Travel Journal: People's Republic of China, 1980 – Part 4

 

[Below is the penultimate installment of “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980”; it’s also the first post on Rick On Theater of the new year.  I’ll be covering our visit to Nanking (now called Nanjing) and our arrival in Peking (now Beijing). 

[As I have in the foregoing parts of this posting, I recommend that readers go back and start with Part 1, posted on 24 December 2021, and proceed through the intervening sections (posted on 27 and 30 December) before proceeding with Part 4.]

Nanking [Nanjing] – Monday, 29 December

Departure from Wuxi for Nanking (Nanjing) was very early; the train left at ca. 8 a.m. for the three-hour ride.  But all was pleasant, and it passed quickly.  [Nanjing is 118 miles west-northwest of Wuxi.  Both are in Jiangsu Province.]

We arrived in Nanking ca. 11 a.m. and went straight to the hotel for a brief rest and lunch.  In the afternoon, we had a boat ride on the Yangtse [Yangtze] River, passing the Yangtse River Bridge.  Though the river isn’t pretty, the ride was pleasant, and the boat provided entertainment: a very amusing magician.

[The Yangtse River Bridge at Nanjing is a double-decked road-and-rail truss bridge [bridge whose load-bearing superstructure is composed of a framework of wood or metal used to support a roof, bridge, and so on] that opened in 1968.  The upper roadway is for automobiles and trucks; the lower deck is for the Beijing-Shanghai rail line.]

After the ride on the river, we stopped at People’s Park by Hsuan Wu [Xuanwu] Lake where we saw Nanking’s two pandas (actually three – two giant and one lesser, which looks like a racoon).  They certainly are cute animals, and the Chinese really love them (many products are panda brand, and pictures and figures of the bears decorate walls and shops everywhere.  While we were watching the pandas, the Chinese visitors to the zoo couldn’t decide whom to watch – us or the bears!

[In contemporary China almost every city has a park named ‘People’s Park,’ also transcribed as Renmin Park (renmin means ‘people’; the alternative term for yuan, the Chinese currency, is renminbi, or ‘people’s money’).  The Nanjing park in question is today more commonly called Xuanwu Lake (or Xuanwuhu) Park.

[Once an imperial lake garden, in 1911 (the nationalist revolution, or Xinhai Revolution, that overthrew the Qing Dynasty), the lake was made into a public park, with bridges connecting the different islands, tearooms, pagodas, and formal gardens.  From the grounds, you can see both the ancient wall of Nanjing (built 1366-86 CE) and the modern cityscape.]

After the pandas, we made a stop at Nanking’s major department store (of course!).  Much less crowded than Shanghai (Nanking is ¼ Shanghai’s size) and better stocked than Wuxi, I found shopping here very interesting.  I bought a tan Mao hat (a little large, but at 66¢, who can argue?) and a fur vest-like liner [sold to be sewn into another garment] for the Wall in Peking.  [As I observed, our tour mates from the other groups warned us that the Wall is mighty cold!]

[To be accurate, Nanjing at about 4¼ million people in 1980 was closer to ⅓ the size of Shanghai at 11 million than ¼.]

Back at the hotel for dinner, we had a special treat – a local desert delicacy: chocolate soufflé.  It’s not as light as our soufflé, but more like a warm, baked pudding.  Very tasty nevertheless, and well worth 67¢!

Nanking – Tuesday, 30 December

This morning, we paid a visit to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum in a huge memorial park (20 acres).  It was very impressive and serene, showing great respect for the man the PRC considers the founder of the Chinese revolutionary movement.  (The 1911 Xinhai Revolution is considered the forerunner of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.)

[Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) was the first leader of the Kuomintang.  He’s revered as the “Father of the Nation” in the Republic of China (now Taiwan) and as the “Forerunner of the Revolution” in the PRC.  He served as the first provisional president of the Republic of China (1911-12) and later as de facto ruler (1923-25).

[Sun went to medical school and in 1892 received an M.D.—but he became engaged in politics, enough to be forced to take refuge several times abroad in Hong Kong, Japan, Hawaii, and London.  He participated in or supported several failed uprisings against the Qing emperor before 1911. 

[The KMT government was often unstable and Sun still had to leave China several times as he worked to strengthen the party’s organization.  There was even an accommodation with the Chinese Communist Party with support from Mao Zedong. 

[Sun died of cancer in 1925 in Beijing and his body was preserved and remained unburied until 1929 when it was interred at his instructions in the mausoleum in Nanjing, begun in 1926.  He chose Nanjing because that was where he first proclaimed the Republic of China in 1911.

[The Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum’s layout, which resembles an alarm bell to remind the Chinese people of fighting against oppression, is similar to the tombs of Chinese emperors.  In fact, it has contrasts and similarities to the tomb of the Hongwu Emperor (reigned: 1368-98), first Ming emperor, which I saw later that afternoon. Sun’s memorial park covers about 20 acres of ground.

[The first structure is a pailou, or memorial arch, which marks the entry to the mausoleum grounds.  From there a long tree-lined path leads up a hill for several hundred yards to the formal gateway with its three arched entries over which is inscribed Sun’s motto (putatively in his own handwriting): “What is under heaven is for all.”  

[Behind the gate is a square pavilion which houses Sun's memorial tablet, a huge stone stele about 20 feet high.  All the structures of the mausoleum have two stylistic elements in common, unifying the complex: they are all made of grey-white stone and all have roofs of distinctive blue-glazed tile. 

[From the gateway, the path leads up a wide stairway of 392 steps to the main memorial hall at the top.  In the front memorial room is a seated marble statue of Sun (reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln in his memorial in Washington, D.C.) and memorial tablets on the walls to the right and left.  

[North of this room in a circular chamber is the marble sarcophagus with his remains.  A recumbent image of Sun is carved on the tomb cover.]

After the mausoleum, we spent some time in the Nanjing Historical Museum, which houses a jade burial suit (of the third order, for local officials) of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-221 CE) and many pieces of exquisite Tang (648-907 CE) and Ming (1368-1644) porcelain.  It also had exhibits of artifacts and burial mounds from various periods of ancient and prehistoric Chinese civilizations. 

Needless to say, the museum also has some propaganda (displays of revolutionary heroes of past peasant uprisings against various emperors). 

Even the four-part division of the museum is propaganda-oriented: Ancient; Slave society; Half-slave-half- feudal; Feudal (ending in 1911 with Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist revolution).

Because it was so cold in the unheated museum, our guide, Mr. Wang, had to rush us through, unfortunately causing us to miss many interesting exhibits.  Again we have been slightly cheated by the season.

[Officially called the Nanjing Museum (and not to be confused with the Nanjing Municipal Museum), it was established in 1933, near the end of the Republic of China’s control of the Mainland.  Housed in several buildings, the collection includes over 400,000 exhibits from the Paleolithic era (Old Stone Age – approximately 2 million BCE-10,000 BCE) to 1919.

[The exhibits cover archeological finds, jade ware, bronze ware, Ming and Qing porcelain, calligraphy and painting, ceramics, lacquer ware, and textiles and embroidery.  We had to rush through the various halls, but this is the second largest museum in the People’s Republic and I would have liked to have spent some time there. 

[When I went to Cairo in ’82 and I felt rushed through the Egyptian Museum (see “Travel Journal: Israel & Egypt, 1982.” Parts 8 and 9 (8 and 11 August 2021), I went back on my own on a free morning.  I don’t think I’d have been allowed to do that in China, but it never occurred to me to ask.  Bu hao!]

I was impressed by Mr. Wang’s knowledge of both this area (Jiangsu Province) and of China in general.  He really seems to know the facts and implications, rather than some rote anecdotes and stories learned for tourists.

Lunch was at a guest-house/restaurant on the grounds of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum that belonged to Mme. Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mei-ling, 1898-2003) until 1949.  Obviously luxurious and lavish, it had little but its setting and exterior decoration (gaudily painted eaves under traditional Chinese tile roofs) to evidence its past glory. 

[Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) was the leader of the KMT and of the Republic of China, first on the mainland (1927-49) and then after he took the ROC into exile on the island of Taiwan (until his death).  He was also the military leader of the National Revolutionary Army and finalized the unification of China under the KMT in 1928.  He married Soong in 1927; she was his last wife of three, plus two concubines.  Soong was also Sun Yat-sen’s sister-in-law.

[The villa, formally named the Residence of the Chairman of the National Government, is known colloquially as the Meiling Palace (the hyphen disappeared with the introduction of pinyin).  It was built between 1930 and 1934 as the residence of Chiang when he was in Nanjing [which means ‘southern capital’; Beijing means ‘northern capital’], the capital of the ROC at that time.

[Much of the villa was designed and decorated with Soong’s taste in mind.  Many Nankinese believe it was a gift of love for Soong—noting, for instance, that there are 34 columns under the roof, symbolizing Soong’s birthday: 4 March (i.e., 3/4).

[After Chiang decamped for Taiwan in 1949, the villa became a rest house for officials of the PRC and special guests who came to Nanjing to visit Sun’s mausoleum.  It wasn’t open to the public, but there must have been arrangements for special visitors; readers will recall that the regional CITS branch out of which our tour was run was in Nanjing.  The villa was restored and opened to the public in 2013.] 

After lunch, instead of a visit to Nanking Teachers’ College for a conference with teaching students, I elected to go back downtown to browse and wander.  We stopped briefly at the Ming Tomb, burial site of the first Ming emperor [the Hongwu (Wade-Giles: Hung-wu) Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang (Wade-Giles: Chu Yuan-chang; 1328-98), which I mentioned above], whose capital was in Nanking, and one at the Foreign Language Bookstore (where I bought a copy of Teahouse [by Lao She], which was the first Chinese drama to tour Europe, and a collection of plays by [Guan Hanqing,] a 13th-century author).

[Nanking Teachers’ College went through many name changes, and its origins and history is confused because higher education in Nanking/Nanjing underwent a lot of growth and recombinations between the late Qing years, the ROC period, and the beginning of the PRC. 

[Chairman Mao was especially interested in education, and then the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing (Wade-Giles: Chiang Ch’ing; 1914-91), founder of the radical “Gang of Four,” was a leader, persecuted intellectuals, including many teachers.

[The Teachers’ College, not to be confused with the Nanjing Normal University of Special Education, seems to have started as early as 1906 as Sanjiang Normal School (a “normal” school is an old name for what is now most commonly called a teachers’ college or a school of education) and is now a faculty of Nanjing University as the Institute of Education.

[The Ming Tomb in Nanjing dates from 1381, when Zhu Yuanzhang began its construction (it was completed in 1383 with additional construction for later burials of Zhu’s family and retainers lasting until 1405).  The majority of the Ming tombs are located near Beijing, where the capital was moved in 1406.  (We’ll see them when we get to the capital at the end of the tour.)

[The construction had expended a great amount of resources and used 100,000 military laborers.  The complex occupies 290 acres of ground. The history of the mausoleum records that a temple and a pagoda on the site were moved and that many older graves were displaced to make way for Zhu’s tomb. 

[Zhu was interred there in 1398 at his death at the age of 71.  The legend says that there were 13 funeral processions that took different routes and ended at different locations in order to disguise Zhu’s actual resting place.  Over a dozen imperial attendants were entombed alive with Zhu and later, 46 royal concubines were buried as sacrifices.

[The mausoleum, known as Ming Xiao Ling, includes a number of fascinating sights, such as huge stone statues of lions, elephants, camels, and horses—all realistically depicted down to the scales and hairs.  (The 80-ton stone blocks were brought from a distance of 12½ miles.)  Pairs of mythical beasts are also among these sculptures.

[Further along en route to the tomb is a statue of a giant tortoise which supports a carved stone stele (a vertical stone slab or pillar bearing an inscription or design), called “The Stele of Godly Merit and Saintly Virtue.”

[Teahouse (Cha Guan – Wade-Giles: Ch’a Kuan; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980; available at Barnes & Noble from Press Holdings International [2001] and Amazon from China Books [2013]) is a three-act play (spoken drama, or huaju) that depicts the society of China as reflected in the various characters who frequent a Beijing teahouse.  

[The play depicts the changes in China through the changes in the patrons lives during the last 14 years of the Qing Dynasty (1898-1912), the warlord’s separatist period (a period of the ROC when the country was divided among military factions, 1916 to 1928), and the victory of the Second Sino-Japanese War (the Japanese invasion and occupation of China during World War II, 1937-45), ending in 1948, just before the founding of the PRC.

[Lao She has said he chose a teahouse for his setting because it was a place where people of all walks of life came together.  The playwright saw the traditional Chinese teahouse as the focal point and mirror of Chinese society.  Teahouse has been called a Chinese Grand Hotel (1930 play by William A. Drake and classic all-star 1932 film from MGM).

[The play, which covers half a century and has over 60 characters, was written in 1956 and first published in China in 1957; it had its première in 1958 in Beijing (some sources give the première as ’57).  Despite its popularity, the play was banned and became one of the emblematic targets of attack for the Cultural Revolution, along with author Lao. 

[Lao and Teahouse were rehabilitated in 1978 (the year before the first English translation by John Howard-Gibbon appeared) and the play saw its first overseas staging (in Chinese) during a tour of Europe (West Germany, France, and Switzerland) in 1980.  It went on tour around the world in 1986, playing in Hong Kong, Canada, England, Singapore, and the U.S. 

[(I saw an Off-Off-Broadway staging in 1983 by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, now defunct, at the 28th Street Playhouse in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.  It was labeled the “American Première”—meaning, I presume, the début in the U.S. of the play in English—a new translation, by the way, from Ying Rocheng [1929-2003; aka: Ying Ruocheng] of the Beijing People’s Art Theater [which produced the Beijing première, the 1979 revival, and the 1980 and ’86 overseas tours; Ying was in the 1980 production]; according to Koon-Ki Ho in his study “From the Absurdist to the Realist: A Reading of Lao She's Teahouse from a Comparative Perspective” [in Oriens Extremus 39.2 (1996): 204-27], the U.S. Chinese-language première was in 1986.)

[Beijing-born Lao She (1899-1966), the pen name of Shu Qingchun (Wade-Giles: Shu Ch’ing-ch’un), was a humorist, poet, short-story writer, novelist (Rickshaw Boy [Camel Xiangzi], 1937), and dramatist.  He went abroad to teach Chinese in England in 1924, but returned to China in 1930.

[During the Sino-Japanese War, Lao served as president of the Chinese Writers’ Antiaggression Association, uniting cultural workers in national resistance against the Japanese.  His wartime patriotism was highly praised, but by the summer of 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began, Lao became one of the first writers and intellectuals to be condemned as a counterrevolutionary.  He committed suicide by drowning on 24 August that year.

[The writer’s family rescued his manuscripts after his death, hiding them for posterity.  After Lao was posthumously rehabilitated, his writings were republished.  Many of his works have been made into films; Teahouse was filmed in 1982 (with Ying Ruocheng in the role he played on stage) and adapted as a TV series in 2010.

[I wrote a post on Lao She and Teahouse for my blog.  It was posted on 9 November 2021 at https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2021/11/lao-shes-teahouse.html.

[Guan Hanqing (Wade-Giles: Kuan Han-ch’ing; ca. 1241-1320), dubbed China’s Shakespeare, was a playwright and poet in the Yuan Dynasty who’s considered to be the greatest playwright of the Chinese classical theater. 

[Guan spent most of his late life in Dadu, the “Grand Capital” of Yuan China (now Beijing), established by Kublai Khan (1215-94; reigned: 1260-94), the founder of the dynasty.  Guan’s believed to have written over 60 plays, of which some 15 have been preserved.  (The collection I bought, Selected Plays of Guan Hanqing (1979), includes eight titles, translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.

[Guan’s plots, in the fashion of his time, are unrealistic, but he created compelling characters, often women of low social standing who act with intelligence, integrity, and courage.  His writing style is simple, fluent, and lively, closer in spirit to the early popular theater than to the plays by his contemporaries.  The action, often simple everyday events, is depicted with humor and poignancy.

[Guan may have been a scholar (some records list him as a doctor) and he was also said to have been a theatrical manager and sometimes an actor.  Known as the “playboy of the Grand Capital,” he certainly led a libertine life, spending a lot of time in places of “low entertainment.”  Acknowledging his unconventional lifestyle, he called himself “the most famous dandy and the head of all loafers in the world.”  (One could think of him as a medieval Chinese Christopher Marlowe.)

[Guan’s most famous work is Snow in Midsummer (Dou E Yuan; also translated as Injustice to Dou E), which is included in my collection.  The story is a framework for criticism of the evils of contemporary (i.e., Yuan) society.  Guan was a pioneer of a dramatic form called zaju (Wade-Giles: tsa-chu), or variety theater made up of prose, poetry, dance, singing, and mime, which gives voice to the repressed and indignant feelings.]

We landed back at the No. 1 Department Store.  I wandered, bought a [porcelain] soup ladle [which I still have] and, later at the Friendship Store, a beautiful scroll [painting].

The banquet tonight wasn’t quite to the standard of the one on Wuxi [see 27 December], but nevertheless, quite good.  Norman Weinstein sat again at my table (or I at his, since I made sure to be with him) so he could help identify each dish, its ingredients, and method of preparation. 

We finally had Maotai tonight.  After all I’d heard, it wasn’t so strong [between 76 and 106 proof; most liquor sold in the U.S. is 80 proof] or so hot [i.e., sharp].  It just tasted bad, and smelled worse!  The odor didn’t do much good for the food at the banquet.  It reminded me of Ratzeputz.

[Maotai, which dates from the Qing Dynasty, is an alcoholic beverage made from distilled sorghum, named for the town in Guizhou Province where it was originally made.  It’s one of China’s most popular spirits and a standard at state functions.  (Maotai shouldn’t be confused with the rum cocktail Mai Tai, common in tiki bars and Polynesian restaurants.)

[Ratzeputz is a German liquor, made from ginger and with an alcohol content of 60% (120 proof) when I had it.  (Since 2006, the alcohol content has been reduced to 58%.)  It has a strong, sharp taste and smell and leaves an intense aftertaste.  (See my posts “'Der Illegale,” 5 July 2009, and “Berlin Memoir,” Part 6, 11 March 2017.)

[Unless you’re a devotee, it’s not a pleasant drink; foisting it on someone who’s never had it before is something of a common joke.  (The meaning of the name Ratzeputz is obscure, but Ratz in German is exactly what the word looks like: ‘rat’; and putzen is ‘to clean’—so ‘rat cleaner’!)]

I brought a bottle of bourbon with me, and offered some of our Chinese hosts a taste.  They reacted to it the same way we reacted to Maotai – and it appeared that bourbon and the Maotai were about the same strength.

Because of Norman, we had a brief tour of the kitchen.  The Chinese have no ovens (not enough fuel), so the entire kitchen was mostly food-preparation area and storage, with one large charcoal stove with open burners for the woks.  Almost everything is prepared in the woks, except rice and few other dishes steamed in large pots.  No other cooking vessels were apparent.

[When I tried to order a cake for the group on my birthday (see Suzhou, 25 December), our guide explained that they couldn’t accommodate me because the hotel didn’t have an oven.  (The same is true of family homes and apartments.)  Any special baking is done at specialty bakery shops or at a hotel that makes a practice of Western-style baking.]

Peking [Beijing] – Wednesday, 31 December (New Year’s Eve)

We departed Nanking this morning for Peking by plane.  Pleasant flight arrived ca. 11:30 a.m. and we went to lunch at a restaurant in the Sun Temple.  The meal was not outstanding but the grounds were moderately interesting.

[We didn’t actually eat in the temple, which is also called the Temple of the Sun (Ritan); the grounds are a public park since 1951 and among its other amenities are several restaurants and outdoor cafés.  The Temple of the Sun was where emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties offered sacrifices to the sun god.]

Then we visited Tiananmen Square [Wade-Giles: T’ien-an-men] briefly (Mao’s tomb was not open) and then the Forbidden City.  It was somewhat overwhelming, since we had just over an hour to rush through it as it closes at 4 p.m.  The size of the city is itself astounding [178 acres; the Kremlin is only 68 acres; the U.S. Capitol grounds are only 59 acres and the White House occupies 18 acres of ground] – it really is a city within a city.

[Tiananmen Square is the main plaza of Beijing, named after the Tiananmen (“Gate of Heavenly Peace”), to the square’s north, which separates it from the Forbidden City.  Among other structures of civic significance to China, the square is the site of the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, completed in May 1977—8½ months after Mao’s death. 

[The tomb’s usually a major tourist attraction, but we never got to see it except from the exterior.  In the central hall of the mausoleum, the embalmed body of Chairman Mao is preserved in a glass sarcophagus (just like Vladimir Lenin in Moscow’s Red Square); it’s attended by a military honor guard.

[After my visit to Beijing, the square became internationally identified with the 1989 protests, sometimes called the ’89 Democracy Movement, and massacre, known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre or the June Fourth Massacre, that ended with a military crackdown.

[The Forbidden City is the Palace complex in the center of Beijing that was constructed from 1406 to 1420 (in the middle of the Ming Dynasty), and was the imperial palace and winter residence of the Emperor of China from the latter half of the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty.

[The complex consists of 980 buildings encompassing 8,886 rooms.  It’s listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

[After being the home of 24 emperors, the Forbidden City ceased being the political center of China in 1912 with the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor of China (1906-1967; reigned: 1908-12).  The Forbidden City was converted into the Palace Museum in 1925.]

After a stop at the Friendship Store (!), we went to our hotel on the outskirts of Peking to get ready for dinner.  I elected to go for the Peking duck in town at the “Sick Duck” and I was not disappointed.  What an exquisite meal!  Easily worth twice the ¥25 [about US$17] we [each] paid for it!  It really was a treat worth traveling for!

[There are numerous restaurants in Beijing that serve Peking duck, and many of them are called simply Peking Duck Restaurant.  So, many of the best-known go by widely known nicknames like Big Duck and Super Duck. 

[The Sick Duck isn’t called that as a reference to the quality of its cooking—many diners and critics consider it the best or second-best Peking duck restaurant in the city—or the cleanliness of its kitchen.  Officially, it’s called the Wangfujing Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant; it’s nick-named the Sick Duck because it’s near the Peking Union Medical College Hospital.

[The thing about a Peking duck meal—which is really a banquet if properly done—is that it uses every part of the duck except the beak (but including the feet).  The main dish, of course, is the duck meat, which is roasted until the skin is crispy—Peking duck restaurants are among the specialty restaurants that have ovens—sliced very thin (often by the chef at the diners’ table), and eaten in a pancake (like the ones for moo shu pork or chicken).

[Diners take a pancake, spread it with plum sauce, add pieces of the duck, usually also julienned cucumbers and scallion, roll the pancake, and eat it with their hands or with chopsticks.  The rest of the meal traditionally includes various dishes—the selection depending on the restaurant and the chef—made from the rest of the duck, along with other ingredients such as jellyfish, shrimp toast, and vegetable dishes.

[Other duck dishes might include duck feet, sliced duck liver and gizzard, duck wings, deep‐fried duck liver, duck spring rolls, and duck soup.  Some were more interesting and tasty than others (the duck feet were pretty tasteless and chewy; the jellyfish was like chewing highly flavored rubber bands: once the seasoning was gone, you’re just left with the rubber bands).]

Tomorrow is the Wall and the Ming Tombs, and starts early, so to bed!

[I’ll be covering our outing to the Great Wall of China, reputedly the only man-made structure on earth that can be seen from outer space, in Part 5 of “Travel Journal: People’s Republic of China, 1980,” coming up on Wednesday, 5 January. 

[As I noted at the top of this section, Part 5 will be the final installment of my transcription of the journal.  It will recount our stay in Beijing and our returns to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and our departure for home.  In addition, I pause at the end of the journal to make some observations and relate some impressions of China and the journey—all conceived and written over 40 years ago. 

[I hope all of you will come back later this week to read the final chapter in this voyage and see what I had to say at its conclusion.]