Building sights

I am so lucky to be travelling around China 'off-season'. Everywhere I go there are very few tourists, prices are lower for a lot of things and I've had the pick of places to stay. There are a few backpackers around and the odd gaggle of tourists who, all wearing the same (invariably red) baseball caps, follow their flag-waving tour leader as they're herded from one spot to another but I'm glad I'm doing the sights now and not with a billion other people in summer.

Even the weather's been brilliant on the whole - clear, crisp and cool days with stunning blue skies. (Here in Chengdu, skies are a uniform milky white; it's like living in limbo weather and it plays with your head. So to get out from under nothingness was invigorating.) But for every Ying there's got to be a Yang: this is the time of the year when the tourist sights get themselves spruced up for the summer (and for the Olympics) so a lot of places I've been to are swathed in green construction tarps and obscured by scaffolding.

Throughout Beijing, streets are lined with hoardings covered by developers' visions of the future: lots more malls basically. Take a peep behind and you see shabby old shops, derelict and aerosol-sprayed with the Chinese character for "demolish". I've got no high horse to jump on here. Expecting Beijing to keep every last one of its grubbiest hutongs would be like expecting London to have kept its Dickensian squalor to "protect its past". It'll be interesting to come back and see what goes up instead in a couple of years' time though.

Outside of the city, too, this is the time to look forward to high season. I took a trip out to the Summer Palace (which, as the information signs all around emphasise, again and again, was ravaged by British and Japanese invaders). It's a huge park whose current form dates largely from the Eighteenth Century (although the park had been a royal retreat since the Eleventh) and is dominated by Kunming Lake which takes up two thirds of the park's area.

A bit disappointing, then, that the lake had been drained when I visited. Still, it was a good day out walking around this monumental puddle, over fairytale bridges, in and out of mystical pavilions and taking in the whole thing from the summit of Longevity Hill (it probably sounds better in Chinese).

In Xi'an too, construction is the order of the day. Even the hostel I first went to was being done out. Apart from making it generally bigger and better, the guy there said they were also putting in longer beds to accommodate foreigners more comfortably. He paid for a taxi to take me to their sister hostel which was in an even better location (it's the Han Tang Inn, if you're interested, and it got a five star rating from me for what that's worth).

Of course, the main thing most people go to Xi'an for is to see the Terracotta Warriors and I was no different. I took a public bus for the hour long journey and blindly got off when everybody else did. It wasn't the Warriors though, but the tomb of Qin Shi Huang - the first emperor of a unified China and in whose honour the Terracotta Army stand guard. As the Rough Guide says, there's not much to see on this huge mound of earth but it does bring to life the stories of what's meant to be hidden below. They say there's an entire city down there with rivers of mercury and heavens picked out with pearls for stars and the emperor's body at the centre of it all. Two and a half thousand year old booby traps await any intruders; I understand that some exploratory soundings have been taken to verify the truth of the legend but no excavation has yet taken place. It doesn't half make you wonder though...

The accidental trip to the tomb also gave a sense of scale to the whole monument. The warriors that have been uncovered are a further two kilometres west from here - God only knows what's in between and still to be found.

Reaching the army finally, you're met first by a vast car park and then the official souvenir superstore. You walk up an avenue of newly built and half-built, generally empty retail opportunities on your way to the burial site itself. To be honest it's all being done in the best possible taste and, as one of the world's top ten tourist attractions, you'd expect there to be a lot of development going on, wouldn't you? (The only thing that got to me was the persistence of the tour guides looking for trade - but I've had my rant about this already below.)

For all the construction going on though - and apart from Kunming Lake - I've generally not been disappointed by the sights I've seen. Crikey, you'd have to have a heart of clay not to be moved by the lines and lines of warriors staring fixedly ahead that greet you in the first gigantic hall erected over the original pit of the Terracotta Army. They say that, although the bodies were mass produced, the heads are all unique; they were all lined up facing east before being entombed beneath massive wooden rafters, straw matting and tonnes and tonnes of earth on top. You've seen the pictures, watched the documentaries and read the articles in National Geographic so there's not much more I can add here apart from one thing: do come and see them for yourself!

Huaqing Pool is on the way back to Xi'an where, for centuries, emperors bathed in the waters from the hot spring (and where Chiang Kaishek was arrested in the 'Xi'an Incident', 1936). Today it's a collection of more modern pavilions and pagodas and the site for theatrical extravaganzas in the summer but, guess what, it was mostly closed for refurbishment when I was there. No great disappointment to be honest.


Xi'an is a lovely city though. I don't know if you've ever come out of the train station in Amsterdam but it's a fantastic sight with the Damrak stretching out in front of you; you feel you're at the heart of things straightaway. I got the same feeling at the station here; you're met by the majestic medieval city wall stretching away into the distance left and right while a huge arch invites you into the ancient city itself.


Thoroughly modern inside the walls, there are still plenty of sights to see but everything is on a manageable scale and you feel like you can relax here much more than in a megapolis like Beijing which just leaves you completely knackered.


But you've got to go to Beijing. You've got to see the Forbidden City. Surprise, surprise, two of the main halls were all wrapped up in scaffolding and mesh when I visited but the place is so vast that you can put the disappointment behind you and move on to the next amazing thing. It just gets better and better the further you go. The designers even had the foresight to build the whole thing facing south so you take all your pics with the sun behind you and, believe me, everywhere you look there's a must have photo. Hooray for digital cameras!

My final Beijing trip was the big one: the Great Wall which was initiated, incidentally, by Qin Shi Huang (remember him? The one under the mound of earth... the Terracotta Emperor... try and keep up.)

There are many different sections of the wall that you can visit. The most popular is the bit at Badaling which is the one you see most on telly. (For some reason I have the image imprinted on my mind of George Michael and Andrew Ridgley being there, way back, when they were one of the first western pop acts to play China. Odd really.) It's been largely reconstructed (oh, not that old argument again...) and is infested with hawkers, lined with souvenir shops, etc., etc. Basically, not the bit I wanted to see.


Instead we headed further west, stopping in the middle of nowhere to pick up a local guide before winding our way on foot up the side of one of the huge hills north of the capital. Two ancient watchtowers looked down at us from the highest ridge.


Eventually we scrambled our way onto the wall itself, standing up to see how it winds miraculously along the very highest parts of all the hazy hills stretching into the distance on all sides. Neatly paved and wide enough for a horse and chariot to pass, you wonder how the hell they did it. How many people died up here toiling in the freezing cold? But what audacity to even think of doing it - let alone getting it done. It's a place you have to see without the paraphernalia of the Twenty First Century to feel the remoteness and the vastness and the loneliness.

It's the one sight in China that I was most glad to find not under construction.