BEIJING: Of Great Wall & Forbidden City

It has been said that no Beijing visit would be complete without a trip to the city’s four “must see’’ places. These are: The Great Wall of China (the only manmade object visible from the moon); the Forbidden City (so immense that it is a city within a city); the Tiananmen Square (site of student massacre during the pro-democracy demo in 1989), and to a restaurant that specializes in Peking Duck – so named after Peking, the capital of China, now called Beijing.

The four of us: Niña Corpus of Channel 2 and her cameraman Roderick “Ricky” Bautista, Judy T. Gulane of BusinessWorld and myself visited all of these enormous and amazing places during our recent trip to Beijing. With us as tour guide was Adora, a Filipino-Chinese Philippine Embassy employee.

We made the “sidetrips” in the course of our coverage of two great Beijing events: the inauguration of the tourism office at the Philippine Embassy in Beijing and the opening of Beijing International Tourism Expo 2004.

We had only a day for this “must see” places from our scheduled 3-day and 4 nights trip to Beijing sponsored by theDepartment of Tourism. The Capital of China and home to 14 million residents, Beijing, its air heavily polluted, is a huge city where flashy cars clog its long, straight, modern and ancient boulevards. Except for side streets, gone were bicycles, trishaws and auto-rick-shaws that I saw during my first visit here three years ago.

So, the next morning after the opening of our tourism office at the Philippine embassy in Beijing on July 22, our tour routetook us to the Great Wall of China, the world’s largest man-made structure built to date, with almost 6,000 kilometers in length and an average eight meters in height. It stretches across five provinces and two autonomous regions from the Shanhaiguan Pass to the Liajugan Pass in the Gobi Desert. It is estimated that over 300,000 men were involved in the construction of the wall – designed to keep out feuding Mongols — during the Qin Dynasty, 2,300 years ago.

The Great Wall as accompanying photos show is similar in some respects to our very own Intramuros Walled City, the birthplace of Manila. Both walls have big gates, lookouts, dungeons and underground guard quarters. While the top of the Great Wall could accommodate eight horses walking abreast, the Intramuros Wall could probably allow only six horses at the most, walking side-by-side. Interestingly, however, both walls were designed to keep out intruders or enemies: The Great Wall against the marauding Mongols and the Intramuros walls against the natives of Manila.

lso, while the Intramuros Wall which is shorter in height runs in semi-circle on flat lands of a tiny city barangay, the Great Wall which starts from the edge of the sea crosses great mountain peaks, forest areas, creeks and rivers.

The day we visited the Great Wall, despite the fog and the slight drizzle, we joined thousands of tourists from China and other countries in climbing the steep (sometimes not so steep) wall like ants to marvel at the ancient battlefield and the pass’ exquisite form. If it were not for my daily brisk walking in our village park back home it would had been impossible for me to climb the precipitous structure. The Great Wall has over a hundred passes and thousands of watchtowers that add to its wonder and beauty.

It is interesting to note that many of the Great Wall sections and passes have been designated by the Chinese government as key national cultural sites. In 1987, the Great Wall was inscribed in the list of the World Heritage Sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In the first part of our afternoon tour on the same day, we visited the ancient and intriguing “Forbidden City” — so called because the public were not allowed to enter it for 5,000 years. Within the Forbidden City (now called the national museum) was the Imperial Palace, a group of elegant buildings used as the home and private quarters of the emperors of China and their concubines numbering 3,000 to 5,000. Except for the emperor and the male members of his family, no other men were allowed to enter nor to live in the palace except the eunuchs or castrated men. Latest historical accounts have it that when the emperor died these women were killed and also buried with him. Historical research also showed that it was a special committee created by the emperor that searched for his concubines in villages within his imperial domain. It was said that because of the great number of his kept-women, most of them had not seen, much more slept, with the emperor.