Well, this is my first blog. Chris has been pestering me about starting one and given that I want to post some pictures from my recent trip to China, I thought I'd give it a try.Here's picture of one of the buildings at the Ming Tombs where we visited on our first day in Beijing. The tombs are one of the five UNESCO World Heritage Sites in and around Beijing. The Ming Tombs are the burial place for 13 of the 16 Ming Emperors. They are mostly intact and because of the archaeological challenges of digging them up, they are mostly undisturbed.
This is a photo of a map that shows the valley where the Ming Tombs are located. Although Beijing is in a relatively level plain, the mountains start up very quickly just outside the city. The Tombs are located in sort of a bowl, as you can see from the map. It's a couple of miles from the entrance to the main tomb at top center (where my photo is from) and no one was allowed to ride inside the valley.
The same day that we visited the Ming Tombs we also went to the Great Wall. This was the one thing that I thought was a "must see" while I was in China. The wall runs from the sea northeast of Beijing to the desert in the west. It took 300,000 men over 10 years to finish. There are several sites near Beijing that are in good repair. The most famous one is at Badaling, where Nixon visited during his trip to China. It is the one most people know from news coverage of that trip and from movies. That was where our tour was going, but because of a horrific crash on the expressway we couldn't get there. We ended up at another nearby site (there are at least four accessible sites near Beijing) at Juyongguan Pass. This a picture of my friend Mark and me before we walked up the portion of the Wall you can see behind us. We actually made it only to the first tower, because it was so crowded we ran out of time. That was quite enough of a climb for me. If it took them six hours to move accident victims off the major expressway leading out of Beijing, I figured they'd probably just bury one American with a heart attack right where he fell.
On Sunday, we met with our hosts (at the local Starbucks) to get acquainted and work out some logistics. We went to lunch at Mao's favorite restaurant (it serves food in the style of his home province). Afterwards they dropped us off at the Forbidden City, which is right in the middle of Beijing. We got our first taste of Beijing traffic. The Forbidden City wasn't more than a couple of miles from our hotel. but it must have taken nearly a half hour to get there--on a Sunday afternoon! We started our visit from one side of the Forbidden City and walked through to the other side. Most of the large tourist sites around Beijing provide GPS enabled audio guides for which you pay a deposit that you get back when you return them. They worked very well. Here are some pictures from the Forbidden City. A lot of it was being restored and you'll be able to see the difference from sites I visited later which were in much better repair.
On the side of the Forbidden City where we exited is Tiananmen Square. It's supposed to be one of the biggest in the world, but it's so broken up with buildings, monuments and statuary that it's hard to see the expanse. It's most famous for the uprising that happened a few years back and the photo of one man standing in front of a tank. Today it's full of people flying kites and about a million capitalists hawking Mao watches and copies of "Quotations of Chairman Mao." I bought a copy and decided it would have come in handy when I was starting my management career. Here are some pictures:
That brought me to the end of the weekend. Then it was down to work. I'll publish some photos from the rest of my trip in the next installment.
