thousands by royal fiat. “Qin’s ideologues would have approved of Machiavelli, and of Fascism: power was the only virtue.”[22] The stone wall you see today was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The purpose of the Wall was to define the northern frontier, and to keep out the barbarians – men like Esen. When the Ming came to power, a complete overhaul of the northern defences was needed, and thus we have the modern tourist attraction.
[22: Man, pg. 25.]
Leaving the cable car, you see a little restaurant and patio area where people just litter over the side of the mountain, then a staircase. It leads to a terrace with a stone inscription and a set of stairs–
There, over the barrier, you can see it. The perpetual Beijing haze is strong even here, in the mountains, this far from the city, but you can still see down the ridge of the mountain, curving here and there, guard towers spread along the snaking dragon. Then it turns to the left, up a steep incline, Chinese characters written across the hillside. It was truly like stepping into fantasy – stepping into history. Men died building this, men died defending this. Defence at the northern frontier – this was a project that was ongoing for centuries, for dynasties.
You climb up onto the Wall. It hugs the top of the mountains. On the far side is Inner Mongolia. It’s about as green as can be. Steep slopes on either side of the Wall. There’s one camera on a pole perhaps a kilometre away, and folding tables inside every third or fourth guard tower selling Tsingtao beer and bottled water. These – plus the Beijing smog and the tourists – are the only indications you’re walking along a twenty-first century tourist site, instead of a fifteen century military stronghold.
Picture this: the year is 1568. You’re a young man, perhaps twenty-five years old. No, you’re no longer Zhu Qiyu. We’re going to jump ahead more than a century. Qiyu didn’t have too many good days left after that outing to Beihai Park in 1453 anyway – he was deposed by the retired emperor in 1457. He may have died of a sickness, or he may have been conveniently murdered by eunuch assassins acting on orders from the brother he’d had confined to house arrest. He’d been twenty-eight years old. His son had predeceased him, as had his beloved Suxiao. The rest of his concubines had been ordered to commit suicide upon his death. His first wife, Xiaoyuanjing, survived the whole mess, and the resulting court purges by the reinstated brother, possibly because she’d hidden Qizhen’s son, the crown prince that was supposed to succeed her ex-husband until Qiyu deposed the lad. Her daughters, Princess Gu’an and an unnamed daughter who refused to marry and instead became a Buddhist nun, also survived.
But anyway, let’s forget about him. Now we’ve gone a century ahead and you’re a Chinese military officer. You’re fairly well off, have a darling wife back home in Guandong Province, whose currently overseeing a small handful of labourers farming wet rice on your estate. You haven’t seen her, or any woman for that matter, in two years. You’ve got enough money to buy yourself a command. You are currently standing halfway up an unbroken staircase of brick that stretches for more than six hundred steps at close to a forty-five degree angle. It’s December, you have snow on your uniform. You’d never seen snow until you worked your way into this command. You oversee five other men no older than yourself, the youngest a mere sixteen. It’s midnight and you’re looking down the snowy mountainside into the abyss. Five hundred years from now, it’ll be Inner Mongolia, a province of your country, but for now, it is the edge of the known world. And your sworn duty is to defend the very cradle of civilization at your back from the beasts beyond.
It really is like something out of Game of Thrones. You are the watcher on the wall, the shield that guards the realms of men. Only your wall isn’t fantasy, it isn’t a fictionalization of Hadrian’s wall stretching across the thinnest part of an island, and you aren’t defending against ice zombies or giants (or Scots). And nor is it made of ice. No, your wall is more than 45 million cubic metres of brick, and stretches through mountain, desert and plain for a distance greater than that of the Arctic Ocean to Panama. And your enemy, the ghost in the night that could have scouts even now in these Inner Mongolian hills, the virtual centaurs fused at the hip with their horses, are the very origin of the term ‘barbarians’.
Esen, too, is dead now. He died in 1455, two years before Qiyu did. Esen, however, was a nobody, who’s great claim to fame was capturing a emperor (a feat which ultimately gained him nothing). He’d been leader of the western barbarian groups, the Oirat, and as such had no leg to stand on when it came to pronouncements about his heritage and noble bloodline. He was just a warlord, a strongman. The new guy, however, has the lineage, has the undivided political support, and has the name: Altan Khan (it literally translates to ‘Golden Leader’[23]). He is simultaneously politically cunning and villainously barbaric: He’s recently accepted some 16,000 Chinese refugees fleeing their homeland because of persecution of their religion (some might say cult).[24] He is also strengthening his family’s stranglehold on the throne and gaining himself a powerful ally by creating the position of Dalai Lama in Tibet.[25] How is he barbarous? Well, he’s married his granddaughter for a start. In fact it nearly sparked a Mongol civil war, as the girl was betrothed to another. She’s seventeen, and Altan is sixty.[26] In fact, your informants operating on the north side of the Wall just recently brought that information back.
[23: He also had a twin sister named Mönggön, or Silver.]
[24: 1551. They would go on to found the modern Inner Mongolian capital of Hohhot.]
[25: 1578. Several princes of Altan’s family, beginning with his grandson, would be discovered as the reincarnated Dalai Lama until the corruption was outlawed by our old friend Qianlong, the commissioner of the Summer Palace, after the Qing Dynasty conquest of Mongolia.]
[26: This was not an instance of his son adopted a stranger for some sort of political manoeuvring. This was a direct blood relation, the daughter of his daughter. Her name was Noyanchu Jünggen.]
The edifice upon which you stand, and the apparatus maintaining it, is, perhaps, the greatest national expenditure in all of human history – both in terms of resources, and lives. Greater than the pyramids, the moon landing, or the entire Allied expenditure of the Second World War. As of now, the Wall is nearly 1,800 years old, transcending a dozen dynasties.
One of your men, his name is Zhao, lost a sister to the barbarians. He’s from northern Gansu, 3,000 li (roughly 1,500 kilometres) from here. The swine road in in the night, lit a dozen homes on fire. Mr. Jin’s livestock pen was tied to the saddles of five horses and pulled down, a dozen horses and three times as many sheep corralled away by the bandits. Ten people were shot down with arrows. And Zhao’s sister, just sixteen years old, was snatched up as she fled her burning house, thrown over the bridle of a horse. They disappeared into the night as quickly as they’d come. Zhao volunteered to be a scout, to learn that bastard language and disguise himself as a merchant, go off into the unknown. Instead he wound up here, bowing to you. You’ve sworn to him he will have his vengeance.
Suddenly, to your right, a light. It’s a fire, five guard towers down, about five hundred meters away. You’re paralysed for a half a second before you snap into action. This is the code red you’ve trained for. Now a fire four towers down. Mission critical. Now three. Red phone ringing in the White House while Soviet nukes are in the air. You forget everything else and run. Three-hundred-plus icy steps in the dead of winter, no handrails. Your sole duty is to light the bonfire in your own tower. You have a bow, but there’s no sense fighting them; you have five men, and their entire army is comprised of trick shooters that could pluck a bird from flight while charging at full speed on their horse. You need to light that fire, alert the next station. They’ve probably come for a raid – the same sort of thing that saw the abduction of Zhao’s sister – but it could just be they’ve come for empire.
And you are all that stands in their way....
You can get to sections of the Wall with little to no tourists, find loops in the curving structure where you’re all alone. We met a Swiss woman who spoke in halting English on a five week vacation that included Tibet. There was an older British-New Zealander man who’d been living and teaching in China for nine years; he told us that to this day he refuses to drive on their free-for-all roads, and that a drug dealer caught in China is sentenced in the morning and dead by sundown. There were a couple of frat brothers with what sounded like a German accent taking pictures. As we snaked up, down and around, through guard towers and up uneven stairs, we saw people in matching t-shirts. As it turned out, they were a Run For the Cure sort of cancer funding group, half teens and twenty-somethings and half middle-aged, and more and more of them congregated as we approached that staircase I mentioned in our hypothetical 1568 invasion.
I reached a guard tower. Your bed might have been a straw mattress if you were assigned here. There’s no shutters on these things. Maybe they had a fire pit in here, but it would still be damned cold in the winter. Latitudinally, you’re somewhere around the area of Washington DC, and you’re up in the mountains, so I imagine it gets frigid in the winter. There were plenty of pictures at the base of the chairlift showing a thick coating of snow along the Wall. Most of the guard towers are every hundred meters at Mutianyu. This particular guard tower I’d arrived at was a sort of base camp for this cancer run group. There was maybe twelve of them there, stretching their calves and hamstrings. Not all guard towers have access to the roofs, but this one does, as you have to go up the stairs to continue along the Wall.
From here, in an unbroken line, is what one member of that cancer group called the ‘Stairway to Heaven’, an unbroken staircase of six hundred steps at a steep incline. I didn’t count the steps, and from what I’ve been able to pull off Chinese tour company websites, the actual Stairway to Heaven seems to be at another Wall section, Simatai, but this seemed like a good candidate to me.
Despite the cooler autumn weather throughout the rest of the week, it was actually quite warm that day – or maybe it was just the exhausting hike up that staircase. The sun was out, attempting to cut through the haze, and I was sweating. There are these little stone walls every fifty steps or so up the staircase, first on the left, then the right. I’m not sure if they were meant as cover, in case Altan’s men breached the Wall and were chasing you up this thing, or if they were meant to stop you from tumbling all the way down if you tripped.
About three quarters of the way up, and there’s a Chinese woman that wants a picture. We pose, and who should we see coming down from the next guard tower but Fidel and Anabel, the Mexican couple I sat beside on the flight to Hong Kong. They’d flown five hours from Mexico City to Toronto, then fifteen hours to Hong Kong, where, at one point during the flight, he disappeared for a solid four hours. I bumped into them in the cable car lineup at Ngong Ping in Hong Kong, where he said they were flying out the next day. They were visiting Hangzhou, Shanghai and Xian as well on their trip, and here I was, bumping into a Mexican couple on the Great Wall of China, some 2,000 kilometres away from the Po Lin Buddhist Monastery where I’d last seen them.
Our driver, Wong, met us back at the strip of shops and restaurants where the bus dropped us off, next to a Burger King and a Carles Coffee Tea Bars (a Starbucks ripoff). The walk along the Wall was physically exhausting, but phenomenal. There was an acrobatics show and a trip to the Panjiayuan Antique Market the following day, but the highlight of the trip was easily the act of stepping into imperial Chinese history.
There were challenges in Beijing – the smog, the cultural differences, the police state, the language barrier (I really need to work on my Mandarin). The flight from Macao was delayed because (so claimed a Chinese man interjecting) the Chinese premier was flying in without notice and the entire airport needed to be locked down for his arrival. There was the crazy driving, taxis going up bike lanes, scooters and bikes going wherever they pleased. The tea house scams and the omnipresent eyes of the People’s Liberation Army. But it was an experience like no other.
You might expect me to end on a fictional afternoon with Zhu Qiyu in a bathhouse with two dozen courtesans. Instead, I’m going to go back to our friend Altan Khan, out in a ger somewhere in the Mongolian grasslands, in bed, being kept warm by his seventeen-year-old granddaughter (I feel dirty). I end here because we’ve only gotten one side of this story. Altan didn’t lead an invasion in 1568. Neither did Esen a hundred years before. There may have been raids, but there was no great war. We’ve heard about the villainous ‘barbarians’, but we haven’t heard about how they saw the giant to the south, building a Wall and restricting trade and making them dependent, sending assassins and provocateurs to disrupt their way of life. I think about Altan, beneath a wolf’s pelt, cuddling with Noyanchu, thinking about the religious dimension he could exploit with his new allies. He probably had no idea he’d be primarily responsible for shamanism almost vanishing from Mongolia. Shortly after his death, a political rival, trying similarly to cozy up to the Tibetans, built Erdene Zuu Monastery, a tremendous walled temple rivalling anything in Tibet, on the grounds of Ogedei Khan’s old imperial capital, Kharakhorum, dead centre in Mongolia.
And perhaps it will be there, in a few years time, where I can once again pick up Altan’s story, and add it to these pages....
Sources
Atwood, Christopher P.. Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2004.
Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2013.
Cawthorne, Nigel. Daughter of Heaven: The True Story of the Only Woman to Become Emperor of China. London: Oneworld Publications, 2007.
Gutmann, Ethan. The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2014.
Humphreys, Andrew and Chen Chao. Top 10 Beijing. London: DK Eyewitness Travel, 2015
Jiang Yun Feng. “Beijing – Temple of Heaven – The ceremony of sacrifice at the winter solstice.” gbtimes. http://gbtimes.com/life/beijing-templ.... Acc. October 27, 2016.
Lewis, Simon. The Rough Guide to Beijing. London: Rough Guides, 2008.
Man, John. The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2008.
The Harem and the Barbarian [PART 1]
The Harem and the Barbarian: Beijing’s Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Great Wall, and More
Date: Monday, October 10th – Saturday, October 15th, 2016
I did not eat deep-fried scorpion on a stick.
They were being sold at the Wangfujing Night Market, two minutes walk from my hotel. I was a few blocks from the Forbidden City off Wangfujing Avenue. An upscale shopping district was about a few minutes walk down Wangfujing, and at night booths sprung up in alleyways off this major thoroughfare selling brass or clay statues of dragons, horses, tigers and qilins, magnets, laser pointers, green camo hats with the Chinese communist star on them, silk scrolls with tigers, phoenixes or the Great Wall on them, and t-shirts proclaiming “I [heart] BJ”. There were ubiquitous bottles of milk, Yanjing and Tsingtao beer, lamb on a stick, grilled snake and tentacles on a stick, tripe (strips of stomach lining), deep-fried tarantulas, footlong millipedes and, yes, deep-fried scorpions on a stick, which were skewered through while still alive – twitching and squirming, their tails jabbing about – and then deep fried upon their sale.
(One young woman walked by me one night at this market, munching off a two-foot stick or deep-fried tentacle pieces. I, as a sheer gut reaction, spat out a disgusted grunt: “Uurgh.” She, standing not three feet from me, heard me say it, and looked up to see the uncontrolled – and, admittedly, rather rude – reaction of an uncultured Westerner to her delicacy, and burst out laughing, sniggering to her friend as she passed.)
Wangfujing itself was closed to vehicular traffic for the 5th Beijing Wangfujing International Brand Festival, and beer and ice cream shacks were erected, salesmen dressed up as Mongol aristocrats outside shoe stores, police were out with their red and blue flashing epaulettes and bomb-sniffing German shepherds.
You walk the street at night. Buddhists and Christians perform dance numbers in the sidewalk, or in front of St. Joseph’s church. It’s a little chilly in Beijing in October, and I was just wearing a t-shirt. You’re a racial minority, and stand out like a sore thumb; everyone knows you’re a tourist. At major tourist sites like the Temple of Heaven or the Summer Palace young women try and sneak pictures of themselves with you, until you catch them, offer them a picture and they’re giddy as can be, linking arms with you and making the peace sign. But at night, it’s a different type of woman that comes up to you.
The first was from Harbin, in Manchuria. She was pretty, perhaps about thirty, sitting with a woman a little older on a sidewalk bench. She spoke exceptional English, though her friend seemed to speak fairly little. “Aren’t you cold?” the young one in red asks. Sit, talk for a minute. Where are you from? Ah, Canada, it’s colder there, right? You’re more used to the cold. Many Chinese people there, yes? Many immigrants? Your Chinese is very good. Where did you learn?[1]
[1: We were conversing almost exclusively in English, but I’d said the odd word in Mandarin.]
Within thirty seconds or so she got to the point. How about we go for a beer, just down the street, we can talk some more? Get out of the cold?
No, I told her politely, saying I had to get back soon. I had an early morning the next day, off to see the Forbidden City. She was insistent, but when she saw I wasn’t going to fall for it, she quickly conceded and ended the conversation.
The second one appeared beside me like a ghost as I was walking back towards the hotel. Same general questions. Where you from? Lots of Chinese people in Canada, no? You here on vacation? Hey, would you like to go to a bar and get some beer? No, well how about coffee? How about you give me money for a beer and I’ll go alone?
Then she cursed me out and ran off the other way. The third, maybe sixty seconds later, leapt off a bench and jogged towards me. Hello, where are you from? I just shook my head and held up a hand, and kept walking.
They were all women, all around thirty or so, all spoke exceptional English. Reasonably pretty. But then why was I ignoring their advances?
This sort of thing is on dozens of videos and blog posts on travel to China, it was listed in the Beijing travel book I carried with me in my pocket, and it’s right on the Government of Canada travel advisory website. It’s the tea house scam, and it seems to be the number one thing to be on the lookout for in Beijing.[2]
[2: Apart from espousing the wrong political opinions. More on this in a little bit.]
Generally she’ll suggest going to a tea house. She’ll say she’s a student of English, wants practise with it. You go to the tea house, order a couple drinks, you naturally pay for hers, and you either have neglected to ask the price, or when they gave you a number like three (yuan or renminbi[3]), it was shorthand for three hundred. When the bill comes, it’s exorbitant, and they physically won’t let you leave until you’ve paid it. She, of course, is in on the scam with the tea house.
[3: The exchange rate, at the time of writing, is ¥5.12 to CAD$1]
I was approached by one textbook tea house scam on the Friday. I was out visiting the Foreign Language Bookstore, in the middle of this shopping district. No DVDs of Legend of Yuan Empire Founder, a 2013 HBS series on Kublai Khan. As I was leaving, though, a book almost jumped off the shelf at me. It was on Emperor Puyi and his harem. Yes, I think I’ll get this.[4] Walking out, a woman bounded up from a sidewalk bench and ran over to me. They’re hungry like vultures. Hello, where you from? Toronto? Vancouver? Are you here on vacation? And so on it goes.
[4: The Last Emperor and His Five Wives by Professor Wang Qingxiang. It cost me about $22 Canadian; looking it up back in Canada, the cheapest I saw was $65 plus shipping. Despite the efforts of the translator, much of it is in a somewhat broken, halting grammar.]
She was also around thirty, had a partner behind her that was more submissive. She wore a white turtleneck with her hair down and had a thin, wispy, feminine moustache. She claimed to be from Hangzhou – you know Hangzhou, it’s down near Shanghai – and was here practising her English. Her English was already quite good, but she apparently needed a refresher. Would I like to go for some tea and practise?
Wangfujing Avenue is in the heart of downtown Beijing. Tienanmen Square isn’t far, and the same with Beihai Park, the “earliest and best preserved imperial garden in the world.”[5] North of Tienanmen Square is the Forbidden City, the former centre of the Chinese empire and imperial palace in which the emperors lived. This one-hundred-and-eighty-acre palace, now a museum, is surrounded by a moat, contained within a massive red-bricked wall, and contains nine hundred and eighty buildings, all held together by not a single nail. Completed in 1420, it was first used by Zhu Di, third emperor and the great usurper of the Ming Dynasty (he’d committed a coup d’état against his nephew). The last emperor, Puyi – who, after his abdication would become a Japanese war criminal, tried as such by the People’s Republic in 1950 and imprisoned for a period of ten years – was forced from the palace in 1924.
[5: Quote taken from a placard outside the park.]
Early on the Wednesday morning, I shook hands with the tour guide that would show a small group around this elaborate palace, as well as the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace. His name was Bruce Lee, or so he called himself. His driver showed up not long after with a cargo van. We toured with a lovely older British couple – actually, he was born in Canada and she was Georgian-Russian, though they hailed from London – as well as a clueless Australian woman. The British couple were in the middle of a several weeks-long Eurasian tour, which began in St. Petersburg, then along the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Lake Baikal, into Mongolia, and they were flying out the following day to Lhasa, Tibet. Just the day before, they’d toured the Badaling site of the Great Wall with Bruce Lee.
“It’s packed, shoulder to shoulder,” said John, the husband, bringing up pictures on his phone with crowds that looked like a Hong Kong subway station. He’d toured Mutianyu, another major site, about fifteen years before, and so this time around they went to Badaling.
Mutianyu was the one that I’d wanted to see, as I knew it was less crowded, less commercialized and more hilly, with steep, never-ending staircases and a wavy course along the mountains. It’s about ninety minutes outside Beijing, as opposed to Badaling, which is sixty. Not really all that far north when you consider the constant threat, the constant raids, from barbarians beyond the Wall.
The hotel concierge desk employed three people, with three different levels of fluency in English. The youngest of them, Matthew, spoke barely a word. Boyd was better, could book tours and answer basic questions about the airport shuttle bus, but struggled greatly with it. Eason, however, was practically fluent. Mutianyu was not offered through that hotel, but no worries, assured Eason. “I can hire a private car for you to go there if you like. Eight hundred yuan for the day. You can leave whenever you like.” The driver, however, will speak only a little English. I had to think on this. The concierge desk was closing in ten minutes. “Just talk to Boyd tomorrow,” says Eason. Boyd, however, didn’t speak enough English to know about this arrangement. He tried flipping through a tour book and priced out something closer to 1,600. So the Great Wall we’ll leave until later in the week. In the meantime, I booked the tour with Bruce Lee.
“Forbidden City,” says Bruce Lee, standing just inside the Meridian Gate, “is from Ming, Qing Dynasties. Total, twenty-four emperors live inside.” He was holding the little yellow flag of his tour company on a collapsible stick, and spoke largely with his hands. The courtyard inside was tremendous. All the buildings were in vibrant colours, and had ornate, Oriental xieshan designs. There were dragons carved into the wood and elaborately painted. The emperor’s throne room is in line symmetrically north of the Meridian Gate, with civic offices to the one side and military offices to the other. Elaborate stone designs line the pathway just inside the Meridian Gate, leading to the expansive courtyard of interlocking brick, which, as Bruce Lee explained, was fourteen layers deep – almost a meter and a half thick. The emperors, it seemed, were paranoid about enemies tunnelling in.
“Inside the Forbidden City, you including two parts: Front Court and Inner Palace. Front Court used for the emperor for grand ceremony, meeting, conference. The Inner Palace for the emperor, empress, concubines.”
Deep inside the Inner Court, one of the buildings we saw (through a pane of glass) was the imperial bedchamber. There were many beds inside, each draped in silk embroidered with phoenixes and dragons, and covered with curtains and the lot. Sometimes there would be a version of a wedding ceremony for a concubine (this would probably depend on the emperor’s whim, and her rank as a concubine), but nothing as elaborate as the ceremony for his wife. The wife, Lee explained, was not chosen by the emperor, but usually by the emperor’s parents. The father, usually the retired emperor, still had a certain patriarchal function within the royal family, even after stepping aside from the throne (which they didn’t always do, Lee was quick to add). Divorce, likewise, was something decided by the emperor’s parents. These were political affairs, not personal. Besides, for the monarch’s sexual whims, for his perpetual satisfaction, that’s why he had concubines.
“How many concubines?” Bruce Lee had asked before we got to the emperor’s bedchamber, standing just inside the Gate of Heavenly Purity, separating the Front Court and Inner Palace. “Three thousand.”
Let’s suppose you’re a Chinese emperor for a moment. It’s 1449. You’re Zhu Qiyu, the second son of the Xuande Emperor. Your half-brother, Qizhen, just ten months older than you, ascended to the throne in 1435, at just the age of eight (at least one of you was born from one of your father’s concubines). When he was twenty-one, he decided he needed to prove himself in battle. As it so happened, the Ming did have a powerful enemy out there causing problems, and one who was growing in strength every day. His name was Esen. John Man, in his book The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World, says,
“[Esen] inherited control of the western Mongol groups, the Oirat. In the 1440s he took over what are today Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian -stans, then the Chinese-Mongol borderland groups along the Gobi to Manchuria. ... It looked as if one day he might become another Genghis and lead the Mongols to reclaim China. One way he increased his popularity at home was to exploit the ‘tribute system’ by which China dealt with the ‘barbarians’. ... The reality behind the euphemistic exchange of barbarian ‘tribute’ and imperial ‘gifts’ was trade ... but also payment to keep the peace, always with the (unstated) threat of blackmail – that if the emperor’s gifts were not good enough, the barbarian leaders might go on the war-path. ... This was nothing but extortion.”[6]
[6: Man, pg. 186-187.]
In other words, the Chinese had better pay up if they don’t want raids to take these things by force. The Chinese would often enter into treaty agreements with their barbarian neighbours to keep the peace. Sometimes the Chinese emperor would symbolically adopt the Mongol khan, forming a father-son, an uncle-nephew, or, when barbarian power was particularly strong, a brother-brother relationship. Often times Chinese princesses were carted north to become the latest wife of a khan to seal such agreements. Perhaps you’ve even seen some of your sisters sent north to Esen.
So in 1449, under the guidance of a corrupt eunuch, your august brother raises a half-million-man army in just two days, and sets out north. And doesn’t disaster happen. In a confrontation known as the Crisis of Tumu Fortress, not far from Badaling, Esen, alerted of your brother’s movements by his intelligence network, acts quickly and attacks, cutting off the royal contingent from the body of the army. Qizhen falls into Esen’s hands. The court in Beijing receives a letter: Half your army lies dead, and I have your emperor. You will send me....
Beijing reorganizes. A new minister of war has now pushed through a motion that Qizhen be declared a retired emperor – this being the quick and easy fix to the hostage situation. In essence, it means Beijing is abandoning your brother, while at the same time trying to put a nice face on it. And the war minister... well, guess who he’s decided should be your brother’s replacement.
You come to the throne just one day after your twenty-first birthday. As a prince, you’d have had your own concubines, but they were not (comparably) great in number. You knew each of their names, and could list where they came from. One of them, in fact, Suxiao, was a favourite of sorts, and will remain so as you ascend the throne; in just a few short years, you’ll depose the wife you took shortly before the Tumu Crisis and instill Suxiao as your new empress.[7] But there are worlds of difference between being a prince and an emperor. As emperor, you are the personification of yang (among other things, maleness), in Daoist eyes. To maintain the balance of the universe, you need an appropriate magnitude of yin (femaleness).
[7: There’s no father emperor here to manage the family politics – that falls on you as well.]
So picture your situation for a second. You were destined to be just some mediocre royal official, yet, at the age of twenty-one, you’ve stepped into the emperorship of China. You’ve signed off on all the proclamations ‘retiring’ your brother. Human tribute (i.e. concubines) begins coming in from vassals and neighbouring countries. The Koreans have stopped sending concubines at this point, but you still get them from the Vietnamese, Champans (southern Vietnam), Cambodians, Thais, Tibetans, Manchurian tribes, Okinawans, and even some Mongol and other Central Asian peoples, as well as from across China. An administrative woman, the nüshi (essentially your own private madam/sexual manager) will interview various candidates on your behalf, right down to a strip inspection and gynaecological exam. Administrative eunuchs catalogue and house these women in the Forbidden City. The only males, apart from yourself and certain royal officials, permitted inside the palace are eunuchs, so no one shall touch them but you. When you hold court, a coterie of wenches are there, silent in the gallery. When you tour the Imperial Garden, at the north end of the palace, women are gathered at every corner, hoping just to catch your eye. You don’t know all their names anymore – you can’t. You haven’t even met them all. Sometimes a bowing eunuch will tell in passing that an embassy arrived today from the Uyghur tribes. Thirty new women. Don’t worry, your exalted, they were taken to the baths and are now comfortable in their rooms. Your humble servant has some paperwork on them. Should you meet with these new ladies, you think? Ah, you’re too tired now; you’ll arrange something in the morning, if you remember. Leave the paperwork on the stack over there. Too much baijiu tonight, you tell the eunuch. I need to go to bed. Would you please send a servant to fetch... well, Xiaoyuanjing (your wife) has been moody of late, how about you bring me Suxiao. No, she doesn’t need the lingerie or the nipple tassels, I just want a warm body in bed next to me as I sleep.
“Okay, my friend, now we are on the Dragon Line,” says Bruce Lee, pointing and waving with his index finger. He points to the north: “If you want to go to the Ming emperor’s tombs, just go straight. Fifty kilometres.” To the south: “Along the Dragon Line, we find Tienanmen Square. Tienanmen Square, Forbidden City, Olympic Park and Ming Tombs, all built on central line.”
At every major building in the palace, there rests two large iron pots, like hollowed-out boulders. Around the corner are equally large turtle dragon – or longgui – statues. What are the pots for, posits Bruce Lee. It’s because the entire palace is wood. These pots are pre-modern fire hydrants.
In the Imperial Garden, there are two large statues of qilins, Chinese mythical figures. I’d seen these around. You can see miniature versions at the Wangfujing Night Market, where you’re badgered by pushy salesmen. “What do they signify?” I ask Bruce Lee.
He smiles, seems impressed I know the name of them. “The qilin is one of nine sons of the dragon – the long,” he says. “They... they can tell is a person if loyal or not, if he is someone that is trustworthy.” During the Ming Dynasty, the mariner and explorer Zheng He (himself ‘human tribute’ as a eunuch) became one of the most widely travelled explorers prior to the discovery of the Americas. Indeed, one such myth is that Zheng discovered the Americas before Columbus, though this claim is doubted by academics. He did make it as far as the west coast of Africa, where the Chinese got their first sight of a giraffe, which was mistaken as a qilin, and the style has varied since. Though they tend to lack the long neck, they have the hooves and antlers (in giraffes, ossicones). They look somewhat fearsome, with dragon-like scales and a wicked, toothy grin. In the Daoist tradition, they punish the wicked. Buddhists believe they refuse to walk on the grass for fear of damaging even a single blade, and do not eat flesh. Generally they’re seen a sign of luck and good omens.
You exit the back side of the Forbidden City, a bridge across the moat and out onto Jingshan Front Street, where the driver would pick us up. Jingshan Park is across the road, a former imperial parkland I never got the chance to tour. To the west of Jingshan Park was Beihai Park, another imperial park, mostly water with Qiongdao Island in the middle of it. Beihai I did tour, but that was another day, and a section for a little later in the story. Instead, we turn east along Jingshan Front to where the driver would meet us. It was broad sidewalk, interlocking brick. There’s a concession truck parked here. Women are selling large picture books in English about the Forbidden City (they were fairly cheap; I don’t remember the price exactly, but it wasn’t much – I almost wish I’d picked up a copy). Police are ubiquitous, their uniforms pristine. A beggar sits on the sidewalk, holding a microphone with his right hand and singing along to a stereo. He’s an amputee, missing his left arm, and he’s badly burned down the whole left side of his body (he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and you could see horrific burns all the way down to the waistband of his pants). But for as much I might have wanted to toss the poor guy a few yuan, I didn’t even make eye contact with him, and briskly kept marching.
Sitting in the waiting lounge at Macau International two days before, I was all too aware I was about to board a plane into a totalitarian country. Customs were simple enough, ushered through quite quickly into the waiting lounge, where I slipped on my headphones and began reviewing my Mandarin. The duty free was stacked full of single malt scotches, pricey baijiu, one rather expensive Japanese whiskey, gallons worth of cognac, and not much else. In my luggage, tucked into a five-hundred-page graphic novel as bookmarks, was some literature on Tibetan Buddhism, picked up in Hong Kong. It was written entirely in Chinese characters which I couldn’t read, and I had to simply trust the gentleman at the monastery when he told me it was politically safe for the Mainland. You don’t mention anything about Tibetan separatism in the PRC. More risky stuff I’d gotten rid of, like the Falun Gong propaganda handed out outside the Ngong Ping 360 cable car entrance. These pamphlets – one decrying Falun Gong forced organ harvesting in China, and one that was pro-Chinese propaganda, denouncing the Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi as a cult leader – were left in the Hong Kong hotel room (though not before photographing every page, emailing the pictures to myself and then deleting them from my phone).
A short list of political topics not to touch in Mainland China: Tibetan independence, Uyghur separatism and/or terrorism in Xinjiang, ‘Southern’ Mongolia (an Inner Mongolian independence movement; look up a guy named Hada), anything critical of President Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party, and, of course, the Falun Gong movement. Both Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese government’s brutal repression.[8] The Falun Gong movement, criminalized as a cult under the presidency of Jiang Zemin (in office 1993-2003), is now at the centre of accusations of large-scale forced organ harvesting by the Chinese government and military, a topic of widespread international condemnation.[9]
[8: Separatists in Xinjiang, predominantly Uyghur Muslims, tend to go a different route than self-immolation. The Turkestan Islamic Party (East Turkestan is the Uyghur separatist name for Xinjiang) is recognized as a terrorist group by China, the European Union, United Kingdom, United States and others, though the extent of genuine Islamic terrorism in Xinjiang has been thrown into question. Prior to 2001, the Chinese blamed dissidence in Xinjiang on the CIA, then conveniently changed their story after 9/11; now they’re involved in a war against al-Qaeda. To be sure, a certain number of Uyghurs have fled the region, some of which joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a contingent of which are now al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) aligned in the Syrian Civil War, though Chinese claims of attacks in Xinjiang are treated with scepticism. The Chinese heavily censor the internet, particularly here, once shutting it down entirely for a period of six months, and its geographical isolation and barriers put up by the government prevent independent journalism from verifying Chinese claims.]
[9: For more on this, see The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem by Ethan Gutmann.]
Seeing a badly burnt amputee as a beggar in the Beijing streets, I wanted to get away from this political powderkeg as quickly as possible.
“You have to try the pu’er tea,” insists Bruce Lee. Next on our tour was a traditional Chinese tea house. “Only sold in China. It comes from Yunnan Province and they can’t make enough for export.” As we drove, he explained how tea is supposed to be drunk. It’s a very technical procedure. “Men, your fingers curled inwards, to symbolize the dragon. The dragon is yang, it is male. Women have their fingers spread outwards like the phoenix. This is yin, female. Men, don’t hold your fingers like this, or else you’re a ladyboy.”
At the tea house, our host reiterated this. “If a man holds his fingers like this,” she says, “it means he’s a sissy.”
There were five different types of tea to sample, with all sorts of gimmicks like teacups that change colour with warmth applied, or a little clay ‘pee boy’ statue which ‘pees’ when the water gets hot enough. The Australian woman touring with us bought nearly too much to carry, while at the same time deciding to ask the British couple about Australia’s duty and declaration policies with a confused look on her face.
“Temple of Heaven,” Bruce Lee says in the van, “three times bigger than Forbidden City. Summer Palace, six times bigger.” The Temple of Heaven, or Tiantan, a large Daoist park also built in the early fifteenth century by the usurper Zhu Di, consists of two parts. The outer portion is manicured parkland, where senior citizens gather in numbers and aggressively play cards. The inner portion is the temple itself, a large, three-story Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. This circular building, elevated on a stone platform and surrounded by a large courtyard, and was also constructed entirely of wood with no nails holding it together.
This is where you (Qiyu) would come to make offerings to Tian, or Heaven, twice yearly for good harvests. You may have even come here to pray for your brother, the retired emperor, in the early days, who (according to Esen’s memorandums) was kept in good health and was being treated like an imperial guest.[10] In cases of national emergency, such as a drought, you may be expected to come here outside of the usual, twice yearly schedule as well. That’s why you’re here today: Lihua, your sister, whom Qizhen sent off to seal a pact with Esen in 1443,[11] has sent a secret message to the court through a Mongol emissary (you’re pretty sure she seduced him, but the message doesn’t specify this). She’d been sent off to the wedding bed at the age of fourteen, and has no great love for the brother that sent her there. That’s one more reason you decided to make certain demands of your brother when he showed up at the Wall a year after your enthronement – yes, Esen did release “his useless prize in exchange for a weak Chinese promise to reopen border trade”,[12] but you were sure to make him disavow the throne before you let him through the Wall. He’s now under house arrest. Lihua did always have a fondness for you, and in her rambling note expresses joy that you came to the throne. The main text of her message though is this: Esen, her ‘darling husband’, is plotting a large-scale raid near Red Salt Lake, about sixty kilometres into the Ordos, in what is today Inner Mongolia. The Wall out there is not finished, and you have to act fast.[13] You’ve dispatched an army to reinforce local garrisons, but those barbarians have always moved faster than Chinese armies, and there’s no date on Lihua’s message. So here you are, abasing yourself before Heaven above, awaiting updates from your commanders in the field.
[10: He was even offered a Mongolian wife, which he declined.]
[11: Unlike the other historical figures I’ve put names to, Lihua is fictional.]
[12: Brook, pg. 96.]
[13: I’m taking liberties here. There was an incident at Red Salt Lake, but it was a local commander that got word, leading an attack against the Mongols and sparking debates about the national interest in continuing the building of the Ming Wall. This occurred in 1473, not 1453 (the year following the deposing of Empress Xiaoyuanjing), as I’m depicting. See Man, pg. 201, for details.]
Suxiao, now your wife after you got rid of the first one (Suxiao was right, Xiaoyuanjing really wasn’t cut out to be empress), stands back as you make your obeisances to the gods. You haven’t touched her, or any of your women, for three days, nor have you eaten meat or had wine. You’ve been by yourself, west of the park, at the Palace of Abstinence. You leave that hall just before dawn at the ringing of a bell. Everything in Tiantan Park is in multiples of nine, a lucky number. Singers, dancers and bannermen all take their places. Everything is highly choreographed. Incense is being burned. A cow has been prepared; it has been shaven and the stove is warm. Animal sacrifice doesn’t happen at every ceremony, but a cow has been arranged today because of the urgency in your sister’s letter. You make your prayers. While you pray, officials offer meats, vegetables, wine, silk and jade to other gods on the upper level of the altar. These things are burnt in stoves to the south while incense wafts throughout the park.
“Things went well,” Suxiao tells you in the palanquin en route back to your palace. “The prognosticators assured me Heaven was quite please.”
When you get back to the palace, the sycophantic eunuchs are all smiles. There are two generals there, also offering praise, their heads bowed. You wave them all away.
You have gone the past seventy-two hours without release, something a man in your position only does for Heaven itself. Suxiao, your darling wife, is prepared. She’s wearing her best corset beneath her court robes, and has had the eunuchs prepare a vase of tororo-jiru.[14] Moreover, when you’re finished with all the post-ceremonial hoopla in the Front Court, you’re pleased to find she has one of her sistren in the harem[15] already in your bed chamber. You know this one. Yes, yes... don’t say it, you’ll get her name. Thin, Vietnamese, has a sexy accent...
[14: Made from grated Chinese yams, the Japanese apparently used this as a pre-modern lubricant. In fact, it dates to Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), so I’m a century and a half early in having it appear here, but just go with it.]
[15: Former sistren; she’s your wife now.]
“I was 2655, most exalted,” she says sheepishly.
Ah, that’s right, you never got her name. That was the number on her file, written above her name. You really must speak to the eunuchs – they should write the number in a smaller font or something.
“If the Son of Heaven wishes to hear you speak,” says Suxiao, “he will ask it.” Now your wife is holding a riding crop.
2655 has gone bright red. Yes, that’s what you liked about her. She’s not as coy and practised – not as fake – as the other sycophants streaming through the revolving door of your bedchamber. There’s a realness to her. She’s embarrassed, nods without speaking.
“Good girl,” says Suxiao. “Now take off that dress,” she dictates, pouring a liberal amount of the tororo-jiru into her hand–
Alright, I think I’m going to stop myself there. This is a travelogue. If you want concubine sex scenes, there are other places you can find them.[16]
[16: I might suggest One Night in Ikh Khulan.]
---continued in PART 2---
Date: Monday, October 10th – Saturday, October 15th, 2016
I did not eat deep-fried scorpion on a stick.
They were being sold at the Wangfujing Night Market, two minutes walk from my hotel. I was a few blocks from the Forbidden City off Wangfujing Avenue. An upscale shopping district was about a few minutes walk down Wangfujing, and at night booths sprung up in alleyways off this major thoroughfare selling brass or clay statues of dragons, horses, tigers and qilins, magnets, laser pointers, green camo hats with the Chinese communist star on them, silk scrolls with tigers, phoenixes or the Great Wall on them, and t-shirts proclaiming “I [heart] BJ”. There were ubiquitous bottles of milk, Yanjing and Tsingtao beer, lamb on a stick, grilled snake and tentacles on a stick, tripe (strips of stomach lining), deep-fried tarantulas, footlong millipedes and, yes, deep-fried scorpions on a stick, which were skewered through while still alive – twitching and squirming, their tails jabbing about – and then deep fried upon their sale.
(One young woman walked by me one night at this market, munching off a two-foot stick or deep-fried tentacle pieces. I, as a sheer gut reaction, spat out a disgusted grunt: “Uurgh.” She, standing not three feet from me, heard me say it, and looked up to see the uncontrolled – and, admittedly, rather rude – reaction of an uncultured Westerner to her delicacy, and burst out laughing, sniggering to her friend as she passed.)
Wangfujing itself was closed to vehicular traffic for the 5th Beijing Wangfujing International Brand Festival, and beer and ice cream shacks were erected, salesmen dressed up as Mongol aristocrats outside shoe stores, police were out with their red and blue flashing epaulettes and bomb-sniffing German shepherds.
You walk the street at night. Buddhists and Christians perform dance numbers in the sidewalk, or in front of St. Joseph’s church. It’s a little chilly in Beijing in October, and I was just wearing a t-shirt. You’re a racial minority, and stand out like a sore thumb; everyone knows you’re a tourist. At major tourist sites like the Temple of Heaven or the Summer Palace young women try and sneak pictures of themselves with you, until you catch them, offer them a picture and they’re giddy as can be, linking arms with you and making the peace sign. But at night, it’s a different type of woman that comes up to you.
The first was from Harbin, in Manchuria. She was pretty, perhaps about thirty, sitting with a woman a little older on a sidewalk bench. She spoke exceptional English, though her friend seemed to speak fairly little. “Aren’t you cold?” the young one in red asks. Sit, talk for a minute. Where are you from? Ah, Canada, it’s colder there, right? You’re more used to the cold. Many Chinese people there, yes? Many immigrants? Your Chinese is very good. Where did you learn?[1]
[1: We were conversing almost exclusively in English, but I’d said the odd word in Mandarin.]
Within thirty seconds or so she got to the point. How about we go for a beer, just down the street, we can talk some more? Get out of the cold?
No, I told her politely, saying I had to get back soon. I had an early morning the next day, off to see the Forbidden City. She was insistent, but when she saw I wasn’t going to fall for it, she quickly conceded and ended the conversation.
The second one appeared beside me like a ghost as I was walking back towards the hotel. Same general questions. Where you from? Lots of Chinese people in Canada, no? You here on vacation? Hey, would you like to go to a bar and get some beer? No, well how about coffee? How about you give me money for a beer and I’ll go alone?
Then she cursed me out and ran off the other way. The third, maybe sixty seconds later, leapt off a bench and jogged towards me. Hello, where are you from? I just shook my head and held up a hand, and kept walking.
They were all women, all around thirty or so, all spoke exceptional English. Reasonably pretty. But then why was I ignoring their advances?
This sort of thing is on dozens of videos and blog posts on travel to China, it was listed in the Beijing travel book I carried with me in my pocket, and it’s right on the Government of Canada travel advisory website. It’s the tea house scam, and it seems to be the number one thing to be on the lookout for in Beijing.[2]
[2: Apart from espousing the wrong political opinions. More on this in a little bit.]
Generally she’ll suggest going to a tea house. She’ll say she’s a student of English, wants practise with it. You go to the tea house, order a couple drinks, you naturally pay for hers, and you either have neglected to ask the price, or when they gave you a number like three (yuan or renminbi[3]), it was shorthand for three hundred. When the bill comes, it’s exorbitant, and they physically won’t let you leave until you’ve paid it. She, of course, is in on the scam with the tea house.
[3: The exchange rate, at the time of writing, is ¥5.12 to CAD$1]
I was approached by one textbook tea house scam on the Friday. I was out visiting the Foreign Language Bookstore, in the middle of this shopping district. No DVDs of Legend of Yuan Empire Founder, a 2013 HBS series on Kublai Khan. As I was leaving, though, a book almost jumped off the shelf at me. It was on Emperor Puyi and his harem. Yes, I think I’ll get this.[4] Walking out, a woman bounded up from a sidewalk bench and ran over to me. They’re hungry like vultures. Hello, where you from? Toronto? Vancouver? Are you here on vacation? And so on it goes.
[4: The Last Emperor and His Five Wives by Professor Wang Qingxiang. It cost me about $22 Canadian; looking it up back in Canada, the cheapest I saw was $65 plus shipping. Despite the efforts of the translator, much of it is in a somewhat broken, halting grammar.]
She was also around thirty, had a partner behind her that was more submissive. She wore a white turtleneck with her hair down and had a thin, wispy, feminine moustache. She claimed to be from Hangzhou – you know Hangzhou, it’s down near Shanghai – and was here practising her English. Her English was already quite good, but she apparently needed a refresher. Would I like to go for some tea and practise?
Wangfujing Avenue is in the heart of downtown Beijing. Tienanmen Square isn’t far, and the same with Beihai Park, the “earliest and best preserved imperial garden in the world.”[5] North of Tienanmen Square is the Forbidden City, the former centre of the Chinese empire and imperial palace in which the emperors lived. This one-hundred-and-eighty-acre palace, now a museum, is surrounded by a moat, contained within a massive red-bricked wall, and contains nine hundred and eighty buildings, all held together by not a single nail. Completed in 1420, it was first used by Zhu Di, third emperor and the great usurper of the Ming Dynasty (he’d committed a coup d’état against his nephew). The last emperor, Puyi – who, after his abdication would become a Japanese war criminal, tried as such by the People’s Republic in 1950 and imprisoned for a period of ten years – was forced from the palace in 1924.
[5: Quote taken from a placard outside the park.]
Early on the Wednesday morning, I shook hands with the tour guide that would show a small group around this elaborate palace, as well as the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace. His name was Bruce Lee, or so he called himself. His driver showed up not long after with a cargo van. We toured with a lovely older British couple – actually, he was born in Canada and she was Georgian-Russian, though they hailed from London – as well as a clueless Australian woman. The British couple were in the middle of a several weeks-long Eurasian tour, which began in St. Petersburg, then along the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Lake Baikal, into Mongolia, and they were flying out the following day to Lhasa, Tibet. Just the day before, they’d toured the Badaling site of the Great Wall with Bruce Lee.
“It’s packed, shoulder to shoulder,” said John, the husband, bringing up pictures on his phone with crowds that looked like a Hong Kong subway station. He’d toured Mutianyu, another major site, about fifteen years before, and so this time around they went to Badaling.
Mutianyu was the one that I’d wanted to see, as I knew it was less crowded, less commercialized and more hilly, with steep, never-ending staircases and a wavy course along the mountains. It’s about ninety minutes outside Beijing, as opposed to Badaling, which is sixty. Not really all that far north when you consider the constant threat, the constant raids, from barbarians beyond the Wall.
The hotel concierge desk employed three people, with three different levels of fluency in English. The youngest of them, Matthew, spoke barely a word. Boyd was better, could book tours and answer basic questions about the airport shuttle bus, but struggled greatly with it. Eason, however, was practically fluent. Mutianyu was not offered through that hotel, but no worries, assured Eason. “I can hire a private car for you to go there if you like. Eight hundred yuan for the day. You can leave whenever you like.” The driver, however, will speak only a little English. I had to think on this. The concierge desk was closing in ten minutes. “Just talk to Boyd tomorrow,” says Eason. Boyd, however, didn’t speak enough English to know about this arrangement. He tried flipping through a tour book and priced out something closer to 1,600. So the Great Wall we’ll leave until later in the week. In the meantime, I booked the tour with Bruce Lee.
“Forbidden City,” says Bruce Lee, standing just inside the Meridian Gate, “is from Ming, Qing Dynasties. Total, twenty-four emperors live inside.” He was holding the little yellow flag of his tour company on a collapsible stick, and spoke largely with his hands. The courtyard inside was tremendous. All the buildings were in vibrant colours, and had ornate, Oriental xieshan designs. There were dragons carved into the wood and elaborately painted. The emperor’s throne room is in line symmetrically north of the Meridian Gate, with civic offices to the one side and military offices to the other. Elaborate stone designs line the pathway just inside the Meridian Gate, leading to the expansive courtyard of interlocking brick, which, as Bruce Lee explained, was fourteen layers deep – almost a meter and a half thick. The emperors, it seemed, were paranoid about enemies tunnelling in.
“Inside the Forbidden City, you including two parts: Front Court and Inner Palace. Front Court used for the emperor for grand ceremony, meeting, conference. The Inner Palace for the emperor, empress, concubines.”
Deep inside the Inner Court, one of the buildings we saw (through a pane of glass) was the imperial bedchamber. There were many beds inside, each draped in silk embroidered with phoenixes and dragons, and covered with curtains and the lot. Sometimes there would be a version of a wedding ceremony for a concubine (this would probably depend on the emperor’s whim, and her rank as a concubine), but nothing as elaborate as the ceremony for his wife. The wife, Lee explained, was not chosen by the emperor, but usually by the emperor’s parents. The father, usually the retired emperor, still had a certain patriarchal function within the royal family, even after stepping aside from the throne (which they didn’t always do, Lee was quick to add). Divorce, likewise, was something decided by the emperor’s parents. These were political affairs, not personal. Besides, for the monarch’s sexual whims, for his perpetual satisfaction, that’s why he had concubines.
“How many concubines?” Bruce Lee had asked before we got to the emperor’s bedchamber, standing just inside the Gate of Heavenly Purity, separating the Front Court and Inner Palace. “Three thousand.”
Let’s suppose you’re a Chinese emperor for a moment. It’s 1449. You’re Zhu Qiyu, the second son of the Xuande Emperor. Your half-brother, Qizhen, just ten months older than you, ascended to the throne in 1435, at just the age of eight (at least one of you was born from one of your father’s concubines). When he was twenty-one, he decided he needed to prove himself in battle. As it so happened, the Ming did have a powerful enemy out there causing problems, and one who was growing in strength every day. His name was Esen. John Man, in his book The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World, says,
“[Esen] inherited control of the western Mongol groups, the Oirat. In the 1440s he took over what are today Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian -stans, then the Chinese-Mongol borderland groups along the Gobi to Manchuria. ... It looked as if one day he might become another Genghis and lead the Mongols to reclaim China. One way he increased his popularity at home was to exploit the ‘tribute system’ by which China dealt with the ‘barbarians’. ... The reality behind the euphemistic exchange of barbarian ‘tribute’ and imperial ‘gifts’ was trade ... but also payment to keep the peace, always with the (unstated) threat of blackmail – that if the emperor’s gifts were not good enough, the barbarian leaders might go on the war-path. ... This was nothing but extortion.”[6]
[6: Man, pg. 186-187.]
In other words, the Chinese had better pay up if they don’t want raids to take these things by force. The Chinese would often enter into treaty agreements with their barbarian neighbours to keep the peace. Sometimes the Chinese emperor would symbolically adopt the Mongol khan, forming a father-son, an uncle-nephew, or, when barbarian power was particularly strong, a brother-brother relationship. Often times Chinese princesses were carted north to become the latest wife of a khan to seal such agreements. Perhaps you’ve even seen some of your sisters sent north to Esen.
So in 1449, under the guidance of a corrupt eunuch, your august brother raises a half-million-man army in just two days, and sets out north. And doesn’t disaster happen. In a confrontation known as the Crisis of Tumu Fortress, not far from Badaling, Esen, alerted of your brother’s movements by his intelligence network, acts quickly and attacks, cutting off the royal contingent from the body of the army. Qizhen falls into Esen’s hands. The court in Beijing receives a letter: Half your army lies dead, and I have your emperor. You will send me....
Beijing reorganizes. A new minister of war has now pushed through a motion that Qizhen be declared a retired emperor – this being the quick and easy fix to the hostage situation. In essence, it means Beijing is abandoning your brother, while at the same time trying to put a nice face on it. And the war minister... well, guess who he’s decided should be your brother’s replacement.
You come to the throne just one day after your twenty-first birthday. As a prince, you’d have had your own concubines, but they were not (comparably) great in number. You knew each of their names, and could list where they came from. One of them, in fact, Suxiao, was a favourite of sorts, and will remain so as you ascend the throne; in just a few short years, you’ll depose the wife you took shortly before the Tumu Crisis and instill Suxiao as your new empress.[7] But there are worlds of difference between being a prince and an emperor. As emperor, you are the personification of yang (among other things, maleness), in Daoist eyes. To maintain the balance of the universe, you need an appropriate magnitude of yin (femaleness).
[7: There’s no father emperor here to manage the family politics – that falls on you as well.]
So picture your situation for a second. You were destined to be just some mediocre royal official, yet, at the age of twenty-one, you’ve stepped into the emperorship of China. You’ve signed off on all the proclamations ‘retiring’ your brother. Human tribute (i.e. concubines) begins coming in from vassals and neighbouring countries. The Koreans have stopped sending concubines at this point, but you still get them from the Vietnamese, Champans (southern Vietnam), Cambodians, Thais, Tibetans, Manchurian tribes, Okinawans, and even some Mongol and other Central Asian peoples, as well as from across China. An administrative woman, the nüshi (essentially your own private madam/sexual manager) will interview various candidates on your behalf, right down to a strip inspection and gynaecological exam. Administrative eunuchs catalogue and house these women in the Forbidden City. The only males, apart from yourself and certain royal officials, permitted inside the palace are eunuchs, so no one shall touch them but you. When you hold court, a coterie of wenches are there, silent in the gallery. When you tour the Imperial Garden, at the north end of the palace, women are gathered at every corner, hoping just to catch your eye. You don’t know all their names anymore – you can’t. You haven’t even met them all. Sometimes a bowing eunuch will tell in passing that an embassy arrived today from the Uyghur tribes. Thirty new women. Don’t worry, your exalted, they were taken to the baths and are now comfortable in their rooms. Your humble servant has some paperwork on them. Should you meet with these new ladies, you think? Ah, you’re too tired now; you’ll arrange something in the morning, if you remember. Leave the paperwork on the stack over there. Too much baijiu tonight, you tell the eunuch. I need to go to bed. Would you please send a servant to fetch... well, Xiaoyuanjing (your wife) has been moody of late, how about you bring me Suxiao. No, she doesn’t need the lingerie or the nipple tassels, I just want a warm body in bed next to me as I sleep.
“Okay, my friend, now we are on the Dragon Line,” says Bruce Lee, pointing and waving with his index finger. He points to the north: “If you want to go to the Ming emperor’s tombs, just go straight. Fifty kilometres.” To the south: “Along the Dragon Line, we find Tienanmen Square. Tienanmen Square, Forbidden City, Olympic Park and Ming Tombs, all built on central line.”
At every major building in the palace, there rests two large iron pots, like hollowed-out boulders. Around the corner are equally large turtle dragon – or longgui – statues. What are the pots for, posits Bruce Lee. It’s because the entire palace is wood. These pots are pre-modern fire hydrants.
In the Imperial Garden, there are two large statues of qilins, Chinese mythical figures. I’d seen these around. You can see miniature versions at the Wangfujing Night Market, where you’re badgered by pushy salesmen. “What do they signify?” I ask Bruce Lee.
He smiles, seems impressed I know the name of them. “The qilin is one of nine sons of the dragon – the long,” he says. “They... they can tell is a person if loyal or not, if he is someone that is trustworthy.” During the Ming Dynasty, the mariner and explorer Zheng He (himself ‘human tribute’ as a eunuch) became one of the most widely travelled explorers prior to the discovery of the Americas. Indeed, one such myth is that Zheng discovered the Americas before Columbus, though this claim is doubted by academics. He did make it as far as the west coast of Africa, where the Chinese got their first sight of a giraffe, which was mistaken as a qilin, and the style has varied since. Though they tend to lack the long neck, they have the hooves and antlers (in giraffes, ossicones). They look somewhat fearsome, with dragon-like scales and a wicked, toothy grin. In the Daoist tradition, they punish the wicked. Buddhists believe they refuse to walk on the grass for fear of damaging even a single blade, and do not eat flesh. Generally they’re seen a sign of luck and good omens.
You exit the back side of the Forbidden City, a bridge across the moat and out onto Jingshan Front Street, where the driver would pick us up. Jingshan Park is across the road, a former imperial parkland I never got the chance to tour. To the west of Jingshan Park was Beihai Park, another imperial park, mostly water with Qiongdao Island in the middle of it. Beihai I did tour, but that was another day, and a section for a little later in the story. Instead, we turn east along Jingshan Front to where the driver would meet us. It was broad sidewalk, interlocking brick. There’s a concession truck parked here. Women are selling large picture books in English about the Forbidden City (they were fairly cheap; I don’t remember the price exactly, but it wasn’t much – I almost wish I’d picked up a copy). Police are ubiquitous, their uniforms pristine. A beggar sits on the sidewalk, holding a microphone with his right hand and singing along to a stereo. He’s an amputee, missing his left arm, and he’s badly burned down the whole left side of his body (he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and you could see horrific burns all the way down to the waistband of his pants). But for as much I might have wanted to toss the poor guy a few yuan, I didn’t even make eye contact with him, and briskly kept marching.
Sitting in the waiting lounge at Macau International two days before, I was all too aware I was about to board a plane into a totalitarian country. Customs were simple enough, ushered through quite quickly into the waiting lounge, where I slipped on my headphones and began reviewing my Mandarin. The duty free was stacked full of single malt scotches, pricey baijiu, one rather expensive Japanese whiskey, gallons worth of cognac, and not much else. In my luggage, tucked into a five-hundred-page graphic novel as bookmarks, was some literature on Tibetan Buddhism, picked up in Hong Kong. It was written entirely in Chinese characters which I couldn’t read, and I had to simply trust the gentleman at the monastery when he told me it was politically safe for the Mainland. You don’t mention anything about Tibetan separatism in the PRC. More risky stuff I’d gotten rid of, like the Falun Gong propaganda handed out outside the Ngong Ping 360 cable car entrance. These pamphlets – one decrying Falun Gong forced organ harvesting in China, and one that was pro-Chinese propaganda, denouncing the Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi as a cult leader – were left in the Hong Kong hotel room (though not before photographing every page, emailing the pictures to myself and then deleting them from my phone).
A short list of political topics not to touch in Mainland China: Tibetan independence, Uyghur separatism and/or terrorism in Xinjiang, ‘Southern’ Mongolia (an Inner Mongolian independence movement; look up a guy named Hada), anything critical of President Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party, and, of course, the Falun Gong movement. Both Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese government’s brutal repression.[8] The Falun Gong movement, criminalized as a cult under the presidency of Jiang Zemin (in office 1993-2003), is now at the centre of accusations of large-scale forced organ harvesting by the Chinese government and military, a topic of widespread international condemnation.[9]
[8: Separatists in Xinjiang, predominantly Uyghur Muslims, tend to go a different route than self-immolation. The Turkestan Islamic Party (East Turkestan is the Uyghur separatist name for Xinjiang) is recognized as a terrorist group by China, the European Union, United Kingdom, United States and others, though the extent of genuine Islamic terrorism in Xinjiang has been thrown into question. Prior to 2001, the Chinese blamed dissidence in Xinjiang on the CIA, then conveniently changed their story after 9/11; now they’re involved in a war against al-Qaeda. To be sure, a certain number of Uyghurs have fled the region, some of which joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a contingent of which are now al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) aligned in the Syrian Civil War, though Chinese claims of attacks in Xinjiang are treated with scepticism. The Chinese heavily censor the internet, particularly here, once shutting it down entirely for a period of six months, and its geographical isolation and barriers put up by the government prevent independent journalism from verifying Chinese claims.]
[9: For more on this, see The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem by Ethan Gutmann.]
Seeing a badly burnt amputee as a beggar in the Beijing streets, I wanted to get away from this political powderkeg as quickly as possible.
“You have to try the pu’er tea,” insists Bruce Lee. Next on our tour was a traditional Chinese tea house. “Only sold in China. It comes from Yunnan Province and they can’t make enough for export.” As we drove, he explained how tea is supposed to be drunk. It’s a very technical procedure. “Men, your fingers curled inwards, to symbolize the dragon. The dragon is yang, it is male. Women have their fingers spread outwards like the phoenix. This is yin, female. Men, don’t hold your fingers like this, or else you’re a ladyboy.”
At the tea house, our host reiterated this. “If a man holds his fingers like this,” she says, “it means he’s a sissy.”
There were five different types of tea to sample, with all sorts of gimmicks like teacups that change colour with warmth applied, or a little clay ‘pee boy’ statue which ‘pees’ when the water gets hot enough. The Australian woman touring with us bought nearly too much to carry, while at the same time deciding to ask the British couple about Australia’s duty and declaration policies with a confused look on her face.
“Temple of Heaven,” Bruce Lee says in the van, “three times bigger than Forbidden City. Summer Palace, six times bigger.” The Temple of Heaven, or Tiantan, a large Daoist park also built in the early fifteenth century by the usurper Zhu Di, consists of two parts. The outer portion is manicured parkland, where senior citizens gather in numbers and aggressively play cards. The inner portion is the temple itself, a large, three-story Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. This circular building, elevated on a stone platform and surrounded by a large courtyard, and was also constructed entirely of wood with no nails holding it together.
This is where you (Qiyu) would come to make offerings to Tian, or Heaven, twice yearly for good harvests. You may have even come here to pray for your brother, the retired emperor, in the early days, who (according to Esen’s memorandums) was kept in good health and was being treated like an imperial guest.[10] In cases of national emergency, such as a drought, you may be expected to come here outside of the usual, twice yearly schedule as well. That’s why you’re here today: Lihua, your sister, whom Qizhen sent off to seal a pact with Esen in 1443,[11] has sent a secret message to the court through a Mongol emissary (you’re pretty sure she seduced him, but the message doesn’t specify this). She’d been sent off to the wedding bed at the age of fourteen, and has no great love for the brother that sent her there. That’s one more reason you decided to make certain demands of your brother when he showed up at the Wall a year after your enthronement – yes, Esen did release “his useless prize in exchange for a weak Chinese promise to reopen border trade”,[12] but you were sure to make him disavow the throne before you let him through the Wall. He’s now under house arrest. Lihua did always have a fondness for you, and in her rambling note expresses joy that you came to the throne. The main text of her message though is this: Esen, her ‘darling husband’, is plotting a large-scale raid near Red Salt Lake, about sixty kilometres into the Ordos, in what is today Inner Mongolia. The Wall out there is not finished, and you have to act fast.[13] You’ve dispatched an army to reinforce local garrisons, but those barbarians have always moved faster than Chinese armies, and there’s no date on Lihua’s message. So here you are, abasing yourself before Heaven above, awaiting updates from your commanders in the field.
[10: He was even offered a Mongolian wife, which he declined.]
[11: Unlike the other historical figures I’ve put names to, Lihua is fictional.]
[12: Brook, pg. 96.]
[13: I’m taking liberties here. There was an incident at Red Salt Lake, but it was a local commander that got word, leading an attack against the Mongols and sparking debates about the national interest in continuing the building of the Ming Wall. This occurred in 1473, not 1453 (the year following the deposing of Empress Xiaoyuanjing), as I’m depicting. See Man, pg. 201, for details.]
Suxiao, now your wife after you got rid of the first one (Suxiao was right, Xiaoyuanjing really wasn’t cut out to be empress), stands back as you make your obeisances to the gods. You haven’t touched her, or any of your women, for three days, nor have you eaten meat or had wine. You’ve been by yourself, west of the park, at the Palace of Abstinence. You leave that hall just before dawn at the ringing of a bell. Everything in Tiantan Park is in multiples of nine, a lucky number. Singers, dancers and bannermen all take their places. Everything is highly choreographed. Incense is being burned. A cow has been prepared; it has been shaven and the stove is warm. Animal sacrifice doesn’t happen at every ceremony, but a cow has been arranged today because of the urgency in your sister’s letter. You make your prayers. While you pray, officials offer meats, vegetables, wine, silk and jade to other gods on the upper level of the altar. These things are burnt in stoves to the south while incense wafts throughout the park.
“Things went well,” Suxiao tells you in the palanquin en route back to your palace. “The prognosticators assured me Heaven was quite please.”
When you get back to the palace, the sycophantic eunuchs are all smiles. There are two generals there, also offering praise, their heads bowed. You wave them all away.
You have gone the past seventy-two hours without release, something a man in your position only does for Heaven itself. Suxiao, your darling wife, is prepared. She’s wearing her best corset beneath her court robes, and has had the eunuchs prepare a vase of tororo-jiru.[14] Moreover, when you’re finished with all the post-ceremonial hoopla in the Front Court, you’re pleased to find she has one of her sistren in the harem[15] already in your bed chamber. You know this one. Yes, yes... don’t say it, you’ll get her name. Thin, Vietnamese, has a sexy accent...
[14: Made from grated Chinese yams, the Japanese apparently used this as a pre-modern lubricant. In fact, it dates to Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), so I’m a century and a half early in having it appear here, but just go with it.]
[15: Former sistren; she’s your wife now.]
“I was 2655, most exalted,” she says sheepishly.
Ah, that’s right, you never got her name. That was the number on her file, written above her name. You really must speak to the eunuchs – they should write the number in a smaller font or something.
“If the Son of Heaven wishes to hear you speak,” says Suxiao, “he will ask it.” Now your wife is holding a riding crop.
2655 has gone bright red. Yes, that’s what you liked about her. She’s not as coy and practised – not as fake – as the other sycophants streaming through the revolving door of your bedchamber. There’s a realness to her. She’s embarrassed, nods without speaking.
“Good girl,” says Suxiao. “Now take off that dress,” she dictates, pouring a liberal amount of the tororo-jiru into her hand–
Alright, I think I’m going to stop myself there. This is a travelogue. If you want concubine sex scenes, there are other places you can find them.[16]
[16: I might suggest One Night in Ikh Khulan.]
---continued in PART 2---
Asia's Sin City: The Gambling Destination of Macao
Asia’s Sin City:
The Gambling Destination of Macao[1]
[1: Perhaps better known by the old Wade-Giles transliteration Macau, with a U (same pronunciation), though the pinyin is fairly standard now. Both spellings were seen in the territory, at airports and in Hong Kong and the Mainland.]
Date: Friday, October 7th – Monday, October 10th, 2016
In the gambling capital of the world, I made one bet. It was the last night I was there, after I’d returned from a rather unerotic ‘burlesque’ show (more on this later), while chilling in the hotel room. My brother was drinking Korean soju, while I was sipping a New Zealand chocolate vodka mudslide cocktail (about four percent alcohol). I had a small bottle of Zhengzongxiaoping flavoured baijiu (a more recognizable brand might be Moutai).[2] Scotch was everywhere in Macao, as was cognac. We cracked open our Hennessy sampler bottles – a little sweet, maybe it’s an acquired taste, like oppressing political dissidents – when my brother convinced me to head back out to Cotai and see all that that strip of land had to offer. I’d come to this city-state for the casinos, the glitz and glamour and gaudiness, and thus far I’d seen giant pandas, the historic district, museums, and few casinos. I wasn’t staying in Cotai, the Las Vegas Strip of Asia, but rather on the Macao Peninsula, not far from the Ferry Terminal. I had briefly walked through Cotai the night before, seeing the Venetian, the Parisian, the City of Dreams and the Sands Cotai Resort, which includes the Himalaya Casino, the Conrad Hotel, the Hilton and the 4,000-room Sheraton. However, I’d only briefly seen the inside of the Sands and the City of Dreams, and had missed out on the extensive shops, indoor canal system and labyrinthine casino of the Venetian, which, when measured by floor area, is the seventh largest building in the world.
[2: Thirty-nine percent alcohol. Goes down easier than pure baijiu, but the flavouring kind of makes it taste like medicine.]
[3: At close to a million square meters, it’s roughly fifty percent larger than the Pentagon.]
Moreover, I had completely missed the Galaxy, another major installation in Cotai. So, I was convinced to go out. There are high minimums in Macao, and I hadn’t bet anything since my arrival. The best baccarat minimums I’d seen were at the Jimei Casino, an ‘off-Strip’ two-room casino of about twenty tables (an no slots), comparable to the sort of joint you’d stop at thirty minutes outside of Vegas when that extra half hour is a bridge too far.
[4: And I didn’t even know how to play baccarat. I had looked it up briefly when I was writing One Night in Ikh Khulan, but I’d forgotten the details.]
We arrived, transferred from the Sands Macao (the older joint, on the Peninsula) via free shuttle bus to the Sands Cotai (newer, larger). We crossed the road, snapping pictures of the Eiffel Tower outside the Parisian, just down the way, and the massive bulk of the Venetian. Inside was a maze of high-end shops, set up just like the Venetian in Las Vegas. Up on the third floor was the canal system, lined by even more shops, old brick facades, with the fake domed ceiling to make it look like you were in Italy. Back down an escalator to the casino floor, which was packed at this evening hour, with people dressed in everything from designer suits and dresses to stained track suits, table games as far as the eye could see – baccarat here, blackjack there, some Caribbean poker off that way, craps around the other side of the escalator – and a bright red carpet with coiling, serpentine dragons dancing about on it. High minimums, as usual; at a casual glance, a low-end blackjack table had a minimum of HKD$300, with an upper limit of HKD$15 million.
[5: For some reason, this casino would only take Hong Kong dollars, not Macanese patacas (the currency of Macao), despite the fact that these two currencies are virtually interchangeable and they are always within three cents of each other. At the time of my writing this, one hundred Hong Kong dollars is valued at CAD$16.94, and 100 Macanese patacas is CAD$16.44]
How about roulette, I thought? That’s usually a cheap minimum. Where are the roulette tables, I had to ask. Ah, over that way, on the far side of this central escalator island. We head over. Most of the tables are packed, but one isn’t too busy. My brother asks if I want to place a bet. Why not? One bet. We each take a hundred dollars. The dealer gives my brother two chips. I always play the inside, so I ask for singles, which in North American casinos are usually valued at a dollar a piece. She likewise hands me two chips. Okay, so these are singles. HKD$50 a piece. Alright. 23 and... yes, I’ll go with 11. The wheel spins and... shouldn’t it come up on 11. Pays out thirty-six to one. HKD$1800. Have you ever seen a HKD$1000 bill?[6]
[6: It works out to about $300 Canadian, off of a $17 bet.]
Somewhat overshadowed by its bigger, more business savvy, more developed sister, Macao exists on the west side of the Pearl River Delta, across the channel from Hong Kong. It has about one fourteenth the population, and a little over one percent of the land area. However, this old Portuguese gateway into the Orient is now the Las Vegas of Asia, and the gambling capital of the world, bringing in seven times the revenue annually of its Nevadan cousin. When counted as its own country, it has the highest population density in the world and is richer than Dubai.
I’m a gambler at heart. I like the flashy, gaudy nature of casinos. Before this trip, I had never left North America, and to go to Asia for the first time, Hong Kong was the target. It’s the most Westernized part of East Asia, with half the population speaking English and heavy cultural ties to its former colonial parent, Britain. And if I’m going to travel to Hong Kong, you can’t come that close to the Las Vegas of Asia and not stop by.
You arrive via TurboJet Ferry from Hong Kong. About sixty minutes. It’s an international border between the two Special Administrative Regions, though hassle is minimal; it’s similar to the Canada-US border pre-9/11. The Ferry Terminal is on the Peninsula, not far from the fifty-kilometre road link they’re building between the two.[7] The Golden Dragon Hotel is only sixty hundred and fifty meters away, but with bridges going every which way and sidewalks terminating, perhaps walking isn’t the best option. There’s a lot across the road with dozens of shuttle buses. They’re all free here, operated by the casinos and running customers either between multiple casino properties, to the Ferry Terminal, or Border Gate, the connection with Zhuhai on the Mainland. I see Venetian, Galaxy, Hilton... no Golden Dragon. Very poor English with the first person I ask.
[7: Expected to cost more than US$10 billion, this project consists of a nearly thirty-kilometre bridge across the Pearl River Delta, returning to sea level at an artificial island, where it becomes a tunnel, then emerging on another artificial island. It’ll also connect to the Mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai. We could see one of the many artificial islands while crossing the Amizade (or Friendship) Bridge.]
One shouldn’t expect a lot of English in Macao. It’s a former Portuguese colony in the south of China. The dominant language is Cantonese. A certain percentage of the population will speak Mandarin, as well as Portuguese, but English is rare, even within parts of the tourist industry.
Ah, here’s a young woman calling out for her shuttle bus, and she’s asking if I need help in halfway decent English. “Golden Dragon? They don’t run a shuttle bus here anymore. You...” she struggles, “take the bus for Casa Real. Golden Dragon just around the corner. But...” and now here you can see the mental strain of her trying to translate this right, “don’t tell driver... don’t tell him Golden Dragon.”
I nod. “I understand,” I tell her. She smiles. The shuttle buses are meant for guests of that hotel, not any random traveller.
The bus arrives at Casa Real, not far away. Ask the bellhop. In broken English, he points to the intersection, then points left. Get to the corner. There’s the Golden Dragon. It’s across the road from a failing mall, and on the far side is Fisherman’s Wharf. Between Casa Real and the Dragon are about a half dozen watch shops, small little things in storefronts selling major brand name watches like Rolex – which I’m pretty sure weren’t knockoffs, as the prices on some of them were six figures (patacas). In fact, these watch shops, as well as jewelry shops of the same sort, were littered throughout Macao. Throw a stone from any location and you’ll hit three of them. The places all look rundown, in strip plazas next to pharmacies and convenience stores selling cheap flavoured baijiu and a half dozen different types of cognac, yet the prices are astronomical.
My guess is their business model is something like this: You’re a wealthy businessman, down to Macao for a little fun. You’re out at the casino. Remember that the ‘low-end’ tables have upper limits of HKD$15 million. Maybe you’ve got a sex worker sitting next to you at the craps table. She squeezes the dice in her cleavage before you play. Prostitution is legal here in Macao, much like it is in Nevada.[8] You’re on a winning streak, win big. You walk down the block to your hotel. You’re bathed in euphoria. You pass three watch shops. Hey, a Rolex would look good on me, don’t you think? Maybe you buy one. As for the jewelry, well, doesn’t your good luck charm deserve a little something? She kissed the cards just before you won, after all. Maybe she even... prods you to this decision. Come on, baby, I really like that diamond necklace. Suddenly, it’s on her neck. Ah, what’s a win in Macao for if not blowing it on whores and frivolity? So what if there’s a ninety percent chance she’s pawning that necklace in twelve hours’ time? You’ve had enough cognac in the last few hours that you really aren’t aware of that possibility right now. You just want to get her back to the hotel room....
[8: Also like in Nevada, there are restrictions to this rule. Brothels are not legal here, and neither is any sort of pimping.]
The thing to understand about Macao is that it’s comprised of four districts (in Portuguese, freguesias), collectively about half the size of Manhattan. Old Macao, the original Portuguese settlement, dating back to 1557 when they bribed a local governor to set up a trading port, is the Peninsula, confusingly called Macao Peninsula, or sometimes just Macao, connected to Guangdong Province. Then there are ‘the Islands’, as they’re sometimes referred: Taipa (in the north) and Coloane (in the south). However, these islands (plural) have now become one island, with the land reclamation and creation of Cotai connecting the two. This is the major casino district, where all the big names like Venetian and Sands are located, though there are casinos elsewhere throughout the territory as well.
The history of gambling in Macao dates back to the 1850s, when the Portuguese legalized it as a way of generating revenue. Today, it’s the only place in China where gambling is legal. Initially the trade was small, largely non-commercialized betting houses, until 1961 when a Hong Kong-born business magnate named Stanley Ho (and some associates) promised to boost Macanese tourism and thus won a government monopoly. In the 1940s, at just twenty-two, Ho made partner at a Japanese import/export firm. Portuguese sovereignty over Macao was nominally respected by the Japanese during the war, as Portugal was officially neutral, however by the late stages of the war, the Japanese virtually dominated the territory through a protectorate. Ho made his first fortune during these years, smuggling goods into Mainland China.
Today, there are thirty casinos in Macao, and the monopoly first negotiated between Ho and government has been broken, though Ho still owns nearly half the casinos in the territory, including the Grand Lisboa, the crown jewel of Macao.
The Golden Dragon is across the road from a failed mall, home to rundown pharmacies, a ‘Funny Sex Shop’, and a lot of empty businesses. On the other side is from Lotus Square, a large open square with the Macanese and Chinese flags in the centre. On the one side of the square is the Grand Prix museum and the wine museum, which provides tastings of a couple different vintages. The other side of the square is an underpass crossing the road, littered with hooker calling cards, or ‘tart cards’, which leads to the Sands Macao. From here you can get lunch at Gourmet 888, an Asian restaurant on the third floor, or you can gamble at baccarat or blackjack tables, none of which are less than HKD$300. Or you can catch the free tour bus across Amizade Bridge and into Cotai, where you’re deposited at the Sands Cotai Resort (but only if, wink wink, you’re staying at that hotel). The Jimei Casino, that cheap, dumpy joint I mentioned earlier, is next door, and across the way is the Waldo Casino and Hotel (aha, I found him! He’s been hiding in Macao this whole time!), and of course about a dozen more watch and jewelry shops.
China’s National Day – their Independence Day or Canada Day – is October 1st, and in honour of this, a week-long food festival was taking place at Fisherman’s Wharf, just on the other side of Avenida da Amizade. I discovered this entirely by accident, taking a walk the first night. A hundred booths were set up, selling everything from lamb on a stick to grilled squid, coconut milk ice cream, Tsingtao beer, Japanese beef, and a sort of Taiwanese poutine. There’s a half-built Roman coliseum in the background, where it looks like concerts are held, and in the other direction are a bunch of waterfront restaurants and a few shops. Barbed wire and hired guards surround expensive yachts, and the Amizade Bridge connecting the Peninsula to Taipa is across the water. In the heart of the festival, vendors are shouting advertisements, pretty girls are dressed up in cupcake dresses and posing for photos, and a stage is set up where singers perform some sort of Chinese pop.
“There’s an accent I recognize,” exclaims a white guy as my brother an I are getting frozen yogurt. This was on the third night, as we went back to this festival each day. He’s from Florida, it turns out. This is his froyo shack. His employee hands me my yogurt cup with crushed Oreo and sprinkles on it. How does a Floridian wind up in Macao? “I came over to Shanghai for business, bounced around a bit and wound up here. One day I had a craving for frozen yogurt and realized they don’t sell it here, and now here I am.”
On the second day, the Saturday, was a tour of the historic district. You start out in Largo do Senado, or Senate Square, old European-style buildings around a fountain, with walking streets all tiled with swirling black and white. Nowadays there are designer shops all throughout, but it still has that Old World look to it. Signposts are erected throughout, pointing you towards various other parts of the historic district.
Less than a half kilometre away are the Ruins of St. Paul’s, a Jesuit church built in the early 1600s, of which only the front stone facade survives today due to a fire in the nineteenth century. Along the way to this postcard image of Macao, you find winding walking streets of finely laid tile and endless shops hocking the things Macao is famous for: slabs of jerky meat the size of sheets of paper in various flavours, and the infamous Macanese egg tart. Take a pastry crust and fill it with an egg custard, then bake until caramelized. It’s... an interesting taste.
Across the road from St. Paul’s is the Fortaleza do Monte, the old Portuguese fort used to defend the Peninsula. The gardens are manicured, and you climb a series of old stone steps until you find the peak and the entrance.
China was first opened to the West at the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and then only in limited capacity. The dynasty had turned inward, and wasn’t interested in what the outside world had to offer. As a rule, they refused to trade with Europeans when they showed up. The Portuguese were the exception to this, as they managed to pay a lease, an arrangement worked out with a local official, not the court in Beijing. The Portuguese had trading ports all down the west coast of Africa, back up the east, in India, Malacca, Ternate (Maluku Islands of Indonesia), and they’d arranged a trade deal in Nagasaki. A Catholic power, their main rival was the Dutch.
Fortaleza do Monte was necessary to defend the small territory from Dutch attacks, which would occur with some regularity. (The Dutch would eventually get their hands on Taiwan, which they called Formosa, but this was inadequate to compete with the Portuguese because of its much greater distance from the mainland, and because at the end of the Ming, a loyalist general seized it from them to create a Ming stronghold.) At the entrance to the fort, you can see the cannons pointing out of the battlements above. There’s an advertisement at the doorway for a concert being held here tonight: Voice from the Mongolian Steppe, a morin khuur ensemble for the 30th Macao International Music Festival. Through the doorway and up a stone ramp, you find the peak of the fortress, where you can walk all the way around and get a view of the city. In the immediate area you can see slums, rundown neighbourhoods and squat block hospitals. In the far distance to the northwest are construction projects for massive apartment blocks, but that may be in Zhuhai. The cannons that they still have here face south, what would have been a clear shot to the water a few centuries ago. Now, however, they would only manage to demolish the Grand Lisboa, the giant, fountain-shaped hotel and casino owned by Stanley Ho. In the centre they’re setting up for the Mongolian concert that night, and slightly to the north of that is the entrance to the Macao Museum, where impatient Chinese women are forcing open the opaque sliding door looking for the hours of operation, only to be rebuffed by a security guard pushing them back out.
At the southern tip of the Peninsula, not far from the Macao Tower, which sports the highest commercial bungee jump in the world, is a small temple. You can walk here from Fortaleza do Monte, through up and down, thin, winding streets that look like they belong in old Amsterdam, only lined with Asian restaurants selling everything from pork knuckles to eel. You arrive at the temple, and there’s a refreshment cart selling ice cream in the baking heat in the area out front, as well as people selling overpriced little magnets in the shape of Macanese poker chips. Spirals of incense are slowly burning all around the temple, creating a haze of smoke that gives it an almost mystical feel, despite the heavy crowds and now commercialized nature of the place.
Fans are set up at shrines, and incense in being sold. Groups of Chinese women bow multiple times and then place their incense in the sand. It’s built into the hillside, as are all the winding streets running though this district. You climb. Within only one or two sets of stairs, the tourism of the place drops away and it’s more peaceful, more serene.
The A-Ma Temple is Daoist, specifically built for the worship of Mazu, the goddess of seafarers and fisherman. Mazu, as legend has it, was a real person, a young woman named Lin Mo that lived during the Song Dynasty. She had a natural ability to read the weather above and beyond your average person (perhaps in the same way arthritis sufferers can predict a storm?), and would warn fisherman of approaching typhoons. She died at the age of twenty-eight and was deified thereafter. The Ming built this temple in 1488. The Portuguese first landed in Macao at Lintin Island (now Nei Lingdong Island, Guangdong) in 1513. On one of many successive trips, they landed near A-Ma, and are said to have asked the locals the name of the place. The locals, assuming they were talking about the temple, replied A-Ma-Gau, meaning ‘Bay of A-Ma’ – and thus, the Portuguese named the place Ma-Cau, or Macao, ever after.
Down in Coloane there’s a small zoo, the Giant Panda Pavilion (the hotel had to write out ‘panda’ in Chinese characters to hand to the taxi driver). Departing from Cotai (because why take a taxi all the way down from the Peninsula when there’s a free bus that gets you most of the way, to Cotai?) you drive around the Crown and the City of Dreams, and turn onto Estrada do Istmo, the main drag running between the Sands Cotai Resort on the one side and the Venetian on the other. It’s a divided highway, with overpasses leading from one casino to the next, and the animals of the Chinese zodiac lining the gardens in the median. There’s the Parisian, and Studio City in the shape of a giant speaker. To the left, next to the Sands Cotai is an empty lot, which I’m sure will one day be another colossal casino resort. Crosswalks largely work on an honour system here; there’s few signals stopping traffic. Yamaha scooters dominate the roads, young women in business dresses straddling the passenger seat. There are half-finished bridges everywhere in Macao, terminating randomly where construction stopped. A stray dog crosses the road to find a fence preventing him from going any further. A cyclist has smashed his face into the rear windshield of a hatchback; he and the driver wait for an ambulance as he sits dazed, blood on his face and a pool of glass on the road.
You come around a corner next to some expensive-looking condos and the driver abruptly stops. He’s pointing at the small sign for Seac Pai Van Park with a cartoon panda on it. The panda (they only had one in a public exhibit), slept and barely moved, as is consistent with my experience with pandas. The rest of the park has a few monkeys, some flamingos, a lone caribou and a panda information centre, which goes over the history of the two panda cubs born there.
If you’re going to see a show in Macao, the show everyone recommends is House of Dancing Water, an aquatic acrobatics show that’s been playing at City of Dreams for six years. So back to the casino for tickets. Elaborate fountains and lion statues outside City of Dreams lead you to a tremendous revolving door, and you’re hit with the overwhelming stench of perfume. The entire interior of the place is bathed in it. The baccarat tables here are at HKD$2000, though there were some Caribbean poker tables at HKD$300. The show is sold out. How about tomorrow? No, the flight’s in the morning. It seemed for a Sunday night there wasn’t much else available to see. Back at the Golden Dragon, the internet was slow and the concierge, with limited English, kept coming back to House of Dancing Water.
It’s here now that I return to the unerotic ‘burlesque’ show, for the Golden Dragon had a poster up for something that looked like a burlesque show in the front entrance. I asked the concierge about it. Limited English, he said it was playing every hour starting at six. Just upstairs.
It turned out to be one part strip club and one part live sex show – which is about as erotic as watching the most vanilla porn you can imagine in a theatre with other patrons.
I bring this up because it’s just one part of Macao’s sex industry. I’ve already mentioned the tart cards at underpasses. Like Vegas, prostitution is a big part of the allure of Macao. But whereas in Vegas teams of people hand out stacks of five or six cards on each corner all down the Strip, advertising wildly varying prices on semi-naked women whose nipples sometimes poke out from behind the star censor marks, the situation in Macao is much less overt. Tart cards are not seen in Cotai; I saw them with regularity at the underpass leading to the Sands Macao, and one night I walked around the Golden Dragon building (also home to convenience shops and restaurants and residences) just after someone had gone through littering them about. The women are much more modest than their Nevadan sistren; they’re dressed like Sunday school teachers.
Brothels are not technically legal here, but you can go nine tenths of the way towards being a brothel and get away with it. For example, ‘saunas’ are quite popular – in fact, one was operating out of the Golden Dragon, advertisements plastered across the elevator. On the way up to the Crazy Happy Show (that was the name of it), I shared an elevator with a Russian or eastern European woman with a full tattoo sleeve that I’m certain was a ‘masseuse’ there.
The Macanese government, it seems, tolerates a certain sidestepping of exact legal definitions, because tourism is necessary to the Macanese economy. Every now and then there will be a crackdown, but businesses merely relocate. Poking around,[9] it seems one of the best saunas, Darling 1, has relocated several times.
[9: Google and the NSA have got to love picking apart my browser history.]
One of the most infamous elements of the Macanese sex industry is the so-nicknamed ‘Racetrack’. The Hotel Lisboa, a cylindrical building across the road from the newer, more glamourous Grand Lisboa, and also owned by the Ho family, has a shopping area on the ground level, full of designer shops in a doughnut layout. It used to be common practice for sex workers, apparently in coordination with officials at the hotel, to have a room on standby, and troll for customers in this ring of shops. Most hotels and casinos bar prostitutes from working on the premises, and will remove anyone they suspect of being a sex worker, but not the Hotel Lisboa. The catch was, they couldn’t just stand there, amongst these designer shops, like it was a street corner. Security is there, and will tell them to keep moving. But as long as they keep walking, around and around and around in circles, they’re fine – hence why they call it the Racetrack. So the end result is dozens of scantily-clad Asian women with eyes for wealthy men, crammed into this small plaza, and they just so happen to have a room ready upstairs.
Even if you wanted to stick with a very rigid definition of brothel, doesn’t that still sound like one? Well, the Macanese authorities thought so too, and despite the fact that this thing operated for years, even making it into the novel Rain Storm by Barry Eisler,[10] it was eventually busted, resulting in the arrests of ninety-six women and a nephew of Stanley Ho – which is a little like arresting a nephew from the Kennedy or Rockefeller family. I walked through the Racetrack at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and it was deserted.
[10: John Rain, Book 3. Eisler (or maybe his publishers) has changed the names of every book in the John Rain series more times than I can count. This one also goes by the names Winner Take All and Choke Point.]
Another thing Macao is famous for are ‘fishbowls’, a brothel-like enterprise wherein a customer can choose a woman from behind a pane of glass, as if the women were on display at a zoo – the sort of thing you might find more common in Thailand than in Nevada.
So it really is the Sin City of China. There’s no desert – in fact, there’s oppressive humidity – and it needs some work, a decade or so for its infrastructure to match its profit margins. The underpasses are kind if seedy (and not because of the tart cards), the roads need work, the slums are present everywhere. The failed mall across from the Golden Dragon had more vacant businesses than full ones and is a popular hangout for smoking teenagers. There are half-finished bridges everywhere, the overpasses are rundown and the vacant lots and flare-obstructing construction in Cotai somewhat distract from the glamour of the place.
But it has that Vegas glitz – outlandish casinos, Rolexes and jewelry everywhere, Rolls-Royces, pubic amenities, live sex shows, fishbowls and saunas and outcalls advertised at underpasses everywhere. Macao is perhaps eighty percent there. It’ll be really nice to see in perhaps fifteen years’ time. Maybe next time, instead of the ferry, I’ll take a bus across the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge.
Sources
Botas, João. “Legend of A-Ma: How Macau got its name” South China Morning Post, September 1, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/destination-macau.... Acc. Nov 9, 2016.
Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2013.
Clements, Jonathan. Coxinga: And the Fall of the Ming Dynasty. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2005.
Lai Ying-kit. “Stanley Ho’s nephew, 96 ‘prostitutes’ and five hotel staff held in Macau hotel vice bust” South China Morning Post, January 13, 2015, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/articl.... Acc. Nov 8, 2016.
The Gambling Destination of Macao[1]
[1: Perhaps better known by the old Wade-Giles transliteration Macau, with a U (same pronunciation), though the pinyin is fairly standard now. Both spellings were seen in the territory, at airports and in Hong Kong and the Mainland.]
Date: Friday, October 7th – Monday, October 10th, 2016
In the gambling capital of the world, I made one bet. It was the last night I was there, after I’d returned from a rather unerotic ‘burlesque’ show (more on this later), while chilling in the hotel room. My brother was drinking Korean soju, while I was sipping a New Zealand chocolate vodka mudslide cocktail (about four percent alcohol). I had a small bottle of Zhengzongxiaoping flavoured baijiu (a more recognizable brand might be Moutai).[2] Scotch was everywhere in Macao, as was cognac. We cracked open our Hennessy sampler bottles – a little sweet, maybe it’s an acquired taste, like oppressing political dissidents – when my brother convinced me to head back out to Cotai and see all that that strip of land had to offer. I’d come to this city-state for the casinos, the glitz and glamour and gaudiness, and thus far I’d seen giant pandas, the historic district, museums, and few casinos. I wasn’t staying in Cotai, the Las Vegas Strip of Asia, but rather on the Macao Peninsula, not far from the Ferry Terminal. I had briefly walked through Cotai the night before, seeing the Venetian, the Parisian, the City of Dreams and the Sands Cotai Resort, which includes the Himalaya Casino, the Conrad Hotel, the Hilton and the 4,000-room Sheraton. However, I’d only briefly seen the inside of the Sands and the City of Dreams, and had missed out on the extensive shops, indoor canal system and labyrinthine casino of the Venetian, which, when measured by floor area, is the seventh largest building in the world.
[2: Thirty-nine percent alcohol. Goes down easier than pure baijiu, but the flavouring kind of makes it taste like medicine.]
[3: At close to a million square meters, it’s roughly fifty percent larger than the Pentagon.]
Moreover, I had completely missed the Galaxy, another major installation in Cotai. So, I was convinced to go out. There are high minimums in Macao, and I hadn’t bet anything since my arrival. The best baccarat minimums I’d seen were at the Jimei Casino, an ‘off-Strip’ two-room casino of about twenty tables (an no slots), comparable to the sort of joint you’d stop at thirty minutes outside of Vegas when that extra half hour is a bridge too far.
[4: And I didn’t even know how to play baccarat. I had looked it up briefly when I was writing One Night in Ikh Khulan, but I’d forgotten the details.]
We arrived, transferred from the Sands Macao (the older joint, on the Peninsula) via free shuttle bus to the Sands Cotai (newer, larger). We crossed the road, snapping pictures of the Eiffel Tower outside the Parisian, just down the way, and the massive bulk of the Venetian. Inside was a maze of high-end shops, set up just like the Venetian in Las Vegas. Up on the third floor was the canal system, lined by even more shops, old brick facades, with the fake domed ceiling to make it look like you were in Italy. Back down an escalator to the casino floor, which was packed at this evening hour, with people dressed in everything from designer suits and dresses to stained track suits, table games as far as the eye could see – baccarat here, blackjack there, some Caribbean poker off that way, craps around the other side of the escalator – and a bright red carpet with coiling, serpentine dragons dancing about on it. High minimums, as usual; at a casual glance, a low-end blackjack table had a minimum of HKD$300, with an upper limit of HKD$15 million.
[5: For some reason, this casino would only take Hong Kong dollars, not Macanese patacas (the currency of Macao), despite the fact that these two currencies are virtually interchangeable and they are always within three cents of each other. At the time of my writing this, one hundred Hong Kong dollars is valued at CAD$16.94, and 100 Macanese patacas is CAD$16.44]
How about roulette, I thought? That’s usually a cheap minimum. Where are the roulette tables, I had to ask. Ah, over that way, on the far side of this central escalator island. We head over. Most of the tables are packed, but one isn’t too busy. My brother asks if I want to place a bet. Why not? One bet. We each take a hundred dollars. The dealer gives my brother two chips. I always play the inside, so I ask for singles, which in North American casinos are usually valued at a dollar a piece. She likewise hands me two chips. Okay, so these are singles. HKD$50 a piece. Alright. 23 and... yes, I’ll go with 11. The wheel spins and... shouldn’t it come up on 11. Pays out thirty-six to one. HKD$1800. Have you ever seen a HKD$1000 bill?[6]
[6: It works out to about $300 Canadian, off of a $17 bet.]
Somewhat overshadowed by its bigger, more business savvy, more developed sister, Macao exists on the west side of the Pearl River Delta, across the channel from Hong Kong. It has about one fourteenth the population, and a little over one percent of the land area. However, this old Portuguese gateway into the Orient is now the Las Vegas of Asia, and the gambling capital of the world, bringing in seven times the revenue annually of its Nevadan cousin. When counted as its own country, it has the highest population density in the world and is richer than Dubai.
I’m a gambler at heart. I like the flashy, gaudy nature of casinos. Before this trip, I had never left North America, and to go to Asia for the first time, Hong Kong was the target. It’s the most Westernized part of East Asia, with half the population speaking English and heavy cultural ties to its former colonial parent, Britain. And if I’m going to travel to Hong Kong, you can’t come that close to the Las Vegas of Asia and not stop by.
You arrive via TurboJet Ferry from Hong Kong. About sixty minutes. It’s an international border between the two Special Administrative Regions, though hassle is minimal; it’s similar to the Canada-US border pre-9/11. The Ferry Terminal is on the Peninsula, not far from the fifty-kilometre road link they’re building between the two.[7] The Golden Dragon Hotel is only sixty hundred and fifty meters away, but with bridges going every which way and sidewalks terminating, perhaps walking isn’t the best option. There’s a lot across the road with dozens of shuttle buses. They’re all free here, operated by the casinos and running customers either between multiple casino properties, to the Ferry Terminal, or Border Gate, the connection with Zhuhai on the Mainland. I see Venetian, Galaxy, Hilton... no Golden Dragon. Very poor English with the first person I ask.
[7: Expected to cost more than US$10 billion, this project consists of a nearly thirty-kilometre bridge across the Pearl River Delta, returning to sea level at an artificial island, where it becomes a tunnel, then emerging on another artificial island. It’ll also connect to the Mainland Chinese city of Zhuhai. We could see one of the many artificial islands while crossing the Amizade (or Friendship) Bridge.]
One shouldn’t expect a lot of English in Macao. It’s a former Portuguese colony in the south of China. The dominant language is Cantonese. A certain percentage of the population will speak Mandarin, as well as Portuguese, but English is rare, even within parts of the tourist industry.
Ah, here’s a young woman calling out for her shuttle bus, and she’s asking if I need help in halfway decent English. “Golden Dragon? They don’t run a shuttle bus here anymore. You...” she struggles, “take the bus for Casa Real. Golden Dragon just around the corner. But...” and now here you can see the mental strain of her trying to translate this right, “don’t tell driver... don’t tell him Golden Dragon.”
I nod. “I understand,” I tell her. She smiles. The shuttle buses are meant for guests of that hotel, not any random traveller.
The bus arrives at Casa Real, not far away. Ask the bellhop. In broken English, he points to the intersection, then points left. Get to the corner. There’s the Golden Dragon. It’s across the road from a failing mall, and on the far side is Fisherman’s Wharf. Between Casa Real and the Dragon are about a half dozen watch shops, small little things in storefronts selling major brand name watches like Rolex – which I’m pretty sure weren’t knockoffs, as the prices on some of them were six figures (patacas). In fact, these watch shops, as well as jewelry shops of the same sort, were littered throughout Macao. Throw a stone from any location and you’ll hit three of them. The places all look rundown, in strip plazas next to pharmacies and convenience stores selling cheap flavoured baijiu and a half dozen different types of cognac, yet the prices are astronomical.
My guess is their business model is something like this: You’re a wealthy businessman, down to Macao for a little fun. You’re out at the casino. Remember that the ‘low-end’ tables have upper limits of HKD$15 million. Maybe you’ve got a sex worker sitting next to you at the craps table. She squeezes the dice in her cleavage before you play. Prostitution is legal here in Macao, much like it is in Nevada.[8] You’re on a winning streak, win big. You walk down the block to your hotel. You’re bathed in euphoria. You pass three watch shops. Hey, a Rolex would look good on me, don’t you think? Maybe you buy one. As for the jewelry, well, doesn’t your good luck charm deserve a little something? She kissed the cards just before you won, after all. Maybe she even... prods you to this decision. Come on, baby, I really like that diamond necklace. Suddenly, it’s on her neck. Ah, what’s a win in Macao for if not blowing it on whores and frivolity? So what if there’s a ninety percent chance she’s pawning that necklace in twelve hours’ time? You’ve had enough cognac in the last few hours that you really aren’t aware of that possibility right now. You just want to get her back to the hotel room....
[8: Also like in Nevada, there are restrictions to this rule. Brothels are not legal here, and neither is any sort of pimping.]
The thing to understand about Macao is that it’s comprised of four districts (in Portuguese, freguesias), collectively about half the size of Manhattan. Old Macao, the original Portuguese settlement, dating back to 1557 when they bribed a local governor to set up a trading port, is the Peninsula, confusingly called Macao Peninsula, or sometimes just Macao, connected to Guangdong Province. Then there are ‘the Islands’, as they’re sometimes referred: Taipa (in the north) and Coloane (in the south). However, these islands (plural) have now become one island, with the land reclamation and creation of Cotai connecting the two. This is the major casino district, where all the big names like Venetian and Sands are located, though there are casinos elsewhere throughout the territory as well.
The history of gambling in Macao dates back to the 1850s, when the Portuguese legalized it as a way of generating revenue. Today, it’s the only place in China where gambling is legal. Initially the trade was small, largely non-commercialized betting houses, until 1961 when a Hong Kong-born business magnate named Stanley Ho (and some associates) promised to boost Macanese tourism and thus won a government monopoly. In the 1940s, at just twenty-two, Ho made partner at a Japanese import/export firm. Portuguese sovereignty over Macao was nominally respected by the Japanese during the war, as Portugal was officially neutral, however by the late stages of the war, the Japanese virtually dominated the territory through a protectorate. Ho made his first fortune during these years, smuggling goods into Mainland China.
Today, there are thirty casinos in Macao, and the monopoly first negotiated between Ho and government has been broken, though Ho still owns nearly half the casinos in the territory, including the Grand Lisboa, the crown jewel of Macao.
The Golden Dragon is across the road from a failed mall, home to rundown pharmacies, a ‘Funny Sex Shop’, and a lot of empty businesses. On the other side is from Lotus Square, a large open square with the Macanese and Chinese flags in the centre. On the one side of the square is the Grand Prix museum and the wine museum, which provides tastings of a couple different vintages. The other side of the square is an underpass crossing the road, littered with hooker calling cards, or ‘tart cards’, which leads to the Sands Macao. From here you can get lunch at Gourmet 888, an Asian restaurant on the third floor, or you can gamble at baccarat or blackjack tables, none of which are less than HKD$300. Or you can catch the free tour bus across Amizade Bridge and into Cotai, where you’re deposited at the Sands Cotai Resort (but only if, wink wink, you’re staying at that hotel). The Jimei Casino, that cheap, dumpy joint I mentioned earlier, is next door, and across the way is the Waldo Casino and Hotel (aha, I found him! He’s been hiding in Macao this whole time!), and of course about a dozen more watch and jewelry shops.
China’s National Day – their Independence Day or Canada Day – is October 1st, and in honour of this, a week-long food festival was taking place at Fisherman’s Wharf, just on the other side of Avenida da Amizade. I discovered this entirely by accident, taking a walk the first night. A hundred booths were set up, selling everything from lamb on a stick to grilled squid, coconut milk ice cream, Tsingtao beer, Japanese beef, and a sort of Taiwanese poutine. There’s a half-built Roman coliseum in the background, where it looks like concerts are held, and in the other direction are a bunch of waterfront restaurants and a few shops. Barbed wire and hired guards surround expensive yachts, and the Amizade Bridge connecting the Peninsula to Taipa is across the water. In the heart of the festival, vendors are shouting advertisements, pretty girls are dressed up in cupcake dresses and posing for photos, and a stage is set up where singers perform some sort of Chinese pop.
“There’s an accent I recognize,” exclaims a white guy as my brother an I are getting frozen yogurt. This was on the third night, as we went back to this festival each day. He’s from Florida, it turns out. This is his froyo shack. His employee hands me my yogurt cup with crushed Oreo and sprinkles on it. How does a Floridian wind up in Macao? “I came over to Shanghai for business, bounced around a bit and wound up here. One day I had a craving for frozen yogurt and realized they don’t sell it here, and now here I am.”
On the second day, the Saturday, was a tour of the historic district. You start out in Largo do Senado, or Senate Square, old European-style buildings around a fountain, with walking streets all tiled with swirling black and white. Nowadays there are designer shops all throughout, but it still has that Old World look to it. Signposts are erected throughout, pointing you towards various other parts of the historic district.
Less than a half kilometre away are the Ruins of St. Paul’s, a Jesuit church built in the early 1600s, of which only the front stone facade survives today due to a fire in the nineteenth century. Along the way to this postcard image of Macao, you find winding walking streets of finely laid tile and endless shops hocking the things Macao is famous for: slabs of jerky meat the size of sheets of paper in various flavours, and the infamous Macanese egg tart. Take a pastry crust and fill it with an egg custard, then bake until caramelized. It’s... an interesting taste.
Across the road from St. Paul’s is the Fortaleza do Monte, the old Portuguese fort used to defend the Peninsula. The gardens are manicured, and you climb a series of old stone steps until you find the peak and the entrance.
China was first opened to the West at the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and then only in limited capacity. The dynasty had turned inward, and wasn’t interested in what the outside world had to offer. As a rule, they refused to trade with Europeans when they showed up. The Portuguese were the exception to this, as they managed to pay a lease, an arrangement worked out with a local official, not the court in Beijing. The Portuguese had trading ports all down the west coast of Africa, back up the east, in India, Malacca, Ternate (Maluku Islands of Indonesia), and they’d arranged a trade deal in Nagasaki. A Catholic power, their main rival was the Dutch.
Fortaleza do Monte was necessary to defend the small territory from Dutch attacks, which would occur with some regularity. (The Dutch would eventually get their hands on Taiwan, which they called Formosa, but this was inadequate to compete with the Portuguese because of its much greater distance from the mainland, and because at the end of the Ming, a loyalist general seized it from them to create a Ming stronghold.) At the entrance to the fort, you can see the cannons pointing out of the battlements above. There’s an advertisement at the doorway for a concert being held here tonight: Voice from the Mongolian Steppe, a morin khuur ensemble for the 30th Macao International Music Festival. Through the doorway and up a stone ramp, you find the peak of the fortress, where you can walk all the way around and get a view of the city. In the immediate area you can see slums, rundown neighbourhoods and squat block hospitals. In the far distance to the northwest are construction projects for massive apartment blocks, but that may be in Zhuhai. The cannons that they still have here face south, what would have been a clear shot to the water a few centuries ago. Now, however, they would only manage to demolish the Grand Lisboa, the giant, fountain-shaped hotel and casino owned by Stanley Ho. In the centre they’re setting up for the Mongolian concert that night, and slightly to the north of that is the entrance to the Macao Museum, where impatient Chinese women are forcing open the opaque sliding door looking for the hours of operation, only to be rebuffed by a security guard pushing them back out.
At the southern tip of the Peninsula, not far from the Macao Tower, which sports the highest commercial bungee jump in the world, is a small temple. You can walk here from Fortaleza do Monte, through up and down, thin, winding streets that look like they belong in old Amsterdam, only lined with Asian restaurants selling everything from pork knuckles to eel. You arrive at the temple, and there’s a refreshment cart selling ice cream in the baking heat in the area out front, as well as people selling overpriced little magnets in the shape of Macanese poker chips. Spirals of incense are slowly burning all around the temple, creating a haze of smoke that gives it an almost mystical feel, despite the heavy crowds and now commercialized nature of the place.
Fans are set up at shrines, and incense in being sold. Groups of Chinese women bow multiple times and then place their incense in the sand. It’s built into the hillside, as are all the winding streets running though this district. You climb. Within only one or two sets of stairs, the tourism of the place drops away and it’s more peaceful, more serene.
The A-Ma Temple is Daoist, specifically built for the worship of Mazu, the goddess of seafarers and fisherman. Mazu, as legend has it, was a real person, a young woman named Lin Mo that lived during the Song Dynasty. She had a natural ability to read the weather above and beyond your average person (perhaps in the same way arthritis sufferers can predict a storm?), and would warn fisherman of approaching typhoons. She died at the age of twenty-eight and was deified thereafter. The Ming built this temple in 1488. The Portuguese first landed in Macao at Lintin Island (now Nei Lingdong Island, Guangdong) in 1513. On one of many successive trips, they landed near A-Ma, and are said to have asked the locals the name of the place. The locals, assuming they were talking about the temple, replied A-Ma-Gau, meaning ‘Bay of A-Ma’ – and thus, the Portuguese named the place Ma-Cau, or Macao, ever after.
Down in Coloane there’s a small zoo, the Giant Panda Pavilion (the hotel had to write out ‘panda’ in Chinese characters to hand to the taxi driver). Departing from Cotai (because why take a taxi all the way down from the Peninsula when there’s a free bus that gets you most of the way, to Cotai?) you drive around the Crown and the City of Dreams, and turn onto Estrada do Istmo, the main drag running between the Sands Cotai Resort on the one side and the Venetian on the other. It’s a divided highway, with overpasses leading from one casino to the next, and the animals of the Chinese zodiac lining the gardens in the median. There’s the Parisian, and Studio City in the shape of a giant speaker. To the left, next to the Sands Cotai is an empty lot, which I’m sure will one day be another colossal casino resort. Crosswalks largely work on an honour system here; there’s few signals stopping traffic. Yamaha scooters dominate the roads, young women in business dresses straddling the passenger seat. There are half-finished bridges everywhere in Macao, terminating randomly where construction stopped. A stray dog crosses the road to find a fence preventing him from going any further. A cyclist has smashed his face into the rear windshield of a hatchback; he and the driver wait for an ambulance as he sits dazed, blood on his face and a pool of glass on the road.
You come around a corner next to some expensive-looking condos and the driver abruptly stops. He’s pointing at the small sign for Seac Pai Van Park with a cartoon panda on it. The panda (they only had one in a public exhibit), slept and barely moved, as is consistent with my experience with pandas. The rest of the park has a few monkeys, some flamingos, a lone caribou and a panda information centre, which goes over the history of the two panda cubs born there.
If you’re going to see a show in Macao, the show everyone recommends is House of Dancing Water, an aquatic acrobatics show that’s been playing at City of Dreams for six years. So back to the casino for tickets. Elaborate fountains and lion statues outside City of Dreams lead you to a tremendous revolving door, and you’re hit with the overwhelming stench of perfume. The entire interior of the place is bathed in it. The baccarat tables here are at HKD$2000, though there were some Caribbean poker tables at HKD$300. The show is sold out. How about tomorrow? No, the flight’s in the morning. It seemed for a Sunday night there wasn’t much else available to see. Back at the Golden Dragon, the internet was slow and the concierge, with limited English, kept coming back to House of Dancing Water.
It’s here now that I return to the unerotic ‘burlesque’ show, for the Golden Dragon had a poster up for something that looked like a burlesque show in the front entrance. I asked the concierge about it. Limited English, he said it was playing every hour starting at six. Just upstairs.
It turned out to be one part strip club and one part live sex show – which is about as erotic as watching the most vanilla porn you can imagine in a theatre with other patrons.
I bring this up because it’s just one part of Macao’s sex industry. I’ve already mentioned the tart cards at underpasses. Like Vegas, prostitution is a big part of the allure of Macao. But whereas in Vegas teams of people hand out stacks of five or six cards on each corner all down the Strip, advertising wildly varying prices on semi-naked women whose nipples sometimes poke out from behind the star censor marks, the situation in Macao is much less overt. Tart cards are not seen in Cotai; I saw them with regularity at the underpass leading to the Sands Macao, and one night I walked around the Golden Dragon building (also home to convenience shops and restaurants and residences) just after someone had gone through littering them about. The women are much more modest than their Nevadan sistren; they’re dressed like Sunday school teachers.
Brothels are not technically legal here, but you can go nine tenths of the way towards being a brothel and get away with it. For example, ‘saunas’ are quite popular – in fact, one was operating out of the Golden Dragon, advertisements plastered across the elevator. On the way up to the Crazy Happy Show (that was the name of it), I shared an elevator with a Russian or eastern European woman with a full tattoo sleeve that I’m certain was a ‘masseuse’ there.
The Macanese government, it seems, tolerates a certain sidestepping of exact legal definitions, because tourism is necessary to the Macanese economy. Every now and then there will be a crackdown, but businesses merely relocate. Poking around,[9] it seems one of the best saunas, Darling 1, has relocated several times.
[9: Google and the NSA have got to love picking apart my browser history.]
One of the most infamous elements of the Macanese sex industry is the so-nicknamed ‘Racetrack’. The Hotel Lisboa, a cylindrical building across the road from the newer, more glamourous Grand Lisboa, and also owned by the Ho family, has a shopping area on the ground level, full of designer shops in a doughnut layout. It used to be common practice for sex workers, apparently in coordination with officials at the hotel, to have a room on standby, and troll for customers in this ring of shops. Most hotels and casinos bar prostitutes from working on the premises, and will remove anyone they suspect of being a sex worker, but not the Hotel Lisboa. The catch was, they couldn’t just stand there, amongst these designer shops, like it was a street corner. Security is there, and will tell them to keep moving. But as long as they keep walking, around and around and around in circles, they’re fine – hence why they call it the Racetrack. So the end result is dozens of scantily-clad Asian women with eyes for wealthy men, crammed into this small plaza, and they just so happen to have a room ready upstairs.
Even if you wanted to stick with a very rigid definition of brothel, doesn’t that still sound like one? Well, the Macanese authorities thought so too, and despite the fact that this thing operated for years, even making it into the novel Rain Storm by Barry Eisler,[10] it was eventually busted, resulting in the arrests of ninety-six women and a nephew of Stanley Ho – which is a little like arresting a nephew from the Kennedy or Rockefeller family. I walked through the Racetrack at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and it was deserted.
[10: John Rain, Book 3. Eisler (or maybe his publishers) has changed the names of every book in the John Rain series more times than I can count. This one also goes by the names Winner Take All and Choke Point.]
Another thing Macao is famous for are ‘fishbowls’, a brothel-like enterprise wherein a customer can choose a woman from behind a pane of glass, as if the women were on display at a zoo – the sort of thing you might find more common in Thailand than in Nevada.
So it really is the Sin City of China. There’s no desert – in fact, there’s oppressive humidity – and it needs some work, a decade or so for its infrastructure to match its profit margins. The underpasses are kind if seedy (and not because of the tart cards), the roads need work, the slums are present everywhere. The failed mall across from the Golden Dragon had more vacant businesses than full ones and is a popular hangout for smoking teenagers. There are half-finished bridges everywhere, the overpasses are rundown and the vacant lots and flare-obstructing construction in Cotai somewhat distract from the glamour of the place.
But it has that Vegas glitz – outlandish casinos, Rolexes and jewelry everywhere, Rolls-Royces, pubic amenities, live sex shows, fishbowls and saunas and outcalls advertised at underpasses everywhere. Macao is perhaps eighty percent there. It’ll be really nice to see in perhaps fifteen years’ time. Maybe next time, instead of the ferry, I’ll take a bus across the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge.
Sources
Botas, João. “Legend of A-Ma: How Macau got its name” South China Morning Post, September 1, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/destination-macau.... Acc. Nov 9, 2016.
Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2013.
Clements, Jonathan. Coxinga: And the Fall of the Ming Dynasty. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2005.
Lai Ying-kit. “Stanley Ho’s nephew, 96 ‘prostitutes’ and five hotel staff held in Macau hotel vice bust” South China Morning Post, January 13, 2015, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/articl.... Acc. Nov 8, 2016.
Los Bandoleros: The True Story of My Night in a Cuban Jailhouse with Two Hookers and the Minister of the Interior
Date: December 15-22, 2014
On 17 December, 2014, President Obama announced the formal reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the Republic of Cuba after fifty-four years of embargo. Ernesto, our ageing, portly, fifty-something tour guide, who the following day took us speedboating up a river to the choppy waves of the Atlantic, was ecstatic. His son, he proclaimed, would get a chance to taste real Coca-Cola, would get to see the interconnectivity of the World Wide Web. Such was the opinion of most Cubans, who seemed overjoyed; at least those connected to the tourist industry.
I was in Holguín Province, at the far east end of the island, staying at the all-inclusive Brisas resort, about an hour’s drive from the city of Holguín, in the small town of Guardalavaca. My parents had been married for thirty years and, for their anniversary, were renewing their vows in a beachfront ceremony. I was my father’s best man, my sister was the maid of honour, and my brother had obtained an online minister’s certificate, and officiated the ceremony in a gazebo on the Brisas beach. Two friends tagged along with me to enjoy the week.
On the first day we arrived late into the day and barely had a chance to familiarize ourselves with the resort before we settled into a night of drinking. My friend Andrew was the last of us to retire that night, and actually stayed out almost all night, largely by himself, where at one point he fell asleep in one of the many hammocks scattered along the beach (this is after he, reaching that point of drunkenness, had to test every hammock he could find to see if it would bear his weight). He told me the next day that he’d been awoken by resort staff around 2:30 or so in the morning to see if he was alright, to which he promptly replied he had been, until he’d been woken up.
The second day, at 9 in the morning, was an information seminar conducted by our WestJest representative, Jorge, run out of a lounge in the main building, overlooking the pool. This covered things like currency exchange, whether the tap water was safe to drink, what excursion packages were available, and so on. We didn’t have to attend this, but I wanted to to get some basic information. I awoke early, as I normally do, let my hungover friends keep sleeping, and lounged in a hammock outside. I cracked open the book I’d begun on the plane and read some more about Koxinga, the seventeenth century pirate king of Taiwan (I was at the point where Koxinga’s father, Nicholas Iquan, seduced his own stepmother and then skipped town to become a pirate out of Macao).[1] Come 7, my stomach grumbling, I went for breakfast at the buffet. As a side note, I should mention that everyone told me the food in Cuba was godawful, yet I didn’t find this to be the case at all. While it wasn’t Michelin Star quality, I had no complaints – and indeed, if nothing else, some of the various mistranslations of the dishes (pasta/paste, mashed potatoes/masked potatoes) are worth a laugh.
[1: Coxinga: And the Fall of the Ming Dynasty by Jonathan Clements.]
Jorge went through a thirty-minute seminar on the resort, currency exchange, excursion packages and general info on Cuba. Andrew, hungover, stumbled in a few minutes after Jorge began. Afterwards, we went to book an excursion with him to Holguín City and the fishing village of Gibara the following day, that Wednesday (which left the resort at 7:30am). The remainder of the day was spent drinking, swimming, relaxing and visiting the local market about ten minutes’ walk west down the beach. Two other resorts shared the beach, and small open air market crowded a space at the far end, where I picked up a scorpion statue carved from bull horn and two nudie oil paintings (which I was later taxed on when I attempted to leave the country, and had to roll out salacious nude images in front of a young twenty-something senorita at the customs desk as she photographed and stamped them).
At 6:00pm the buffet opened once again for the dinner rush, and we’d all agreed to meet for a good meal. It was raining; my friend Brian and I had been relaxing in the hotel room (I was reading more about Koxinga), whereas Andrew had ventured out to “make every minute count” but agreed to meet us there for 6. Brian and I were there, met up with my parents and the others, and I sat down to a nice meal of pasta in wine sauce with a glass of red wine, wondering where Andrew was. I got about halfway through the meal when my phone started ringing, and you can guess who it was.
Because Cuba is a communist backwater, their telecommunications infrastructure is in the toilet and my service provider grouped them in with Russia, the Middle East, and most of Africa (the only places worse had no service at all: North Korea and two or three African countries where they still consider radio waves to be witchcraft). As a result, just answering the call would cost me four dollars, so the very first thing I said was, “This is costing me money, so it better be important.”
Andrew was in a panic. Now, I heard him tell this story about seventeen more times in the course of the next several hours, so (although this is not the entirety of the story conveyed in that short phone call) here are the pertinent details:
Andrew had gone back to the market (rain had been on and off). He was returning along the beach to make the appointment for dinner. He was drunk. Two Hispanic women, that he variously described as looking sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and fourteen, approached him asking for a cigarette. They spoke very broken English, but were wearing American clothing (Aeropostale) and he assumed they were resort guests (there were a lot on non-English guests there, from Europe and other places). He gave them a cigarette and they asked him if he wanted “fucky-fucky,” motioning to the beach. It was at this point he realized they were Cuban, and reasoned they probably weren’t too well off if they were resorting to beachfront prostitution. He told them he wasn’t interested in sex. We’d all brought American products – shampoo, cosmetics and whatnot – to give out to the locals, as we were told this is often better than giving cash, given the embargo. These young women clearly needed these things more than the resort maid or bartender, both of whom live relatively good lives compared to the rest of their comrades, given the exchange rate between the standard Cuban peso and the international convertible peso. Why not give these women some of these products? They said that was cool and followed him as he made his way back down the beach. Resort security, lax as it was, nonetheless tries to discourage impoverished locals from disturbing the resort lifestyle, so, the sign language prompting of the girls, they hopped off the beachfront trail and over to the road that runs in front of the resort. At a certain point, when they were trying to lead him further from the resort, he tried to explain in broken sign language how he needed to go to his room to get these items. They didn’t seem to understand. He had the hotel room key with him – he could show them what he meant when he said he needed to go back towards the villas. As soon as he removed his wallet, the one girl grabbed it from his hand and they both made a mad dash through the field adjacent the hotel, where they “ran like jackrabbits.” He followed in pursuit, yelling in a broken French-Spanish mixture, “Mon identification, por favor.” He didn’t even care about the cash inside, but rather the health card, firearms licence and protection officer badge (his passport was safely locked away in the room safe). The two girls split up to go around a large cactus bush, he followed one while losing the other, and ran out of breath before he could get to either of them. He found himself in a field with a few horses, asked for help from a local drunkard half passed out in a ditch, who was unable to help him, and then managed to converse a little bit with the old Hispanic woman who owned those horses. She told him (in broken English) to go to “la policia” and offered to lead him there, through some woods, where she assured him it was only five minutes away.
(The exact reason as to why his wallet was out in front of two whores remains a matter of some debate.)
Not all of the above occurred during the phone call, but from what he gave me, I told him to return to the resort and let them call the police. I thought this was a joke, but assuming for a second it was real, I thought the old woman leading him through the woods was an even bigger scam – you’re likely to run into the senoritas’ pimp with a machete saying, “Si gringo, once upon a time in Cuba...”
When I met him in the lobby, and he came charging up the stairs drenched in sweat and panicked. We asked the concierge for assistance, and she promptly called security. A few minutes later, a young gentleman from the security staff named George appeared – clean shaven with closely cropped hair, a pristine white shirt and a tie clip. George’s English was not the best, but sufficient enough, and he began to get the picture after two or three renditions of this story from Andrew (who was anxious and rambled, spoke quickly – telling the story not just to George, but a bystander who happened to overhear the first telling).
It was at this point when Jorge, as well as his cohort Pablo, our WestJet representatives, were on their way out, in civilian clothes, and both stopped to catch the tale ending of this story. They conversed with George, got Andrew to retell the story once more, and waited patiently with us until the police arrived. I was ecstatic to have them there, because I knew as customers of theirs, they had a vested interest in helping us out, and also because their English was much better than George’s.
When the police arrived, they literally did not ask Andrew a single question; they spoke for about thirty seconds with George (Jorge and Pablo standing by), the one officer asking short, clipped questions while the other opened the hood of their 1970s-era Soviet-made Mercury Zephyr-style cruiser (presumably to keep it running), and then both officers vanished as quickly as they’d come. It was Jorge that explained to us that they’d had reports of girls matching the description given to George earlier in the day, and one officer might know where they are. (Guardalavaca, we would learn, was a town of about 3,000 people, so it’s not easy to vanish into anonymity.) Jorge told us it would be best to rebook our Holguín tour to the Friday, as the police would likely show up the following day and need a formal statement. Then he and Pablo left as they were late for a dinner.
Andrew was most concerned about his identification, and didn’t care at all for the cash inside the wallet. He asked George if the resort could provide a guy with a flashlight to go skimming through the cactus bush looking for the discarded wallet, the rationale being that the girls would swipe the cash and ditch the wallet. It was now dark outside, and it would be much more effective (and safer) looking through the bushes with a flashlight and a security officer. George placed a call on his radio and had a man come around in a golf cart with a cheap flashlight, where we were driven about 100 meters down the road, and left to wander in pitch black with this one flashlight and the apps on our phones. The security officer provided turned the golf cart around and waited patiently at the side of the road as we wandered 100-200 meters into this field, with horse shit everywhere, and skimmed around this cactus bush.
By the time we’d given up and were walking back to the road, George had reappeared and sent away his man, and Jorge and Pablo reappeared as well. They told us the police had two girls in their custody and we needed to come to the police station to identify. We crammed in the back of Jorge’s car and went around the corner, about five minutes’ walk from the resort, exactly where the old farmer had been leading Andrew.
I’ve never identified suspects from a lineup before, and I know that Hollywood isn’t the best gauge for the way things really are, but when Andrew was brought in here, he was led into a hallway with four girls, stood two feet from them with no bars or glass or mirror, and then proceeded to point out the two who’d mugged him. I followed him in, didn’t get a chance to so much as look at these girls, and then we were being led out. (The other two girls would stick around the station for the next few hours, chatting amiably with the cops, so we concluded they must be informants or working with the police in some capacity.)
We waited for some time, then the one girl was led out by two officers, and was taken to retrieve the wallet. When they returned, the police (not one of them spoke a word of English) had to go through every article and item in the wallet and fully document everything for their report, occasionally asking Andrew about the contents (and being none too forthcoming with what they were finding). It was around this time that Jorge left us, leaving us in the good hands of George, who would continue to translate for us. Some time passed as the police slowly went about their business, and Andrew began asking questions about what sort of penance awaited the girls, and whether or not he could ‘drop the charges’ now that his wallet had been retrieved (the girls, he could see, were crying down the hallway; the scare had clearly been put in them and that was probably as effective a tactic as legal recourse – and he didn’t particularly have the heart to send them to a Cuban prison). George was unable to answer these questions, as the police seemed to be outright ignoring him, and he didn’t know the answers himself. We did learn, however, that the girls were aged seventeen and eighteen.
Some time later, after endless waiting in the police station lobby, Jorge returned in his 1970s-era Soviet Mercury Zephyr. He marched back into the lobby, and got into a somewhat heated debate with the four or five officers there. They all proceeded outside and he continued to debate them heavily in Spanish. We had no idea what was happening. Apparently the police were not accepting George as a representative for us as foreigners, and had called back our direct representative. Jorge then stayed with us pretty much to the end, although George dutifully stayed by our side as well.
At some point around this time two other officers showed up in black jackets that someone (I don’t remember who) briefly referred to as federales. Exactly who they were I never found out, but they drove a more top-of-the-line Mercury Zephyr and parked in the foremost parking spot at the station and walked in liked they owned the place. They, however, were not the power that be that was to deal with Andrew’s situation. As Jorge explained, the police (who were largely doing nothing save having retrieved the wallet and inventoried it for whatever money remained) were waiting for a district representative to arrive from the head office of that municipality. As a foreigner, Andrew would not be in the country to be a witness at these girls’ trial, so there was a special judicial procedure to satisfy the courts.
So we sat there, in the cramped police lobby, Jorge, George, Andrew and I, waiting, and waiting, and waiting, while we petted a stray kitten that wandered in and wanted some attention, and watched the night age. Andrew once more asked, of Jorge, what the girls were facing for this, to which Jorge sighed and answered probably five or six years – five or six years! – and explained that there was no dropping the charges; the police were going to pursue this to the bitter end and there was no way around it.
The little black kitten rubbed its head and shoulders on our legs, Andrew went in and out for a cigarette, we gave up one of the three chairs for one of the women from the lineup that hung around and chatted with the cops, and I absentmindedly read the (Spanish) quote on the wall from Fidel Castro and observed all the pictures of the dictator throughout the lobby and the word revolicionario on the shoulders of each of the cops in uniform.
Eventually (this is around 11pm or so), a military jeep pulls into the parking lot, and out steps a middle aged man with grey hair combed back, dressed in olive green with large glasses. And the words Ministerio de Interior stitched above his breast pocket. All the police seemed afraid of him, and George later told us that Internal Affairs and the Secret Service reported to him. This was the man that was truly in charge, and took Andrew into a back office with Jorge and one or two of the other officers. Andrew had, at this point, filled out a written statement, which the minister took into this back office to type up via typewriter and document the specifics of the crime and the contents (and missing contents) of the wallet. There was, we had learned, only about fifty pesos left in the wallet, and the girls had spent fifty in the course of less than an hour. Keep in mind that all prices in Cuba are heavily regulated, most things are subsidized and the average Cuban makes about twenty to twenty-five pesos per month (this is all in the value of convertible pesos; those available to tourists and which are used by Cubans for non-subsidized goods and services).
It was at this point, Andrew told me later, that he began to get very nervous, because, no matter how you slice it, the facts of the story are that he removed his wallet in front of two admitted prostitutes (one of whom was underage) en route to his room. Moreover, before the trip, we’d bought dollar store notebooks and had written down English-Spanish phrases we might find useful that we’d pulled off the internet. However, we were lazy with it, and what we wound up with was only one page worth of “Hello, how are you?”, “My name is...”, “Where is the washroom?” followed by about four pages worth of pick up lines, and then (of course) the obligatory “My hovercraft is full of eels”. He was worried that, in a country without warrants, the ministry of the interior might just investigate our room, find his handwritten translation book of hardly anything but pickup lines and could be facing a sentence a Cuban hard labour camp.
I, meanwhile, left in the station lobby, found myself increasingly tired and hungry, and at the same time restless. The kitten leapt up onto the spare chair, where it nestled itself into the cushion, and I waited some more. I hadn’t even brought my book with me, so I couldn’t read up on Prince Dorgon’s tactically brilliant conquest of China. I could have left at any time, walked the five minutes back to the resort, but I wanted to stick around just for the story of it. The receptionist at the station, a thirty-something woman, had her hair done up in a Marge Simpson style of a bun, delicately wrapped in a bandana, and in my fatigue I found myself wondering how on Earth that could be comfortable and how she would scratch her head. Andrew would later berate me for this: “I could have been shipped off to Guantanamo for soliciting underage hookers and all you could think about was how that cop scratches the top of her head?!”
Jorge left us one final time, telling me that George had our backs this time and that Andrew was almost finished. I tried to tip Jorge for spending literally over four hours with us that night, but he refused to take it, saying instead that it was his duty. Andrew finished assisting the minister with his report, he was given back his wallet, and George drove us back to the resort in his extended golf cart. The police were past due closing the station for the night, and George told us we should go to the twenty-four-hour burger restaurant on the resort and gather a bunch of hotdogs and hamburgers to take to the police for their service – which we did, through the bowels underneath the main hotel. The police munitions officer, who was waiting for us out front the service entrance, wouldn’t take it, presumably because it could be seen as some form of bribery, so we were forced to leave it on a table for him. He wouldn’t acknowledge it until we left. We both thanked George profusely for staying with us over the course of the night, and once more thanked Jorge and Pablo when we saw them the following morning, first thing, at their desk after a hour-drive back to Holguín at midnight and back the following day. (A very detailed letter of praise was sent to WestJet for the exceptional service we’ve gotten from those two. The response back I got, while delighted that we were so impressed with their service, gave the impression they didn’t believe the story Andrew presented as authentic.) It was there that Jorge told us that the locals have a term for girls like those: los bandoleros (literally ‘the outlaws’).
The lesson Andrew took from this whole affair was “No good deed goes unpunished,” and he jokingly remarked for the remainder of the week that he should have just fucked those two on the beach and avoided the whole mess. I told him that if he’d done that, while he was with the one the other probably would have stolen his pants and his wallet and he’d be left with absolutely nothing but the real risk of going to Guantanamo (this he begrudgingly agreed was probably the case). The lesson I take from it is: fly WestJet.
On 17 December, 2014, President Obama announced the formal reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the Republic of Cuba after fifty-four years of embargo. Ernesto, our ageing, portly, fifty-something tour guide, who the following day took us speedboating up a river to the choppy waves of the Atlantic, was ecstatic. His son, he proclaimed, would get a chance to taste real Coca-Cola, would get to see the interconnectivity of the World Wide Web. Such was the opinion of most Cubans, who seemed overjoyed; at least those connected to the tourist industry.
I was in Holguín Province, at the far east end of the island, staying at the all-inclusive Brisas resort, about an hour’s drive from the city of Holguín, in the small town of Guardalavaca. My parents had been married for thirty years and, for their anniversary, were renewing their vows in a beachfront ceremony. I was my father’s best man, my sister was the maid of honour, and my brother had obtained an online minister’s certificate, and officiated the ceremony in a gazebo on the Brisas beach. Two friends tagged along with me to enjoy the week.
On the first day we arrived late into the day and barely had a chance to familiarize ourselves with the resort before we settled into a night of drinking. My friend Andrew was the last of us to retire that night, and actually stayed out almost all night, largely by himself, where at one point he fell asleep in one of the many hammocks scattered along the beach (this is after he, reaching that point of drunkenness, had to test every hammock he could find to see if it would bear his weight). He told me the next day that he’d been awoken by resort staff around 2:30 or so in the morning to see if he was alright, to which he promptly replied he had been, until he’d been woken up.
The second day, at 9 in the morning, was an information seminar conducted by our WestJest representative, Jorge, run out of a lounge in the main building, overlooking the pool. This covered things like currency exchange, whether the tap water was safe to drink, what excursion packages were available, and so on. We didn’t have to attend this, but I wanted to to get some basic information. I awoke early, as I normally do, let my hungover friends keep sleeping, and lounged in a hammock outside. I cracked open the book I’d begun on the plane and read some more about Koxinga, the seventeenth century pirate king of Taiwan (I was at the point where Koxinga’s father, Nicholas Iquan, seduced his own stepmother and then skipped town to become a pirate out of Macao).[1] Come 7, my stomach grumbling, I went for breakfast at the buffet. As a side note, I should mention that everyone told me the food in Cuba was godawful, yet I didn’t find this to be the case at all. While it wasn’t Michelin Star quality, I had no complaints – and indeed, if nothing else, some of the various mistranslations of the dishes (pasta/paste, mashed potatoes/masked potatoes) are worth a laugh.
[1: Coxinga: And the Fall of the Ming Dynasty by Jonathan Clements.]
Jorge went through a thirty-minute seminar on the resort, currency exchange, excursion packages and general info on Cuba. Andrew, hungover, stumbled in a few minutes after Jorge began. Afterwards, we went to book an excursion with him to Holguín City and the fishing village of Gibara the following day, that Wednesday (which left the resort at 7:30am). The remainder of the day was spent drinking, swimming, relaxing and visiting the local market about ten minutes’ walk west down the beach. Two other resorts shared the beach, and small open air market crowded a space at the far end, where I picked up a scorpion statue carved from bull horn and two nudie oil paintings (which I was later taxed on when I attempted to leave the country, and had to roll out salacious nude images in front of a young twenty-something senorita at the customs desk as she photographed and stamped them).
At 6:00pm the buffet opened once again for the dinner rush, and we’d all agreed to meet for a good meal. It was raining; my friend Brian and I had been relaxing in the hotel room (I was reading more about Koxinga), whereas Andrew had ventured out to “make every minute count” but agreed to meet us there for 6. Brian and I were there, met up with my parents and the others, and I sat down to a nice meal of pasta in wine sauce with a glass of red wine, wondering where Andrew was. I got about halfway through the meal when my phone started ringing, and you can guess who it was.
Because Cuba is a communist backwater, their telecommunications infrastructure is in the toilet and my service provider grouped them in with Russia, the Middle East, and most of Africa (the only places worse had no service at all: North Korea and two or three African countries where they still consider radio waves to be witchcraft). As a result, just answering the call would cost me four dollars, so the very first thing I said was, “This is costing me money, so it better be important.”
Andrew was in a panic. Now, I heard him tell this story about seventeen more times in the course of the next several hours, so (although this is not the entirety of the story conveyed in that short phone call) here are the pertinent details:
Andrew had gone back to the market (rain had been on and off). He was returning along the beach to make the appointment for dinner. He was drunk. Two Hispanic women, that he variously described as looking sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and fourteen, approached him asking for a cigarette. They spoke very broken English, but were wearing American clothing (Aeropostale) and he assumed they were resort guests (there were a lot on non-English guests there, from Europe and other places). He gave them a cigarette and they asked him if he wanted “fucky-fucky,” motioning to the beach. It was at this point he realized they were Cuban, and reasoned they probably weren’t too well off if they were resorting to beachfront prostitution. He told them he wasn’t interested in sex. We’d all brought American products – shampoo, cosmetics and whatnot – to give out to the locals, as we were told this is often better than giving cash, given the embargo. These young women clearly needed these things more than the resort maid or bartender, both of whom live relatively good lives compared to the rest of their comrades, given the exchange rate between the standard Cuban peso and the international convertible peso. Why not give these women some of these products? They said that was cool and followed him as he made his way back down the beach. Resort security, lax as it was, nonetheless tries to discourage impoverished locals from disturbing the resort lifestyle, so, the sign language prompting of the girls, they hopped off the beachfront trail and over to the road that runs in front of the resort. At a certain point, when they were trying to lead him further from the resort, he tried to explain in broken sign language how he needed to go to his room to get these items. They didn’t seem to understand. He had the hotel room key with him – he could show them what he meant when he said he needed to go back towards the villas. As soon as he removed his wallet, the one girl grabbed it from his hand and they both made a mad dash through the field adjacent the hotel, where they “ran like jackrabbits.” He followed in pursuit, yelling in a broken French-Spanish mixture, “Mon identification, por favor.” He didn’t even care about the cash inside, but rather the health card, firearms licence and protection officer badge (his passport was safely locked away in the room safe). The two girls split up to go around a large cactus bush, he followed one while losing the other, and ran out of breath before he could get to either of them. He found himself in a field with a few horses, asked for help from a local drunkard half passed out in a ditch, who was unable to help him, and then managed to converse a little bit with the old Hispanic woman who owned those horses. She told him (in broken English) to go to “la policia” and offered to lead him there, through some woods, where she assured him it was only five minutes away.
(The exact reason as to why his wallet was out in front of two whores remains a matter of some debate.)
Not all of the above occurred during the phone call, but from what he gave me, I told him to return to the resort and let them call the police. I thought this was a joke, but assuming for a second it was real, I thought the old woman leading him through the woods was an even bigger scam – you’re likely to run into the senoritas’ pimp with a machete saying, “Si gringo, once upon a time in Cuba...”
When I met him in the lobby, and he came charging up the stairs drenched in sweat and panicked. We asked the concierge for assistance, and she promptly called security. A few minutes later, a young gentleman from the security staff named George appeared – clean shaven with closely cropped hair, a pristine white shirt and a tie clip. George’s English was not the best, but sufficient enough, and he began to get the picture after two or three renditions of this story from Andrew (who was anxious and rambled, spoke quickly – telling the story not just to George, but a bystander who happened to overhear the first telling).
It was at this point when Jorge, as well as his cohort Pablo, our WestJet representatives, were on their way out, in civilian clothes, and both stopped to catch the tale ending of this story. They conversed with George, got Andrew to retell the story once more, and waited patiently with us until the police arrived. I was ecstatic to have them there, because I knew as customers of theirs, they had a vested interest in helping us out, and also because their English was much better than George’s.
When the police arrived, they literally did not ask Andrew a single question; they spoke for about thirty seconds with George (Jorge and Pablo standing by), the one officer asking short, clipped questions while the other opened the hood of their 1970s-era Soviet-made Mercury Zephyr-style cruiser (presumably to keep it running), and then both officers vanished as quickly as they’d come. It was Jorge that explained to us that they’d had reports of girls matching the description given to George earlier in the day, and one officer might know where they are. (Guardalavaca, we would learn, was a town of about 3,000 people, so it’s not easy to vanish into anonymity.) Jorge told us it would be best to rebook our Holguín tour to the Friday, as the police would likely show up the following day and need a formal statement. Then he and Pablo left as they were late for a dinner.
Andrew was most concerned about his identification, and didn’t care at all for the cash inside the wallet. He asked George if the resort could provide a guy with a flashlight to go skimming through the cactus bush looking for the discarded wallet, the rationale being that the girls would swipe the cash and ditch the wallet. It was now dark outside, and it would be much more effective (and safer) looking through the bushes with a flashlight and a security officer. George placed a call on his radio and had a man come around in a golf cart with a cheap flashlight, where we were driven about 100 meters down the road, and left to wander in pitch black with this one flashlight and the apps on our phones. The security officer provided turned the golf cart around and waited patiently at the side of the road as we wandered 100-200 meters into this field, with horse shit everywhere, and skimmed around this cactus bush.
By the time we’d given up and were walking back to the road, George had reappeared and sent away his man, and Jorge and Pablo reappeared as well. They told us the police had two girls in their custody and we needed to come to the police station to identify. We crammed in the back of Jorge’s car and went around the corner, about five minutes’ walk from the resort, exactly where the old farmer had been leading Andrew.
I’ve never identified suspects from a lineup before, and I know that Hollywood isn’t the best gauge for the way things really are, but when Andrew was brought in here, he was led into a hallway with four girls, stood two feet from them with no bars or glass or mirror, and then proceeded to point out the two who’d mugged him. I followed him in, didn’t get a chance to so much as look at these girls, and then we were being led out. (The other two girls would stick around the station for the next few hours, chatting amiably with the cops, so we concluded they must be informants or working with the police in some capacity.)
We waited for some time, then the one girl was led out by two officers, and was taken to retrieve the wallet. When they returned, the police (not one of them spoke a word of English) had to go through every article and item in the wallet and fully document everything for their report, occasionally asking Andrew about the contents (and being none too forthcoming with what they were finding). It was around this time that Jorge left us, leaving us in the good hands of George, who would continue to translate for us. Some time passed as the police slowly went about their business, and Andrew began asking questions about what sort of penance awaited the girls, and whether or not he could ‘drop the charges’ now that his wallet had been retrieved (the girls, he could see, were crying down the hallway; the scare had clearly been put in them and that was probably as effective a tactic as legal recourse – and he didn’t particularly have the heart to send them to a Cuban prison). George was unable to answer these questions, as the police seemed to be outright ignoring him, and he didn’t know the answers himself. We did learn, however, that the girls were aged seventeen and eighteen.
Some time later, after endless waiting in the police station lobby, Jorge returned in his 1970s-era Soviet Mercury Zephyr. He marched back into the lobby, and got into a somewhat heated debate with the four or five officers there. They all proceeded outside and he continued to debate them heavily in Spanish. We had no idea what was happening. Apparently the police were not accepting George as a representative for us as foreigners, and had called back our direct representative. Jorge then stayed with us pretty much to the end, although George dutifully stayed by our side as well.
At some point around this time two other officers showed up in black jackets that someone (I don’t remember who) briefly referred to as federales. Exactly who they were I never found out, but they drove a more top-of-the-line Mercury Zephyr and parked in the foremost parking spot at the station and walked in liked they owned the place. They, however, were not the power that be that was to deal with Andrew’s situation. As Jorge explained, the police (who were largely doing nothing save having retrieved the wallet and inventoried it for whatever money remained) were waiting for a district representative to arrive from the head office of that municipality. As a foreigner, Andrew would not be in the country to be a witness at these girls’ trial, so there was a special judicial procedure to satisfy the courts.
So we sat there, in the cramped police lobby, Jorge, George, Andrew and I, waiting, and waiting, and waiting, while we petted a stray kitten that wandered in and wanted some attention, and watched the night age. Andrew once more asked, of Jorge, what the girls were facing for this, to which Jorge sighed and answered probably five or six years – five or six years! – and explained that there was no dropping the charges; the police were going to pursue this to the bitter end and there was no way around it.
The little black kitten rubbed its head and shoulders on our legs, Andrew went in and out for a cigarette, we gave up one of the three chairs for one of the women from the lineup that hung around and chatted with the cops, and I absentmindedly read the (Spanish) quote on the wall from Fidel Castro and observed all the pictures of the dictator throughout the lobby and the word revolicionario on the shoulders of each of the cops in uniform.
Eventually (this is around 11pm or so), a military jeep pulls into the parking lot, and out steps a middle aged man with grey hair combed back, dressed in olive green with large glasses. And the words Ministerio de Interior stitched above his breast pocket. All the police seemed afraid of him, and George later told us that Internal Affairs and the Secret Service reported to him. This was the man that was truly in charge, and took Andrew into a back office with Jorge and one or two of the other officers. Andrew had, at this point, filled out a written statement, which the minister took into this back office to type up via typewriter and document the specifics of the crime and the contents (and missing contents) of the wallet. There was, we had learned, only about fifty pesos left in the wallet, and the girls had spent fifty in the course of less than an hour. Keep in mind that all prices in Cuba are heavily regulated, most things are subsidized and the average Cuban makes about twenty to twenty-five pesos per month (this is all in the value of convertible pesos; those available to tourists and which are used by Cubans for non-subsidized goods and services).
It was at this point, Andrew told me later, that he began to get very nervous, because, no matter how you slice it, the facts of the story are that he removed his wallet in front of two admitted prostitutes (one of whom was underage) en route to his room. Moreover, before the trip, we’d bought dollar store notebooks and had written down English-Spanish phrases we might find useful that we’d pulled off the internet. However, we were lazy with it, and what we wound up with was only one page worth of “Hello, how are you?”, “My name is...”, “Where is the washroom?” followed by about four pages worth of pick up lines, and then (of course) the obligatory “My hovercraft is full of eels”. He was worried that, in a country without warrants, the ministry of the interior might just investigate our room, find his handwritten translation book of hardly anything but pickup lines and could be facing a sentence a Cuban hard labour camp.
I, meanwhile, left in the station lobby, found myself increasingly tired and hungry, and at the same time restless. The kitten leapt up onto the spare chair, where it nestled itself into the cushion, and I waited some more. I hadn’t even brought my book with me, so I couldn’t read up on Prince Dorgon’s tactically brilliant conquest of China. I could have left at any time, walked the five minutes back to the resort, but I wanted to stick around just for the story of it. The receptionist at the station, a thirty-something woman, had her hair done up in a Marge Simpson style of a bun, delicately wrapped in a bandana, and in my fatigue I found myself wondering how on Earth that could be comfortable and how she would scratch her head. Andrew would later berate me for this: “I could have been shipped off to Guantanamo for soliciting underage hookers and all you could think about was how that cop scratches the top of her head?!”
Jorge left us one final time, telling me that George had our backs this time and that Andrew was almost finished. I tried to tip Jorge for spending literally over four hours with us that night, but he refused to take it, saying instead that it was his duty. Andrew finished assisting the minister with his report, he was given back his wallet, and George drove us back to the resort in his extended golf cart. The police were past due closing the station for the night, and George told us we should go to the twenty-four-hour burger restaurant on the resort and gather a bunch of hotdogs and hamburgers to take to the police for their service – which we did, through the bowels underneath the main hotel. The police munitions officer, who was waiting for us out front the service entrance, wouldn’t take it, presumably because it could be seen as some form of bribery, so we were forced to leave it on a table for him. He wouldn’t acknowledge it until we left. We both thanked George profusely for staying with us over the course of the night, and once more thanked Jorge and Pablo when we saw them the following morning, first thing, at their desk after a hour-drive back to Holguín at midnight and back the following day. (A very detailed letter of praise was sent to WestJet for the exceptional service we’ve gotten from those two. The response back I got, while delighted that we were so impressed with their service, gave the impression they didn’t believe the story Andrew presented as authentic.) It was there that Jorge told us that the locals have a term for girls like those: los bandoleros (literally ‘the outlaws’).
The lesson Andrew took from this whole affair was “No good deed goes unpunished,” and he jokingly remarked for the remainder of the week that he should have just fucked those two on the beach and avoided the whole mess. I told him that if he’d done that, while he was with the one the other probably would have stolen his pants and his wallet and he’d be left with absolutely nothing but the real risk of going to Guantanamo (this he begrudgingly agreed was probably the case). The lesson I take from it is: fly WestJet.
September 9, 2013
The Nevada Sky: The True Story of the Most Majestic Scene in Nature (That Doesn't Contain Nipples)
It was the week of 1-7 September 2013, and I was in Las Vegas with my friend for vacation. While I was there, the big sight I wanted to see was the desert's night sky, where, as countless Google Image results will show, the entire Milky Way can be seen stretching (practically) from horizon to horizon as a scar across the sky. In every other state in the contiguous United States (and certainly a good many hours' driving radius in southern Ontario), the light pollution is so bad that, on average, on a clear night, you can only see a handful of stars – maybe fifty in all, on the right night, in a very dim country area. Out here, they say you can see as many as 7,700.
The timing had to be crucial. There's only about a dozen (at most) nights a year to get a sky shot like that. It has to be at the right time of year, so the Earth is between the sun and the rest of the galaxy. That was summer (hence why I left Canada to come to the Mojave Desert in September). It also had to be during a new moon, because you need there to be nothing else, not even a cellphone's backlight, to pollute the dark with non-stellar light. The new moon itself was 5 September, the Thursday, yet I opted to go on the Wednesday (I figured 1/27th of a moon's sliver wouldn't interfere) because checkout was 11am Friday and I didn't want to be wrecked beyond what was necessary for the flight back to Canada Friday night.
We rented a car while in Las Vegas for this express purpose. The night lights of the city would make stargazing as impossible on the Strip as in New York City. The Internet gave me answers as to the best places to go that were two and half to five hours from the city (in various national parks), yet the people I talked to in Las Vegas merely said fifteen miles out the 93.
On the Wednesday night, just my luck, it rains. Pisses rain. Storm clouds (at least what Nevadans qualify as storm clouds) from horizon to horizon. The desert was supposed to be the safe bet. But, as we were repeatedly told, the rains had been much more precipitous this year than the average. But there were high winds and patches of clear in the distance, so I just hoped that they would clear. So while I waited for the skies to clear, I went to the gun range, four blocks from our hotel, dropped my credit card on the counter and fired off a sniper rifle (that they simply called “the Savage”) and an AK-47 – something you'd never get a chance to do in Canada for so little red tape. It was actually an awesome experience, and I'm not a bad shot for point blank range with a sniper rifle. (The range, of course, played up the machismo of it, and when you first walk in, the receptionist is a twentysomething blonde with a tight body and perky voice, V-neck shirt, short shorts and a pistol in a thigh holster – entirely decorative, I could easily tell.)
Anyway, by the time I got back to the hotel and we went for dinner, the rain had stopped but there was still some overcast, and the sun had completely set, so it was hard to tell just how overcast it was. I went for a walk along the Strip to gauge the sky better, and after about a half hour or so, when I was walking back, I could tell just how sparse the cloud cover was (there was one small cloud and nothing more), so I headed back to the hotel. My friend was already asleep, so I merely grabbed the keys, the camera(s) and snuck back out. After all, the whole reason for renting the car was this, so it would have been a complete waste and I'd have been pissed had I not gone for it.
I stole a map from the closed Hertz desk and headed for the parking garage. It was about 11:15. I took Koval to Spring Mountain Road to the 15/93, got on going towards Salt Lake City. Once you pass North Las Vegas, the limit jumps to 75mph, and I drove for what felt like forever until I saw the junction for the 93. The entire time, you're leaving the valley into the hills and you see a sea of orange and yellow from the city – a glorious sight, but it presented the looming fear that I'd have to drive for a long distance up the 93. The ramp was about the distance of a good size drive thru, coming to a stop sign at the bottom. It was a four-way stop, and a truck appeared at my right before I could see any directional signs, so I went with my mental image of the map and went to my left. There were no identifying highway signs, so I had no idea if I was heading in the right direction. There were no speed limit signs, so I had no idea how fast to go (it was a rural highway, which in Ontario is usually 80kmph, so I chose 55 and locked the cruise).
Immediately there were two power generating stations, one after the other, to my left that were painted in lights, and the one remaining cloud over Las Vegas (or to the south of it, I can't be sure) was illuminated as bright as a white cloud in the day sky. Presently I see a turn off to my right, leading into a gravel or sand pit stop on the side of the road, which I recognized only by the reflection of my headlights off the taillights of a parked car in there, and considered turning around to join him. But, that cloud still loomed immediately to my left, and I figured I didn't want to pull into a lone gravel lot next to a random stranger in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert. So I kept going, figuring there'd be another one of those gravel or sand turn offs eventually. (Pulling off onto the shoulder was not really an option, as the slope was too steep into the ditch, and the shoulder itself was only really a tire's breadth. I'd need to turn off all my lights in order to see this properly, which meant I'd be hugging the side of the road, inches from being smashed by a wandering truck, as few and far between as they may have been.) I vowed I'd go another ten miles and see how it looked.
It was empty on this highway. And the lights had vanished. So more and more stars were appearing through my windshield, but I still had my high beams on, and knew I didn't have a hope of seeing the “clouds” of endless stars clustered together; didn't have a hope in seeing the scar shape of the galaxy itself until I parked the car. There was a turn in the highway, veering slightly to the right, at which point I watched a truck coming at me for about six or seven minutes before realizing it was a truck's headlights.
The following day we drove up to the junction of the 93 and the 375, where the “Extraterrestrial Highway” begins, and let me tell you this has to be the straightest road I've ever seen. There's about a forty mile stretch that's as straight as straw.
After that truck passed me there was nothing more. The glowing cloud to my left over Vegas was slowly passing to my rear, and I kept my eyes open for another turn off pit stop. One finally came right about ten miles after the first, which would make it about twelve to fifteen miles from the junction with Interstate 15. I overshot it because I didn't see it until I was on top of it, slowed down, did a three-point turn, went back and pulled in. There's a fence that runs along the highway thirty feet or so from the road, which I later came to assume was a wildlife control fence. I swung the car around in this little sand lot, using the headlights to determine the limits of it, then came to a stop, parked the car and removed the key. It takes a second for the headlights and the dome light to go off, and you have to open the door to get the dash lights and the radio to go dark, so I stepped out of the car as the headlights finally went dim.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust fully, but I wasn't completely blind to what lay above me. There it was, clusters and clouds, a spattering of stars from horizon to horizon. The cloud over Vegas was far in the distance and I had the entire night sky illuminated above me.
And I mean illuminated. The terrain around me was black as pitch. You couldn't see even an inch outside the limits of your high beams when on the road, not a single highway light or another vehicle as far as the eye could see. And they could see pretty far. This was a flat desert with no humidity, perfect visibility, the clear air of the Nevada plateau and the outline of mountains in the distance in any direction. It was impossible to determine how far away they were. The follow day I discovered they were, indeed, on the far horizon, and the entire sky – a sight so panoramic as to astound the imagination – was streaked with the majestic spilt “milk” of the galaxy.
Except for three dark lines crisscrossing the splendour. It took me a second to realize these were power lines, above my head. That's how pitch it was out there. I drove for fifteen miles into the desert, without ever seeing, just beyond the periphery of the high beams, that there were power lines running parallel to the road the entire time.
The sky itself wasn't black. The land was, but the sky was surprisingly bright. A navy blue with a light tint of maroon and violet. The stars were all white, with the slightest hint of a sky blue. Even with all the majesty I was seeing, it was still only the stars on that colour spectrum; the reds and the yellows not luminous enough to show up.
It should be noted that when you look at pictures on Google Images, and see the entire sky streaked in red or violet or whatnot, you're seeing an image taken with a special camera with a lens adjusted to certain spectra of light. That's not what you see with your naked eyes. That's why none of my images turned out. With still frames, digital video and VHS video, all three were merely black screens (the backlight on those black screens blinded me to from the sky).
Yet, despite the differences between highly expensive cameras and my naked eyes, it was still (and I'm trying not to exaggerate, euphemize or get poetic here) the most spectacular sight I have ever seen, that was not on a woman's chest. I have to get that qualifier in there (and I'd gone to the Flamingo's burlesque topless dance show the night previous, so I had an up-to-date basis for comparison). There are not words to describe it.
And then, it got fucking spooky (I'm using that word quantitatively). Picture this: You can't see your hand in front of your face. The mountains in the distance could be twenty feet from you or a thousand miles. You didn't know there were power lines to your side. You missed the turn off. There's not a single light – not even a radio dial – from horizon to horizon. All you can see is something so dim that you haven't before seen 1/1000th of it, despite it having been there every night of your life.
And no one knows where you are. You're thirty miles into the desert with the bodies of Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart, at 12:30 in the morning, in a foreign country. I wasn't worried about other people that might be out there with ill intent. I was worried about the wildlife. I could be gored to death by a bighorn sheep and no one would ever know. I could be bitten by a rattlesnake. I could be prowled by a cougar (or a puma if you prefer – or a catamount, or whichever name you attach to it; it does hold the Guinness world record for the animal with the most names, as we learned at the National Atomic Testing Museum that Monday), whose range does extend into the desert.
And you literally would not see it until it took your eyes out (okay, in the case of the sheep, you might hear the clomping of its hooves as it charged towards you, but I really wasn't too worried about the sheep).
I didn't stay too long out there. My cameras clearly weren't working, and the image would be forever burned into my memory. Never has an image been more surreal, more awe-inspiring, more humbling.
The timing had to be crucial. There's only about a dozen (at most) nights a year to get a sky shot like that. It has to be at the right time of year, so the Earth is between the sun and the rest of the galaxy. That was summer (hence why I left Canada to come to the Mojave Desert in September). It also had to be during a new moon, because you need there to be nothing else, not even a cellphone's backlight, to pollute the dark with non-stellar light. The new moon itself was 5 September, the Thursday, yet I opted to go on the Wednesday (I figured 1/27th of a moon's sliver wouldn't interfere) because checkout was 11am Friday and I didn't want to be wrecked beyond what was necessary for the flight back to Canada Friday night.
We rented a car while in Las Vegas for this express purpose. The night lights of the city would make stargazing as impossible on the Strip as in New York City. The Internet gave me answers as to the best places to go that were two and half to five hours from the city (in various national parks), yet the people I talked to in Las Vegas merely said fifteen miles out the 93.
On the Wednesday night, just my luck, it rains. Pisses rain. Storm clouds (at least what Nevadans qualify as storm clouds) from horizon to horizon. The desert was supposed to be the safe bet. But, as we were repeatedly told, the rains had been much more precipitous this year than the average. But there were high winds and patches of clear in the distance, so I just hoped that they would clear. So while I waited for the skies to clear, I went to the gun range, four blocks from our hotel, dropped my credit card on the counter and fired off a sniper rifle (that they simply called “the Savage”) and an AK-47 – something you'd never get a chance to do in Canada for so little red tape. It was actually an awesome experience, and I'm not a bad shot for point blank range with a sniper rifle. (The range, of course, played up the machismo of it, and when you first walk in, the receptionist is a twentysomething blonde with a tight body and perky voice, V-neck shirt, short shorts and a pistol in a thigh holster – entirely decorative, I could easily tell.)
Anyway, by the time I got back to the hotel and we went for dinner, the rain had stopped but there was still some overcast, and the sun had completely set, so it was hard to tell just how overcast it was. I went for a walk along the Strip to gauge the sky better, and after about a half hour or so, when I was walking back, I could tell just how sparse the cloud cover was (there was one small cloud and nothing more), so I headed back to the hotel. My friend was already asleep, so I merely grabbed the keys, the camera(s) and snuck back out. After all, the whole reason for renting the car was this, so it would have been a complete waste and I'd have been pissed had I not gone for it.
I stole a map from the closed Hertz desk and headed for the parking garage. It was about 11:15. I took Koval to Spring Mountain Road to the 15/93, got on going towards Salt Lake City. Once you pass North Las Vegas, the limit jumps to 75mph, and I drove for what felt like forever until I saw the junction for the 93. The entire time, you're leaving the valley into the hills and you see a sea of orange and yellow from the city – a glorious sight, but it presented the looming fear that I'd have to drive for a long distance up the 93. The ramp was about the distance of a good size drive thru, coming to a stop sign at the bottom. It was a four-way stop, and a truck appeared at my right before I could see any directional signs, so I went with my mental image of the map and went to my left. There were no identifying highway signs, so I had no idea if I was heading in the right direction. There were no speed limit signs, so I had no idea how fast to go (it was a rural highway, which in Ontario is usually 80kmph, so I chose 55 and locked the cruise).
Immediately there were two power generating stations, one after the other, to my left that were painted in lights, and the one remaining cloud over Las Vegas (or to the south of it, I can't be sure) was illuminated as bright as a white cloud in the day sky. Presently I see a turn off to my right, leading into a gravel or sand pit stop on the side of the road, which I recognized only by the reflection of my headlights off the taillights of a parked car in there, and considered turning around to join him. But, that cloud still loomed immediately to my left, and I figured I didn't want to pull into a lone gravel lot next to a random stranger in the middle of the night, in the middle of the desert. So I kept going, figuring there'd be another one of those gravel or sand turn offs eventually. (Pulling off onto the shoulder was not really an option, as the slope was too steep into the ditch, and the shoulder itself was only really a tire's breadth. I'd need to turn off all my lights in order to see this properly, which meant I'd be hugging the side of the road, inches from being smashed by a wandering truck, as few and far between as they may have been.) I vowed I'd go another ten miles and see how it looked.
It was empty on this highway. And the lights had vanished. So more and more stars were appearing through my windshield, but I still had my high beams on, and knew I didn't have a hope of seeing the “clouds” of endless stars clustered together; didn't have a hope in seeing the scar shape of the galaxy itself until I parked the car. There was a turn in the highway, veering slightly to the right, at which point I watched a truck coming at me for about six or seven minutes before realizing it was a truck's headlights.
The following day we drove up to the junction of the 93 and the 375, where the “Extraterrestrial Highway” begins, and let me tell you this has to be the straightest road I've ever seen. There's about a forty mile stretch that's as straight as straw.
After that truck passed me there was nothing more. The glowing cloud to my left over Vegas was slowly passing to my rear, and I kept my eyes open for another turn off pit stop. One finally came right about ten miles after the first, which would make it about twelve to fifteen miles from the junction with Interstate 15. I overshot it because I didn't see it until I was on top of it, slowed down, did a three-point turn, went back and pulled in. There's a fence that runs along the highway thirty feet or so from the road, which I later came to assume was a wildlife control fence. I swung the car around in this little sand lot, using the headlights to determine the limits of it, then came to a stop, parked the car and removed the key. It takes a second for the headlights and the dome light to go off, and you have to open the door to get the dash lights and the radio to go dark, so I stepped out of the car as the headlights finally went dim.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust fully, but I wasn't completely blind to what lay above me. There it was, clusters and clouds, a spattering of stars from horizon to horizon. The cloud over Vegas was far in the distance and I had the entire night sky illuminated above me.
And I mean illuminated. The terrain around me was black as pitch. You couldn't see even an inch outside the limits of your high beams when on the road, not a single highway light or another vehicle as far as the eye could see. And they could see pretty far. This was a flat desert with no humidity, perfect visibility, the clear air of the Nevada plateau and the outline of mountains in the distance in any direction. It was impossible to determine how far away they were. The follow day I discovered they were, indeed, on the far horizon, and the entire sky – a sight so panoramic as to astound the imagination – was streaked with the majestic spilt “milk” of the galaxy.
Except for three dark lines crisscrossing the splendour. It took me a second to realize these were power lines, above my head. That's how pitch it was out there. I drove for fifteen miles into the desert, without ever seeing, just beyond the periphery of the high beams, that there were power lines running parallel to the road the entire time.
The sky itself wasn't black. The land was, but the sky was surprisingly bright. A navy blue with a light tint of maroon and violet. The stars were all white, with the slightest hint of a sky blue. Even with all the majesty I was seeing, it was still only the stars on that colour spectrum; the reds and the yellows not luminous enough to show up.
It should be noted that when you look at pictures on Google Images, and see the entire sky streaked in red or violet or whatnot, you're seeing an image taken with a special camera with a lens adjusted to certain spectra of light. That's not what you see with your naked eyes. That's why none of my images turned out. With still frames, digital video and VHS video, all three were merely black screens (the backlight on those black screens blinded me to from the sky).
Yet, despite the differences between highly expensive cameras and my naked eyes, it was still (and I'm trying not to exaggerate, euphemize or get poetic here) the most spectacular sight I have ever seen, that was not on a woman's chest. I have to get that qualifier in there (and I'd gone to the Flamingo's burlesque topless dance show the night previous, so I had an up-to-date basis for comparison). There are not words to describe it.
And then, it got fucking spooky (I'm using that word quantitatively). Picture this: You can't see your hand in front of your face. The mountains in the distance could be twenty feet from you or a thousand miles. You didn't know there were power lines to your side. You missed the turn off. There's not a single light – not even a radio dial – from horizon to horizon. All you can see is something so dim that you haven't before seen 1/1000th of it, despite it having been there every night of your life.
And no one knows where you are. You're thirty miles into the desert with the bodies of Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart, at 12:30 in the morning, in a foreign country. I wasn't worried about other people that might be out there with ill intent. I was worried about the wildlife. I could be gored to death by a bighorn sheep and no one would ever know. I could be bitten by a rattlesnake. I could be prowled by a cougar (or a puma if you prefer – or a catamount, or whichever name you attach to it; it does hold the Guinness world record for the animal with the most names, as we learned at the National Atomic Testing Museum that Monday), whose range does extend into the desert.
And you literally would not see it until it took your eyes out (okay, in the case of the sheep, you might hear the clomping of its hooves as it charged towards you, but I really wasn't too worried about the sheep).
I didn't stay too long out there. My cameras clearly weren't working, and the image would be forever burned into my memory. Never has an image been more surreal, more awe-inspiring, more humbling.
June 13, 2013
Ebook
The ebook version of my novel, "The Zimmer Insurgency" is now available for $1.99. Check it out at Lulu.com
http://www.lulu.com/shop/jason-shanno...
http://www.lulu.com/shop/jason-shanno...
April 14, 2013
Youtube video for the book
On the weekend of April 20th, I'm going to be filming a YouTube video in promotion of my debut novel "The Zimmer Insurgency" with my friend Theo. The video will be structured as a Q&A video, wherein Theo will read me readers' questions, and I'll answer them. I'm still accepting questions, so if any readers or potential readers have a question to submit on the book, the author or the writing process, feel free to submit before then.
