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.
Published on February 20, 2017 11:18
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