June 4 Enamel Factory and The Wall

It would be too much to ask, of course, that we could just go to the Wall in the morning when it was like NOT 35C. Charley maintains that it’s too crowded in the morning and that if we go in the afternoon we’ll have the place pretty much to ourselves. What Charley says goes, as he’s the only guy that can talk to the bus driver.

The morning was therefor dedicated to the Jade Museum and the Enamel Museum, followed by a great lunch. Not to belittle those places, they are very interesting as there is always an introductory tour by one of the staff and there’s always a museum-quality section in addition to the shopping area.

Serious jade.

 

Hard to believe this is cut out of one piece.

Glueing copper doodles onto a copper figurine. Then the areas are painted with different colors, the whole thing is

buffed down to show the dividers, and voila! Enamel.

 

An example of enamel at its best.

What exactly would you use these things for?

Then it was off to the Ming Tombs, which in this case are not dug up yet. The Chinese have learned their lesson, when they opened the tomb of the Terracotta Warriors everything was vividly colored, but the colors faded and disappeared within a few days. So they are very reluctant to open up known treasures until the technology improves and they can preserve the delicate nature of these priceless relics. In the case of the Ming Tombs, there is a large public area out front and a main building that has been converted into a museum. The tomb is just out back; it is a hill about 100’ high and well over a kilometre long, there will be some serious stuff in there when they screw up enough courage to open it. It holds Emperor Dongle (pronounced 'dong-lee'), the big guy around here in the early 1400s.

The museum contains, among other things, a very interesting section on Zheng He. He was a general tasked by the Mings with building an ocean fleet to visit the outside world (they were very insular at the time). He built a fleet of enormous ships that would hold soldiers, courtiers, ambassadors, etc and then visited countries throughout Asia and Africa, and possibly sailed as far as North America. This was roughly 60 years before Columbus. When he got home the Emperor had died and the new Emperor wasn’t interested in that foreign stuff so all the ships were burned and that was the end of that.

This is the tomb. 
 Pretty interesting, no?

A model of Zheng He’s ship. This thing was more than 300 feet long, the arse end is 3 stories of apartments….

 

Debbi at the entrance to the tombs.

This tree is struggling with its role.

After lunch - yippee! - we finally get to the Wall, which is about a 90 minute drive from our hotel. Incidentally, it’s meaningless to describe anything as ‘so many minutes from Beijing’ because it’s over 100 km long and 30 km wide…. It’s quite hilly and the terrain is very pretty, and there are walls all over the place. They go up one side of the valley, fart around on the top for a while, come back down about a kilometre away, go up the other side, wander around on the hill over there, and then come back down pretty much where we started out! What’s with that? 

I decided to climb the section on the other side of the valley as, although it was somewhat lower, there didn’t seem to be anyone over there. Eventually I found out why - I couldn’t figure out how to get over there! After four tries and about a mile of parking lots I gave up and went back to climb with everyone else. It was good. The stairs vary from steep through very steep all the way to f*cking steep, and the stone stair treads are cracked, broken, and uneven. The width also varies; at the bottom the stairways are often 3-5 metres wide, but as you go up and it gets steeper there’s sometimes only room for two people to pass. The saving grace is that some genius installed metal pipe handrails, which I’m sure has saved many a life. My guess is that more soldiers died falling down the steps than ever got killed by invaders!

 

So, up the wall I go. Met Deb and a friend a few hundred metres up the hill; they were contemplating a steep pitch and I think maybe screwing up their courage a bit. I carried on by myself, and as I climbed things generally got more steep and more narrow. Every 300 metres or so there’s a two-story stone guard house where they lit signal fires in the good old days, now we just use them to take photos. I eventually went up through three of them (about 1500’ vertical) and then started worrying about my knees and ankles on the trip down so called a halt. The view was marvellous, and the trip back down was just fine. Unbeknownst to me Deb wasn’t that far behind me, but she got an attack of the scoots that have been plaguing both of us and there aren’t any washrooms up here! Apparently she set some kind of record heading back down.

Looking up from the bottom.

 

A bit narrow and steep-ish in places...

And down from the top.

 

"Password please!"  Second guardhouse.

Another one off the bucket list! 
Note more walls in background.

Just a few more steps and we'll be at the top!

Well, that was pretty cool. By the time we drove back into Beijing it was time for dinner, and Charley took us to a place that specialized in Peking Duck. It was in their extremely modern and upscale financial district, which is really something to see at night but sadly we didn’t get any photos that would do it justice. The duck was good, the meal was great, and it was the last time that our little group of eight would be together. Funny how quickly you make friends when thrown together with a bunch of complete strangers; we have everyone’s contact info and intend to keep in touch with as many as we can….

Cutting up the duck at the table - in Peking.

 

Didn't expect to see this little guy at the door!

And that was that. Next morning was time to get our butts to the airport and head home. It was a really great trip. I still don’t think I have my head properly wrapped around the things we did and saw, everything was so different. The overall impression I came away with was an energetic bunch of people who are very busy building an amazing new country, but who haven’t lost touch with their incredible past. It was much more modern and cleaner and more organized than I had expected, with parks and lakes and green spaces everywhere we went, and while the Yangtze River area is really misty from the high humidity we never encountered any savage levels of air pollution. Just lucky I guess. For those of you who have thought about going to China but never made it, this is an incredibly cheap and safe way to do it. I recommend it to anyone without hesitation.