Friday, August 18th - Enter the Dragon

This dragon, from the 9 dragon screen at Beihai park, is a particualy menacing example of the chinese dragons that are on virtually every surface in china. I'm not kidding. EVERY surface in china has a dragon. Maybe the locals get used to it, and stop noticing. I really enjoy the dragons and will miss them when we leave.


Good morning from Beijing. It’s Monday Morning, the 21^st of August at 6 am as I write this. Its been a couple days since I was able to keep up with our travel journal as we have been busy traveling. This is the problem with a travel journal is that the more you travel, the more you have to say and the less time you have to say it in. Makes a travel journal very difficult. Also, Kris and I leave for Changsha tonight and will get Olivia tomorrow afternoon. I can’t believe it’s finally here, and anything I have to report about our recent touring to the sights of China seems extremely trivial. Nonetheless, the camera is very full of pictures, and I don’t ever want to forget this trip. So I will try and hit the highlights at least.

Friday was the first day of a 3-day whirlwhind guided tour which begins at 9 AM each morning the lobby of the hotel and ends rather late. The guides pack way too much in because in addition to the important historic sights, they seem obliged to direct you to a handful of shopping centers (the silk factory, the jade factory and the Cloisonne factory) where you feel similarly obliged to buy something, and we have no doubt they receive a cut of the sales from busloads of tourists they bring. In some cases, it is rather obvious.

Friday was particularly auspicious because we finally found the Starbucks in Beijing! We both ordered our favorite drinks (I had a drip coffee, and Kris an Americano with skim milk and raw sugar. the drinks were remarkably indistinguishable from our starbucks at home, except the coffee was just a little weaker. Not too bad.

After getting coffee, Kris and I met our guide and found out that we would be touring alone with her because the other members of our party had not yet arrived from their various locations. Our tour included Beihai park, the temple of heaven, a cloisonné factory, and a silk factory. the first two sights were amazing and beautiful historic sights on a scale that I am simply not used to seeing. Basically these are extremely large parks full of impressive religious architecture with grand Buddhist temples and houses of the former emperors. Beihai park was especially beautiful. Like the other public squares we have visited over the last several days, the park was full of older Chinese people exercising, dancing, playing music and doing water calligraphy. All this occurs at the base of beautiful and historic Buddhist temples.

Scenes from Behai Park

This is what happens when you end up on a tour with a guide: you go from hanging out with locals, to donning the tourist uniform and becoming - gasp - a tourist. We paid 10 Yuan ($1.25) for the priveledge of taking this picture.

The locals at Beihai park practice thier traditional fan dance in the morning (background) and exercise with string and top.

Men are writing traditional poems. This is so interesting to watch them write all these poems, watch them evaporate, then begin writing again. I never saw any women writing, only playing with the caligraphy pens, it must be a man thing.


The 9 dragon screen at Beihai park is one of 3 in China (the world?). They are very intricate and beautiful and represent the power of the emporer.

Kris and I assume the position in from of the Buddhist temple in Beihai park. Actually, we copied some chinese tourists who took their picture this way right before we did.....when in Rome.....

After Beihai park, we visited the temple of Heaven. The temple of heaven was built by one of the emperors. (Of course, the guide gave us so much history, I forget which emperor, but we bought the book and will look it up later if you would like to know.) Like the other sights, the temple of heaven is built on a scale that is hard to imagine by western standards, and was very full of Chinese and European tourists. Upon arriving we were swarmed by a group of children whose parents insisted talk to us in English. this was great fun and the children spoke very good English.

Okay, you all know just how much I hate to be the center of attention. You can imagine how hard this was for me to endure. I felt like a rockstar on much of this trip and have been greeted with much enthusiasm by so many of the locals. I have been so tired of feeling ashamed to be an american. I don't here. I don't feel like I have to apologize and It's very refreshing to feel good about being a mei guo.



The Temple of heaven in the background. This is not an actual religious temple, it is a simply a grand place built by the emporer to worship. The thing about emporers. They like really really big houses with lots of gold dragons painted on them.

This is detail from the temple picured above. It is being restored for the olympics with some fresh gold paint for the dragons.

Every detail of these palaces is covered. Here's the doorknob to the palace.

The cloisonné and silk factories, were, in fact, very interesting indeed. Not just because we had the opportunity to see how the Chinese make their wonderful pots and silk goods, but because it was a bit of a lesson in Chinese culture as well.

We learned that much of the silk and cloisonné is produced through the labor of young girls (not sure exactly how young, they were simply described as young girls by our guides) many of whom are recruited through the orphanages at a very young age, and apprenticed into one of the “trades”. The apprenticeship I am told can begin as early as age 4, but at the factories we visited, the youngest girls were teenagers. We did not see much of the actual factory, what we saw was a few individuals (5 or 6 at each station) showing us how the goods were produced. At the silk factory, the guide told us rather proudly that their factory has more than 2000 young girls tying silk threads into rugs everyday. The work I saw appeared to be relatively safe and non-toxic, but extremely tedious, monotonous, repetitive. Imagine tying tiny silk threads (a centimeter in length or so) to the backing of a rug in a very complex color pattern for several hours a day for years and years. Our guide told us a small silk rug can take several months or a couple of years to complete because it can only be tied by hand, there is no way to have a machine produce a silk rug in this style. This is not the life I would have wanted for our daughter.

The factories we tour are demonstration factories, not the real thing. I assume this is why we don't see any young girls working on pots and silk despite the fact that guides at both facilities seemed rather proud of the large number of girls they had in their factories producing goods. Considering how sensitive americans are about child labor it was actually very strange to hear.

Because you see the finished pots in the gift shop - and we were overwhelmed by clerks who wanted to assist us by showing us every pot in the place, I actually didn't get a picture of a finished pot. But, they are beautiful, I'll get a picture from somewhere.

Kris and Matt stretching silk threads into a comforter.