Running up that hill

West of Beijing’s flat expanse rise some prominent hills. The Summer Palace is close to their base, and you can see them in some of my pictures from there.

(from April 2007)

Given the city’s long history and the significant portion of it when it was an imperial capital, it’s not surprising that emperors took an interest in these hills. Beijing’s climate is notoriously unpleasant at many times of the year, which encourages those with the means to get out of town. Add to that the fact that it’s really pretty up there, and you can bet the rulers appropriated big chunks of it for their personal use.

The park today called Xiangshan (Fragrant Hills) is one of those chunks. According to the brochure, it dates back to the Jin Dynasty in 1186. It has served as a royal resort for summer hunting and other activities for other subsequent dynasties based here. The famous emperor Qianlong ordered much expansion and building in 1745. And like many ancient things here, it’s had a variety of different names through the ages.

As with the Old Summer Palace, much damage was done to Xiangshan by English and French armies in 1860 and by the allies of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. It was opened as a public park in the 50s, and much of the destruction has been restored.

It’s quite a distance from the center of town. Taking the subway to the closest point still leaves you a bus ride of an hour or so.
The second bus is the one to Xiangshan, and almost all of the people were waiting for it. Note that although it appears warm, the sky is a uniform color that is not blue.
This is the park entrance, with the titular hills behind it. The highest one, on the right, is where I’m headed. Beijing’s elevation is 143 feet, and the top is at 1827.
This is half of Yanjing Hu (Spectacle Lake – spectacle as in eyeglasses) with a little artificial waterfall. From near here, there is a cable car to take you to the summit, but that’s for wimps, and I’m not a wimp.
If I remember right, this is the front of an old monastery (this part of the brochure is only in Chinese, and not any characters I know). I think it was built by the emperor for when the Lama visited from Tibet. I like the tree growing out of the wall.
This is Liulita (Glazed Tile Pagoda, pronounced oddly like “Lolita”), which managed to survive the destruction while most everything else went down.
From there on, it gets kind of steep. This is one tiny fraction of what seemed like an endless stairway. By this point I was starting to wonder if the cable car might have been a better choice. But imagine the feeling of accomplishment that lies ahead!
Yes, that’s the top way up there. Would it take longer to go back down and catch a ride?
There is even some wildlife to be seen.
Very near the summit now, seriously out of breath and thankful for the extra bottle of water I bought from a lady a few hundred meters below. Notice how people react to a sign that says Dangerous! No coming close! And no, that is not the Great Wall in the background, just an old park boundary fence.
This is the top. Finally made it. My legs were on fire, but I can now count myself among those elite few who have done the climb. All ten million or so of us.
You’ll have to take my word for it that Beijing is down there. The air at this height is actually pretty good, and we were in bright sunlight. The “haze” was so diffuse that you couldn’t see it in a layer from this height.

After a lengthy breather, it was time to head back down, which involves a somewhat different set of leg muscles. Equal opportunity aches, you could say.
It’s quite a pleasant spot for a picnic or just relaxing. The park is most famous for its fall colors, with a number of different species of trees contributing. I’ve heard it can be extremely crowded at that time of year. But it’s pretty nice in early summer as well.

As you can tell, when I went up this hill, I was not running, but I couldn’t resist a Kate Bush reference for the title. But I am not a wimp.

For some shots of Xiangshan on a clearer day, check out this page. Just my luck, the day after I went was clear and blue, at least in the morning – thunderstorm at night.

No cheap yaks

It was a little like walking into a Monty Python sketch. I entered April Gourmet, one of the Western-style groceries I visit when I need something the Chinese stores don’t carry. In front of the deli case was a young woman wearing some sort of traditional garb I didn’t recognize holding a little plate of samples with toothpicks. As I walked past, she said in heavily accented English, “Tibet yak cheese.” Of course I tried some. I think maybe the samples had been sitting around too long, since mine was kind of dried out, but it was a fairly good cheese, with a little bite to it but not too strong. It’s kind of expensive, being an organic specialty item aimed squarely at the affluent market, but I will probably buy it someday. But I have to admit that the phrase “Tibetan yak cheese” just makes me want to giggle.
I picked up a brochure, which helpfully informed me of the following facts:

No addiction of fluid coagulate chemicals.

Yak cheese has an unique modest, clean and smoothy milky taste, and is highly nutrient. Cheese, in itself, has an much more splendid flavour than external mold, and without the flavour of animals. In the beginning, it may taste modest, clean and smoothy. And after around 30s, the mixed flower-flavour begins to spread, and lasts about 120s, at the peak, with a fresh, pleasant, milky sweet and flower’s fragranct taste in your mouth.

Mr. White, the American cheese authority, has praised of this precious cheese that “The cheese has a fresh, pleasure fragrance like flower.”

Its quantity of iron is 9 times of other cheeses, Zinc is 3 times, calcium is 1.5 times.

In addition, it is helpful for loosing weight, adjusting metabolism, improving your immune system, “resisting cancer and oxidation,” adjusting blood pressure and sugar, improving bone density, and preventing and curing diabetes. Dang, maybe I should have bought some. I’m too young to oxidize.

You can visit their website here.

Music with two good friends

This weekend is a three-day holiday in China: Duanwujie, the Dragon Boat Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. The Dragon Boats themselves seem to be a Southern China thing. From Beijing, you’d have to travel to the coast to see any as far as I can tell. But there are plenty of other opportunities for diversion in lieu of cool watercraft.

My choice was the Second Annual 2 Kolegas Folk Festival. I saw a show at this club back in the winter time, and I must say it’s much nicer when the weather is. Incidentally, the Chinese name for the club is Liangge Hao Pengyou Jiuba (Two Good Friends Bar). The signs said that all proceeds from the ¥50 entrance fee will be donated to Sichuan earthquake relief.
As you can see, they have canopies set up outside, and the weather is pretty nice. The twist is that all the music actually took place inside the club. Apparently the Beijing security bureau has decided that there will be no outdoor performances for the time being. No official reason has been given, which leads to all sorts of speculation, most of which doesn’t put the authorities in a good light. Seems to me they’d be better off publicly stating their reasons, presuming of course that they are reasonable (which admittedly seems unlikely – I mean, honestly, what can happen?).

Anyway, on the music. Virtually everything was in Chinese, so I can’t even provide artist names aside from reading them out of a magazine, and even then I can’t match up the names with the performers I saw. If any readers can help out, please post comments and I’ll update. I had some technical difficulties on Saturday, so no pictures.

I’m pretty sure the first performer I saw was Wang Juan. She’s a local singer-songwriter with an emotional, delicate voice. I have an album of hers, and it’s quite good.
(This is a picture from her band set on Sunday.)

Other performers included Xiao He, Zhang Si’an, and Wu Ningyue, who is also in a band called Buyi that I would really like to see. They mix rock music with folk from the Ningxia Autonomous Region to the west. There was also an American folk-blues guitarist who was very good, with finger-picking and nice slide work on a set of mostly blues standards. Mixed in with all the acoustic music were some electric and mixed electric/acoustic acts. For the most part, the music resembled American folk music, only sung in Chinese. Many in the audience were able to sing along with songs.
For food, they had yangrou chuanr (lamb skewers), grilled oyster mushrooms, grilled Xinjiang style bread, and little hard-boiled eggs (smaller than ping pong balls) heated on skewers. The woman helping out here is a Canadian from Québec who also played accordion with one of the groups.

Attendance was fairly small, maybe as many as a hundred, though there was never a time when everyone was inside at the same time.

I returned on Sunday afternoon with camera on board. Here are some shots of artists I saw, some labeled on the assumption that the published schedule was adhered to.

Liu Dongming

Malika

Luotuo

On Day Two, Wang Juan did a second set, this time with a band backing her.

Zhang Weiwei/Guo Long

As the afternoon turned to night, we got this trio.
She walked with a crutch and had someone help her onto the stage. She has a really beautiful voice that gave me goosebumps a couple of times even without being able to make out much of the lyrics.
Her guitarist was amazing, obviously trained in classical guitar from his hand positions. The flutist had an incredibly pure tone and perfect vibrato, probably also classically trained; he also played a djembe drum (which, as you notice from previous pictures, is downright ubiquitous in the Chinese folk scene). Very lovely all around.

And to finish things off with a little more fun and energy, there was Mademoiselle et les Chinois.
Mademoiselle was our helpful grill attendant, and I could make out enough of her Chinese (and French!) to know that she was making many jokes about how tasty the food was, and encouraging everyone to eat more.
She was really funny, and sang songs from a variety of sources, from French standards to funky, sexy dance tunes. One of them was “Belleville Rendezvous” from the animated film Triplets of Belleville (though without the original accompaniment by bicycle and newspaper).

That made for a pretty full weekend. As it happens, in two weeks there is another festival scheduled at the same location, this time for Chinese independent rock. It’s called CH+INDIE III: The Search for Spock. Last year’s festival was CH+INDIE II: The Wrath of Khan. The week after that, there’s another festival called Beizhan, which will feature Zheng Jun as a headliner one night.