I read somewhere that there’s no point in visiting more than one Chinese big city, because they’re all the same. Fortunately we ignored such advice and went straight from Shanghai to Beijing. Sure, we could have lived without the extra dose of pollution, crowds and mad drivers, but this trip would be utterly incomplete without Beijing’s three landmarks: the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Olympic Village.

Most of the tourists in Beijing seem to come from other parts of China

Changing of the guard at Tiananmen Square

You’re never alone at Tiananmen Square: five security cameras in this lamp post alone!

Tiananmen Square a few days before the big military parade commemorating the 70 years of the end of World War II

After 70 years, the Sino-Japanese relations continue to be extraordinarily tense

Jules admires the Forbidden City from the middle of Tiananmen Square

The Forbidden City is huge. This photo was taken for the top of Jingshan Park

Jinshang Park, once a private imperial garden, is well worth a visit

Throughout contemporary history, the Forbidden City was nearly destroyed twice: in 1860, by the invading British and French troops (they burned down the Summer Palace instead); and in 1949, by the Communist Party

The Forbidden City is massive: in total, there’s nearly 9,000 rooms

Red symbolizes auspicious events and happiness…

… But the Forbidden City would be magnificent in any color

Jules relaxes after walking through the never ending mazes of the Forbidden City

Our nephew’s stuffed kiwi takes a selfie near the Forbidden City moot

Fishermen outside of the Forbidden City

Chinese have a peculiar sense of queuing

Beijing’s Opera House, or the ‘Giant Egg’, is an incredible structure of titanium and glass

Hutongs are traditional Northern China neighborhoods, typically made up of narrow alleys and courtyard residences. Many were destroyed to give way to large avenues

Katie Melua needs to update the lyrics: Beijing’s nine million bycicles are long gone

Not sure what this guard is watching out for

Beijing National Stadium, a.k.a. ‘The Bird’s nest’. Google for some night pictures, they’re incredible!

Another bullseye: We visited Beijing during the 2015 World Championships in Athletics!

The National Acquatics Center, or ‘Water Cube’, sits right next to the ‘Bird’s Nest’

A part of the center was made into a water park after the Olympic Games

The pool where 25 world records were broken was apparently undergoing maintenance

The Olympic Park Observation Tower seems to come right out of a science fiction novel

Jules waits for the rain to stop before seeing the rest of the Summer Palace

Parts of the Summer Palace were burnt down by the French and British troops in 1860, and later rebuilt

Verne enjoys the Summer Palace in the rain

The Suzhou Marketing Street in the Summer Palace was modeled after the traditional river markets in Suzhou, which we will talk about in the next post

We take around 200 pictures a day. Selecting the ones for the blog is a pain!

A kid practices saxophone on Beijing’s streets

Language was definately a barrier in China!

The Mutianyu section of the Great Wall has been beautifully restored

The Wall is pretty crowded near the cable car, but…

… Walk a bit to either side and things get much nicer

Jules enjoys a moment of solitude in the Great Wall

Unfortunately the Great Wall is not immune to littering…

… And graffiti

The Western influence creeping up to the Great Wall!

Close to the end of the Mutianyu restored section, sits the ‘Wild Wall’

Verne hikes the ‘Wild Wall’ on a rainy day

Restoring the full 20,000+ km of the Great Wall is next to impossible

It is a pity tough, as things are slowly crumbling to pieces

There’s hardly a vacant spot in Beijing

The Millennium Monument as built to welcome the new millennium

Like in many other Chinese landmarks, the nicest places are off limits

The 789 Art Zone, located in an old factory complex, was originally set up as an artistic community, but has since then been gentrified with many coffee shops and art galleries

It is however still a place to enjoy a great variety of art pieces…

… Some more low-key…

… Others are more cheeky…

… And others openly criticize the Chinese government: this portrait of Ai Weiwei refers to the ‘Great Wall’, which blocks access to Instagram, Facebook and other sites (like this blog, for instance)

Jules enjoys our last morning in Beijing, at Lianhuachi Park

Just meters away, this gentleman was putting on a great show of sax

Moving around one billion people is no small feat: Chinese public transports are busy but very efficient

In our way to Xi’an, we caught a glimpse of modern Beijing across a stretch of old China rice fields

We arrived to Beijing during the celebrations of the 70 years of the end of World War II. The whole city was going crazy: crowds everywhere, security checks at each corner, the Tiananmen Square closed for the big military parade (for a country that defines itself as non-expansionist, they sure know how to put on a show, one that we saw played over and over on the subway screens and public TV channels). While for Western countries World War II was mostly about putting a stop to Nazism, for China it represented something much closer to home: the end of the Japanese occupation, an issue that to this day continues to stand in between the relations of both countries.  Here’s an example: one of the exhibits we attended was called ‘Anti-Japanese and National Salvation Movement’. In Europe we take for granted something that, judging by the Sino-Japanese example, is difficult to achieve: a fine balance between not forgetting the atrocities that were committed during the war and rebuilding a unified continent. Who in their right mind would hold an ‘Anti-Germany’ exhibit?

A few days after the military parade, we were able to visit Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden CIty. These two landmarks, facing each other, seem oddly conflicting: Tiananmen Square stands as a hall for the heroes of the revolution that established the People’s Republic of China, while the Forbidden City served as the imperial palace for the Ming and Qing dynasties for over 500 years. The imperial grounds did suffer some damage during the revolution, but further destruction was prevented by Zhou Enlai, the republic’s first Premier. These days, a huge portrait of Mao Zedong stands at the entrance to the Forbidden City, somehow connecting the old imperial palace with Tiananmen Square. Mao Zedong was one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party and the leader of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution movements, during which an estimated 40 to 70 million Chinese died from starvation, forced labour and executions. Much like in other cases, his portrait should be in a museum, not a landmark.

Next came another of Beijing’s musts: the Great Wall. Beijing is actually just one of the many places from where it is possible to visit the 21,196 km wall, the only manmade structure visible from space. The most popular portion of the Wall is Baraling but we went instead to Mutianyu to avoid the crowds. Getting there using public transport requires navigating though multiple scammers that try to get you on the wrong bus or get off at the wrong station, but the savings are well worth it for a couple of stingy backpackers like ourselves. We quickly forgot the whole ordeal once we got there, as the Great Wall is a magnificent thing, even on a rainy day. Together with Katya and Maxim, an awesome Russian couple we met while circumnavigating the scammers, we hiked up and down the Great Wall. If you’re reasonably fit, ditch the cable car and do the whole thing on foot: that way you avoid the crowds and get the wall pretty much for yourself. This is one of the few portions of the Great Wall that has been fully restored. In fact, if you continue walking to the west you’ll get to see the ‘Wild Wall’, an unrestored section. In hindsight it was a pretty dumb idea to venture there on a rainy day: the whole thing is very slippery and riddled with tricky pathways.

The obsession with security that motivated the construction of the Great Wall (which served both to keep the barbarians out and the Chinese in) seems to continue to this day. We were lucky enough to meet an Italian student that was traveling through China to interview people: according to her, many of the Chinese she interviewed were willing to tolerate censorship in exchange for safety and economic growth. The most visible face of censorship is the ‘Great Firewall’ (access to Facebook, Instagram and WordPress – the platform we use to write this blog – is not allowed), but its effects run much deeper: for instance, many Chinese don’t know the story of the man that stood in front of the tanks in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

The last Beijing landmark we visited was the 2008 Olympic Games site, which is a short subway trip away from downtown (Beijing, like Shanghai, has an impeccably organized subway system that goes everywhere in the city). The first thing you’ll notice after getting out of the subway station is the National Stadium, also known as ‘The Bird’s Nest’. The stadium was designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron (which also designed the Allianz Arena in Munich), in collaboration with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei (who later regretted helping the Communist Party to stage a successful Olympic Games). Our pictures simply don’t do it justice, google ‘Bird’s Nest at night’ to get the full effect! Next to the stadium stands the National Aquatics Center, or ‘Water Cube’, another iconic building from the 2008 Olympics. The “soap bubbles” structure, made from super-thin ETFE, is as impressive from the inside as it is from the outside. Standing next to the pool where 25 world records were broken was something special. Some believe that this pool is particularly fast because of its increased depth, but the usually high number of fallen world records probably had more to do with the high-tech swimwear debuted that year (and banned in 2010).

That’s it for now, but Jules will quickly follow up with tales from Xi’an, Luoyang and Suzhou, three smaller cities (only in China can you call 1 million+ city “small”).

Verne*