Trip to China - day 6

01.07.2014

China is a wonderful, interesting and ambitious country. However, from time to time you encounter small glitches. For example, a door blocker in our bathroom turned out to be put in its place but not fixed by a screw. J

After experiencing some Beijing traffic…

… we got to the Temple of Heaven. Once this was a place the Emperor of China came each spring to pray to the God of Heaven so that the harvest is good. And later in the year, in autumn – to thank. If the year had been too dry he would come to pray once more in summer. Nowadays it is a park where people dance,

…do taiji,

… or just walk around. Of course, it is also a museum. Here we see the Temple.

Three levels of perimeter symbolize the past, present and future life. It’s round. In ancient China people belived that the Heaven is round and the Earth is square (天圆,地方), therefore, houses and even palaces are rectangular but temples are usually round.
And this is the place the Emperor actually spoke to the God of Heaven from.

The external wall is square but everything inside it is round (see above!).

In the centre of the hill there is a stone the Emperor stood on and spoke to the God of Heaven, with everyone else standing at the foot of the hill. This is not the case today:

In the second half of the day we had free time. First, I went to the Lama Temple. Once it was a prince’s palace but then, to increase solidarity with Tibet, it was transformed into the Temple. They have an amazingly huge wooden statue of the Buddha there, and somewhat smaller statues of other Buddhas (yes, there are many of them!), boddhisatvas etc.

Another interesting thing about the temple is their audioguide.

It automatically starts talking about a place once you’ve reached it. But you cannot switch the previous record on. Therefore if you make a step more than you are expected to, you risk to miss some interesting information as the device switches to the next point and you cannot reverse it. L

And then, for the third evening in a row I went to see a show. This time a Beijing Opera (Peking Opera) show. Actually, they didn’t show a full opera, they performed three excerpts from different operas. The techniques included plastic acting (without any words) with acrobatics – these were really impressive, singing (which is somewhat different from how they sing European operas) and dancing. Before the show an actor put make up on himself and dressed for the performance just on the scene. And then, there was a performance, which, as I wrote, was quite good, especially the pantomime part of it. To get some impression you can look at this scene, where the characters pretend to be fighting in the darkness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9_yUYanonM.

Before the performance one of the actors
demonstrated the process of making up.

To the performance I went by taxi, but back I travelled via Beijing underground. It is quite spacious unlike London Tube, but much less decorated than metro in Kyiv, my hometown. Overally, it reminded me RER in Paris.

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