A JEWISH RENAISSANCE TRIP TO CHINA October - November 2009 Acknowledgments Grateful thanks are due to all those who were prepared to commit their memories to paper, thereby contributing articles to this journal. Acknowledgment of the following art work should also be made: line illustrations by Ruth Barnett; photos by Tania Barnett, Ruth Baumberg, Jonathan Burg, Hersch Kikoler and Mimi Rolbant. Editing and layout by Mimi Rolbant; copy editing by Susan Kikoler. 2 A Rickshaw Ride in Beijing by Ruth Barnett Monday, 19 October After months of planning and mounting anticipation, there we were in Beijing’s ultra-modern airport at 2 a.m. British time, after a 10 hour non-stop flight. Mimi, the tour organiser, was there already to meet us and gather together our party of 23 and introduce us to Feng, our Beijing guide, and Professor Xu Xin, who was to accompany us for the whole tour and from whom we were to learn so much. As it was 9 a.m. Chinese time and we had had breakfast on the plane, our coach took us straight to the biggest Lama Temple in Beijing, built in 1694 and used as a residence for the visiting Dalai Lama. Incense was burning in the five successive courtyards between magnificent all-wooden temples painted with intricate patterns in four colours, which we learned were gold for the emperor and the universe, blue for the heavens, green for the earth and red for happiness. Even the Beijing taxis were gold-sided with blue, green or red tops. The pièce de resistance was an 80 metre high Buddha made out of one sandal-wood tree. Beijing traffic in five-lane, tree-lined boulevards was awe-inspiring, as were the endless, towering blocks of newly-built high-rise flats. We learned that traffic was reduced to just manageable by banning cars with certain number plates on different days of the week. Shoals of bicycles, scooters and electric bicycles overtook us at every traffic light and intersection. With remarkable ingenuity, many of the cycles had a variety of vehicles attached at the back; one elderly gent even had his missus attached behind in a wheelchair. Another cyclist was scarcely visible peeking out from a mountain of cardboard boxes piled all around him. Not until 2 p.m., after a Chinese lunch at three round tables with revolving centres, did we book into the Marriott Hotel West. We were allowed only one hour to unpack and freshen up before the coach took us to the Temple of Heaven, built in 1420 in the reign of the Ming Emperor Yongles, about whom we were to learn so much. This temple was clearly a social meeting and recreation place, as the long, covered walk leading up to it was peopled with card players, smokers, dancers and a hubbub of cheerful chatter. Dragon kites and a multitude of other tourist knik-knaks were offered to us. It was good to a great number of tour groups of Chinese people of all ages exploring their own country. By now the time difference and lack of sleep were taking their toll on us but we needed to keep awake and alert for further experiences awaiting us, starting with a rickshaw ride …. Visiting the Locals by Susan Kikoler By dusk we were all exhausted but perked up at the thought of a rickshaw ride around the Lake of Ten Temples, popular with locals in the evening, to visit a hutong. ‘Hutong’ is a Mongolian word for ‘water-well,’ since the earliest family dwellings were built around them. Today it means a labyrinth of very narrow streets, barely 6 metres across, where the locals live in traditional courtyard dwellings. We visited a family where parents (a former archaeologist and his wife), sons and daughters-in-law all had rooms off the little square 'garden' and met to eat together only on special occasions. We were told that hutong living is very cold in winter, as these courtyard dwellings are quite old and often unmodernised. 3 We were not the first foreign visitors, as Henry Kissinger had been there before, which a photo testified. We sat huddled on chairs of all shapes and sizes in the main room and tried to get our jetlagged brains into gear to find some questions to ask. The owner’s mother had bought the property in the 1950s on a 70-year lease from the government who still owned the land. No one knew what would happen when the lease expired. Apparently, such dwellings are worth a staggering 28 million yuan (£2.8 million), which is incredible. We all admired the photo of the adored granddaughter. There were a lot of smiles of goodwill and mutual incomprehension, but at least we had made contact with the locals. The rickshaw ride back almost brought us in contact with the local hospital, as our drivers / riders steered their vehicles around, over and through a slalom of road works that threatened to capsize us at every turning. The lake was lined by the multi-coloured lights of various bars and eateries along its shores and made the scene very beautiful. Eventually we reached the sanctuary of the lakeside restaurant for dinner where, miracle of miracles, the meat eaters might have had the best food in their room but the vegetarians were much warmer in theirs. G-d does smile upon the righteous! Early Autumn in the Summer Palace by Ruth Baumberg Tuesday, 20 October Writing Day 2 has connotations of the biblical ring of “Vayehi erev, vayehi boker, yom sheni” but, in fact, despite being our first full day of immersion in China, this was a day of the standard tourist itinerary with no Jewish connections. However, listening to our guides and watching what was going on around us, there was plenty to think about. And we had with us for the duration our august, but approachable guide, Professor Xu Xin, who gave us different insights into Chinese culture and looked after us so well, even to the extent that he was always ready to help us down the steps of the bus and answer our often impertinent questions! After a good night’s rest (despite many of our moans in not being able to sleep after the time zone change and accompanying jetlag) in the quite palatial Marriott Hotel West, we were loaded into our bus and set off for the Summer Palace. We were beginning to get accustomed to the huge crowds of Chinese tourists everywhere (the pleasant autumn weather is the most popular season for travelling), the persistent hawkers dogging our steps and even some beggars, which I had not thought to see in China. There was also the persistent smog, which we had heard about in connection with the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, but I had not realised that it would be everywhere we went in every city and even noticeable at the Great Wall. But today was a blue sky day after the morning, as our pictures show. Probably the reason for the smog was the appalling traffic everywhere, the multitude of cars that had taken over to a large extent from the bicycle (though there were still more of these than in the West) and the endemic traffic jams. But everywhere was evidence of the pell mell rush to development, huge new tower blocks, vast new cities, movement and a sense of optimism as the old is swept aside in favour of the new. All of the Chinese people whom we met were optimistic about the future and clear that life was improving, whatever their privations in the past. We walked in the classical grounds of the Summer Palace, from the traditional style buildings, constructed by the all- powerful and notorious Empress Dowager Cixi, relatively late in the 19th century, having burnt down in the Second Opium War of 1860 or, as we had to learn, in the late Qing Dynasty, to the artificial but artful lake with a vista straight from a willow pattern plate – a mist, a temple, a bridge, willow trees, and the remains of the autumnal dying lotus plants in the water. This took us into the myth of the traditional Chinese 4 past and the legitimacy of its modern present. There were gardeners with rakes tending tree peonies which were an ancient speciality of Chinese plant breeding. There was a charming scene on a promontory where a large Chinese choir of visitors assembled and sang and we drank in the beauty and wanted to linger, but we had to continue. At a view of the famous marble ship, a local Chinese group ate sweet corn off a street stall and grinned at us Westerners taking photographs of them. After a commercial break at a pearl concession, there was a brief stop to see the new Olympic stadium, designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron with the artist Ai Weiwei as consultant, a highlight of modern architecture and shaped like a demented bird’s nest but very impressive, with vast acres of space around it. Our next stop was lunch at the Wan-Ha-Ha restaurant where we came to grips with these vast cavernous restaurants, otherwise familiar from our larger urban British Chinese restaurants, where the food, though partly familiar – chicken with lemon, sweet and sour chicken, even a bastardised version of chips, was bountiful and mostly excellent. Mostly big tourist groups were eating there, but even some of us fussy and nervous eaters in the group developed a partiality for such delicacies as Black Fungus mushrooms (which I have found available dried at 85p for a large pack in our local Leeds Chinese supermarket) and a superb, soft, lightly-spiced aubergine dish.